welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world today we are telling the story of Donald Trump not because it's the day before the election not because this is a political show this is a tech show we never discuss politics I don't actually think a single political subject I don't think we've we've yet to cover a single political topic I'm blissfully unaware
we're not going to start today yeah not going to start today but we are covering Donald Trump today not because he's the former president not because he's running for president again we are covering him because he is a tech founder and we need to talk about the technology angle of the tech company he started truth social uh I've had a running joke for a while with a bunch of friends that uh you know Donald Trump
might be the best tech entrepreneur of the last two or three years and um yeah obviously it's it's a kind of a silly thing because people don't think about Trump as a tech founder but if you actually look at the numbers I couldn't name another company that got to A10 billion valuation in Tech in less than two years in this recent cycle yeah it's one of those things you can you know
saying is somebody good or bad uh is usually very objective but in this case there's metrics that we can discuss and going from Zer to two billion in two years 10 billion sorry zero Z to 10 billion the stock six billion now and it's been three years I guess yes it's a little bit volatile which we'll get into but uh but it's crazy because everyone did expect it just to completely rug and
be worthless and I don't know maybe that'll still happen nothing here is financial advice but uh it's it's just a fascinating story of like how one of these major celebrity deals gets done how people as big and Larger than Life than than Trump work and there was uh a big uh Deep dive in The Economist that we're going to kind of use as the backbone of research um truth social call it a hit piece I think it's
actually pretty neutral you come away from it just kind of learning some things there's some good there's some bad and we'll kind of go into what that hit piece means but um let's let's start you know back in 2016 Trump was kind of this Outsider candidate he was the first I think he was the first president to never hold elected office of any kind before winning and he ran this very
unorthodox campaign tons of just posting on Twitter the best yeah I think why would you want any other role I think at one point he was posting something like 40 times a day and I think during his presidency he posted something 50,000 times or something like that like shame I know legendary poster um and he had been on the record on there's like a very specific interview I think it's
back in the '90s maybe early two I think 90s maybe ' 80s where he like explicitly says like I wouldn't want to be a part of you know public office really oh I don't know that interesting I know that uh I mean he's had like an obsession with the media and kind of understood the like the uh the ASM totic returns that come from being a media personality for a long time he had this rule early
on that was like he would never turn down an opportunity to be on TV no matter what it was even if it was going to be bad he was like I just want the exposure I because exposure is just so important yeah he's the original like he's the poster child of like no attention is bad attention y almost yep yeah and he and there's that story about how he like fought tooth and nail to get on the billionaires list on
the Forbes list and it was like everybody else all the other billion the real billionaires are like like paying to get taken off of it like whatever you know I don't want to be extorted and Trump's like please um but yeah I mean during the uh during the Trump Administration or during like one of these sagas there's always a question about like what is Trump actually worth
and there was always and he his argument was like well I'm a billionaire because I have like brand Equity yeah and it's very funny because now he's kind of converted that brand equity in some way to this like meme stock and it's like well it's kind of liquid and he kind of does have a lot of money now so it's hard it's much harder to make the argument that he's not a billionaire now
yeah and I think he had gone through in you know he had seen how owning a business is a great way to convert influence into iida right where like there was like a huge amount of the the pressure over the years and sort of naysayers were saying oh he uses Mara Lago as a way for people to buy uh favor with the Trump family in in a similar way that um you know Hunter Biden has
has had an esteemed art career as well yeah um which is you know one could argue that that's another way yeah um but I think that could get a little political yeah so I think the whole story starts essentially right after January 6th massive riot at the capital lot of pressure on Trump and the Tech Community kind of comes together and de platforms him all simultaneously he gets his
Facebook YouTube snap Snapchat and his beloved Twitter account um he gets kicked off of all of those and he got deplatformed from like Shopify and a bunch of other things I think there was a rumor at the time that there were like all the CEOs were just in a group chat together and so there were there was a little bit of moment where it was like okay shutting down the he's still the sitting president because the
inauguration was on the 20th um kicking the the the sitting president off of social media is is a crazy move so they had to all be in like Unison and be like yeah we're all going to do this yeah um and a lot of a lot of push back at the time even though January 6 was really crazy but what's interesting is that within just a few days like there was a plan in place for truth social so um
this all this all started when a pair of former contestants on Trump's reality TV show The Apprentice Wesley Moss who's a financial advisor and actually has a YouTube channel with like 20K Subs this guy Wes Moss uh he talks about like how to retire early um and this how to retire early spack a company to 10 billion waiting until you hear the end of the story I'm not kidding uh and then
Andrew Dean latinsky who is a Harvard grad he now goes by uh Andy Dean I I think um it has a radio show um but these two guys these two former Apprentice uh contestants show up to Mara Lago and over uh uh they meet with Trump on January 26th so just six days after January 6th like the dust has very much not settled not wasting any time and they and they meet with him they share cheeseburgers and they describe
their vision for like Trump's New Media Empire which is crazy I mean my my takeaway is obviously like you know uh working with Trump is like you know like extremely volatile there's a lot of things that could go wrong but um the the takeaway for me is just like if you have the opportunity to go to like a Billionaire's Mansion who has like an an insane amount of some sort of cornered
asset in Trump's in Trump's Cas Social Capital it's like Social Capital but even if it's like somebody who's like oh yeah they're sitting on like massive forest reserves or like water rights and like you have a chance to go there and sell them on a vision for like what they should do next that's going to be extremely extremely valuable yeah and yeah it's it's an example of you know
the market is efficient in some ways but deeply inefficient in other ways we I have a friend who is a health and wellness influencer and basically the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company he was just like sure that sounds great the business does like you know millions of dollars a year in Revenue now so you can just do things you can just pitch things
right and these guys like you know had they waited even another few weeks maybe the opportunity never would have happened yeah yeah 100% it's not like these guys were like x Facebook X Twitter like really established in social media they just had the connection to Trump through the show clearly like a lot of energy and you'll see that throughout this this story like the the dates will go over the dates and
it's like major Milestone every like three months like the speed of execution here is is very remarkable faster than what I would think would be possible given the scale of the operation um so they go to they go to maralago they they they pitch it and they kind of break down this idea of this truth social New Media offering they're talking about a streaming service online payments
Network a social media platform and can you guess what the deal terms were this is this is fascinating me because like we we know a lot of companies that have done deals with celebrities and it it ranges all the way from like oh we just paid them a CPM deal and they posted on their Instagram to oh we gave them a couple points of equity to like these 50-50 deals that happen every once in a
while I I I know some people that just did one of those um in this case Trump got 90% of the new company which in hindsight was very fair considering that the real Enterprise Value is you can there's almost a direct line between the company's Enterprise Value and Trump's social capital and you can see the yep fluctuations there it's interesting I would love to I don't know
if this will ever be shared but I wonder if he there were other competing bids and people were like there's no way we can give him 90% of the cap table like that would never make sense and those people left like a billion dollars on the table basically yeah for when it was trading at 10 billion it's literally a billion and so these guys got I mean they split the the rest so I think I
think uh Wes and Andy got maybe 5% each and then of course there were delution and you know Equity grants after that but um still like when you think about what where they were going and they clearly had a vision of like a billion dollar multi-billion dollar exit essentially like pretty good terms for not you know for like a couple years of work basically um and so they are trying to set up financing but instead of going
I I think they actually did Pitch this in the valley and I think some VC firms passed on like a traditional deal but very quickly they go straight to because the VCS would look at it and be like all right you have a non-operating partner with 90% just violates doesn't back out yeah you would have to be very contrarian to do it yes yes extremely um and and then there's also all this
volatility about like okay well if Trump runs again maybe he'll de priori PR Iz TR social or if he wins then that could invite a whole bunch of other scrutiny it's like there's so many failure modes it totally makes sense not to do it if you're traditional VC even if you're hunting for like oh something that's edgy uh it's still really risky and so they decided to go the spa route this
was uh 2021 spaxs were like super super hot there and I I I actually haven't been involved in the spa I know you know some guys who have done them um but I think most people think about a spack as like going public in the sense that like the company drives the process and says like we are going public okay like now we have done that but with spaxs it's much more like like the spaxs exist
there were like 326 different spaxs which are these you know special P purpose acquisition companies they're holding companies blank checks so they they IPO the company with like basically no financials so it's a very simple process with the SEC it gets approved it has a stock ticker but it's just trading at the value of the cash and then they go and acire a bus that exists and then
once they once they do that acquisition they can Rebrand or re rename the ticker and then the company's public so the company doesn't need to go through all the traditional process and all the oversight so it happened a ton a lot of the beautiful Financial Innovation incredible and I'm sure it'll be back um and it actually like spaxs are not entirely new something that was like
revitalized in 2020 2021 uh they've existed for a while these like reverse mergers um but uh moss and and and latinsky uh Andy and West these guys start calling uh all the different spacks that are out there to try and get them to bite on the truth Social Deal and so they call 326 candidates uh which is hilarious because you know chamath got a call yeah because he had like seven different he had like IPO a IPO B
IPO C IPO D at the time and they were definitely like so many of these oh yeah like you have so many of these like let's let's do it but uh everyone passed essentially for for reasonable reasons um liberals wouldn't touch it even those who agreed to meet were wary um many said no right away at least one person yelled like get out of my office I don't want anything to do with you um there's
this funny quote from yeah you have to think about how toxic the Trump brand was then right it was post J could have been more now there's been this like anybody anybody that was passing like had like infinite reasons to pass even if they thought it could do well it just almost wasn't worth the career risk for anybody to go and do that even the people who liked Trump and maybe they
supported him in 2016 or 2020 it's like it was very clear that Trump's like star was waning at that moment this whole 2024 cycle has just been like a surprising Revival of the Trump brand um but uh there's and a case study on the human Spirit yes yes um but there's this interesting quote from Merida merger which was one of the spaxs that like talked on the record about it said I was
like I don't want to be on half the country's radar I don't want any one looking up my name I have kids and he said once once he started to dig in he was like it looked like a quick cash grab rather than the long-lasting business adventure we don't do the cult of personality thing and so uh you know uh Adam and Wes start they keep calling and eventually they find this guy this uh swaggering Miami based
investor named Patrick Orlando what a great name for a guy based in Florida Patrick Orlando n nominative determinism essentially it's great and so it' be great it we got to we should do a deep dive he might be brother of the week at some point maybe yeah and so uh Patrick Orlando had already taken one of these blank check companies public he was sitting on a spa it's a search fund it's
just like the the the Harvard MBA that raises 10 mil to go buy some HVAC company but on a much bigger scale uh raising maybe a 100 million um and then and then going and finding the the business and during this time this time there was so people that all those hundreds of spaxs out there were going and hitting up every possible like they were there was way more spaxs than there
were qualified companies right and so I was golfing with an investment banker uh around this time and and he was like oh like your company Lucy might be a target for a spa right and I was like no like we're like pretty small still like this wouldn't make sense we wouldn't want to be a public company he was like and he was like well what's wrong like is your cost structure not big
enough that was the problem it wasn't the revenue it was like but if we could have Justified like oh yeah we're burning $100 million a year so it totally makes sense that would have been justification to Spa not the revenue because the revenue is your material what matter there was there was so much Capital available at that time it basically was a last resort for most companies where if you couldn't really
go public and you couldn't access private Capital yeah that was the best route yeah and then also like like which had a huge adverse selection problem for that I feel like there just been this massive drought in like liquidity for VC funds for a long time where like the companies were all marked really high and they were great but there was just no actual payouts to any LPS and so if
you had like maybe you were holding on to some power law winners that would like IPO properly but if you could get some early liquidity and just kind of clean up your portfolio by spacking a bunch of things that felt pretty good because you could distribute the shares now of course what happened was that a lot of these companies got locked up and then the stocks tanked and so LPS got
dumped on and and didn't really wind up with anything good but um but yeah I mean around this time like Trump was really really anxious to rejoin social media and just kind of get his content game back up he's a poster he's a poster he's just like the founding fathers I I didn't know he did this but he he started a Blog called from the desk of Donald J Trump and uh and and he was thinking about like going
direct and kind of doing his own thing um and there was a lot of tension about this deal but eventually they got it done and so on June 4th 2021 Trump and Orlando signed a preliminary agreement to work together as far as moss and latinsky were concerned the money was coming now all they had to do was build the company so think about this Jan 6 insane Riot like the worst press for
anyone in the entire world like really dark time getting impeached I think around that time too like very quickly like just miserable the Jan 26th they meet have cheeseburgers at Mar Lago and are like let's do this thing and then June 4th less than six months later they're like okay we have the money lined up we're going public with this company yeah insane you can just do things it's crazy um so cheeseburgers he
could have been having cheeseburgers at the Rosewood but instead he was on the in Florida mar mar Lago and so uh they bring in on this guy uh Josh Adams who doesn't exist online and he brings on Billy Boozer as technology officers and so great names Billy I know Josh Adams and Billy Boozer so Billy boozer's a a tech guy and they start building this uh this group of software Developers cuz
they're actually going to go going to go build this thing now that they have the funding lined up and so they're doing a lot of interesting things they're working at this Wei work in Atlanta and uh and and and like it's basically all like tech tech developers like Engineers who have like kind of dropped out of society or like hardcore Libertarians or like living off the grid and then and
then the entire management team is just former apprenticed uh like former Stars he says uh it says at one point there were three or four three or or four of the people there were contestants on The Apprentice so they're just like okay we need somebody in a suit to like do BISD like get get a charismatic person who's been on TV um it's uh it's kind of Genius I I really think we need a new
Apprentice It's it is funny though that because that's kind of how hiring generally works it's like oh yeah I worked with this guy like six or seven years ago like he's he's good I trust him he's just like the best guy for the job that you're aware of at that time and all it takes is like one text message and a call and he's like cool let's do it yeah we really need a new we
really need a new Apprentice maybe we should do it something that's like Mr beastify for the for the Next Generation Um hit us up in the comments if you want to be on our Apprentice show um so uh and then they bring on this like remote software engineer from Macedonia and they're basically forking uh Mastadon are you familiar with this open source project um and so they're they're using
a lot of that as like the the the the base code to build the the network um and uh it's it's like pretty janky in the early stage like very much like a fork of this thing doesn't really look really good but they all have faith that you know Adams and Boozer and these other guys will like you know fix it up before they launch move fast and break things work for meta it'll work for
truth yeah um and so a lot of people at the company are basically just uh blackpilled on social media generally because of the deplatforming and so they're they're they're all there kind of on a on a mission um just just saying like Okay you know it seems like they all support Trump generally but they're more there about like free speech and like the importance of like like an open platform and that's kind of how all
these things get started like even Mastadon I think got started in the same way um Blue Sky had the same thing and there's been a couple other uh there's so many of these clones at this point I think Jack dorsy is working on a new one there's that crypto one um and and and theaster foraster yeah and the whole and the whole plan is always like we're gonna be more open more consistent less
you know Mercurial about the policies and whatnot um and so uh these the the developers they they're quoted here saying they found it outrageous that Twitter had suspended Trump's account the problem as they saw it was pressure from corporate advertisers whose play it safe attitudes Adam summed up as you can't put our brand right next to the guy that's saying all the mean words and
I kind of get that like you know if you're at if you're at Twitter and and every Advertiser is calling you like I don't want my I don't want my ads appearing next to Trump but what what I always found weird was like the advertisers never had a problem advertising in the middle of like a trump rally that was being advertised or that was being broadcast on NBC or CNN
it was only later when it was like okay Trump's like this really it's kind of a cop out of being like oh we're getting all this pressure from this other group and just like putting the putting the blame on them versus taking responsibility as a platform um because it's it's a lot you know having like a programmatic ad is just dramatically different than a podcast ad where there actually is like an
endorsement happening yeah and and You' think that like yeah people would be able to segment out like okay this ad clearly is not related to this in this incendiary Tre tweet and usually like if you're an anti-trump guy like the algorithm will serve you like the quote tweet that's dunking on him so like you're it's not it's very rare that you're seeing just like pure Trump
tweets that are like UN in the platforms you have to imagine there's millions and tens of millions of people who would only use the platforms to consume Trump content and so the plat it wasn't the platform's incentive to boot him right because they're just in the business of capturing attention and monetizing it and that was the story of all of the Trump rallies that got broadcast on CNN
and NBC prior to the 2016 election like that those were phenomenal for Ratings so everyone had these incentives aligned to promote Trump and he got so much earned media and so much Free Press just because he was like the clown who was polling at like 3% but then he won and everyone was like oh we should probably like not do that if we care about you know blocking him from being
the president and so now he's been much more like you know constrained um although he's made obviously a comeback in the 2024 cycle and he's been much more platformed this time around uh mostly due to X and and other like podcasts obviously did like a million podcasts and hasn't had any problem with those like yeah it is it is weird because you know technically like when when Andrew Tate got deplatformed it
wasn't just that they banned the Andrew Tate accounts they actually would ban like Tate fan club number 65 and that and that was his whole acquisition strategy was this like affiliate model where anybody could monetize the Tate brand yep and so he would go on a live stream talk for like three hours his little minions would like clip it and then go viral with those and then be selling a lot of those people that were
clipping had more ARR than average YC batch but uh but but that was like a that was another like unique like moment in like you know platform censorship or deplatforming because it wasn't just Andrew Tate's account that got banned it was uh it was people that were posting Andrew take content and so there was a worry at the time that the same thing would apply to Trump and if Rogan had
Trump on Rogan would lose his YouTube account but that didn't happen because I think there was just like too much pressure too much push back which I think is good because like r be able to talk to it's also very different that the Tate minion accounts were purely trying to sell Andrew Tate courses whereas if Joe Rogan is covering something in the news it's just news yeah exactly and so the first decision
