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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Watching TVPN. It is Friday, 03/07/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today.
Speaker 1:We're talking about The US jobs report, the Bitcoin strategic reserve. We talked to Nick Carter earlier this week. We're gonna go back, look at what we talked to him about, what he got right, what he got wrong, and a bunch of his new takes have already dropped on that timeline. We're gonna be breaking it down. Also, SpaceX, they've been trying to launch Starship for a while.
Speaker 1:Little bit of a setback, but some promising
Speaker 2:Zero for eight versus Affirmative.
Speaker 1:It was it's been a it's been a tough time, but team still locked in a lot of optimism on the timeline, and we're gonna break it all down. Also, I mean, gotta shout out Elon. He's a reply guy now. He has officially replied to the show. The timeline is is blowing up.
Speaker 1:We have the best week on x for the show in history. We are definitely gonna have to do a Dom Perignon episode soon. But we also have a bunch of call ins. Wilma Knightis is calling in. Alexis Ohanian is calling in.
Speaker 1:Sam Lesson's calling in. So stay tuned. That'll happen about an hour from now. But until then, we are breaking down these stories, the news, what's going on the timeline. What's up, Jordy?
Speaker 1:What are you thinking?
Speaker 2:Just excited? I'm just not no no thought, no mind. Just just purely, just sort of, like, getting into the flow.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Golden retriever.
Speaker 2:Very excited to have Alexis on this week. He dropped some big news, both around a bid for TikTok as well as bringing back Dig.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm excited to get into that and hear it, first person. But,
Speaker 1:And same lesson, I wanna talk to him about the should we launch a meme coin?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, also, I just wanna hear who his favorite creator who the what creator is he the most bullish on, like, financially? That's an interesting question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good one. And then his one zero one billboard.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. About. Yeah. So that segment will be brought to you by AdQuic, of course. But we wanna kick off the show with an absolute banger.
Speaker 1:Skooks on the timeline is quote tweeting a very odd interaction between JD Vance and Peter Teal. JD, what happened to you? And, and it's the, it's not just the fat childish JD meme, but it's a yassified version of that. And, and JD's do you wanna do you wanna do the voice?
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. This is a high risk one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What
Speaker 2:what are you talking about, mistotile?
Speaker 1:And Is that right? Peter says, my creation, my life's work. Is this really how it all ends? And Scoop says, imagine showing this to a regular person. And it's a very silly post.
Speaker 1:We don't talk about politics on the show.
Speaker 2:Fortunately, we have no regular people watching
Speaker 1:this on
Speaker 2:the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. If you're in your you you definitely understand every layer of this meme for sure. But it's interesting. I do think I do think it's it's weird how I was talking to Lulu about this.
Speaker 1:Like, the JD meme has, like, completely broken containment, and it seems like maybe it's bipartisan. Like, both sides are having fun with it. Like, it's both derogatory, but also supportive. And even JD is like, yeah. I get it.
Speaker 1:It's cool. Like, it's very different from the weird thing. That we
Speaker 2:we've I don't think we've ever seen this scale Yeah. Of you can imagine this then happening to every public figure. Yeah. Like, if if it works for JD
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's also funny to do it with Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah. Right? Or, like, any, like, major celebrity, public figure, politician.
Speaker 1:It's also weird that it didn't happen with Trump because Trump feels very memeable. He feels very like, he's always in these really iconic, like, images, like the, obviously, the assassination attempt. But even, like, the McDonald's photo was very it was deliberately shot to look like pop art. And, but he hasn't gone down this path, which is, like, this bizarre, like, very online meme world. But, anyway, hilarious post.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Skooks.
Speaker 2:And it's good to be starting with a post. You know? Going back to our roots. We're doing guests now. Yep.
Speaker 2:But it's great to have, start the show With a banger. With a banger.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And it's you know what else what other thing is good to start the show with? An ad read from wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
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Speaker 2:Anything's possible.
Speaker 1:But let's move on to the jobs report. Joe Weisenthal is the one to follow on this in my opinion from Bloomberg. He says breaking a 51,000 new jobs, unemployment ticks up to 4.1. You know, he's writing his own post because I've never seen anyone misspell unemployment as badly as he did.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Still did
Speaker 1:still did numbers. Fantastic poster. You know, he's just ripping this and that's what makes him
Speaker 2:an employment.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Yeah. I don't know how Kaye worked his way in there. And also two piece
Speaker 2:to do. So so we have a surprise He's hammering on the keyboard. Surprising number of listeners on Apple Podcasts Yeah. And I feel like this is a good opportunity to give a quick disclaimer Yes. Which is that the show is heavily centered around video now.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so you're gonna get a better experience on Spotify Yeah. Or YouTube.
Speaker 1:YouTube or x. Or x.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But we're trying to so I'm just gonna say it how Joe spelled it, which is unemployment. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. So economists had expected a 60 k new jobs. That was kind of consensus, and an unemployment rate of 4.4. So we we missed that.
Speaker 1:Very unfortunate. You know, we want zero unemployment. We want everyone in America to have a fantastic rewarding job and creating shareholder value at all times. So a little bit disappointing, and, stock futures were up a little bit, and then they went down. And in general, you know, mixed messaging on what this means for the beginning of the new administration and the economy.
Speaker 1:There's a report in the Wall Street Journal breaking it down. The US continued to
Speaker 2:break had some interesting quotes recently where he said this administration is not focused on cheap goods Yep. Or the stock market Yeah. Which historically, politicians would at least, you know, try to get you to believe that they cared about those, you know, two things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's kind of a rough quote because he didn't he should have he should have immediately said, like, what is he focused on? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:To be clear. Long term, it's just a
Speaker 2:word for word quote.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Little misinformation there.
Speaker 1:But I I think most people, most Americans should be comfortable with, like, a little ripping the Band Aid off, a little bit of temporary pain in the form of a tariff or, you know, some sort of jobs dislocation Yeah. In in the future of, oh, then we're gonna grow at 10% GDP or we're gonna have massive prosperity. That that's an awesome trade. People should be down for that if they think about it. But it's weird to be, like, you know
Speaker 2:Well, people are people are also rightfully fixated on the present. Right? Yep. If you're if somebody's struggling financially, they don't really care about 10% GDP growth in 2030. They care about, you know, what's happening now and this year.