that they really have to make at truth social is the is kind of the the monetization model like the business model and so they they have this they don't want pressure from advertisers because that was the whole thing that started this problem with um with Trump getting kicked off of all the major social media media platforms and so they were thinking about either charging for
the service itself like you know $10 a month just to go on it like Spotify um or uh do something else they they had this idea and they landed on this business model similar to the one used by twitch uh the video streaming site where most of the content is free but fans can tip or subscribe to creators and the site takes a cut of that and this is an interesting question that I
think I keep coming back to as I dig into the true social story is like how much like whether you think it went right or wrong that's kind of an exercise for the listener but the question is is are the problems or benefits due to strategy or execution yeah because I think that if you went to like you know Ben Thompson who studies you know these platforms at straty and asked him you know what the best
business model is for a social network he would almost he would want you to push like the the extreme ends and that's what he was advocating for on on Twitter he was saying like you either need to be completely free and tons of ads that are really well targeted and kind of be the aggregator like meta and that's why meta has done really well even post ATT and when Apple pulled back
on all the targeted ads Apple's meta has been doing really really well or you need to be completely closed pay only pay wall only like what Ben does at stery where you know you only pay for everything yeah and Trump could have thrown up a substack and gotten to nine figures of ARR very very quickly oh yeah but he wouldn't it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way
unless exactly you know um and in many ways like truth social fits into the theme of Trump's life which is he is an entertainment brand right and Truth social is an entertainment experience and that you can go on there and see funny things and laugh and retweet things and things like that but now it's become an entertainment product in the form of a ticker symbol where it just provides you
know daily entertainment in the form of watching the number go up or down usually very dramatically yeah it's a meme stock um and so it's interesting because there it seems like at the time there was a debate between the executives like The Apprentice business guys and the developers and the software Engineers who were more on like a more like missionary versus mercenary and so the missionaries who are very all
about like openness and and durability and censorship resistance they don't want to do an advertising model and they actually say here that um uh that uh you know um for many users ads and other profit boosting PLO had ruined the experience of of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and I think that's an that's an incredibly incorrect take yeah I think that yeah this is we've
talked about jordy's law right which is the higher quality the content the more ads you can jam in it and if you have a media product and you can't put a lot of ads in it it usually is just not that great of a product yeah and also I mean there's the real there's the revealed preference which is that every Facebook and Instagram and Twitter user says oh the ads are so bad and yet they keep
logging on way more than they would if they paid and also with X I want the ads to get better I want more targeted ads the only reason I'm annoyed by ads on X is I'm like this isn't relevant to me yeah it's very clear that the whole iOS privacy app tracking transparency thing was just political infighting between the big tech companies I don't want to see bad ads I want to see good ads for
things that I'm shopping for I like when I'm talking with my friends about something and thens an hour later I get an ad for it it's like a bookmark that I never had to it's you know it's like I actually I actually know people that if they're if they're shopping for something they're like okay I need to make a decision about like which printer to buy they'll go just like visit all
the printer websites and then it's like they hold court on Instagram and they're just like come to me you know oh like I I've been doing some research on you know which which uh jitter-free Coffee Company I should buy let me visit all their websites and then they'll all advertise to me and whichever has the greatest ads I'll buy but but but I don't need to make decision based on
your website I'm gonna make the decision based on your ads which is very interesting um but then uh I mean the other thing is that um ads are just much better at price discrimination and so if you have if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging $10 a month they both pay $10 a month but but if you're doing an ad-based model you'll get $1 in ads from
the college kid and you could get a$1 th000 or $10,000 from the billionaire because because it's targeted to you're going to be able to Target more premium ads um and so that that price discrimination really really maximizes value capture for these for these digital platforms and that's why ads really are like the end all Beall of monetization strategies for these companies um and it's interesting do you
know dton Caldwell at y combinator he's a he's a YC partner um he started a company called app.net do you remember this no back in I want to say like 2012 or something uh still in high school yeah uh he he started a a paid Twitter it was it was uh you know you had to pay to use it and the whole idea was that the money would go to developers who'd be able to develop things on top kind of
like foraster where it's like and and and he had a really tough time with it because it was hard to to get that Viral growth whereas with Twitter it's like you can always hear a new story and be like oh I should get on there and then you're on and then the more you use it the more money they make and the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that
you spend on the site and the and your wealth essentially so if you're buying you know Rolexes and Lamborghinis they're going to make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just you know shopping for Candy Crush or whatever um but yeah it the it's it's it's fascinating they also had this crazy struggle with their Tech stack because they didn't want to get deplatformed and like rugged by one of
the tech companies do you remember the Parlor situation where parlor was on Amazon web services and because a bunch of the January Sixers were on parlor organizing parlor just got booted and if you just lose your hosting provider you're not going to be able to move over like just instantly this is what Matt from antim metal was originally working on which is like a decentralized Crypton
native Cloud which at that moment that's what the original antim metal was which made a lot of sense and it turns out um they ended up evolving the company into what it is today because there was only a tiny tiny tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud and they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted but in that moment in time it felt like oh yeah
Cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of like your the political leanings of the platform yep yeah yeah it's it's very Niche I've seen it work in there's this uh there's this rendering Network for CGI where uh every every CGI artist has a a really beefy computer but they're not always rendering out their projects so they can share render time between the computers
so the computer's basically always rendering and then they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project and there's like render tokens in between they have like a crypto thing and I think it's I think it's been like one of the more successful like use cases even though it's kind of a small Market um so then uh they you you know they're hiring more people um to to scale up the company and
like actually build this thing um they hire this interesting guy uh this Baptist of South Asian descent named justice epen uh who was cancelled for tweeting God smites unbelievers isn't that crazy like he was an engineer at some company and another engineer posted on Reddit complaining about him and he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers and
what's weird is that like based on that response I feel like he must have tweeted something crazier like tweeting I feel like some some you could go tweet God smite's unbelievers right now and people would be like so true yeah or like isn't that just like a straight up from God from the Bible like that's not like that controversial I think but I guess the intention matters yeah but he had he had
a very B he had a very bad go of it and so he was one of those people that was like really driven by the mission right um and then uh it says also among the other recruits was Ryan Lackey a Libertarian programmer who had been working since 1990s to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the internet and uh do you recognize this
guy Ryan Lackey looks like a boss I know that guy could I interview him I interview him in Miami yeah um this not this year yeah this year really yeah I interviewed him about prepping yeah oh that's this is him yeah and uh I mean he has a wild wild story um he uh he was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business like he wasn't in the military he just went there to
install satellite Communications and take like really small like DOD contracts here and there so like the the Army would be like oh we have some forward deployed base that's a guy if he opened up a safe at 100 you'd you you'd enter any price and and you know uh you know Sealand that uh like offshore uh offshore concrete platform located in the North Sea seven miles off the English Coast uh he went there and
installed a server Farm there and he was like doing their like it isn't that crazy uh yeah so he so he was there I think he was doing like security and stuff uh they had a man who worked at Apple they had a bunch of other people basically just like uh the outcasts of tech like all come together in this we work in Atlanta the black sheep exactly um and it's very funny because they
start like colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all like they're all similar and how fringy they are but they're all different fringes so there's one guy who opinion strongly held yeah yeah so there's one guy who describes himself as a a literal communist I don't know why he's working and a vegan and a vegan and uh and he gets it and and then like epen
the guy who tweeted God smite's unbelievers uh was observed prizz to his colleagues particularly Gleason the vegan communist which is so funny because it's just like you have all these like black sheep and they're all just like fighting in this chaos pit yeah it's it no it's not just like a group of people with different differing views that are all like happy to be around people with differing views a
bunch of people that are like no I am right I'm right like we need no government at all or we need complete government like we're going to argue until we figure this out yeah yeah yeah uh but probably some interesting conversations um but then there's this like anecdote about how like uh so it's all like just like chaos on this way work like trying to build this thing like forking open S projects like
working so fast um and and then like when Patrick Orlando like the big like investor the spa owner comes by they have to like bring all the remote workers in to like make them look bigger and like put up big displays and like play Trump Clips on the TVs to be like this is a real office like this is this is like a real deal um and and and like the former employe why is there no
Hollywood documentary on this yet by the way well I mean that's the whole reason I wanted to do this story was because you know as much of a joke as it is like like this does deserve a a profile in Bloomberg like the information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in Tech in the last few years like Yeah and I don't need the fifth uh mockumentary of of Wei
work I want the first of trump social yeah Trump social true social and slip totally totally um and I mean these interactions are so funny it probably it probably should be uh like a A mockumentary or a or some sort of movie because it's no it should be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur entrepreneur named Donald J Trump I think Trump
should go on the circuit with it Emily Chang we need an Alex Conrad piece get him Alex if you're listening yeah yeah do it your move um and so and so they're that like the the tech people keep bringing like the Trump organization like ideas for like how to you know juice engagement on the site and one of them so funny said um they told Trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge
something similar to Twitter's Blue Tick uh Trump thought he was talking about making physical badges like a like a sheriff's Five Point star and mailing them out to users which is like actually what they should have done yeah they should have done that it would have been so good like I would it would be such a collectible to get like the original truth social have you ever used truth
social I actually signed up I created an account just to see like what's going on there it's chaos I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted not even there's very little that like actually makes it its way over because it's all so boring yeah it's all just like and the ads are particularly funny because they're all like ads for like third party un un uh
like unpaid for or what's it called when you don't like register a trademark you're not paying the money doesn't go to Trump but it's like a trump t-shirt basically and he's just like cool with it because like whatever um but they're all they're all framed like the the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll like a fake poll and the poll will be like do you support J Donald J J
Trump and it be like hell yes or like no and no matter what you click it's just an image so no matter what you click it takes you to the next thing and it'll be like do you want to take back the country from the corrupt Democrats and it'll be like yes or no you can click no it'll still take you to the next thing and it just takes you to a checkout for like a $60 t-shirt or like a coin or
something that's like well maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and and kind of the numbers they're putting up tell me you have some no no I mean we we I mean you You' pulled up their U chart earlier talking about how they've done about a million dollars of AD Revenue in the last 12 months yeah yeah last 12 month they're they're not they're they're post monetization clear if they're focusing
on monetization or if it's just sort of Happening by Nature being a big technology platform yeah but it's I'll let you get I think the numbers are uh in the last 12 months they did a little over a million dollars in Revenue they uh eida was negative 100 million net income was negative -400 million roughly 380 and it's almost a 10 billion dollar company so you can think of it as like
it's a gross story though it's a gross story um it's wild um and so yeah I mean they wind up building this site and it's actually like a very simple front end it's like a direct clone of like every Twitter clone ever but the back end's like extremely complex because they need to have like two providers for everything like two databases two you know front end or two two like uh I
forget what they call it like CDN because like the uncan man and he had to have the equivalent backend social media platform basically distribution engine so so so they're so they're building All This and like I think at a certain point I I think this happens a lot with like the Trump projects where it's just like he's at Mar laga somebody says hey I'll give you 90% of this business and he's
like yeah go for it like like we'll see what happens and then they came back with like the Spa offer and he's like okay this is getting interesting and they come back with like a site that's like kind of working and oh okay like maybe I should go deeper and so then imagine I can imagine him like hammering out a tweet you know not a tweet a post a truth a truth and hitting sen for the
first time and seeing it lag for like 20 seconds and then post and me like not bad not bad cuz he grew up in the AA like he came like he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products so he had probably had other attempts and been like this is really hard and so just having a working product he was probably pretty excited about it well you know he's a printed
email Guy yeah he doesn't he doesn't do email on the computer it's all it's all printed out for him and then he just says okay yeah respond to this this way W that's great um and so you know I think as yes for sure uh I think as as things start to get a little bit more real um the the rest of the Trump org kind of descends so Eric Trump shows up and wants a piece and uh don Junior
wants a piece as well and Melania wants some shares um and uh and they kind of go back and forth they're fighting with uh latinsky and yeah they try to go back on the deal West Moss well yeah they try and go back on the deal and they try and say like you know oh that that thing we signed that term sheet for 90% like that wasn't accurate like we don't want you to run this thing like which is funny
because it was already so aggressive how do you get more aggressive than that when it's yes it would have still made sense for them to do it even if they had a point of the company but going trying to take him from 10 10 down to yeah I don't know and so they so they issue another 3% of the company to the Trump org they didn't give any to Melania I assume it's just like delution on top of
the existing structure but what's really interesting is that uh like latinsky and and West Moss like the original guys even though they only own 10% of the company they must have had some block right or something or like the board must have been structured in a way that they could because otherwise we would just be hearing about like and then they were gone and like then they lost all
their equity and like that didn't happen maybe it was just like legal threat but were doing on that fateful cheeseburger meeting they were like we will give you 90% of the economics but we want we want to gain they were on The Apprentice they learned from the best Donald himself how do you so Donald's probably sitting there being like they're using my moves against me yeah and so like as as so
they sort all that out and as they as they're starting to build they they do wind up partnering with Rumble uh okay which is like the the the the YouTube competitor um that's actually like fairly big I know some people that have worked there right yeah I think it's a public company I think it was another spack and uh they acquired uh y our peers over at alln I think Rumble acquired Colin yep which is cool yeah
little Cameo from uh sax yeah yeah and so they uh they they do have like a more robust Tech stack than some of the other uh partners and so the idea was okay maybe we get on Rumble they can host our our data but at the time Rumble Rumble hadn't been struggling with like deplatforming as much cuz most of the stuff they host I mean they host like bar stool they host uh who's that guy
from Get Him to the Greek you know that guy oh yeah yeah yeah yeah he's like some sort of like former comedian now like a podcaster Russell Brand that's who it is so they host Russell Brand these people aren't like completely agitating and being like take to the streets they're not the most aggressive so I think they I think Rumble has not had that many problem rum kicking
themselves for not doing you know trying to make a billion dollar bid for Truth at that moment in time well a lot of the other companies were like gab or parlor and getter at this time we both talking to Trump about like hey why don't you come and make this one your home because we already built it and we'll give you you know some sort of percentage realize it's not about the tech it's about the
distribution yep that and and they and you know that parlor and getter were not going to be like yeah take 90% of our company yeah there's just no way they're probably like oh we'll give you 5% and we'll pay aunch and you'll get all this stuff but like there's just no way that even you know once they built it there's just too many people around the table too many people on the cap table so just
impossible um but uh then on October 20th so we're still less than a year out uh the day the world was meant to learn about the merger and the existence of Truth social Trump summoned latinsky to Mar Lago in a Twist worthy of The Apprentice itself the former president said he was once again considering a deal with getter and asked latinsky to convince him that truth social was
better some how latinsky got Trump to sign the merger agreement wow Legend like Legend you get called and it's just like actually I'm bailing on this thing like get out of my office and he's just like wait wait wait this is going to work he was summoned yeah yeah that was a long that was a long flight so it worked Orland uh you know Orland Patrick Orlando goes to the Atlanta Wei work
with a magnum of Vu cako and they pop out of the Champaign and the press release goes out that evening and the the they call it Trump media and Tech ology group uh and the plan is to give a voice to all the tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they'd been working on the press release claimed that Trump's New Media offering would be worth $1.7 billion but
within 24 hours the stock market valued the spack at 10 times that amount 17 billion so total meme stock for a minute uh obviously for a minute it goes down but yeah for not for for not much I think it's still that but but but even even at that 1.7 billion you know that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal because he owns and now he owns 60% but you know at that point it was
you know still more but it was enough to be yeah it was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say like oh you're not a real billionaire right but now it's just like check the market cap you can run the numbers yourself yep yeah and even though like a lot of it's locked up I'm sure he can borrow against
it I'm sure there's some sort of collateral he's probably gotten some out and we'll get more out and stuff so yeah it's fascinating and so they launch and there's a bunch of like you know negative press and they get attacked and uh at one point they one of the companies that's providing their backend technology actually does close truth socials account but because the tech team had built these backups they were
only down it affected 88.5% of their traffic for three minutes that's it pretty crazy these guys are better than CRA cracked yeah it's like insane uh and so of course that's uh they're they're not uh they're not done yet because uh you know friend dear friend of Donald Trump Gary Gensler uh pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the the spack was illegal uh because his
his view was that um Orlando had spaed with the idea of acquiring truth social and you can't do that you have to truly set up a blank check and not know and so if there's evidence that it's like oh you're going to IPO G to acire this company then that would mean that you should just spack you should just go through the noral process a regular IPO but if you truly spack the blank check
and then you get the call and you're okay this is what I'm searching for I'm going with it is that lawsuit still it's settled settled we'll get there um but it did settle and now everything's above board hilariously enough and so um of course like there's a there's a bunch of more problems that happen people figure out that the companies working out of this we work in Atlanta and so you know
tons of trump haters are like doxing people and taking photos outside and they're really worried about um you know threats to their lives uh which should have been predictable if you go work for this yeah why were they not in Trump Tower seriously they should have been somewhere like secure I would think something I don't know or work out of my Lago I guess or something um but but now