Speaker 2:So we are gonna be having a special guest next week, to break down the tariffs specifically Yep. Because, we're not venture capitalists, and so we don't have, we can't really comment on tariffs Exactly. The same way that Yeah. That that Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should call a VC.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta call a VC
Speaker 1:for this. Yeah. Whenever there's, like, something really, really wonky, really difficult, just like something you should have to spend, you know, your entire career studying. You got to call them because they will be up to speed for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need a a sound effect button that's just like, you know, call them. You see, like, I'm gonna take my, like, call them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Trivia or something. That's great. Well, let's rip through some of this Wall Street Journal article. The economy added a seasonally adjusted a 51 k jobs in February. Labor department reported Friday, slightly below the gain that, economists pulled by the Wall Street Journal expected to see.
Speaker 1:Still, this is up from one twenty five k jobs in January. Economists believe that cuts to the federal government jobs under Trump came too late in the month to be captured in February figures. So if you hear someone saying, oh, this is because Doge is laying people off, that whatever happens there, if something's going to happen, it hasn't taken effect yet to be caught in this particular stat. So if you hear someone saying that, they're probably wrong. Of that, 3,500 jobs were lost at the postal service where where employment often swings higher and lower from month to month.
Speaker 1:That's just kind of a natural process with the, with the postal service. The remaining 6,700 jobs lost represented the biggest drop in more than two years. Morgan Stanley economists in a note Friday said they didn't believe the decline was a reflection of layoffs, but instead was the front edge of the freeze on federal hiring. Trump put a hiring freeze in place January 20, the day he was inaugurated. And so I don't know what else we wanna go into here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the Atlanta Fed had reported earlier this week that GDP growth was negative two and a half percent. Yep. And all this is kind of generally tracking Yep. The government, government spending is a major driver of GDP growth.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so when you start cutting it and cutting, federal jobs and new hiring and federal, you know, card spend as we saw this week Yeah. I think the Doge team had, ran into an issue where they couldn't close, these sort of credit cards, but they could just put a dollar No. On them on $1. Very funny.
Speaker 2:So, anyways,
Speaker 1:strategist at Evercore ISI worry that uncertainty over contracts and grants is having an additional paralyzing effect on hiring at employers that are exposed to these funding sources or in need of regulatory approvals from agencies that are themselves public paralyzed by Doge review. And so, you know, anytime there's a lot of chaos in the government or in the in the, you know, the broader markets, companies tighten up because it's a little bit riskier to invest.
Speaker 2:Many businesses Overall, like, a lot of this data, it seemingly has been, like, heavily politicized over the last decade. Yep. Right? And so it's hard to really, know what's what's truly real. You know, historically, you know, you you'd see this sort of, like, payroll data, but, you know, then you'd figure out after the fact that some of it was associated with, you know, contract work or or even things like, you know, we saw at different points, jobs data featuring, like, door like, DoorDash and sort of, like, on demand, labor, which is is that really employment or is it, you know and and how do you classify that?
Speaker 2:But, ultimately, as you know, we're gonna have to wait till the experts like Joe Rogan, weigh in on this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's more hear from men. Yeah. There's more, data here. Belt tightening by government workers who have lost their jobs or fear losing them has begun to show up. Card spending by Bank of America customers in the Washington DC metropolitan area has slowed according to an analysis conducted by the bank's economists.
Speaker 1:And there's also worries over tariffs, which we'll dive into next week, even though the tariffs I mean, it seemed like this week, it kind of, like, they were on, then they were off, then they were on, then they were off. And it's the same thing with the Bitcoin reserve that we'll get into. But, it it it's it's all just, like, uncertainty, and that probably slows down most business leaders, like, decisions. A lot of business leaders are excited about the idea of, like, a a a a deregulated environment, more opportunity, ability to run faster, ultimately hire more. But it's like until it actually shows up and we get what we asked for, we're not gonna bet against that when, you know, we don't know where exactly the opportunities will lie.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyway, if you're looking to make investments based on what's going on in the market and in the economy, go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We
Speaker 2:love that. Have high yield cash accounts, bond accounts, treasury Sure. Accounts, options, indexes.
Speaker 3:You can play it any
Speaker 1:way you want.
Speaker 2:Etcetera. They got something for everybody over there. Whatever wherever you are on the risk curve, Publix got something for you. And, this show is for entertainment purposes only. But if you want investment advice, check out the All In podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. All all good fun. But,
Speaker 1:let's go over to Nick Carter. Let's talk about Nick. The, the Bitcoin reserve and how things shook out. What was that?
Speaker 2:No. Just already this post is great. So Nick posted, yesterday evening. He said to the government, made all these l one founders come to DC to kiss the ring, and the night before published the news that they're not actually buying their bags after all. And, and, anyway, so another comment here from from Wanda.
Speaker 2:What's funny about this whole thing that I don't think many realize yet, is that Sachs got Trump to sign a piece of paper that essentially changes nothing because they already have those coins, tokens. Anyway, so I'm interested to see I'm gonna pull up, like, Bitcoin price action over the last twenty four hours because, yeah, it's I mean, it's sort of up I mean, it's still up over the last it's up 10% over the last week. Yeah. But this certainly wasn't good, you know, necessarily
Speaker 1:It bounced around a wall.
Speaker 2:Long term for Bitcoin price action because it's basically saying now the government's not gonna become a buyer. Yep. We're not using taxpayer dollars to, buy Bitcoin. Yep. And, and and the so the the positive thing is there there was sort of historical concern that at some point, the US government would come and market sell, Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Let's read through David Sacks' official announcement. He now has he's dropped his all in podcast badge and now just has a White House badge. Yeah. And so I I feel it. I I mean, this is him.
Speaker 1:Right? David Sachs, forty seven here. Yeah. I think this is the official. He has a gray check
Speaker 2:mark now. Interesting.
Speaker 1:And so, I think it's good to go to the go go to the source, and then and then we'll build off of this with some other posts. Just a few minutes ago, Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of a criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime. That was something that people initially reacted to very, very heavily.