that like the the spack is going through it's the the parent company was now the most valuable spack in history and uh all the tech workers basically uh you know consider The Apprentice guys like they're de facto bosses even though it seems like all the titles are pretty pretty vague um the uh the employees learn that there's going to be this new guy running the company essentially a CEO and it's uh Congressman Devon Nunes
so this steps in yes and and of course this push do once once you once you once you've gone try to find a great Congressman to run company yeah yeah what what a dream but uh Nunes had an interesting background so he he was uh he spent two decades representing a rural area in California and was best known as for his time as the chair of the house intelligence committee during the investigation into
Trump's alleged collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and at that time Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump so like he was the one Congressman or like the main congressman who was like pushing back against the Russia gate stuff and so that probably won him like a ton of favor with Trump because he's like you
went to bat for me on this one committee like thank you I'll work with you in the future um and so uh you know true social employees like respected him for that but they were kind of like what is this non-tech guy doing running our company one one person said this is like uh going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the CEO of Microsoft and I love that love that quote because
they're like we are Microsoft yeah dud you run like you run like a website that pulls in a million dollars a year there are like Indie hackers that are doing better than you and you're comparing yourself to a business that's worth a trillion dollars but respect respect um and so it's like maybe he's actually qualified to run this who knows like it's such a small operation you know whatever um so he doesn't comment
in this economist article but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth and um interestingly like while he was there he pushes for advertising as soon as possible yeah so again it's like this guy's completely unqualified like all the employees all the disgruntled employees who spoke to the economist for this article are like like oh he's so
unqualified he was the worst boss he was terrible but like I keep seeing like some of the decisions he make and I'm like these seem reasonable like advertising is the correct business model and you should run fast and so there's a lot of uh like the new CEO told the team they needed to work harder because a lot of money had been spent like that's true like they were burning a lot of money like he said that they
needed to do advertising as soon as possible that's also true like it's like kind of odd to say because yeah he doesn't have the traditional background but seems like he kind of decisions a lot of business is common sense yeah and so and so the tech guys are like are like Adams and Boozer are like really pissed because they they really don't want to do advertising they're like
let's get let's get like like and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter they're like Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads when they launched um but you know just like they need they need they need a growth story it's that balance between yeah revenue and just um traction right yeah there is something to be said for that where it's like would the stock be trading even
higher if people weren't like they only have a million dollars it's like well they haven't even started monetizing yet who knows maybe their first month proba I actually think it would be trading higher yeah because if you if somebody told you I was shocked when you told me that they had a million dollars of Revenue right like it seemed seems like you would intentionally have to be
trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention right terrible conversion of attention to I mean as a political candidate Trump has raised like almost a billion dollars right just by asking for donations so you would assume that if you went on there and was like I'm going to give you at least some sort of product maybe it's like a badge or something like he would
be able to get like tens of millions hundreds of millions or the physical pin yeah something you know you think if he's just selling stuff you able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention but it's just very different when it's this like ad platform but um yeah very interesting so uh at long last the app was released to the public on February 21st 2022 so it's just over a
year from that like dinner at Maraga over it really is fast execution like you have to admit it um and it's interesting comparing it to like quibby do you remember that company like they spent like what six years in like stealth raised all this money and it just like went it's like at least they're down to fail fast like respect that yeah um but of course the launch is like a mess and like hundreds of thousands of people
spent days on the waiting list trying to sign up once in they encountered glitches Galore error messages broken links one page on the website misspelled truth as t r u just like General like chaos which is which is normal but noral stuff but by the end of the week truth social was number one on the App Store I'm sure they got a call from Nikita beer yeah um I'm sure Nikita was actually
sure they were they were spending eight figures on intro just for Nik just to get his advice yeah um but again like just to remind people the the App Store is a measure of like uh of acceleration not absolute numbers so so if you're if you're grow if you launch and you grow very fast then you'll rank higher it's much harder for uh a product establish that yeah an establish app like Facebook
to be number one because they're not necessarily growing as much um but more than eight 866 th000 people installed it in the first week Instagram by comparison only signed up about 100,000 users in its launch week such a bad comparison this is such a bad comparison because like Kevin cam was an was like an awesome guy intact he but he was like an intern at Twitter no one knew and
they knew if you actually want to create a super engaged start small get the right users don't don't don't just like sign up as many this journalist is writing it like it's a dunk like oh like you know like got him got him it's like yeah that doesn't make any sense um uh but uh so so so at this point like it is a pretty good launch the number one in the App Store maybe Trump's popularity and
widespread frustrations with big Tech really could fuel a major new platform um and so uh two weeks later on March 11th the terms of nunes's contract were finalized he would make 750k in his first year plus bonuses and shares in the company and then some other people came into the the company as well um but uh uh they're working 20 hours a day for six straight months they said they
didn't see their families like they're really grinding to like make this work but there's just total chaos they really took all the core lessons from Silicon Valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly yeah but uh uh obviously things are chaotic there's uh you know disgruntled employees who are like literally destroying code like erasing servers and stuff on their way out that's like wild
thing to do uh also like super illegal and like you could face like a bunch of uh like civil penalties if you do this interestingly a bunch of uh a bunch of EX employees like wouldn't talk on the record for this because apparently in the NDA that you sign with truth social uh you uh there's a $5 million penalty I'm gonna start putting that in the ndas I send VC like hey if you want to see my
pitch deck it's a $5 million fine if you scre the do you screenshot the docon yeah get get out of here and so the the the some of the tech people start leaving the general Council Adams and Boozer and a lot of people are like oh this is like the beginning of the end the stock went down by 10% yeah the stock went down by 10% and then another 10% the next day when when the
tech people quit um but obviously it's like gone back up um and there's this uh like discussion now about like the pre- Nunes era and the post Devon Nunes era um uh because Nunes relocated the truth social offices to Florida moved all of Truth social's data over to rumble's nent cloud service sign the company up for rumble's new ad platform and again this seems like you know maybe it's
controversial and the employees didn't like it but those all seem like really really smart moves like building a new ad platform is genuinely very hard and I remember when when Netflix um announced that they were going to be doing uh ads they wanted to do everything like inhouse and very best there's apps on the App Store with tens of millions of users that use other AD networks to
monetize because it's just there's more liquidity yeah exactly and so uh like if it's if it's something that people I don't know if Netflix wound up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the the ad Network I think they were going to do like the Bing ad Network which obviously is very robust has great matching algorithms and lots of liquidity um but uh if I if it's if it's potentially good
enough for Netflix where Netflix would at least consider it and analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it like obviously it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees like and is only a year old to like not try and build everything in house especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them so um again very very interesting where like I think the
execution was good I think the strategy might have been a little a little lacking just in the and this is something we should discuss more about like you know is building a new Social Network the right strategy for Trump generally or should he have just done the substack I think it was a it was just a timing thing when they decided to do this it was absolutely the best possible
product to build and he didn't know that Elon was going to buy axe yeah and so he didn't know that he was going to get his account back he didn't know that he was going to be able to go on Rogan on you has he gotten his yeah he's gotten his other accounts back yeah yeah yeah he has he has I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back yeah uh and and he's been able to kind of do everything
which has somewhat taken the air out of the truth social balloon because he it's not as existential to him if he was a lot of people a lot of people thought that it would already be a zero full on zero uh and certainly not yeah so they kind of changed their they changed their startup culture it used to be agile teams and horizontal management nness imposed a top down structure in which workers were
siloed into small groups under different managers again like reasonable like sometimes that's the right thing sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical you have to wonder was there was nunz in group chats with highly competent Tech CEOs being like hey what would you do in this situation and
they're like yeah I would Silo things out move from being a horizontal structure to like you know kind of verticalized teams like have build out these different functions like you're really going to want to have a trust and safety dep Department uh that's important for any social media platform totally possible yeah I guess I guess from here where does going into tomorrow um we don't talk about politics on this
uh show but what happen to Truth uh you know if Trump is elected is the most natural next step for the US government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital Town Square for Citizens or where where does truth social go from here I have no idea is it purely an entertainment product it feels like it's like be cases on both sides because if if he wins stuck between a be
case and a bar case I mean if he wins he doesn't need this like liquidity injection as much anymore so I mean this is I think Peter teal had a a quote with in uh who's that axios guy I forget but he was doing some interview andbody was yeah Dan Prim uh and he was doing some interview and it was the question was like what's going on with true social and and Peter was basically like I think
it's some sort of like you know sneaky way to transfer wealth to uh to get around like campaign Finance rules um and so and and so that that becomes less of an incentive like if you want Trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like something along those lines even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the
shares yet it's like clearly having A4 billion do asset is valuable when you're running for when you're running for president um but but after if he wins then okay you don't need to pump the stock anymore and if he loses it's like maybe he becomes less relevant he's not deplatformed anymore and it's not like if he loses he'd be deplatformed again unless he tries some January 6 stuff
again which would be crazy yeah so I don't know it is it is tough yeah it's it's it's certainly a much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade a lot of a lot of attention and relevancy and um and it and and I guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would I'm going to be president and then I'm going to I'm going to write a book and then my wife's
going to write a book and our you know son is going to write a book and every sort of and that that's like very like 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well um but it could be you could imagine a future where every president uh you know just ends up creating a social media platform because that's that's that that becomes like the the right way like would you I
think KLA could probably drive if she created a social media app after losing um if she were to lose uh I think she could get a uh you know 50 million downloads right probably I would I would sign up for that well you know this isn't the first celebrity social media company Jeremy rener cloned an Instagram and had the rener the Jeremy rener app that you could install and it was just
his Instagram feed isn't that insane and you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy rener posts and then he would like post like extra photos but it was just like his feed so just like I'm surfing today I went to the gym and and like the Jeremy rener fan club was just like on his app and then he eventually shutter shuttered it but I mean you could imagine like in the same way that
substack like a lot of people are completely they follow some writer and they're completely unaware that like substack is the underlying technology they're just like oh I love I love not boring. Co right and I just and this guy pachy is great he must have built this website but he's using the substack infrastructure you could see you could see that you could see that happening in
almost every vertical where it's like oh you're using Vimeo to power a website like a YouTube or substack allows you to just generate your own app at some point oh yeah yeah yeah that would be interesting so it's like you're on substack but I mean I talked to the substack guys about other media formats and they allow you to upload podcasts and they actually do allow you to upload
videos so it is possible to run like basically your own private video feed like your own YouTube on substack and you could have someone just like have that you know okay they're they're subscribed to your Brothers app yeah exactly we'd like to own that real estate on your home screen yeah um but uh let's let's close out before with the uh like the the the ending of the SEC uh fight so even though like the the
spa was trading and successful because of the SEC lawsuit the the acquisition wasn't approved and so you weren't technically investing in truth social you were you were investing in IDE in a that had like a contract in place to acquire this company but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the SEC and so there's this lawsuit that
says you know hey it was uh illegal for you to do this spack and this acquisition we're going to block the acquisition um but um on March 24th more than three years after latinsky and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan Trump media and Technology Group stock debuted on NASDAQ uh they settled the case with the SEC for an $18 million fine in July of 2023 it's very that's a big fine yeah
it feels like a big fine but I mean they have a l not in the context of the market cap now but but that does like a significant fine yeah I I I I guess they were just like yeah negotiating and figured out that was like a a number that they were Gary's bonus got was big that year yeah and so uh they get it approved and and and at that point like the the stock actually becomes like the
djt ticker or something like that I think it was D wac before like Digital World acquisition company or something dwac was the was the spack name before yeah it's a very funny name um so so so so they get through Matt LaVine has a good quote in here you know Matt from uh Bloomberg uh he says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust and he's using
the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump from dumping it on retail investors so it's kind of like they're they like maybe the SEC didn't actually have that strong of evidence Ence that Orlando and Trump were talking before iping we don't know how much that there's a huge incentive for all the Trump insiders to keep the party going through the election because if the
stock had there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to zero and if it had how that would have actually created that that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of Americans being like I lost a bunch of money because of Trum and maybe he is the scammer that the media like says right yeah and so they they celebrate the the NASDAQ listing with it's so funny it's
on the NASDAQ it feels so serious for what this is back in Mar Lago yeah back in Mar Lago they have the actor John Voit and uh truth social Brandon cookies that first day the share price touched $78 making the company worth about 15 billion more than doubling the former president's personal wealth moss and latinsky the two uh guys who started this whole thing were unable to profit
from the mo from the moment however as they were locked up they were locked in multiple lawsuits with Trump media and Technology Group um the company argued that their initial deal with Trump was void and they had forfeited their shares um because they had run the company so ineptly and that was interesting because it's like it was s it's a short thing I wonder if there was like a vesting Cliff
that they were trying to like you know push them towards or something like that if they had like some some one-year vest and they barely made it over that could be like a point of contention I don't know but it all worked worked out because they they settled those lawsuits and Moss latinsky won their litigation with the company and cashed in all nearly all their shares together pocketing around hundred
million wow he not gonna have to do YouTube anymore yeah retired explains why he retired early retire early seriously um and so uh I wonder if he got a as part of the settlement he got a complimentary lifetime rogo membership he either got a lifetime membership or a B yeah one or the other it was a high standard deviation outcome yeah I feel like Trump would be fine with them still
going and spending money on the property because it would just be his way to be like I still like yeah I'm your Daddy yeah one current employee messaged a group chat a former current and former truth social staff saying that Nunes had claimed that moss and latinsky had stolen shares leaving nothing for anyone else his colleagues responded with crying with laughter emojis suggesting
that they didn't take this idea seriously as if they were all all the shares were sitting in the office somewhere and on the way out they just grabbed yeah exactly a bunch of I feel like I feel like if any organization was still running on physical Paper Stock certificates it would be it would be true soal it is funny because it's like everyone is saying like oh this is like
a mess and like you know like it's poorly managed and it's like fake but then they're like but also the money's real and I really want a piece like you screwed me out of this like very legitimate thing like they can't you can't have it both ways guys you can be like talking trash in the media or you can have your payout uh lesson learned there um but uh Trump has insisted he won't sell his shares which now amount
to about 60% of the company uh which is very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company IPOs it in two years very very rare um but uh then it just shows that he's Mission oriented yeah right and uh they could yeah all of these these ex employees are really trashing they could probably have 100 million people on the platform if they had any intelligence whatsoever but
again it's like is this a question of intelligence like is this a question of strategy or execution like is it are they running it as a company or a financial product is the product the stock or is the product the website yeah I think we know the answer yes um and so yeah it's it's basically fintech right it's it's uh technology that enables a new uh way to yeah trade on Trump's
Social Capital there's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here he says I had to step away from a from a role that I felt God Made For Me due to ethical and Moral Moral concerns it shook me to my core sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain and I think that there's a lesson here about like like we hear about these Venture Capital firms that
are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for like firing firing Founders And yet when I talk to very very aggressive Founders often times they're fine getting in the ring with a VC with a bad rep they trust themselves they trust themselves and they're okay they're like I I'm willing to get into the Gladiator Arena I'm the lion they need to be worried and I think that
there's something here where like the uh where like you know it is it is clearly public knowledge that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world but if you go in and you play your cards right you can wind up with $100 million payout like those guys did and so so maybe they will wind up hanging out at marago in a little bit but yeah I think it's one of those things like 5 10 years from now they'll
if they were to see Trump they would shake hands and wink be like yeah it would just be like it would be like that one hell of a boxing match yeah it was like yeah going back to that fateful bite of the first Burger yep exactly and then the article closes with a an epilogue about now now Trump has moved on to a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial Financial I had somebody at I had
somebody bring up would any of this have been possible without Diet Coke like if you took if Diet Coke didn't exist could could this entire story have existed and I think you could make an argument that um absolutely not absolutely not that's a good place to end well that's the story of Truth social the truth about truth social hope you enjoyed it um let's move on to some
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of Finance by making markets more accessible and efficient at Citadel securities.com that's Citadel securities.com now back to the show did you see that is it Bowery farming failed uh Yoni writes it really sucks that Bowery farming failed I always was rooting for bowy because it felt like it could actually make a difference on nutrition and climate change here's why from my out Outsiders perspective that
it was so hard growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to Consumers and low margin lettuce is cheap sold through wholesale wall of lettuce at Whole Foods means it's even worse for margins they scaled super quickly building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software while owning the local operations and needing to be
good at lots of complex things simultaneously tons of capex that they paid fors elves if you inverted each of those factors you'd wind up with a multicrop full basket sold directly to Consumers basically a CSA operated as a franchise H interesting I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system it's a worthy effort yeah I remember