Speaker 1:They were like, why are you taxing me? Joe Lonsdale came out and was saying, it doesn't make sense to raise my taxes to buy this asset. A lot of people had had problems with that. And so this completely integrates all of that criticism and really defangs that criticism in my opinion. I I I think it's it's it seems extremely responsive to that reasonable criticism, which is cool.
Speaker 1:It's estimated that the
Speaker 2:And the timing was the big issue here. Right? Because if you're if if there's all this criticism and pushback against Doge, right, for you know, Doge is not a a scalpel. Right? It's sort of, like, broadly you know, they're trying to be precise, but then they're broadly just, like, cutting a lot of spend.
Speaker 2:Yep. Some of which is gonna be waste, some of which would have been probably needs to be reinstated, you know, etcetera. So doing the Doge at the same time as saying you know, coming out and saying we're gonna be buying Cardano and XRP just doesn't make it doesn't make any sense. And so it was rightfully called out. And and to Saks' credit, he went, I think, on Tuesday or Wednesday and was like, wait till you hear what we're actually doing.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And Yeah. And so, it is estimated that the US government owns about, 200,000 Bitcoin. However, there has never been a complete audit because it probably sits with, like, FBI has a little bit, DEA has a little bit, like, different groups have them. I mean, some, like, random, yeah, federal organization could have, like, seized a a little bit, and it hasn't been all centralized.
Speaker 1:Something like, oh, yeah. That's that that flash drive is sitting in evidence somewhere. Like, that's possible. It's it's crazy to think about, but, hasn't been centralized. This executive order directs a full accounting of the federal government's digital asset holdings.
Speaker 1:That seems like a great place to start. The US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called digital gold. Premature sales of Bitcoin have already cost US taxpayers over $17,000,000,000 in lost value because the previously, the government would seize stuff from, like, the Silk Road and then sell it.
Speaker 1:And, obviously, there's been massive price appreciation since then, so that's what he's getting at. Now the federal government will have a strategy to maximize the value of its holdings. The Secretaries of Treasury and Commerce are authorized to develop budget neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on the American taxpayer. In addition, the executive order establishes a US digital asset stockpile consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings. So, again, we're not gonna go out and buy Cardano, but if the FBI winds up busting a drug trafficking ring that happens to own some Cardano, they're not just gonna go and sell it immediately.
Speaker 1:They're gonna throw it in the reserve. I'm not exactly sure that Cardano is, like, the one, but, you know, that's generally what the the the EO is, like, pointing towards. The government will not acquire additional assets for the stockpile beyond those abstain obtained through forfeiture proceedings. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the treasury depart department process made purchase.
Speaker 2:On this is that budget neutral strategies is equal to, forfeiture proceedings. Right? Like, I'm trying to think of other scenarios in which the government would be able to acquire digital assets without in a budget neutral way other than seizure or forfeiture?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, budget neutral? Yeah. I, like, I I really can't think of anything. Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe there's something else where, I mean, a budget neutral strategy for acquiring additional Bitcoin would be you bust the drug ring. They have a million dollars in cash and a million dollars in Bitcoin, and you seize both, and you immediately go and buy an extra million dollars of Bitcoin instead of taking the cash. Yeah. That would be budget neutral within this framework. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So That's a
Speaker 2:good point.
Speaker 1:It Yeah. But maybe there's something where
Speaker 2:it's like a weak argument as to why that money should go towards digital gold versus just fighting crime
Speaker 1:or whatever. I agree. I so, yeah, I'm definitely in the wait and see category on the on on that. But
Speaker 2:overall, I
Speaker 1:think it's great that they're but but, really, they're just signaling, like, hey. Don't worry. We're not gonna raise your taxes and just start pump dumping money, like, new new money into, into, crypto assets. Yeah. Let's continue reading this.
Speaker 1:We'll process out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Gotta, hopefully, the admin search to let Saks lead comms specifically on this because when he, sort of announces these things, they they tend to make sense. Totally. And when the announcements are going out of when the announcements go out on Truth Social, a little bit, more chaotic.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so, Sachs continues. President Trump promised to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile. Those promises have been kept. The this executive order underscores president Trump's commitment to making The US the crypto capital of the world.
Speaker 1:I don't, I want to thank the president for his leadership and vision. I also wanna thank the president's working group, especially Scott Bessant and Howard Letnick for their help. Interesting. So I don't see a lot of I I I think it it feels like they got this to a good place, but I'm not seeing crypto capital of the world in this announcement. I'm seeing they like like, I wouldn't call us the gold capital of the world because we have Fort Knox.
Speaker 1:Right? I would call us the gold capital of the world because we have, you know, really clear laws around how gold is regulated and, like, how you can promote it and what whether it's a commodity or a stock. Right? Like Yeah. Like, we have clear, like like, legal stuff.
Speaker 1:But all of that is harder.
Speaker 2:It is a step forward
Speaker 1:to say
Speaker 2:that the government is gonna hold digital assets Yep. And, you know, benefit from potential price appreciation of those assets, but they're also saying they're not going to sell them. Right? They're just going to, you know, hold them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Nick Carter
Speaker 2:Who knows how this will actually benefit
Speaker 1:their interest. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There is an argument to say that the taxpayers would benefit the most if the assets were sold
Speaker 1:And then just refunded the taxes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Refund, you know, more more realistically, just used to fund operations. Right. What does Nick Carter have to say
Speaker 1:as a follow-up? The announcement could not have gone better. He's very happy about this. He says, campaign promise kept. Bitcoin reserve clearly distinguished from altcoin stockpile.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin gets official US Government seal of approval. No other coin does. No taxpayer money spent to acquire coins, so no backlash, and future acquisition of coins likely left to to congress as it should be. And then he says, bonus if Satoshi really is the NSA, as I suspect, and they have 1,000,000 sitting on a dusty hard drive in Fort Meade, this EO just ensured that they don't ever sell those. And so he's talking about kind of the the the the market pressure that like, the government had 200,000 Bitcoins.
Speaker 1:He thinks that the government has a million more Bitcoins, but there was always this element of, well, what if Satoshi gets active and sells everything? That would create downward sell pressure, so that's always kind of baked into the price, I guess.
Speaker 2:Satoshi was bearish. If if if Nick so if the NSA gets bearish and starts market selling
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. A million
Speaker 2:coins would be rough for the price. But
Speaker 1:And so this should be somewhat bullish in the sense that, hey. Yeah. Those 200,000 coins, they're not gonna be dumped anytime soon. They always could be. It was always an I mean, there's always a a chance that that happens.
Speaker 1:And so that creates some sort of downward price pressure, but no longer. And so, yeah, should be somewhat bullish, but not not, hey, let's go and 10 x the price. Yep. Which just seems what the market is reacting to. Yep.
Speaker 1:Which is cool. Anyway
Speaker 2:Well, you know what the market or what the government isn't market selling, John?
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:Submariners.
Speaker 1:Let's go. And we're just gonna see here.
Speaker 2:The government we're we're coming out. We're saying, you know, that we the government needs a strategic reserve of, you know, Watchery watches. Collectible watches.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And
Speaker 2:they should do the bezel to do that. Yes. Spending money on the Ramp card
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:On bezel.
Speaker 1:Yes. They should take all of the gold in Fort Knox and convert it to gold Cartier Santos.
Speaker 2:Yes. We're just gonna move it into existence.
Speaker 1:Yes. But if you're sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin and you're happy with it, why not, take out a loan against it and go buy a watch, which is something you can actually do now. Yep. But, if you've made a bunch of money on on crypto, why don't you step up your wrist game, get a watch
Speaker 2:on social? Digital assets to hard
Speaker 1:Hard physical assets. Everyone's, oh, yeah. Bitcoin's so good because, like, you know, it's a store of value. If you had to leave the country, you could just take it with you. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1:You can do that with a nice watch too.
Speaker 2:I mean, sort of flight. Sort of. They'll hassle you
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:With with watches. I don't know if you've
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a real issue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A little bit different if you just memorized a seed phrase. But Yeah. In most cases, it's still a fantastic option. And the place to go is Bezel. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts.
Speaker 1:We love Bezel. I bought a watch on Bezel. Jordy bought a watch on bezel. I'm constantly scrolling, and our producer is looking for a watch on bezel now. And it's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:I I I love bezel. And, yeah. Go go check it out. Download the app. Start scrolling.
Speaker 1:It's fun. Scroll. Anyway, let's move on to Starship. Delian says, okay. The Starship blowups obviously suck, but damn are they beautiful.
Speaker 1:He shares a nice photo of, the social of video, which we're still working on getting playing. We'll figure this out soon. But, the videos are
Speaker 2:The technology of daily show has not figured out how to reliably play videos.
Speaker 1:We got a lot of stuff going on here. There's, there was actually a little bit of debate over this because people know that these videos go so viral that what they'll do is they will take videos of the previous crash and then say, like there
Speaker 2:was seven.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So I think this was what this is flight seven.
Speaker 2:This was 8.
Speaker 1:This was 8. So they'll take the flight seven crash and put it up and be like, flight eight just blew up, and they're right that it did. But that's not the right video, but they have a good video, and they know it'll go viral. I think this is 0For8. 0 For 8.
Speaker 1:It's right.
Speaker 2:I texted a size lord capital allocator that is invested, I think, a couple hundred million dollars in the space economy. And I said, why why does the rock why does Starship keep blowing up? And he had a very sophisticated answer Yeah. Which is, space is hard. There have been rumors flying around that, it had something to do with, you know, potential firmament.
Speaker 2:There was a biblical analysis. Yeah. Yeah. But, but not for this show. We're not gonna Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have a deep dive that. But it is this this is the this is the challenge. You know? I've gotten a bunch of space pitches. I I under invested in space personally.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:I just you know, it's it's very, very hard. Yeah. And, when you think of just comparing, you know, a YC founder, you know, goes out and they're talking about some SaaS product, right, that they're gonna make and they ship a v one and it doesn't work. Yeah. It's the stakes are pretty low.
Speaker 2:Right? You can just sort of, like, ship a v two. Maybe you spend a weekend, you know, staying up late and and get it done. Space, you ship your v one. It's extremely, extremely expensive if if it doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In this case, they're on v eight. It's still not working Yeah. To the degree. Like, I'm sure they're making incremental improvements, but it's just the stakes are so much higher.
Speaker 2:And, the the other thing that's very real is is the pace of iteration is is, can't possibly be as fast because if you, you know, you know, even if you're just benefiting from, the Falcon nine and and and leveraging, their sort of, like, payload capacity, you're not, getting you you you sort of have one of these, errors, and then you have to wait months to get to get even a second shot. And And that could be millions of dollars. It's a bunch of lost time, not even factoring in the burn, the sort of, like, OPEX that you're gonna incur during that period. So stakes are very high, and it is, even challenging for the man taking us to Mars. So, not easy.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because, so this is launch eight. Falcon had three failures, but they had a lot longer in between. Yep. So the first Starship, test launch was April of twenty twenty three. So we're coming up on two years of Starship testing.
Speaker 1:Falcon one, they failed in February, then February, and then February. And then in February, like, later that year, they got Falcon one flight four successfully reached orbit. And so there's this thing where, like, they're on a time scale, they're hitting a similar like, it it's taking them a few years to get this right.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But they're just blowing up way more stuff because they're iterating faster. Yep. Which I think is probably fine and good. Like, I I I think, obviously, it's expensive and you want it to work the first time, but, you'd rather just get through as many of the problems as possible and launch more, but it does feel more dramatic. Whereas, there are plenty of companies that are like, yeah, it took us two years to iron this out because it was really hard and we didn't make any mistakes during that time.
Speaker 1:Like, at the end of the day, you just wanna get the thing working. It doesn't really matter. Yep. So, let's go to some reaction from the timeline. Sunday girl is taking a shot at ole Shot's fine.
Speaker 1:He says, if NASA had the fail failure rate that SpaceX does, Elon Musk would be firing everyone in congress, would be demanding to know where the money is going. And Kane chimes in and says, NASA doesn't build rockets. Its contractors, including SpaceX, do. SpaceX Falcon had three failures in 458 launches, making it the most reliable rocket system used by NASA NASA. Starship is still in testing.