seeing the vertical farming stuff and uh never never dug in too much but uh good good take from uh y Yoni as as usual uh I think it the real question question that comes away from it is what was the actual strategy right because I've had the product it's a good product I remember buy buying bow lettuce and being like this is good lettuce but I never you know I don't shop for groceries so it was B rebranded like
yeah so they were like fully verticalized so you could go into Whole Foods and like buy their lettuce that they had cultivated using their technology and and eventually sold but you have to wonder like yeah what's the strategy it's like the lowest possible margin product it's deeply deeply competitive it's really difficult to sort of like differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with bow I
could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create like the same quality of product with with a much different cost structure and so yeah it's one of those things like how would you have you know you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at Bow's scale at $2 billion right I don't know a lot of um uh sort of midlevel midmarket farms Farm
operations that are so it's like I you have to wonder they were last valued at 2 billion dollar what was were they pitching at the time hey we're creating this technology stack that other Farms can use and uh Yoni and slows like have a big thesis around um verticalization which is like if you have this technology like don't just sell the technology or the software like sell the
end products but that's interesting you know they were involved with a company that um they were involved with a company that made software for parking garages yep and that software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain basically and so I would have loved to see Bow's last pitch deck of
being like why are we worth $2 billion selling lettuce right because you have to imagine the the actual net revenue on selling that lettuce like if if somebody was running like a farm you know let's say somebody's running a Vineyard and they're like yeah like we spent like three billion or we spent like 3 million do last year to do one million of of Revenue you'd be like
okay like yeah bad cool like Pet Project do you think they should have gone up Market have you seen that Omas strawberry company it's like $50 a strawberry or something yeah starting with that seems very interesting because like it's so highend it's going to be only consumed by like celebrities and like very it's going to be very instagrammed but you're also going to have so much breadth to like tell your
story whereas if you're just if like yeah there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed but then it just comes in a standard lettuce P still tastes like lettuce still tastes like lettuce whereas the strawberry you open it up it's like a it feels like Sugarfish right yeah I think that that is what they absolutely should have done I think there's a bunch of interesting
angles to do like exotic fruits that are almost like desserts Y and so if they were the key thing though for bowy would be like how do you justify charging four to five to 10 times as much for the same product which is what this I got a box of Asian pears once from someone and they were so juicy that I kept choking on them I would take I would take a bite and it would just explode with like
like coughing like oh my God you guys got to try this they were so good um and and and it's something where I'm sure they were like you know 10 times the price but you have to like to make something like this work where B's investing what I'm sure amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D and Facilities all this capex you have to be able to tell a story of oh we're
going to be able to we're going to be able to expand you know our core product from a 20% gross margin product to a 90% gross margin um yeah just I I I it's also interesting because there's there's like some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors but they are I'm thinking of like rain maker flooding different areas like terraforming it's like yeah maybe we're running out of
Farmland so we need to go vertical in cities or we need to turn the desert into farmland and if we do that it's like okay well all of a sudden the price of farming lettuce is going to go way down if we can just figure out how to there there's another plan to reroute the color River if we uh switch California to nuclear power desalination so so California gets the water from the ocean
desalinator river goes through Nevada to New Mexico and and uh Arizona and all of a sudden Nevada and Arizon one of my favorite talks Aton yeah I think I think what's interesting that where I'd end with Bower is that this was one of the last maybe is one of the last Super high-profile failures from the D Toc era because bowy was a company that the big branding agencies like the red antlers I
believe I I I don't remember if it was Jin lane or red antler that did it but I think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product slap a you know get EMT from Jin lane or antler to like give you this like half a million dollar brand treatment and then people are like oh this is investable now right um like people investing in all birds because it had a cool story and narrative and
visuals but then oh at the end of the day you're selling shoes right yep uh do you see this Martin scr tweet defend capitalism everywhere every time be willing to Die For It civilization collapses without it and then this is something that we could frame put on the wall and then it says like Thomas Jefferson and then Martin Shelli I love this because like the first reply is civilization actually
collapses well when it lacks strong Sovereign institutions social cohesion and resilience to external threats and Martin just says no mogged strong opinion strongly H yeah yeah no I I I just think uh not enough people are saying this yep uh and I think it's now becoming a normal view within uh our hyper online technology world but outside of you know my little brother I've had to talk with him in the
last year being like no capitalism is actually good it's like if you look at all these different categories whether it be education or healthc care or housing capitalism life expectancy capitalism is the driving force that enables Improvement in those areas so ultimately you have to imagine that it's fairly good so it's one of those things that feels obvious but like I actually
think is worth talking about because they there we were our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in uh the classroom and a kid you know I remember in college would be like consumption is bad all you know and it's sort of this like deceleration like view uh that leads to Western Europe which uh I like to vacation in but I certainly don't want to live there don't
want to invest there yeah it's interesting uh capitalism for a long time faced like assaults on both sides there was like the communism like we need to go back to you know like real communism has never been tried we need to go back to like you know Soviet era communism or something like that uh but then there was also like the accelerationist like techno version of anti- capitalism which was like we're
going to get AI and robots and Ubi and are you familiar with Falk fully automated luxury communism this idea that yeah this there's like a bunch of sci-fi stories about this and also like political philosophers about it and that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense although there's all these questions about like how incentives would work in that case but
um but but that did take hold in a lot of Bay Area people where they were like well yeah maybe if we can just have the robots to do everything we'll live in the time of abundance and so there won't need to be uh you know we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything and you can just snap your fingers although there's always a question about like okay well
what luxury communism luxury communism it is a good communism means a Rebrand yeah it it is a good it is a good take and it's certainly preferable to you know terrible communism or something but uh but then there's still a question about like okay well there's only so much beachfront property even if you create like the metaverse or you got other worlds things are always be scared
yeah it's very hard to imagine a world where it's like oh yeah I can just like get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand like okay maybe you have some sort of crazy like micro robots that can just do that but it's like it's very odd um so the uh Sean Frank good friend of the Pod says uh virgin run Club versus Chad walk enjoyer and uh the Virgin run Club says you got to give some credit to will mantis for
being an early major proponent of the Chad walk enjoyer where ly the Lindy walk yeah he would you know frequently tweet that he was going on a 30 mile walk around Manhattan uh and you know shortly after that had a nine figure exit so he he actually s me into that the last time I was in Manhattan I walked the entire Island like from like I don't know 91st Street down to Wall
Street and back and it was amazing like like you you spend like two or three hours walking I mean particularly in Manhattan because the entire city like turns over and you watch people leave work and then start settling in getting dinner and then the nightclub it's insane it's like one of the most fantastic cities in the world um also are you are you aware of how uh a lot of like the best bodybuilders are doing
cardio these days walk it's all walking yeah I forget Chris Williamson was doing a video with somebody uh it's called like seum Chris Bumstead you know this guy so he the Fantastic bodybuilder his cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an incline tread mill yeah and it's amazing I've been doing it because there's never an excuse for you're like oh I don't really want to Sprint right now but
everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking and then 45 minutes in you're like okay I actually burn a lot of calories I'm actually exhausted there's a lot to this cuz it's incline but it's very very hard to stop we bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in Malibu right there's like this amazing walk path fantastic Sagar good friend says 12 days
until clocks this is actually an old tweet but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time 12 days until clock shift forward dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months also people can drink outside one hour later team Standard Time so I guess we're actually in standard time now we went back so he's excited now that we're back on Standard Time um contrarian to be excited about the yeah
yeah but he hates going to Daylight Savings time because then if you wake up early it's dark yeah but I and I agree with this like I think the switch is always like super disruptive especially you have kids in a family like it just throws everything off like you do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time their circadian rhythm yeah our four-month-old it's awful is
now deciding he went from she went from waking up at 710 a.m. to now 610 on the dot and it's like okay awesome but I will say like last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time I got into the office at like 5 or 6 and it was perfectly dark outside and I could watch all the buildings and downtown like light up and like oh it's just beautiful watching the sunrise like there's
nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of like from the office from the top of like when I worked at Bane capital I would get in before everyone and I would uh go around like set up conference rooms I was like an intern and I would always be on like the top floor of this building right as the sun rose and it was like so inspiring see the sunrise over your ThinkPad amazing
is an out of- Body Experience literally over your over your polycom this was like 2012 or 2010 every every single office at a polycom um it was great uh other stuff too I gotta dig in okay so uh Goblin says um uh wait what the hell I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura data data versus the Health Data I've been logging and he's like my summary oh sure your your HRV heart rate
uh drops R varil greater than 20% from Baseline a day or two before the migraine starts if it gets below 40 you can be pretty sure one's coming and then there's a community note that says this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author but it's like some sort of like deeper truth I think that I think what's interesting here is like yeah greater health comes from greater
understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health whether that's oh I feel a lot better at 5:00 p.m. and I have more energy at 5:00 P p.m because I walked in the morning and so the sort of Quantified Self movement has been allowing people to understand themselves better whether that's getting uh your biomarkers tested with function or using your aura ring or
things like that um and I just think like incredible incredible things are going to come from having more quantifiable data yeah and then having a effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free the thing that we keep coming back to about what's actually interested interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service and so if you
want to work with the leading longevity specialists in the world a lot of them charge like 150k per year just to be in their sort of program Y and it's going to be really incredible when the average person with their $10 a month Aura ring can get even better care from this team of digital Specialists than than uh some you know public company CEO that's using David Sinclair's like you know longevity
program or whatever yeah yeah it does seem valuable I I think for certain people they need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something or they need the Quantified Quantified Self data to tell them something but I always worry that there is a a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself like like the sleep tracking is fine it's good sleep's really important if
tracking it helps you get more sleep that's great but you should be able to just ask yourself are you sleepy yeah there's a there's a company that's building uh smart uh AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces yeah called Throne okay and they're bringing the Quantified Self to your toilet basically so it's like understanding yourself through your waist I could see some of that being
being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just like did I get a good night's rest we'll get it we'll get it set up in the studio okay perfect you can you can be like every time I have a really good bow movement the next pod I have F bangers yeah Banger it's great uh so Alexander says bachelors in the 1950s and he posts a what's a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book men were also
pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle-class man Bachelors were categorized as immature infantile uh infantile narcissistic deviant or even pathological family advice expert Paul Landis argued except for the Six Sick the badly crippled the deformed the emotionally warped and the mentally
defective almost everyone one has an opportunity to marry I thought this was relevant I was going to ask you does it certainly resonated likes yeah do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids because there's just a certain sense of um responsibility yeah just responsibility when somebody is working for more than just themselves and has like more on the line that comes
from a family like I I do think there's this sense of ser there is a sense of like Ser like you bring a new sense of seriousness to your work that I don't think you can have I think I think I looked at this and somebody it's it's fairly easy to have a pretty good life if you are just a bachelor and you're living in a your luxury apartment in New York and you have a job and whatever and you can do
your run club and all this other stuff and life gets infinitely more challenging once you have children in the mix and other sort of people that you're responsible for so I think that I I wanted to cover this because I think we'll actually come we're going to see a shift back where um you know Keith raboy was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30 but I I
could imagine they're getting to a point where Tech the tech world starts looking at people that are uh you know that are 40 without children and being like H like I don't know like if you know well you I mean when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012 there was there was a blog post by PG and he and he said that it was it would be hard for a Founder to be married with kids yeah and it was
somewhat controversial but it felt pretty consensus at the time like a lot of people agreed and I think that's that's maybe true for first companies but if you're already like like I've never had a job that wasn't rur so it's like it's kind of just like the career of the entrepreneur is is a little bit more there's less of like a leap like I don't feel like oh if I'm going to start
a new company I'm going to like lose this stable corporate job because that's not a thing that exists um what's interesting about this is that it it I feel like it's resonating it got so many likes because it's part of this like very Trad Revival like let's go back to the way things were right um but but I other than that example with PG it's hard for me to remember like when I was
20 what were the 35y olds or the 40y olds saying about starting families because I I think that it was out of Vogue and now it's kind of back in Vogue yeah and I just I think there's this always this oscillation between two extremes and it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy Middle Ground where everybody's like yeah kids are a ton of work having a family is a ton of work it is a distraction from product
finding product Market fit but there's this like more of like a middle ground where you have um a good example of is like asah from Valor has like a bunch of kids right and and like you could argue that he will be more successful because he has like a small army that's depending on him to perform right yeah it's certainly fail yeah and and I and I do think there's probably something I
mean I remember when I when I like first made like a significant amount of money talking to my father-in-law about this and I was like well I made like so much money I could like retire now and he's like no you can't he's like you don't understand how expensive kids are you don't you don't understand like how much money you actually need as a car guy I think of it in the I think every time I
see like a buddy with like a I have a friend who's like 31 and he's got like six cars that could be considered super cars and I just look at that and I'm like for every one child you could basically support two super cars so I'm like I'd probably be doing the same thing yeah it's great uh let's go to VOR Lorio says who even uses teams and posts a screenshot of Microsoft teams versus
slack daily active users and teams is like absolutely ripping and slack is more or less flatlining and I mean I think the answer is like Norm means like everyone who uses Outlook in just a normal job they show up and the computer's just there and they're not on some slick MacBook working from a coffee shop they just go to work they have a badge they sit at a cubicle and their
boss says this is your text St here you go yeah this is a this is a very startup tweet know this this is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of oh we're going to build a slack integration right because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication slack email email being like the Bedrock of all uh all software
products um I think that uh yeah I remember uh I once built an internal to track how much time people were spending online on slack CU it's a really good proxy for how much time somebody spending at their laptop and so um never got to building teams because it wasn't relevant to me but I think that is it's the building for the teams Market that's going to justify your unifor unicorn
valuation not purely the slack there is something interesting about teams versus slack which is that uh with the recent defense deck boom being a company that has to use teams because of itar is like a little bit of a status symbol and people Founders Flex about it because they're like oh I know that slack I'm a product guy I know that slack is a better product I hate using teams so I
can like complain about this publicly and everyone will know that like my work is so important I can't use slack because it's I was on a I was on a team's call for deterrence this morning yep um yeah the the other yeah I felt I felt like Pat no the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if Salesforce hadn't Oh yeah I mean that's the other thing is that it's just bundled into distribution so but also
but also Stuart was running slack you have to imagine he would that chart would still be going up founder mode yeah founder mode yeah tough Daniel says we need to double the fluoride in the water and add OIC and ader all to this is insane 72,000 likes what a banger this guy is just like a god tier poster yeah it's just like we were talking about this 72 that's so many likes inconceivable most most people
have a tweet that gets 72,000 Impressions and they're like oh I'm going to retire yeah exactly um this guy he doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company he can just fund it off the Creator P yeah good his his I generational wealth coming to for yeah for him the balance is making sure that his his Mr grows faster than his twiter p no no no no just grow the Creator
payouts we'll see at am on subsidize yeah subsidize we'll see ch for cops product no I think you're so you're anti fluoride anti fluoride but but in general I think there there's a much bigger debate to be have had around fluoride and fluoride usually gets um talked about this at Heron but usually gets uh all of the shade when in reality it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the US water infrastructure are lead
based and so that's just channeling lead into every household and fluoride makes lead more bio available so when when you're having fluoride alongside lead you're just absorbing more of it which could could account for the um you know what are what you know IQ uh downsides of fluoride consumption but um but yeah I think if if the United States was really a serious country we would be
thinking about more proactively about medicating the population through the water for free yeah it's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism everybody drinks water so if you want somebody be on a certain substance then put it in the water this is genius because like this tweet could have just said like oh zic is so amazing we should put it in the water like that's just a phrase that people say when something's
like a miracle cure but he wound up like having the most incendiary thing possible double the fluoride but then also adding OIC and Aderall whoever decided there's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water in the United States we it's it's regulated effectively but every single year we're effectively deciding to continue medic ating the population through the
fluoride in the water wow look at this 17 likes this is an Undiscovered gem uh W says tons of young girls are using chat GPT to manifest looks like open aai is acknowledging it on their official Tik Tock so I guess chat GPT is reposting the chat GPT Tik Tok account is reposting this and people are using I don't actually know that much about man this is the uh the secret right where
you just I I will be wealthy I will be at Aon I will be you don't say at Chris you you don't say I will be you say I am atamon oh I am wealthy right present present tense no but this is this this is relevant because this is the bull case for open AI right they're not saying you know people on Tik Tok are using claw to man to manifest right they're using chat GPT it is Cle fori yeah yeah the kleenex
it is it is it's just like ask someone on the street how do you do how do you use AI to do your homework chat gp.com yeah yeah it's almost like Google for search where like if that plays out within AI it's just like when I want AI I go to open.com chat gbt I mean Sundar was correct when he said competition is only a click away and yet Google has a massive Monopoly why it's just the place