Speaker 1:And so yeah. I don't even know if they're selling I think it's still full test runs. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 3:one of
Speaker 1:I I believe one of the sometimes they'll they'll sell, like, basically discounted, rates to be like, hey. Yeah. There's, like, a 10% chance that this works, so we'll charge you one tenth the price if you wanna ride on this thing. Yeah. But, Andy, next yes.
Speaker 2:We should have somebody on, like, I feel like Josh Wolf
Speaker 1:would be
Speaker 2:a good guest to specifically talk about what is what is happening between obviously, you have Falcon nine taking payloads up reliably with companies like Varda. Yeah. But then something sort of happens with Starship specifically that, you know, basically, what is the actual what is actually happening that causes Starship to break up into hundreds of pieces and put on this incredible light show for all of us down on Earth, but but what is the exact sort of process? Mechanism. And has it been different every time,
Speaker 1:or
Speaker 2:is it, sort of reliably you know, it'd be if you're working at SpaceX and it's sort of reliably doing the same thing, that's, like, somewhat comforting. Right? Because it's, like, sort of a fixed problem that you need to solve. But but we should actually you know, we should definitely have somebody on the show to talk about it.
Speaker 1:It. Yeah. Andy, next season
Speaker 2:Sean McGuire would be able to would would be able to speak, to it.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Scott Nolan worked at, at SpaceX early in his career, really has has done a bunch of breakdowns on this stuff. And then, some of the other some of the others early SpaceX guys that have gone on to found other companies, talk about this stuff and break it down. Be cool. Andy says, remember, the funniest outcome is the most likely, guys.
Speaker 1:You get to catch Super Heavy on the first attempt if you accept Starship blowing up on the next flight five flights in a row. This is how the invisible hand of the free market keeps everything fair. Trust the process. Shout out.
Speaker 2:Good post. Xander says flight eight hit me hard watching Starship fall after pouring everything we had into it cuts deep. It hurts because we care, because we know what's at stake, but the pain is the price of progress. We'll carry this loss, rise from it, and push harder than ever onward. Hashtag starship.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Great post. 19,000 likes. Humanity is on Xander's side. Yeah. He says the support has been overwhelming.
Speaker 2:Thank you all in moments like this. It means more than words can express. Every setback is painful, but they remind us why we push forward and how many believe in this journey will keep going. Add as add Astra per aspera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like this John Edwards with the SpaceX tag. He says never give up after Falcon one flight three. We learned the hard way that night is darkest before the dawn. Keep your heads up.
Speaker 1:Keep pushing. We're gonna
Speaker 3:get there.
Speaker 1:So lots of, lots of optimism from the SpaceX team. Sam D'Amico has a funny one. Did you see this? I see. So, I I don't know if you've heard of Lost Sambrita, but it's this, little shade that is built, I think, in LA.
Speaker 1:Have you seen any of these? They're at, like, bus stops, and it's and it's a very expensive, very slow infrastructure project. And Sam says, fun fact, the Lost Sambrita in Starship took the same amount of time. Democrats put an enormous amount of money into infrastructure investments like I
Speaker 2:actually don't understand. Is it is it it's meant to be an overhang for one person, or it's meant to be a chair if it snows a lot?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's a it's it's a sunshade, so you can go and stand under it. Yeah. But it's like a sunshade for just one person, I guess. And I think it's designed to be, like, you can't destroy it, basically. It's, like, very, like, vandal resistant, but it's just how did they come up with this thing?
Speaker 1:It's just so ridiculous. And I guess it's called a lost some Brito, which is very funny. Starship isn't, and then Sam says, Starship, by the way, isn't just the rocket, but the entire city factory that produces it. And, yeah, obviously gotta work out some other things. Sawyer Merritt summed it up.
Speaker 1:He said, breaking SpaceX just successfully caught its Starship super heavy rocket Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love this description.
Speaker 1:In mid air for the third time.
Speaker 2:They parallel park to building.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:It's more than parallel parking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, playing catch with a building.
Speaker 1:And so, I mean, maybe this is just, like, a very stupid take, but it seems like catching the building's, like, the harder part and, like, getting the rocket like, getting those actual starship just not to break up seems like
Speaker 2:Stay in one piece.
Speaker 1:It seems like once they solve that, it's, like, pretty much game over. So I don't know. But base Baron, of course, summed it up very well by saying the blue origin after party for the Starship launch is effing lit right now. I don't know. I I I think they're I think they're all rooting for each other in a in a somewhat serious way.
Speaker 1:But funny to imagine, of course, we love Based Baron having fun on the timeline, poking fun at the rivalry between two bases.
Speaker 2:Different category. You know, if you're if you're in a highly competitive market, let's say project management SaaS Yeah. And your your direct competitor has a product launch and it goes terribly and it gets rejected by the market. Like, the stakes are pretty low there. Right?
Speaker 2:It just doesn't it doesn't set the industry back broadly. Totally. And so there's competitive dynamic that encourages dunking and people don't wanna see other people do well. But Blue Origin and SpaceX, obviously, Blue Origin is gonna benefit from SpaceX's progress. Right?
Speaker 2:Because they're sort of generating, you know, know how that, yes, it's, you know, actual IP for SpaceX, but at the same time, I'm sure you have, you know, like, if SpaceX does really well, there would be a bunch of people that have learned how to do space better, and they'll be able to go and start other companies and work at Blue Origin and all this stuff. And Yeah. It's, it's it's good for the entire industry. So and and humanities. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But where
Speaker 1:blowing all these up, I still feel like like, yeah, I'd probably go on one of these in, like, a few years, which is, like, the exact opposite of how I feel about, like, Boeing, you know? Boeing, like, one, like, little, like like, you know, wing, like, breaks off, and I'm, like, I'll never fly on that again. Yeah. But it's different because it's, like, I understand that, like, you gotta blow up a lot of stuff to get to where,
Speaker 2:you know, it's actually successful Starship flights do you need in a row to feel good about jumping on? Probably three. Three?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I think, like, I'd go on the fourth, maybe. To the moon or to the Mars? Anywhere. To the moon, probably. I'd I'd be, like, the second dude on the moon.