that you go yeah it's the default um I do think that there's something very interesting about AI for these kind of squishier use cases like astrology manifesting uh personality tests that of stuff because the hallucinations are fine it like with code there's like a right answer so it can test itself so it's very good at that but then it's always it's always tough in the middle
but when you get out into just like the are you familiar with the PT Barnum effect this whole thing so the Barm effect is this series of like uh statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized but but actually apply to everyone so I can say like uh you have a complicated history with your family and who doesn't but you're like oh my God you know me or or like you believe you deserve more in
life something like that and you'll be like oh my God I do and so a lot of like tarot card readers Palm readers psychics they use that PT Barnum effect but AI can use that very effectively and it can feel like wow the AI really knows me even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying like heris that are basically apply to everyone but everyone just wants to hear a pump-up
speech and that's valuable so yeah and this and and if if that trend is real there's a really big business there's a hundred million do business to be built on just being like AI for manifestation thin rappers rapper for sure although it might get it might get baked into one of the existing companies like uh co-star could could integrate something totally but I think that these products are so
engaging that they can stand on their you can stand you can spin it up and it can stand on its own probably not super Venture backal probably not A1 billion company but phenomenal business if you get it right I I firmly agree this is this was one of my pitches when I went on my first million I was like exploit the Barnum effect create an AI app rapper yep um I don't even know how to
pronounce this tor taxes Tor taxes says an incredible thread on musk very rarely I see something like this from someone who is not a blind Fanboy tldr some people are larger than life this then then the self-reinforcing ugly pettiness of it you wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside they can do it for real and it's a quote tweet of somebody from Olivia that says if you can't model leviathon walking
through the world you're going to make some pretty bad mistakes and it's just a deep analysis of of musk it's interesting I I like the I've always liked the take that that Elon is both uh you know PT Barnum the circus man the showman and he's also Thomas Edison the inventor and he's solid on both so so and that really breaks people's brains because they want to latch on to just
one it's like yeah he does announce products before they're and he is wrong on those but then he's also a great engineer great manager and can build real stuff like the like the cars drive the Rockets land and so even if he's saying some some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term it's like y both are true what was your take from this though uh it's hard because I actually
think TW million takes um but yeah I think I think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated and the people that just want to pin him as doing like the cringe stuff where he's like jumping on like the stage and oh he's not just an engineer he's not just a poster there's so much more there's so much depth to it all and yet the thing that we had we had a a a listener comment on
a on one of our posts this morning saying that basically like very bearish about acts and your take which I think is the right take because Elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money so at this point in his career betting against him is just like generally stupid stupid idea yeah it's interesting um Ali Taylor says I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it but I
genuinely find chat GPT to be helpful and supportive when I'm anxious this is back to rapper opportunity I would be there's probably already $50 million of AR wor of these sort of like chat gbt therapy products that are just out there Printing and they're not in they're not even being talked about because it's just like two Engineers like just shipping I mean the first version of
this was like all the Riz apps did you see these yeah so I I talked to a kid yeah I think I met that guy too dm'd me and was like Hey I'm building this like chat GPT rapper for uh you know how to talk to girls on dating apps so you'll copy what they said and it'll recommend what you should say and and I was like that's sounds great kid like good job building something that people want
clearly like you have some users like just go monetize it right now because the whole chat GPT rapper thing is going to be a bad meme don't bother with status symbols in Silicon Valley and trying to raise money and he comes back to me like a month later he's like we're doing a million a month yeah yeah yeah yeah I think he ended up joining if we're if we're talking about the same people he ended up joining HF zero there
go and now he's building a selfimprovement sort of community platform product but but that initial that initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable and and then and then taking someone who can a build a product get it to Market figure out the marketing like do the I think he does the growth hack on on Tik Tok like the motion of like getting the stripe
account growing even if it rugs and like oh you got killed by chat PT if you're a 20-year-old and you were making a million dollars even for just one month and then you make nothing it's like it's gonna be so much easier to stand back go read 0o to one figure out what actually a monopoly business is but you have the experience of launching building coding hiring firing all these different things
and then you can go build the real generational company but you actually have the something under your belt instead of just being like Oh I went to pattern match so when you go into your if when you have the right idea and you can go in and you can be like yeah when I was 21 I built a million dooll AR chat GPT high school diploma and a stri for a period of time it was like oh he traded
sneakers on eBay and then it was like oh he created like a Shopify store GP and if didn't kindar ADV to the younger technology Brothers uh both male and female in the audience uh go make a million dollars with a thin chat gbt rapper don't fall for the the scop that VCS are putting upon young Founders that y you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis like immediately like if
you're young just go build something cool yeah uh air Katakana says actually insane how Steve Jobs was the singular successful ideas guy in the entire history of tech companies until 7.3 yeah 7.3k likes clearly resonated um I don't know how true this is it's such a weird thing like who's an idea guy why is ideas guy is such a funny way to slander somebody because among certain
groups being able to generate great ideas is like the highest like it's like the highest status thing especially in the AI era and in and in many ways like you there's you could totally make a case that Elon is an ideas guy right he thinks of really big ideas and then he brings together smart group of groups of people to go and do that and yeah he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing
people and questioning everything and all that stuff but at its core he's an idea guy yeah for sure and I mean it's like where is the line like is Zuck a an ideas guy it seems like he has like the most value he creates there is ideas right and it's more like will almost like he's in founder mode so like he didn't have the idea for the metaverse or the idea for VR but he had the will
to be like we're actually going to go do 10 billion of CBS on this or AI or something anybody that's using calling saying idea guy as a way to slander somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're like oh that's a good idea like I thought of that thought of that but I didn't do it yeah so it's not just having the ideas it's actually being able to like believe in them early like
there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the Incarnation of a few years later and been like wow that's like a really that that was a good idea but there's a massive difference between having the idea and actually taking action on it and going and and going even just betting on the market there's been so many times where I've been like oh yeah like I do feel like Nvidia is
like way under pric right now and bought like $1,000 or something that I'm like let's go should Siz that like way one year one year of college tuition yeah exactly I should have sized that way differently like having conviction in your ideas is is is just as important um and and I think that's what that's why Steve Jobs is successful because he he has the idea that you know you don't
need a keyboard on a phone but then he screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard yeah to a thousand employees that are all have like little subtle soft power Realms and there's a designer over here who has a bunch of friends and you can't fire them and they're G to push back and like there's gonna be all these things so
it's like actually bringing the will of like the founder mode to to to to make your ideas actually happen and getting and being lucky with the timing there's a there's a Justin Mar's brother nick uh one of you know the other co-founder of um Kettle and fire he has a new company that is disrupting the Legacy cpg testing companies and when I saw the deck I was like this is like super obvious
wanted to invest uh would invest in anything he does but um saw it I was like yeah this is super obvious I'm surprised nobody had really taken this on but I'm sure a lot of other people had the idea but a Nick and his co-founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the baby product market and new testing requirements and so it created the sort
of perfect moment to build light labs which will now probably end up being a really massive company and a bunch of other people will look at it 5 years from now and be like oh I could have thought of that let's go to the squirrel story I know we don't talk about politics but this is this is animals it seems to have broken through so uh the Associated Press writes an orphaned
squirrel who became a social media star was euthanized after being seized from home and Mike salana quote tweets it with say his name this wasn't even the biggest Mike salana Banger about this he he he quot tweeted another video of like the yeah this one uh he quot tweeted a video breaking down the squirrel uh it was like all the best clips of the squirrel and uh it just says this is
what they took from you the Elon quote got 150 million views that's like everyone on X right now like every single person saw this every this meme was just a good way for posters to cash in yeah because like Pat Pat Uh blumthal yeah was like sent me one and he sent two and one of them got like 11,000 likes or something something ridiculous but I think I think the real story is that uh the uh squirrel was a content to
Commerce play for this guy's only fans and so having uh the squirrel become a hero of the conservative movement very odd is a bit Shaky Ground to build on because if you look uh if you dig below the surface at all it's only fans uh odd funnel yeah funel many many content plays are many Instagrams are just fronts for fronts for only fans um are you familiar with Gman Amnesia I think
we've talked about this so Gman Amnesia is this idea that like let's say you're like you know a world expert in like structured credit and you pick up like The Wall Street Journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong then all of a sudden when you read an article in the same newspaper that that isn't about your expertise you're
like well if they got my thing wrong maybe they're getting the thing that I don't know about wrong it's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize like oh there's all this like like things aren't just broken in my world they're broken everywhere and yeah it was like my dad reading an article about me in the New York Times you know he like oh wait maybe this isn't like the
you know Bastion of Truth exactly exactly uh and so I feel like this was a huge Gman Amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals because they're like if the government could mess this up like aside from all the laws aside from whatever happened just the idea of like euthanizing an internet famous furry animal is like comm's nightmare 101 right like you should never do that ever
because they have virality and cuteness and that's like all you need so you know that there's going to be a backlash you should know and so and so if if the government can mess up that then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle East or the Vietnam War and so it's very easy to look at this and then realize be like oh the government can and that's elon's Point government overreach and
action and it's like it's such a minor thing and it's like yeah I don't want a squirrel this is never going to happen to me but it's like if if if they can get this that wrong like maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you and I've talked to a lot of people in defense I've seen this at the FDA where it's like like a lot of the defense people are like well I went
really deep dealing with the dod and I saw how broken that was and I W up starting the company but that led me to believe that not it's not just the dod that's broken in their procurement it's also the state department the Department of Agriculture and all of these different agencies that all have like similar levels of rot yeah like Boeing Boeing you know has their issues with
their planes but they were also selling like 150k like soap dispensers uh you know to the government it's very hard to be like oh yeah we are excellent everything but just the one problem you're hearing about usually like there where there's smoke there's fire uh it was funny because I was watching this video of this cute squirrel videos was watching with my three-year-old and he was just dying laughing just like so
cute just like oh my God look at the squirrel and I'm like crying because I know how it ends and it was just like I was like oh my God this poor squirrel like I'm like tearing up and he's just like dying laughing because he just thinks it's like a cute squirrel and I was like damn like yeah when bro when you find out you're going to be like the most hardcore libertarian ever but I'm
not going to tell you uh you can listen to the podcast 10 years and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel um but wild oh yeah here's the soap dispenser story so praying for exits good buddy says uh posts a screenshot of an article about Boeing says Boeing cleaned up on Air Force Parts including soap dispensers marked up 8,000% wow oh yes Good Old Government accountability 150k for soap dispensers
certainly seems correct to me so this is why I'm excited about uh do you know Kimia the AI thing so so our friend kimya is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts and what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition if
Boeing goes to them and they're like we have these soap dispensers and we're Boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us so why not spend these are great soap dispensers they're only $100,000 per dispencer seem might seem like fine uh nobody gets fired for buying Boeing but then if there was another bidder in the mix being like I will sell you a soap dispenser for $500 right exactly and so
Kimmy Kimia is like arming the uh all the people all the drop shippers all yeah basically like basically everyone will just be on aliex yeah so I I I and this is talk to him about is like his company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that want to go and be government contractors because it's very tangible right it's actually easier to
go and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on AliExpress get it sent to you mark it up get the Facebook ad when you could just like product or service and customer product service and customer right so great uh I think uh predicting out the next couple years kimya is going to start a similar to what Shopify did yeah uh New Movement am around government contract are you familiar
with the story of trans diim no oh man it's it's fantastic so uh it was profiled in this four episode limited podcast from Patrick as Shany uh host of invest like the best a separate podcast called 50x and it's a fantastic Deep dive into this company it was uh it was like the least Silicon Valley company private Equity buy up roll up uh and then it goes from like 500 million to five Bill five billion to 50 there's
like there's like 50x of gain and that's why it was profiled in the show but the four episodes are like the CEO who who who like was running the company then the lead investor in the private markets then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next and then the lead investor in the public markets so you get this like very back and forth It's
just fascinating and the first time I listened to it I was like this is like the craziest jargon because you think you're like taking crazy pills because they're like so what's your secret he's like well we raise prices and we cut costs and it's like and he says and they talk about this for like 20 minutes and you're like okay get to like the the crazy one trick that everyone hates
that's so secretive um and and really it's just like super operational efficiency go in Play Book literally stuff that you could learn while getting a Harvard MBA which is raise prices and cut costs but uh Charlie Munger was asked about this on an invest like the best episode like what do you think of trans dime like would you ever invest in this company and he was like no I think
it's unethical and the reason is because a a lot of the way that trans di makes money is they they go like they they make like all of the seat belts on planes so you know if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus When You Buck your seat belt it's all the same clock right they make the toilets all the toilets are the same all the seats are the same and all that stuff or they make like you know
some sort of fan blade that goes in like every motor and so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that get a small Monopoly on one single part and then once they have a contract with the government they'll raise the price so their margins are really good and I don't think they ever get this egregious but what they'll do is they'll say like okay yeah like we sent you this
part for like a dollar it cost us 50 cents to make but the next batch is going to be like 100 bucks and the government's like ah 100 bucks like whatever like that's so little it doesn't matter but they're buying a lot and then all of a sudden trans starts making a lot of money and so it seemen issue is the government the government has budgets but no profit incentive nobody working in the government really
has this sort of profit incentive yeah exactly but it's fascinating it's a very very contentious company like some people love it some people hate it it's a fantastic Financial story um but it's just like under disussed in my opinion meanwhile they're running Seas candy and they're like we raise prices 7% every single year no matter the market conditions or anything else yeah brand
monopolies are okay I guess brand monopolies are fine everyone everyone has their preferred Monopoly that they're like this one's natural and the other ones aren't and all the other ones should be broken up but my monopolies are good Monopoly is for me but not for thee Let's uh go to Jack Prescott he says whatever happens after the earning call the mission and focus will remain
the same execute and deliver protect the West paler should we do a live reaction to um the earnings oh did the earnings just happen today I think they were today yeah I love paler fantastic company very interesting business earnings for share be 10% there we go uh no no I don't think that I don't think it's actually they're trading really well they're they're they're trading like a tech
stock now which is fantastic uh I think they broke 100 billion I saw this insane uh chart that sham Sankar sent me uh the it was like every company in defense all the Primes they're market cap and then they're employees and paler is like fourth by market cap and they have 3,000 employees and every other company has like over 100,000 employees it's remarkable like do more with less the um it's good stuff
it's interesting Google is not up to date I should be probably on perplexity let's actually compare this just open the Bloomberg app yeah need to pull up we need to get a terminal on the desk terminal right here uh but yeah it's interesting that Yahoo is up to date um and yeah perplexity is quite up to date so congratulations to all paler shareholders paler sales beat stock up
133% 13% wow so it must be over 100 billion now yeah that's fantastic I was uh I was at a defense tech tech event in DC and uh sham Sankar the CFO who's been there since like day one he might be a co-founder like for employee uh he gave this great talk about paler and what they're building and you know how they want to work with startups and whatnot and somebody asked this question like oh
well you've uh you've raised like you know $4 billion in the private markets and your revenue is only like $4 billion so like isn't this like a failure financially and he was just like oh my God like you don't understand like the first thing about Finance the guy was from out of the country is from like France something like Backwater like that and uh and and so the next question
I asked I raised my hand I was like uh so you've raised uh only you've raised only four billion dollars and your company's worth like more than 10 times that like how do you make it look so easy the layup their PE ratio is 243 I mean software and they and they have an amazing AI story right because they have like all this private data that no one can get into and so it's like they're going to be able to sell
like very differentiated products I think there's I think there's that's a potentially a trillion dollar company I mean karp is just founder mode like he's the embodiment of it and it's like just don't bet don't bet against that you know seriously um Steve weissner says email marketing is dying Google ads are dying cold calls well are dead not sure people fully realize we're at a huge
inflection point for marketing got to think differently about how to reach your customers [Music] so interesting so what's interesting about this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all going to go back to relationships sure and so the truly gifted salesperson that's just good at making people like them and wanting to do business with them is actually going to excel even in
a world where as a small company you can have an army of like online digital clones that are just selling constantly and it feels like people may only start responding to like a personal message of being like hey like the CEO this company wants to meet you like let me know if you're down for a conversation and it's like sure yeah so it's like going back to cra's point and like core learning
from studying the History's Greatest entrepreneurs like relationships Run the World Y and in an era of uh AI that will become even more the case yep yeah you can't disrupt the Chad that just like people like to do business with I think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses which is like a lot of these things companies have moved on to like this doesn't even acknowledge like
owned media going viral on Tik Tok doing stunts being really good at press like there there are areas of marketing that still are like they might die off in the next few years but he didn't even really capture like the tail end of this marketing but I agree with your point and it's interesting because he's direct response marketing seems to be working better than ever like meta is getting so
optimized that I buy products on a weekly basis from companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product good and and that still seems to work and meta is figuring out a way that even though cpms have gone up dramatically like the ads still work like you can't brute force a stupid product into being really big like you could like a decade ago y but the ad
platform is like getting better and better but yeah I think what this misses is like you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business and there's and you're not going to be relying on this like tool set that everybody has access to yeah I think people miss this with like the the AI spam or like AI sales agents is like
there's going to be an arms race and just as fast as the AI spam increases like so will the AI filtering is that classic like there's this web comic that's like oh this is amazing this this uh this AI uh I just type one bullet point and it turns into it turns it into this like really long email and then on the other side it's like this AI is amazing it turns this long email into
just one bullet point and it's like the relationships are built on just like text messages between two people that are just like do you want to do this deal yes or no like thumbs up and that's the end so uh so so I I I I'm very skeptical about like the spam being a good path unless there's something like you really found some weird Edge and you're just like but it's going to be shortlived yeah the other thing that's
cool is now that anybody can uh anybody can be like a pretty competent developer y I a Founder in my portfolio who's not the CTO of his company like almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all of like the publicly available tools and so what's interesting to that is it's the the really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be looking more like Engineers
where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations like ramp as an example they have like a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activity that they're doing and so you have to imagine IM that the new marketers are not the the the best marketers are not going to be like the affiliate marketers or like I'm really good at AdSense because that's all just
like automated now it's like I'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all you know customers so yeah yeah it's very interesting I like that boring business says good times create high ebit multiples high ebit do multiples create bad times bad times create low ebit multiples low ebit do multiples create good times so I think this is a funny tweet but I have to say
that I feel like it is great good CEOs create high EIT multiples High EIT multiples create sloppy CEOs uh bad CEOs create low EIT multiples and uh low EIT multiples uh create opportunities for good CEOs yeah yeah yeah uh it's kind of like the wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit I think that there's uh I think what what I mean what needs to be like unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that
there's like a million different Wars that you can fight there's like there's like the war of like my company is dying and I need to like fire people cut costs and just like keep this thing going to like make it to the next fight and that's what that that you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard hard time but then you also need a wartime CEO to go back on the offensive y so there's
like defensive wartime CEO offensive wartime CEOs and they're both wartime CEOs yeah the the good example right now is Sundar at Google spending the last 10 years everyone says he's like the classic peace time CEO yeah he's making so much money every employee is making a lot of money the shareholders are doing well everybody's just kind of coasting and then you it's like boom Sam Alman comes in and Laps
you on AI all your AI products internally suck Sam Al everybody loves Sam alman's products boom you make room for the the perplexity guy which is becoming a legendary ship poster himself and uh has a very H it's extreme EV to multiple for his business today um and uh so yeah it's the um relaxed CEOs creating opportunities for cracked CEOs yep I think that's right uh Atlas says amazing now we have
LinkedIn thread guy gonre preneur influencers depicting an aigf in front of the giant goon Tower in Dubai the Goon capital of the world we are still so early and it's another one of these we talked about this before I created this AI influencer in two minutes it's making me $3,000 a month and I only work 60 minutes a day let me show you how to get started and of course enti there's
like an entire economy of people selling courses on how to make your your like Army of of know that and I just want to see I like if somebody's watching and and they can send me their stripe dashboard showing that go influencer go influencer is actually making money like I'll shut up but until then I'm just going to keep calling this stuff out because well the dashboard shows that
the courses are selling you know I love how this guy too his username is creatine cycle and uh I wonder with this quality of posting I'm guessing he stops and he's just always always on it yeah always on it um well you know that uh like when you join Andrew Tate's like you know Club to you know become like a entrepreneur or whatever he had like most most of like the fake Guru entrepreneur hustle core core seller
guys have like one thing they're like I'm the real estate guy I get you in my funnel I talk about how I became Rich through real estate and then you will eventually pay for my course or like my in-person thing to learn how to do real estate there's a different person that does it for crypto or there's a different person that does it for you know uh Shopify sites or whatever Andrew
Tate does all of them yeah he doesn't do just one you go in and there's like eight modules and it's like learn crypto one of them is Forex Trading Forex another and then and then as soon as AI got big he has an AI module so you can become like an AI influencer like this guy might be like Downstream of Tate in some ways that's crazy fascinating yeah it's smart going multiproduct Tate has
so much attention and such a crazy funnel I'm sure that he understands the product shifts but people are just buying the attitude and like the brand and it doesn't matter what the product is you know he can sell anything it's wild yeah let's look at Cody norquist he said he traded in his Tesla zero regrets he bought a extremely depreciating land Range Rover that will probably be worth
half as much in uh in six months yeah I just I don't know if this guy's in Tech but I do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products and they're like wow these are actually pretty nice I never well I never even thought of going to a non- Tesla dealership I went uh you know my I tried my friend's Range Rover and wow this actually feels like
pretty good you know it's like you know those tests that they do in cars where they like touch all the buttons and plastic and stuff like that and there's something about yeah like you can't like I my driver the guy that I used to get to and from the airport he I had to tell him like don't pick me up in a Tesla cuz he has a Tesla and he has um like a uh just like a regular like black car
or whatever and being in the Tesla one Everything feels like cheap and kind of wonky and I just don't like it the acceleration is the other thing but yeah I just don't it's just not a luxury product and I don't want to be in them yeah um and so now that not only are there other like electric products out there but this like sort of prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't
that bad yeah and um I just think that if this trend continues to play out it'll be good for San Francisco because people aren't going to want to get it's really expensive to replace a Range Rover window that's been Shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car Tesla you know you can just eat it it's like yeah I I do think that one of the most like underrated near-term bull
cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio there's no reason why they can't do like a Mercedes S Class A super car which like they've been talking about but even just taking a Model S and being like everything has like wood and and like and like real metals and stuff like and yeah it cost twice as much you know it's the luxurious they don't have a minivan they
don't have a minivan they don't have a station wagon they don't have a convertible currently they don't have a full-size SUV like they're they're just like missing a bunch of pieces but then also within the range you know like Mercedes has done a great job having like the S-Class the class the class and the Sass like it feels different when you're inside like even the leather stitching is different than an a class
and that's not that hard to do it just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale economies of scale around the batteries around the acceleration the self-driving but if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like okay yeah I'm getting the the model the model X but with the upgraded package that takes it to Range Rover level of luxury like
it's game over because it's going to be so much safer than a R Rover when you're driving with the self-driving and stuff like but you're just not going to unless you unless you have a driver who's better than selfing but I don't know I think I think and that will be good for the whole Tesla brand if there are products that genuinely feel like luxur everyone's been talking about oh they
need to go down Market to like the $25,000 car but maybe they actually need they're already basically there because you can buy a depreciated model 3 for around 25 um and but but what you can't buy is is a Tesla that has the luxury features of like a r Roy and and and Lucid air kind of came in as like the top upper Market but they could just Crush Lucid with like a slight tweak to
the inter Tesla built a $400,000 car it would be amazing it would be yeah it would it would it would start displacing I'm sure that has a much bigger Market than the pur sangu right totally totally and I think the I think the design language is evolving in like the 3s X Y like those all have like very neutral unoffensive looks the cybertruck's in the exact opposite direction but the cybertruck
showed me that they could build something that's like as iconic as a Huracan design or something like that and so if they can bring some of that to like what does what does you know Tesla's edgy Next Generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full-size SUV like like Escalade I think they had a Timeless design and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric the the new electric uh
Escalade is I think 180k test at 180 the you can put more crazy stuff in there right because you can get into like like you know operational efficiency around how he's acquiring like the wood and tell a story there there's probably some really interesting that could happen yeah anyway let's move on to David holes founder of mid Journey love this guy played a Starcraft with six friends last night it was a
free-for-all we added two AIS to fill out the eight player map we spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over and suddenly were too powerful and beat us all a lesson in AI safety I think this is a great example it also I used to play Starcraft really quite a bit and uh I was Diamond ranked and like pretty good so I would usually smoke the Bots but I have some distinct
memories where you're just like oh my God I just got steamrolled by like you you think that you're like winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just like this like Wall comes towards you and that could be like what we're doing right now which we like oh look at like the cute llm and like oh I just generated this funny picture of like a squirrel Meme and then
you just get steamrolled by the AI I wonder what AI he was using just like in-game AIS or something third party well every video game has their of course they've had like their AI but those AIS I believe have never maybe they cheat or something but there was the story with open AI they had the DOTA team and then they did a Starcraft thing as well where they were able to beat the
like the world champions uh uh and for that I think they had a specific restriction where they they they interacted with the game via an API but they still limited the actions per minute so they couldn't just get like inhuman reactions and then also the API lets you see like beyond the fog and they wouldn't they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating so they they like they they Nerf the AI they make it
like they kind of level the playing field but the AI Still Still wins and so like you kind of should expect the AI to win if you're going like no no no chess master expects to beat an AI at chess it really makes it it is the re it's like kind of it's great because it's a meme but at the same time it it makes the case for these AI doomers that are like guys we need to stop fighting
among ourselves and it needs to be more of like the humans versus Ai and like we need to take this seriously and that was more convincing than any like essay that I've seen from them totally which are really easy to be like like cool story bro yeah I I mean David just has great takes on all this stuff like he's he is pretty like AGI pilled and um but he has like very nuanced takes he's not just
like out there like saber rattling and like having a contion fit every two seconds why did you why did you select Joshua Steinman we are good morning we are going to win okay simple this is not a new tweet tweet every single day tweets it every single day not even a particular Banger uh some of them ended up some of them it's funny watching like the algo just pick some up more than
others but the reason I included it is that uh I see these like every three four days and every time I see it I'm like nice so anyways I just included it because it's American thank you for your service and uh I do think it's a public service and it's and it's kind of um it's an example of like marketers that think like oh like we're being too repetitive with this messaging where now
associate with winning and being committed to winning and it makes me want to back whatever and being optimistic right I mean and it's yeah he worked like in the Trump Administration is very Pro Trump and and never faltered when the polls weren't going his way like he really believes like he's he's a big fan um also I mean it's his version of like the Joo willing thing he posted this at 6:16 a.m. and as we know the
most important thing is not waking up early it's getting on Twitter early and posting first thing get post this is key will mantis says having a full-time Bible instru instructor is the new private jet yeah and uh press uh no I think was it no Preston quot twed Foo about something else but um no uh I think this is relevant because uh we know some people with fulltime Bible instructors have some
billionaires with full-time Bible instructors and it just shows that even I a product like the Bible that is available to everybody and been analyzed uh you know over and over and over and over for Generations uh it's still worth hiring you know a tutor and learning even if you have the time to study it intensely so yeah there's also an interesting thing where like even if
you're the most like atheist skeptic about the Bible it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in so many different stories like The Lion King or whatever so the first thing a child learns the first story that a that a child learns is like a hero's journey that's derived from the Bible and so if you can go to the source tech text
understand like the the the way the story and the narrative is structured that gives you power in storytelling and also understanding like what resonates our our mutual friend who is a uh Bible instructor to the global Elite uh his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible you're going to miss so many other things when you're reading some random story like The Lion
King it's like oh well like yeah it does just improve like you know your edification and your enjoyment of of other literature so yeah get the full-time Bible instructor although I don't know maybe with AI uh it'll be on demand soon uh some of those Bible apps like print money yeah like it's a good business there's a few and then there's that company angel Studios one of the
most underrated uh media companies that does really well yeah Christian uh like they they did an adaptation of the Bible um that uh was like HBO level cinematography and uh and did really well and they produced a number of of films that are all like uh related to Christian themes and um but more interestingly like the business has just become very very good uh and they've done they've done very well and they
sell tickets try to there's um a podcast called the Bible project that I listen to that's totally free they don't do ads but it's donation base which is like yep um at what point should they just become a church sure right um an online Church effectively um that's cool just pay what you want yeah uh power tools are making a comeback Julian fried freed says the power tool Renaissance is
underappreciated it's a great time to be alive if you are someone who likes making things and twet this is this is I Shar this because it's funny because Tech Guys whose only tools has been a phone and a laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools has been happening like in the background and there's like entire religions oriented around the
different brands of power tools and whether you're like a Makita guy or Milwaukee guy the guys that have their drills like fight each other where they like attach two of them and they just like um so I haven't gone down the power tool like uh you know rabbit hole and watched a thousand hours of some YouTu feel like I got to like Tim Ferris pilled where Tim's like mindset was like
if if something if you can hire if you make $500 an hour and you can hire somebody to do do the job for $100 an hour Nick hu now when I'm doing stuff yeah Nick Huber is like why would you stand on a ladder and it's like it's it's a good point now when I'm doing like if I do something around the house glory and I do like yeah Glory household Glory I find that uh I think women are attracted you know when I when I can
like use a hammer uh Sarah's like nice that's one of my first dates with my now wife like went over to her sister's place changed the light bulb everyone was like this guy's God yeah it amazing marry this man yeah fantastic I got to up my power tool game I need uh I need to build out we're to get some I think we should yeah space on the wall Tom Melo from Rage Against the Machine posts
25 years ago today the Battle of Los Angeles the cover art for that uh that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple other really hit songs and Orin McIntyre quote tweets and says you have the same political beliefs as Black Rock and City Bank I think he was trying to dunk on him but your point of view is that I love Rage Against the Machine and I love black rock and City Bank there
you go so what a match made in heaven I'm glad welcome to the club Tom if you have the same if you have the same uh political beliefs as Black Rock you're a friend of mine it's great yeah it is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this like like I I do think it's a good way to get people to question their beliefs because if somebody thinks that organizations like Black Rock and City
Bank are inherently bad and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group then it is a good uh at least thought starter in their mind to be like maybe I should have a more open mind around certain things this is also one of those interesting tweets where like I can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rtist tweet uh critique like it could be like you believe you like City bank and they like
ESG and Dei so you suck and and like you should be more right-wing or it should be like you like the capitalist Black Rock and City Bank you should be more leftwing yeah and it's like I don't really know but all I know is black Ro basically it kind of makes sense like raging against like black rock is the machine right so it's saying like if you're you're raging Against the Machine
yet yeah you shouldn't be aligned with the machine you're aligned with the you're stimulating the machine yeah but who knows maybe Black Rock and City Bank are raging Against the Machine the machine of stagnation yeah the machine under finalization black rock created Burning Man which is exactly it is the foundation on which Burning Man was built yeah the machine of a lack of financial products uh I wouldn't want to
live in that world be a disaster how long how long until we go viral for being the podcast Bros that that L Capal no no that say that black rock created Black Rock City eventually we'll get there it's going to happen there's there's like a cottage industry of uh of YouTubers that just put out endless like hit pieces on Black Rock being like did you know that they own
everything and they don't understand how like fun of funds or e or ETFs work it's so hilarious and you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like oh my God take one economics class please it's really bad anyway uh Colin Michels says I hope I'm pronouncing that correct Michaels maybe Colin Michaels uh few learn that SpaceX prices their launches way higher than it costs them to launch
they're essentially reaping 30 to 60 million in profit each launch blue origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space Market Bezos is notorious for downward price pressure and then he has to follow it up with an apology kind of I underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet LOL I don't know what they were misinterpreting it seems pretty basic
but um I mean everyone knows that SpaceX is like way ahead of blue origin but you know competition is good and if you like you like going to space I mean it is for losers so wouldn't want to be as a space L the a you know maybe you don't want to encourage thing I I I do I do love when these uh the the the musk Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining because they have they have Waring
properties like everywhere right like they both have car companies because Bezos was like one of the biggest backers of rivan and then they and then they have rival space companies obviously everyone knows about that one SpaceX and blue origin they also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post and the way you just said all this and it kind of makes it seem that Elon is mogging Bezos at
literally every single one of these Washington Post Tesla Commerce Commerce which is like yeah yeah but it's I don't care about I don't I mean it's because I care about I care about what Bezos is doing with his money now and if you're repeatedly getting mogged yeah W you have to imagine though that his performance across all those things is going to improve as his testosterone
level have climbed month over month for the past 5 years it seems like it's happening at the Washington Post a lot of changes there seems like he's improving that maybe blue origin you know becomes a big space launch provider yeah but it's yeah I think that would be amazing for Humanity Olivia Rodrigo whatever her name is um there's there's another one too but yeah I mean I I think Bezos is a
little bit more of like an old school like Mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much is like side projects where it's like get somebody to do something go and show up like he's not on the factory floor at rivan ex feels like when he does something it's like he's putting his life on the line for it and it's like almost you a lot of people this is a critique will say like
like I I I I actually just care about the space thing I I would be fine with him not spending time on media but elon's like I'm going to personally make this change the way this company Works significantly I'm going to go and rename it I'm going to do all this crazy stuff and for it's like he only has one mode doesn't like Angel invest he renaming renaming Twitter has the decision has
grown on me quite a bit when it happened it was like one of my favorite Brands even though it was flawed Y and it was very painful like for years I would just input I guess not that long but I'd still put twitter.com and more and more it's feeling like yeah coming in and making it um just making it your thing actually Mak sense in the context of Elon yeah there's that saying like uh like when