Speaker 1:I'd probably be the first one. I mean, people have already been, so, you know, if they send up some robots or something, I'll be the first human on the ship. I I I I I think it's pretty low risk.
Speaker 2:So if you just had your rocket blow up
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In front of the whole world Yeah. And and you'd been pulling all nighters, where what what kind of,
Speaker 1:I'm crashing on an eight sleep for sure. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com. Use code t b p n.
Speaker 1:Check them out. My sleep scores back up. I'm off the sauce, back on the wagon, off the wagon. On the wagon means you're not drinking. I did not drink last night, and I feel great.
Speaker 1:And I got an 84. Only missed on the routine. I think that's just because I'm all over the place with falling asleep, but I got almost eight hours. Seven forty eight.
Speaker 2:You have me beat. And that was a that was a fair and square. You know, it wasn't I don't have any excuses. I I have my routine was at, you know, something like 93%. I just didn't didn't get the hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think I what what will be really interesting once we get it dialed and we're doing consistent, you know, hundreds every night, the Dom episodes. I think that we might have an advantage here because we drink in the morning. Yes. And so it's fully out of your system.
Speaker 1:So we could probably get Brian Johnson to, like, approve that. Right? Yeah. To be like, yeah. Like, it doesn't count if you drink it at That's right.
Speaker 1:11AM. But the I think the real alcohol problem is when you're drinking, you know, up right up until you go to bed, then it's it's still in your system. Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that's it.
Speaker 1:I think that's the secret. Don't drink. Only Dom Perignon, and only at 11AM after your major, major celebration.
Speaker 2:Before noon.
Speaker 1:Before noon. Yeah. Only drink before noon. Anyway, China is coming for our semiconductor supply chain. We've talked about some of these companies.
Speaker 1:I've been looking for I was thinking about doing a a thread on this, like like, years ago, and trying to, like, break it all down.
Speaker 2:Big surprise.
Speaker 1:It's very, very hard. Yeah. I mean, I thought it would go super viral, but, it's very, very hard because, all of these, Chinese companies that work in the semiconductor supply chain, they all have websites that look exactly the same and, like, they're very hard to translate. It's actually hard to understand who the real players are if you don't speak Chinese and don't really work in the industry. But Nick says China will produce the entire semiconductor supply chain in house.
Speaker 1:Obviously, they want to try and do this. They wanna get away from TSMC. They wanna get get away from Taiwan. This is what's driving Ben Thompson's pitch right now for rolling back the Chips Act. Let's keep China dependent on Taiwan so then there is no incentive, and the thought of a, of a Taiwan invasion is is unthinkable.
Speaker 1:But if you cut them off early, they're going to have to move pull forward their homegrown strategy. And and as soon as they're successful, then it's game on, potentially. Hopefully not. Yep. So in design software, they got Empyrean.
Speaker 1:In fabless chip design, they got HiSilicon, Unisoc, and Byron. In lithography equipment, that's the competitor to ASML out in Denmark or where where's ASML? It's in it's in Europe somewhere. They have SME and c e t c. In photoresist, they have Dinglong and Rongda.
Speaker 1:And then in etching and deposition equipment, they have Nara, Fabrication, SMIC, which is their equivalent of TSMC, packaging and testing. They have two companies, Tongfu and JSAT, NAND, which is the memory, and DRAM, also memory and HBM. They're competing with that, SK Hynix, the South Korean company that makes all the memory that has been super important in the GPU, scale out. I think here's Most people haven't been focusing.
Speaker 2:One of the counterpoints to Ben Thompson's argument, which is just that, you know, we should, you know, let China maintain their dependence on TSMC is I have to imagine that China would have done this exact same thing even if they had unlimited access to, all the chips they wanted in the world from NVIDIA, you know, you know, buying directly from TSMC, etcetera. So Yeah. I think this would have been the natural path in the same way that in The US, in an ideal situation, we would also have a full in house, you know, silicone, supply chain semiconductor supply chain.
Speaker 1:I think that's true except for the fact that when I looked on this list, like, America is not really working on very many of these.
Speaker 2:No. I'm I'm not saying We we we we we in theory, we should.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. But I guess there's a question of, like, how much political will does exactly take? Like, it's it's a it's a huge investment. China seems to be willing to make that because they're kinda backed up against the wall.
Speaker 1:But, we're not doing that in in America. We are doing it kind of more broadly in the West. We've always kind of seen this, even the ASML stuff. It's not an American company, but they built on a lot of American intellectual property, which is how I believe the Chips Act is in for is is enforced.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It says that if you're on this restricted list, you can't buy products from companies that use American intellectual property. Even though it's not an American company, they're an ally, and then they play ball with us. Yeah. And so, anyway, very tricky. So good time to build one of a competitor of one of these companies because they're coming, and we've seen this with it it feels like every few years, there's like, oh, they America, China has a very, very serious competitor in, like, like, Unitree, for example.
Speaker 1:DeepSeek, all these different companies kinda pop up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We missed this earlier this week. Unitree released a demo Yep. Of a of a humanoid doing
Speaker 1:Kung Fu.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which was very cool.
Speaker 1:And the I mean, the the Unitree demos are looking so good now. They often get flagged on community notes as, like, this this is AI or this is CGI. Look at the shadow. It's not matching up. And then sometimes there'll be a fight over, like, no.
Speaker 1:This is actually real. And I think, obviously, then people are also playing into it and making fake videos too. But, in general, like, it is real and the tech is is getting very, very serious and the production scale of that is also really risky. I wonder if they'll do, Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting situation where Unitree doesn't care if a bunch of of CGI videos are released because it's basically information warfare. Yep. Whereas the other humanoid robotics companies would get completely dragged. They they they they obviously can't produce any of these sort of, falsified or or sort of, videos. But, but, Unitree is happy to just sort of show off capabilities that may not may or may not even be real.
Speaker 1:Yep. I wonder when we will see a, you know, there's, like, Chinese drone shows, fireworks. It's like a dragon in the sky. It's all the drones. It's flying in unison with LEDs on them.