there's a change of leadership the company needs to be refounded yeah and that's certainly what Elon did yeah CH even changing the name change all the people change everything so that it's like but he had to do it because as we talked about with the truth social thing like having a network is very is is very important and it's very resilient and even even if the servers did go down
which was like a big fud thing for a while like people would have opened up that app that's where they go like yeah and it's very hard to get people to move even though people tried to move to Blue Sky or we should do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working but it's very different it's working sep Market subculture completely separate product um but yeah cheers to cheers to
both Elon and Bezos I love you guys uh another Steinman tweet gotta love it 100K views uh it's a quote tweet from Arma who posts a picture of the reception desk at General loaders Technical Center in 1965 interior by architect Aeros serin and uh it's crazy because VI looks like a '90s sci-fi movie that's like super ahead of its time and they were probably the '90s sci-fi movie was just referencing
General Motors because they had the they had the technologist they had the money so they just went and sent it and I'm sure it was like the most delightful place to work if you were an engineer you were like this is beautiful this inspires me I want to go build great stuff there fantastic so uh Steinman says Detroit was fire back in the day then politicians decided shipping jobs
to China was more important than the American industrial base uh making it political bro we don't talk about politics on this show come on not on this podcast but we'll highlight Aesthetics we will love some great Aesthetics fantastic yeah I'm really excited for this new generation of hard tech and defense Tech they're going do like they're going to do stuff like we're going to do this at deterr now
it's messy like you know sleeping on the floor of the warehouse but it will be beautiful and there are some companies I forget if it's airbn all the like when when locky Grooms robotics company oh yeah it will have like a robot playing a symphony in the entry way y like um beautiful they're welcome to use this idea just throw some shares to technology Brothers yes yes yes um there
is there is a company that made I I feel like I read it in a hitpiece it's like oh they spent too much money on this but uh they they built a full replica of the uh Doctor Strange Love How I Learned to love the atom bomb there's this Stanley kubric film and there's this iconic huge boardroom where all of the military leaders are are meeting as this massive massive boardroom that's huge 50 people
they like built a a replica of it is the closest uh example to this like the scale AI office I haven't been but isn't it pretty iconic I've been it's I I I don't know if I've been to the newest one um it was beautiful but it didn't like the thing it stand like this stands out stands out it's just like it's just like it's hard to differentiate because like there is some practicality like
like this this um this like entryway desk is like the most impractical thing there's so much like wasted space here but that's exactly the point I love how the woman is sitting like on an island basically a bowl it's fantastic and it's like you can't get within 5et or whatever no yeah it's it's great so yeah making like bold design decisions like that that are they go against the the
obvious optimization of like Square footage like it is going to cost you more to do this but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the longm maximalism yeah Red Bull futurist writes I want a dozen kids uh this guy's awesome uh he's a rocket scientist or an emerging rocket scientist I think he's involved with SpaceX also caffeine connoisseur caffeine connoisseur Excel Enthusiast
fantas um no I I I think this is hilar like I pulled this out because uh years ago he would have been ostracized for saying something like this it would have just been so random but the pro- natalist movement is like now becoming like the nor like the new Norm at least within the tech community and I think it's great because I hope Red Bull futurist uh goes and has 12 children yep
because they're all going to be a bunch of smart little rocket scientists and uh we'll probably create the companies that topple SpaceX and blue origin Monopoly on Space yeah I mean the trick is just like Breaking Free of the mimetics around like what it takes to have a dozen kids like yeah you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city probably not raising a dozen kids
in Manhattan unless you're a trillionaire but if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and you know set your life up to be oh there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting and like you know we've designed our life with that being being the kpi that's the priority well then it becomes very easy
everything flows from that yeah so shout out Red Bull futurist high yield Harry great fintech influencer writes uh oh you just ran the NYC Marathon that's sick dude I just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read so I feel like high yield Harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters like basically it almost it's it's like they there it
seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters and yet these guys are like pretty stable like they've got like they're like posting you know regimen and you know uh it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from high yield Harry now and you know that it means something yep you know it's not just it's not just a post anymore though I feel like if you write
an investment memo someone should read it come on man yeah but I think it's more I think he's more saying you know look when I write a memorandum people put in size they're not worried about what it says they know I wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth they just see the attachment and they wire they don't need to open it yeah they go straight for the wire and okay I like this this is a
little bit more optimistic than what I was think it it was very like low-level analyst coded where it's like I'm doing kind of make work and this sucks that that's how I read it at first but I like your interpretation more I got to I gotta go long hay early early Finn mostly just anything to avoid watching the New York City marathon I was on the phone with somebody yesterday
they were like oh call me after I I got to watch the marathon and I picked up the phone and I was like I'm going to keep it real with you watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing I could possibly imagine I'm not I'm already not that into sports the only way that you should be watching a marathon is significant others in it you're betting on it or you're running in it the best way to watch a marathon
is by running in to be fair to my buddy I did I he did have a friend in it and he was like cheering the friend on and stuff so well even even a friend watching your friend it's like if you're watching a friend run a marathon like it better be like some like blood like relative connection and even then it's cringe but even look at the Spanish when they go to a bull run they're not just
watching they're running with the bulls right great yeah so let's bring bull runs back Bull Run yeah replace the New York City marathon with bull run or just put a bull into the marathon for sure for sure yeah New York City talks this big game oh we have Wall Street bull we're all into Bulls prove it Bull on the street turn it loose turn it loose today turn it loose now I want I
want a New York City Bull Run let the marathon go give them a one minute Head Start and then release the Bulls no Slackers yeah not just one bowl like 10 10 20 you better be running make every make every person running the marathon wear red yes yes that's great yeah no no slack we need to step up the the expectations of the NYC Marathon let's do it umre another paler another paler tweet a little bit more of a post I
like this one though but you know it's good because the other one was didn't have the badge so it was just a fan like a stock uh guy who owns the stock this has the employee badge so uh uh elano Unice says with a lot of paler merch now out in the wild here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo no drugs no fighting no theft no more than two beverages no elliptical no
Kipping pull s why why is he singling out Kipping oh because it's a cross sorry I was thinking that's really good I I thought I was thinking I was thinking muscle ups cuz I never done a Kipping I only do muscle ups yeah of course strict strict muscle ups strict muscle ups no no you know sort of like movement um yeah the reason that this is relevant is like when a company crosses a hundred billion
dollar in market cap it become a religion cuz like he's kind of acting as like a priest of saying like this is good and right and this is wrong um but I think it's a good I mean it is legitimately valuable to be like you know this merch is out in the world we want to like set a tone for like what it means to have this and you know some of this is a joke but some of this is very
real and so I like that he's like enforcing a brand standard like a little bit more broadly and hopefully people got the message if I see someone doing Kipping pull-ups in a pal to your shirt it's over I'm going to show him this tweet like I printed this out print it out I printed it out let's keep it let's each keep a copy in our wall yeah exactly for when we run into somebody
from paler uh I mean paler fantastic team I I I from some random content thing I got a DM from a kid who just like graduated from some school and went to paler and it was like Still A Cut Above it's like a 20-year-old company like you just don't see that anywhere else it's wild um simp for Satoshi I am Ginger trash says by the way Market will become a way to short startups post elction the
financial primitive is finally here yeah and I think what's um what's interesting about this is that you know having the news around bowy today is like okay this is2 billion doll company that's was that's now as of whatever this last week worth zero the thing that uh that so I really hope this becomes true because it'll provide a lot of content for us will be putting some
size on the platform for sure the the interesting thing though is that the private markets effectively have legalized insider trading already right all the private markets are is like using inside knowledge on companies teams Founders and placing bets accordingly and so what will be extremely chaotic about this is that bring short pressure like if this actually happens companies will have to
be like employees you are legally not allowed to trade the company uhk because like it'll be like that you'll see so much activity of like right leading up to a big product announcements like oh $20 million just got placed on poly market right and so hopefully this doesn't lead to more like if this actually plays out it'll be it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private yeah we've just reinvented
stock we just we just reinvented stocks from first principles lmfa yes um well you know how they do this for like uh so death pools are illegal you can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to like go kill them obviously um but on poly Market there are a number of contracts that are like uh this person will still be the leader of you know Hamas by this
date and so it's like we well they could step down but really what you're betting on is like are they going to get taken out and so there's a bunch of like you know uh you know proxy stats that you could probably build to to get there where you say like uh this company's domain will still be live or like this company where you're not like truly betting on just the stock going down but
it's like some proxy for them yeah the real the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around poly Market where like will poly Market do 100 million in volume on this month in 2025 right because like you're you're able to bet about the platform on the platform and it's if it's on chain then it's all like verifiable but then there's also the incentive of like okay if I put a bunch
of size into this into this bet then I could just artificially create the volume what's interesting is that like there are already polym Market markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets like one of the most like popular categories that I see is like will Bitcoin hit 80k in December and it's or will Bitcoin hit 100K by the end of the year and it's like you could
just buy Bitcoin why are you betting on this in this weird way um but that's kind of an effective way to bitcoin I guess um it's some sort of like proxy it's not perfect and so I I could imagine this but for a lot of startups like the liquidity is just not going to be there because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some series a company that like is got some VC platform teams have
entire teams ding up their their portfolios like poly market accounts yeah um yeah the insider trading will be crazy I it would be interesting to see a vcv like yep we're pivoting to like long short yeah like we are a long short fund like and like like we will we will be going long one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our Founders are going to win and so we're
we're investing a $20 million series a and we're putting $10 million on poly Market on shorting all the other companies crazy um we already did bowy let's do Bay Lord says how do we get a new Elite in America I think this one is broken seems like we're in the midst of of uh Power shift no technology Trends to disrupt establish hierarchies way more than it cements them I think we are
I don't aimless post um yeah the the new Elite thing I I was talking to somebody about this how this is this is the story of Elon makes a bunch of money in Tech yep starts owning everything all the like these super important Robo taxes but doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch ofits yeah and then buys the biggest one of the biggest media companies in the world inv people not having like his he's
putting his wealth to work in like very specific targeted ways impact investor essentially much more than like you know oh diffusing a billion dollars through a bunch of nonprofits that are kind of like moving the New Classic straws yeah I saw someone else say like cuz Elon I guess was like helping bust people into Pennsylvania or whatever and somebody was like we have our George Soros
and it's like yeah but I mean the other thing that's underrated about like Elites is is when you I think when people go back to like the this idea of like we need better Elites we need the older Elites it's like back in the 17th century 18th century early 19th century the elites were the ones who would go and build Hurst Castle Versailles they'd build these like massive houses and then
they would and then they weren't just like perfect boxes of glass that were mimetic with everyone else and they just wind up looking like track homes they were like these very unique expressions of wealth and then when they when they turned over it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them even The Descendants and so they became museums and libraries and yeah and like there's
so many stories of of this where yeah the Getty is that right yep exactly like uh the Getty the uh what's the other one in Pasadena I forget um the Huntington it was a house the guy was so rich he was a railroad baron o o oil Baron he built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to oh I want to take the train to New York this is this is elod Gil and his
new monument company new monument company this is Nat fredman with his with his like oneoff projects the Scrolls these are dividends that get paid to society and and pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and Founders want to work with them so they get better deal flow so it actually rational gu this guy uh go and message your favorite Elite which you
can DM them on Twitter and just Pat them on the back say thank you for for doing something good the money good something interesting yeah something interesting that we'll live on Beyond you I mean Bezos is doing that with the long now thing the I think that's what it's called he's building this clock in this mountain that will it'll keep time for like a million years and it's just like
this really heroic engineer project yeah it's just like this heroic engineering project and it's something that like everyone right now is like oh the Project's not going well oh it's not working you know it's like this massive Mega project but then it'll probably work but in the next 20 years you know it just takes time and then it'll just be this time if you want Eternal time
have a little patience have a little patience um skip that one um men only want let's see Dylan Morris says men only want one thing and it's disgusting who wants to split this with me and it's on Biz byell award-winning sailboat manufacturing business in San Louis abiso County and it's going for 495k and it cash flows 75k and they build sailboats that's um that's a tough
uh would you split that with him I I'm not going halves on that this we talked about this last time buying a company with less than half a million of cash flow is buying a job and this one if you split it with a buddy it's buying the minimum wage jobs like you could just work at Chipotle and then like go and like build sailboats for I think bus like this like we need a movement around entrepreneurs and
retiring Boomer operators to be like I'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business and I will give it to you on a seller note over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it because like the only way that I could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising um search funer out of Stanford goes into decides I'm going to roll up all the mom
and pop sailboat manufacturers and create a monopoly or put a put a gun on it and raise some defense Tech money yeah let's go put a gun on it no I think um slap a 50 cal on the front I actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around uh like the he would sail like all the way from California to uh Australia and he actually did have a 50 cal on the front because he was worried about Pirates and
he would be able to like fire off warding shots if something happened because when you're out there alone like anyone could just come up to you and what are you going to do call the cops they'll be there in two days like that doesn't work two days the SOS yeah yeah know yeah you're on your own yeah yeah that's crazy uh John Palmer uh says I feel like joining the worldcoin team is kind of like the
crypto Dev equivalent of joining the Marines people join there and you then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding strong men create Good Times Etc what do you think about worldcoin the eyeball scanner the eyeball scanner very dystopian but I'm I I'm I'm always like I'm just bullish on Sam projects and I'm I'm I'm I'm interested to see like kind of like the manifestation of
that idea yeah you haven't I feel like you don't hear the other thing about it is like I feel like a lot of world coin activity is Just Happening overseas so like these devs are like being deployed to Africa just like scanning eyeballs and like doing it more efficiently yeah um but yeah I think uh I'm I'm excited to like hear more about like yeah it's so it's so dystopian in a way you would
only do it if it was like you thought it was really important work so I mean it does feel like in line with Sam's idea of like okay in the future we need Ubi we need it to be a global U Ubi it is truly the fully fully automated luxury communism concept of like how do you distribute wealth to every single human individually like well you need something that's you know identifiable
on a human basis and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly we should get a worldcoin orb I'm down worldcoin can sponsor the orb I'm down um anab biology says whenever something is past free non non-toxic as a as a non-stick pan it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with something that is
unstudied so we don't know it's bad yet I love this guy I uh he's got a really cool company in the cancer research space like Reviving uh a bunch of lost sort of like esoteric knowledge around cancer and like bringing it back so anyways this guy's like brilliant building something really cool um I've gotten personally gotten some like great health tips from him uh via DMS he gives us example
stainless steel lowest aluminum impossible corn and glass cookware copper are all better if untreated cast iron kind of sketches me out because of the seasoning process you just Perma burn fat onto an oxidizable surface and even if the fat is non-toxic excess iron so he goes on and and yeah it's an interesting thing there there's always this like rat race of like let's get rid
of one thing uh oh we introduced a new a new bad thing like we got rid of lead and then we wound up with microplastics it's hard because so many things that are uh so many products of modern manufacturing processes and the things that we expect out of products end up being just deeply Toxic by their very nature and so it's really hard to shop for modern any any sort of consumer good
now like you have to be hyper you have to be hyper aware of it and and even look like class is superior to plastic um and pretty much I don't know in pretty much uh every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all you know sort of like safety concerns I mean um so yeah I think uh I I think that there should be a deep tech company that tries
to create uh like the issue is the consumer package Goods entrepreneur that's like I want to make a microplastic free version of blank or I want to make a non-toxic pan they don't have time to do a 10-year science experiment on creating a new material we need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are non-toxic that can be used for everyday consumer goods so yeah somebody out
there wants to spend a decade developing um new uh materials for consumer goods that are non-toxic uh we will we will back you Molson Hart says if you get rich when you're young in America you will live in a neighborhood that is 90% old people you cannot relate to at all 8% young people with family money that you can't relate to and 2% with a fellow Uber mench that you can break bread with
same goes for same goes for country clubs it's pretty funny very pretty accurate it's very true uh I think what's interesting is you have this at least in my neighborhood you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last five years and then people that are multi-millionaires because they bought their house like 20 to 30 years ago and the tension between those groups is
crazy right because like they just want very different things um and so yeah but I think I don't know there's there's a lot of Alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in in the trenches basically because all those other people just want to back what you do basically yeah yeah that makes sense I yeah when I moved into my neighborhood
I was like we met our neighbors I was like oh they're about the same age as us and my wife was like they're 15 years older than us no this this happens like I was with Sarah and like her mom groups like the other moms in her group will be like 15 yeah 10 to 15 years older and they're just like there's likey lifestyle yeah well same lifestyle just totally different like era yeah yeah I mean I
think the lesson is like is like that is not a criticism that like like the nice thing is still the nice thing and you should you should you shouldn't be like oh okay because everyone else who's like in my world like lives in like a highrise like that's what I should do it's like no it's okay to go be like the odd one out at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood like
that's fine just do it and meet the old people and it's fine yeah I think there's a lot of people that are are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that and then they wake up one day and they're like wait like I'm the older person in the room and you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room but then