Speaker 1:I wonder when we'll see a a unitary level demo of that with humanoids. Like Yeah. You know, there's, like, Soviet marches of, like, oh, wow. They have a thousand, like, soldiers just marching down the street. Like like, unitary is still in, like, the, oh, we have one cool demo.
Speaker 1:Like, but imagine you see
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A thousand of those, and you're like, yeah. This isn't AI generated. That would be Yep. That'd be a big moment. It's coming.
Speaker 1:And at that point, it's kind of like all the infighting between all the humanoid companies really doesn't matter. Yep. And I become a bull on all of them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:One of the challenges is that Unitree Unitree humanoids are still pretty expensive. Like, I think that the the the
Speaker 1:solid ones.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That's not similar. I mean, like I'm
Speaker 2:just saying
Speaker 1:if you wanted to get if you wanted to get a thousand
Speaker 2:And and and the good ones are more like a hundred k, I think. And so you're looking at to get one of those demonstrations of a thousand, you're looking at potentially a hundred million dollars that you just have to,
Speaker 1:If I'm the Chinese government, that seems like a steal. Steal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Lunch money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you you you want to you want to force the industrial capacity to say, no. Don't just make one great robot. Make make me a hundred thousand. Even if they don't go anywhere, at least you got the reps in to scale up your manufacturing to that point.
Speaker 1:And then v two, make another hundred thousand. Yeah. Always be making a hundred thousand because the product is not one robot. The product is Yeah. A machine that produces millions of robots.
Speaker 2:Yep. Right?
Speaker 1:Anyway yeah. If, when that happens, I hope that there's, like, a little bit of unity between the American, humanoid companies because it's game on. And Yep. Every everybody's gotta be building stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, you forget that, like, in World War two, like, people weren't like, oh, like, I care more about, like, you know, my my my fighter jet needs to have a, a Ford motor engine. It's like No.
Speaker 2:I do think there was
Speaker 1:I want whatever will get me
Speaker 2:I do think there was across
Speaker 1:the channel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. It was more about the liability and people definitely had favorites around equipment, but, you know, in in specific moments, it didn't really matter as long as the thing
Speaker 1:Just build it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any anyone who's helping is better than nothing.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We got some more agents. We got news from Sheeran, who is a writer for Bloomberg. She says, former leading DeepMind researchers coming out of stealth with a new startup aim to build superintelligence starting with autonomous coding agents. They've raised a hundred and 30,000,000 from Lightspeed, CRV, Sequoia, Alex Wang, Reid Hoffman at a $555,000,000 valuation. Nice little round to come out the gates and, good little photo shoot they did here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Another foundation model coming.
Speaker 2:I mean, this one seems aimed, you know, it's more more like an a you know, agents. So who knows if they're actually building, an actual foundational model or it's more of, sort of an orchestration type play.
Speaker 1:It's just crazy that this is another one. Like, there's just so many. I can't keep track. It it's the first time you you really do need the market map because there's just so so many of these. But good luck to them.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, they find an interesting, you know, go to market, interesting distribution channel, interesting product differentiator. We've seen that there are obviously a lot of different ways that you can differentiate the product and make it better. But it's hard to break through. It'll be interesting. There was also
Speaker 2:news today that, Google cofounder Larry Page is reportedly developing a new AI startup. Wait.
Speaker 1:Why isn't he just doing it at Google?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a big pushback. He's launching a new company called Dynatomics, which focuses on using artificial intelligence in product manufacturing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And, That's
Speaker 1:so weird that he's not just doing it at Google. Company throws off, like, a trillion dollars in cash or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somehow I missed this until now.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna just read through it since we're talking about it. So Google cofounder Larry Page has formed a new company, Dynatomics, to upend manufacturing with artificial intelligence. So his argument here would be Google is not focused on manufacturing. Sure. I wanna do something here.
Speaker 2:Yep. Hence, Dynatomics. Page and a small group of engineers are working on ways to use large language models to to create highly optimized designs for wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them. So so sort of some type of autonomous. I mean, very cool conceptually.
Speaker 2:Use AI to generate, you know, schematics Yep. You know, designs for something and then just build it autonomously. The stealth company is run by Chris Anderson. These people said Anderson was previously the chief technology officer of another page back company, Kitty Hawk, and a vicious project to build small electric airplanes, potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities. A company shutdown in 2022 amid failed prototypes and regulatory concerns.
Speaker 2:Anderson did not respond to a request for comment for the information. So, yeah, if if Paige is excited enough to, you know, incubator or invest in or be a large part of a new AI startup, I'm sure the Google shareholders, are sort of bummed that he's not rolling up his sleeves and getting back in to, you know, probably the biggest opportunity in AI. It's just like Google having a coherent effective, AI strategy, which which doesn't feel like they have right now because we've talked about this. You pay for Gemini, and half the time, you don't know where to find it in the in the Google, in the Google verse.
Speaker 1:I wonder how he genuinely feels it's going at Google. Yeah. Because there was this whole report about, oh, maybe with the AI boom, the Google co founders will get back involved, come more in day to day. And there is a view that you could have that, hey, Google is still, I think, the number one website in the world. They can stuff generative AI into the search bar.
Speaker 1:They can adapt and iterate on the product, and they've made it through so many other challenges. Like, people forget about these because it's the the the survivor bias. But there was a whole moment when people were saying that Google was going to be, like, eaten, like, much in the way that Craigslist was by vertical search. So the idea that, like, Yelp was going to be Google for restaurants, and that was going to take that was gonna reduce the size of Google's market. But over time, Google just kind of destroyed Yelp and destroyed everything else.
Speaker 1:And so maybe he truly believes I don't know if I believe it, but but maybe he truly believes that, like, things are going perfectly. And I Yeah. And I don't need to change anything there because, like, Google is succeeding in its mission of organizing the world's information. I mean, Gemini is doing great on evals. They're doing great on CapEx.