you go from the workplace to the neighborhood to you know and you want to like stay on that very American trajectory it's great number Runner run the nums says ambition is just rage channeled and Dan says real AF you think that's accurate I don't rage I don't I feel like uh uh I've never gotten the feeling that Donald J Trump is has internal rage I think he more just like likes being likes
attention and likes winning and those are like the core motivation that's funny because there's like a a book about him that's literally called like fire and fury and it's like it it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage odd odd pick I I if you wanted to pick someone who's like peaceful but extremely ambitious I think you'd go for like a Zuck or like like a Steve Jobs
who like don't seem very like rageful but I guess you hear stories but I feel like you hear more stories about uh like I can think of that that exchange that Zuckerberg had in the early Facebook days where somebody's like where he's like yeah these people just like give me they the person's like they just give you all their data and he's like yeah these idiots like trust me for some reason but is that rage is that
rage I don't know but you don't hear stories of like Trump on like raging out at people right like he sort of gets I don't see it as rage um it's certainly like one one path to ambition obviously we hear a lot of stories where people are like they've been wronged they've been heard but I think people really like boiling this down to just like a single precursor it's like you have to
have a chip on your shoulder to do anything you have to have rage you have to beong you have to come from a broken home or something like that shoulders put chips in pockets it's like it's certainly true that there's some but there are a bunch of Exceptions there yeah I don't know it's a good one if you if you have rage inside at least use it to create value for shareholders oh this
is a great one I love this uh trivan says a friend was at a cafe in San Francisco and said cursor crashed on his laptop I like that he's just like saying this out loud I guess and says a cursor co-founder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug this company is sticking around this is this is this an ad like because this seems a little bit impr impr cursor crashed cursor
crashed out loud and then there just happen CS I mean talk about a great marketing stunt if this was like planned I don't think it was it seems ridiculous it seems this is the type of thing that happens in CAF in San Francisco like yeah you saw the other there was something last week with a with a guy who was like in a SF like uh Cafe with just like a thing on the other side of
his laptop that's like Marketplace startup have Revenue raising preed say hi or whatever and it's like wait really so you looked at his if you looked at his laptop yeah people were taking pictures of it was like only an SF but yeah I just think there's a reason that like half of the super important companies in the world come out of that area and it's because the density of like-minded yeah people and the overlap
that you can have with customers on a day-to-day basis I I remember when I lived in San Francisco I went to a cafe I didn't work from cafes very often but I went to a cafe maybe just to get a coffee and I ran into David Hull's co-founder at leite motion and I remember him just talking to me and I was like oh I love what you're working on like this is super interesting and he
was like breaking it down and uh yeah it like like way back in the day when he was working on this like it was hand tracking for VR that was that was David's first company uh fascinating that's just like the type of thing that happens Serendipity uh San Francisco's a Serendipity magnet um David zenov says realizing the reason they call it hardtech is because this is really hard makes for a nice moat though and then
Dylan just says no bro that's not why and then he say says why and I tweak got cut off I like I like this I like this because because it reminds me of like two cattle ranchers being like makes for a nice moat though you know this cat raising cattle ain't easy but pays the bills it's a life um love it so yeah I uh maybe we do a deep dive on why hard Tech's called Tech but um but yeah it definitely is
real it's sort of nominative nominative determinism shit's hard you know yeah yeah makes sense I mean everything's just slower right like you need a part that could delay you a week there's just like a million things that could go wrong interacting with the physical world and then heavily heavy regulation yeah so it's just like you have two really tough factors that you can't move
at the speed of of at of bits you have to move at the speed of atoms and you have yeah when things break they physically break yeah rough rough but I think the the hard tech and hard is hard meme I think it I was around when I was in YC and I think it was probably true initially and then a scop after a little bit not like an intentional one but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased
being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and Technology had gotten better and there were there were a bunch of ways to like do hard tech adjacent things whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things and that's when the first boom of hard tech started and now we're all talking about it but all the big companies are like 10
years old so like clearly hardtech wasn't hard eight years ago when some of the big companies were getting started but everyone Wasa the interesting thing is like this new generation of hard tech companies so I have portfolio company called Shin which uses robots to kill fish using the traditional uh methodology that Japanese fishermen would do and it's done in a way where
they um they basically insert like a needle into the back of the fish's brain and it and when you kill a fish that way it doesn't the fish doesn't release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly and the interesting thing about that is you're they going to a market with like very little Innovation not a lot of competition uh but then they're going to
build this system that uh other people are going to realize oh that's a really good business but then if you want to go compete with shink in five years you're going to be going up against a company that can spend way that's still very young that can spend way more money on R&D and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this
stuff and the real hardtech is going after like a five to 10y Old hardtech Company that's competing in the same exact category as you that has more resources that has more learnings that has more customer relationships and like so that's the real that's the hard hard tech yeah yeah that makes sense let's go to Ivan Z ciao Ivan says why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays because 1800s citizens
needed a full day's horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the internet and AI That's that's a very interesting I didn't know that super Tuesday yeah every Tuesday right because you need a full day wow full day but you can't match church I feel like he's the founder of notion right yeah yeah I feel
like if you rode a horse to a polling site today you would end up in a very viral video with the police breaking the horses like it just be very dark but no I I thought this was interesting because I I hope that the Ivans of the world end up building uh software like you know more like out of the last week week it seems like there's been a lot of failures on the software side yeah in
regards to you know polling and and um and voting specifically and so if the uh voting and polling software of the future looks more looks and feels more like notion I think that'll be a a win for democracy is the digital polling ever coming like we're so far we're just so deep in this I feel like we never we I'm so blackpilled on it I feel like it'll never happen it should be so simple but
then again uh I was reflecting on the fact that maybe like 10 or 15 years ago there was this there's all these stories about oh well in Japan they're like this cashless Society they have this great NFC technology you just take your phone you can tap to pay you can tap for your ID you can tap to uh get on the subway or whatever it's just all digital and it's like why can't we have that in
America things are so backwards um but then like for the last month I haven't carried anything other than my phone and it's been fine because the DMV finally moved over there's an app for it you can just pull up your driver's license there every single place takes Apple pay now and so we finally have caught up so maybe it'll happen with the digital voting probably not in the next election
though not the next election and then also all the skepticism about the the the Integrity of Elections like one party is going to fight it tooth and nail like yeah whoever's whoever's you know more pissed about the lacks of the election I really think it's Boomers you think so Boomers aren't into it I think Boomers don't get enough hate in general yeah like we need to be slandering
Boomers more add it to the list enemies yeah yeah yeah add it to the list Ben so Eliza says people on the YC ecosystem Shilling to each other but the underlying concept is actually beautiful 20 to 30 something a year 20 to 30 something's uh Founders buying sass from other 20 to 30 something year olds we speak the same language we run at the same speed and it's really nice this is
for sure true love it yeah I think I I think I pulled this out because I invested in A's company and we uh we promote uh we end we for the we do promote companies that we hold Securities in um but yeah I think uh it's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing an entire economy that is dependent on itself also I mean I like people always say this about like oh the the the the YC hack he's like you get into YC you
start some SAS company you sell all the other YC companies your Revenue spikes and it's like is it a good company or not but I haven't heard about that many stories of like oh yeah that company like their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake like YC Revenue like if you if you're in y and you can sell to yeah if you can sell to Airbnb and stripe and coinbase like that's
pretty durable revenue and even if it's just a bunch of startups like there's enough that you could Cobble together like it's not like YC has ever had a situation where it's like oh all of the companies went went out of business all of a sudden most of them are fine because they're in such random Industries diverse yeah it's actually like a fairly Diversified Revenue stream
if you're selling to like all the YC companies it's almost better than being actually more like one of YC's like Moes is that if you could be in YC and you don't go in YC and then somebody that's competing for your in your same category does their the loyalty is like very real like they are going to use your competitor out of at least in the early days until like it's very clear who the
best product is yeah yeah we were talking about some if there was if somebody like the real the only threat that we have with technology Brothers is two other guys that look like us that are in YC that that take the 700k and then they just have all this Alpha from being in YC maybe we should go through y see um we we talked about some company that was like highly highly vol it might have been like a real
estate company or something but it's like all of their revenue came from something that was like super cyclical this happens with hiring companies a lot they're like doing great in a bull market and then as soon as the riffs start and all the companies are laying off their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring so no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of of of
applications coming in when it's not a tight job market um and so you know like that that's an example of like if you can be if you can have a diversified Revenue stream of AMS like oh yeah like well like the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter but there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry and they've
kept us on as a client you can actually be pretty pretty good yeah let's stay on YC let's go to Jared fredman partner at YC says uh today I learned Saudi aramco was started at 225 Bush Street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says every company in the world worth more than $1 trillion dollar was founded on the west coast including Saudi ramco which was started in the same building
as flexport here in San Francisco that is crazy stat West Coast all the innovation in California yeah all the innovation in the world maybe it flips at some point but I can I think I think uh I think Nikita Elsewhere on X was making the point that it's because on the East Coast a lot of power and resources go towards like Prestige and people that have um you know degrees where SF and California are more
egalitarian where if you're talented and hardworking you can get resources and opportunity who knows but I love it and I think that we should we California should be more proud of founding Saudi aramco yeah it's very American it is I wish I wish the state did a little like you know one on 10 into the Saudi aramco preed that would solve our budgetary issues right now fantastic nice cash
flow well I mean I I we we should do a deep dive on the Saudi ramco story because I'm pretty sure that was like like the the ownership of that company was like fought with Wars oh yeah I'm pretty sure like it was a big deal when it got like nationalized it was not like uh it was not just like oh they decided to move over to a different country it was like we this oil is in our ground
and it's ours uh Eric Raymond says you can just make things this is my massive white pill about the revolution in small scale manufacturing that's going on right now the iMed immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair and the designs were all crappy and hit us expensive and made in China so he booted up a small Factory
that now builds custom wheelchairs delivering them for about $1,000 a pop undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five amazing this guy's gonna gonna do one of the dod contracts you mentioned like really no I I just imagine government contract yeah if he can spin up a small Factory that builds custom wheelchairs for $1,000 a pop like he could go and get the Boeing contract that's selling a soap dispenser for
$150,000 and very he clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at Value so get this guy on that the original the original promise of 3D printing where people were like oh you're going to just be able to buy something online and 3D printed in your office or whatever and like I think that will basically come true but it won't necessarily look like people imagined it
it'll just be localized manufacturing talented small companies Etc yeah uh um let's go to Austin is it Reef Austin Reef uh founder of morning Brew right he says the New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today as a reminder here are their demands a ban on scented products unlimited break time pet bement mandatory trigger warnings when discussing events in the news it's funny because they were way ahead of does um
does it have to be your pet or could it be a pet squirrel owned by someone else squ I need some time off for sure um this is this is like such bait like you know because like clearly clearly their demands were more than just this come on like they're Obviously good at he didn't he he knows content he knows content he knows content um but yeah it's very silly but also half of these things are
like you know the read here is like oh they're all like leftwing demands like they're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings but then also half of these are like I could see the right-wing adopting these because like oh the scented products have have microplastic so we can't have scented products anymore or like yeah we need to B our squirrels so like I need time off
yeah so I don't know it's like a little bit of like a horseshoe the I guess the perplexity CEO did a PR push today saying that he would happily replace all of their writers with AI like he did it he did it a piece today he's just becoming a poster oh wait oh the New York Times oh yeah because they're they're in a battle they're in a legal battle New York Times and and perplexity I'm pretty sure or maybe
wired or one of the big Publications for the scraping and whatnot um but it is kind of funny that the New York Times they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election as a way to like oh yeah because the tech Guild is so they do the software development and they do like the the New York Times needle which will be getting like the most traffic tomorrow right
it's going to be like the highest demand they do cool like visualizations some of the tech people are actually really awesome at the they they know when they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the knife you know but yeah I mean I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump maybe um this is a good one Le let's do Linus so the creator of Linux uh Kakashi says the
creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past two years the Linux Creator lonus torold quote AI is useless it's 90% marketing while he ignores AI for now it's all hype so the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded one podcast together in person the very first one and every other episode of this podcast has been AI
generated powered by Deli uh it's funny because it's like the classic like uh you know programmer mistake of like marketing doesn't matter yeah in my opinion so it's like 90% is marketing like let's talk about Nike is that a valuable company does that bring people Joy is it valuable 9% marketing it's 90% marketing of course and that's okay like some things are marketing driven and
that's okay it creates value and and everyone is happy the shareholders the employees the customers everyone's happy the athletes it's like what this is the this is the myth of the myth of consensual capitalism like oh like I didn't consent it's like no one cares no one cares that it's just marketing like it's fine but I I get that we saying at a deeper level like you know we want more AI Innovation like it should be
good A lot of the products are kind of bad but still you you have to to have to fundamentally believe this you have to have you have to believe that all the AI products that we're using are not AI products sure because the products many of them are magic right like they really feel like magic MH let's go to the last one with AI uh suit inop says nobody blank Wall Street Silicon Valley what if a private credit
bubble was combined with an AI bubble and then Nvidia related party transactions were thrown in just for fun and he's talking about how I I believe Nvidia is now doing deals yeah there there's huge amounts of credit being extended that is backed by gpus sure his core I think complaint from what I can tell is that gpus are very rapidly depreciating assets so it's one it's one
thing to extend credit against the house which is relatively stable or you know an appreciating asset uh but extending huge amounts of credit against gpus is like you know uh would be like really Levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the car cars were sort of like um improving very rapidly so much so that a car would be almost worthless after three years yeah whereas a car is
going to have some value for 20 years granted as long as it doesn't sort of well the other the other flip side here that I I see people criticizing is uh this idea that like a a startup will go and raise a $10 million series a and go and get $90 million of Nvidia credits and then they'll announce a $100 million fund raise that looks like you know an in-kind related party transaction from
Nvidia they get $90 million more Revenue because the because the startup will use it but it's kind of like you know where do the money was kind of created out of thin air yeah I feel like the thing is is that this this also happened in the dot bubble where a lot of the uh Telecom providers were were funding a lot of com startups and giving them like preferential access to bandwidth early
on but the thing is is that uh like so it's like o AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term this could lead to a bubble that pops but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure and that's exactly what happened in the do com boom there was a lot of dark fiber and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast
because even though the internet bubble had collapsed the the infrastructure was there so when the right product came along it was able to go super wide super fast so I feel like Bill Gurley uh has a nose for bubbles like he just can smell Bubbles and he's been harping on the um uh he's been harping on the Nvidia related party transaction thing for quite a while yeah interesting let's
move to audience Q&A we have one question then we'll wrap hey John and Jordy I've been running a Fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase I currently own a Gulf Stream G650 ER extended range but have been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing Business Jet what do you think I should go for what do you think look just I I think it's less
about the shell MH and more about what you do with the Interior right and so I think whether it's a Boeing Business Jet and you want to be able to bring you know you're potentially ire polycule or extended family um or you're going you're going to stay with the G stream I would just think about even if you keep your same golf stream um redoing the interior on like a fairly frequent basis
right because it's kind of like redoing the inside of your house like you walk in it feels like this new it feels like a new house even though it's the same um uh same kind of core shell or whatever um but really I I would feel um bad advising any One Direction and would put a you know tell him to go talk to Preston Holland oh sure expert um on private Aviation and he's our private
jaet guy um I have a I I have a little bit more of a point at take so so I I think I know who wrote this in um it's it's really about like what your lifestyle is so so for those who don't know the the Gulf Stream is probably the most PR popular private jet uh El Oprah windfree they all have Gulf streams uh the Boeing Business Jet is essentially a wh labeled Boeing plane so you can get a
737 Max like the thing that you fly on United you can just have that privately you can have a seven you can have a Dreamliner and a lot of heads of state have these uh you know Saudi princes uh you can think of Air Force One as kind of a Boeing Business Jet although it's owned by the military um Trump flies on a BBJ a Boeing Business Jet um but if you think about what the what's the
difference between a CEO of a large company and a head of state well the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country lot of international travel and always landing at a major airport so you're going from DC to London those are huge huge airports when you're just a CEO hey you don't need to bring your entire company with you when you go to to do a deal a lot of the biggest deals it's just you
know Zuckerberg and Kevin sstr going for a hike and so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley they can just fly in very easy easily you don't need to worry about is the landing strip too small or too big so you can get to much more remote locations can still bring your whole family um and but for if if you're thinking about you know running a political campaign now then you need to
be thinking about okay I'm going to be in every major airport because I'm going be campaigning in swing States and they're all going to have huge airports so I can land and I can bring my entire staff my entire team with me and when I get off the plane we're going to hop in a bunch of black SUVs and I'm going to bring my my writer my speech person my makeup artist my comms person my fin
you're gonna bring the my lawyer is gonna be with me all the time and so you really need to think about like what your lifestyle is like and what it's going to be like over time before you make that decision but uh I would probably based on what I know I'd stick with the golf stream but that's our show I gotta hop on with taipe soon um I think we're going to wrap so thanks for watching