Speaker 1:They're building things out. They have TPUs.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, though, somebody I think it was Shkreli was making the Google AI repeatedly hallucinate
Speaker 1:this morning. I just all
Speaker 2:all he had to do was type in, Sam Bankman freed U C, s f, and it would, like, hallucinate that he had gone there, or or you just, like, add, the name of a college at the end, and it would hallucinate that the person you were typing
Speaker 1:went
Speaker 2:to that school, which kinda makes sense that Google, like, like, some something in the Yep. In the in the product is basically saying that when people Google this, they are expecting this outcome. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even if it's false. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like I mean, I feel like the Google DNA for correcting those types of things is pretty strong. Do you know the story of how Google developed I think it was, like, it's it's auto complete or, like, spell check or something. They realized that that if you just look through the massive Google data set of, like I mean, there's, like, billions of searches happening all the time. When someone when someone searches for something and they don't get what they want, they almost always just correct it themselves.
Speaker 1:And so when they when they type when they, you know, mistype something or they or they enter a fact that's incorrect, they will often correct it on the second search. So you can just look at, like, this person's search for, you know well, how did Joe Weisenthal spell unemployment with a k? Employment. Unemployment. And then the next search in immediately after will be unemployment spelled correctly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then and then they can just bake that in. And you can look across the entire dataset and just assemble, like, this amazing auto complete, autofill, like like, prediction, algorithm. And they should be able to do that with all the AI queries that they're getting because they have to be getting a lot because they have good distribution. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, overall, the thing with Google is is you it seemingly, you know, many of their most talented builders continue to spin out and start new companies. Yeah. And when you have the ability to go out and raise a hundred million dollars, basically, you know, while still in stealth without any type of product, the the the, I'm there's clearly a lot part of the show because these guys
Speaker 1:are are are deep
Speaker 2:in their goal. We we can ask, Michael from from Lightspeed is coming on the show on Tuesday, and, we can talk about how Lightspeed even sets up their sort of in in, investment team specifically around these different investments because they obviously are big investors in Anthropic. Yep. Reflection AI, this new company out of DeepMind is, you know, gonna be competing directly or indirectly, with Anthropic. I have to imagine maybe they're gonna be using, Claude in some way, but it's hard to really say at this point.
Speaker 2:And many of these companies on a long enough, not even on a medium term, time horizon are gonna be directly competitive. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:It is interesting that so few VCs it feels like so many so few VC firms have really said, hey. We have our bet and we're happy and we're, like, sticking with it. Yeah. Like, almost every VC firm's been, like, well, like, maybe I'll get two. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? And they're, like, four to five feels like the right number.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Four to five is really, like, the right number of, like, of, like, foundation model companies that directly compete with each other and hate each other. It's very funny. But I mean, I don't I don't know. I mean, I I guess there are plenty of firms that have figured that have that strategy and they're open about it.
Speaker 1:I know plenty of seed funds will say, like, look. Like, we we just we we're going to invest in a lot of companies at the early stage. You guys are gonna pivot. We love you. We'll support you.
Speaker 1:But, like, we're not gonna play the is this competitive game at seed stage because it's just impossible Yep. When we're writing so many checks and so many people are, like, pivoting around and stuff. But if you're, like, taking board seats and, like, really deeply invested, I mean, at the same time, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Andreessen was on the board of Facebook. They invested in the Instagram competitor. What was that called?
Speaker 1:Hipstamatic, I think? They invested in that. I don't remember.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 1:think they also invested in they also invested in Instagram, Andreessen did, because but they couldn't write a huge check, I believe, because they were invested in Hipstamatic. But both of those companies were competitive with Facebook, which they also had a big slice. So I I don't know. The whole competitive thing's tricky. Just gotta make money for you
Speaker 2:every day. Yeah. At the end of the day, I've never seen a a VC that was invested in two companies actually have a tangible impact on one of them winning over the other one. Yeah. Like, I would say that overall, I think founders do have to be, wary that investors do clearly pick favorites internally, but they are they do a generally a very good job of not expressing that or showing that publicly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's not like, they're going out and saying, you know, we, if you're an angel investor, it's much easier to get conflicted.
Speaker 2:Right? Because, you're not taking huge positions in companies. You're generally just wanting to back great teams and people that you like. And sometimes two people that you like decide to work on very similar problem areas. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or they pivot into that area. And so, overall, I've never I I personally have never seen an investor, you know, materially damage a company because they were invested in one or the other. If anything if anything, investors just wanna see all their companies do well.
Speaker 1:A %.
Speaker 2:And markets are big enough that, and and there's very rarely, like, some sort of, like, secret that a company has that doesn't become obvious. Like, the the classic, concern from a founder is like, oh, I don't want my competitors to know that this acquisition channel is, like, working really well. But any anybody that's competing them that's halfway decent is gonna figure out where they're spending money quickly Yep. And, you know, leverage that channel themselves. And so it's not sort of like a real concern.
Speaker 2:Another one is is supply chain stuff. I don't know. I don't want my competitor figuring out
Speaker 1:totally
Speaker 2:how I get this product or service at this price. Yep. And, again, that information will come out over time. Right? Because usually the supplier will just be yapping like, oh, we work with this company, you know, and, like, trying to find other customers.
Speaker 2:So, all these things, at best, you have sort of, like, a momentary gap between
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When your competitor figures out, what you're doing, how you're doing it, etcetera. And you can leverage that, but usually, it's not VC just sort of, like, forwarding, you know, an investor update or
Speaker 1:It also it also matters the the carry structure at these funds because, I mean, a benchmark is an equal partnership. So there's not gonna be as much, like, infighting between the partners, but some funds have, like, very specific deal by deal carry. Yep. Such that if you're invested in two different companies, the firm cares a lot less about the winner, but the individual partners could be like, yeah. We're technically in two different companies that are competitive, but as a partner that only has major carry in one, like, I really don't care about that other one or I actually want that other one to fail almost.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So firms like that Lightspeed that are making investments, you know, broadly in the category are setting up, you know, very clear sort of firewalls.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I actually don't know about the the carry structure at most funds. It's kind of hard to figure out. It's mostly just, like, lore.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:it's They don't need to wait for a newcomer to to scoop it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even even that, like, it just doesn't leak out, really. Yeah. It's it's pretty It's
Speaker 2:really never really rare.
Speaker 1:It's only benchmark has really, like, made it part of their, like, marketing, I think.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, should we move to some, breaking news from David Senra? Founders podcast dropped two episodes at the same time. We talked to him about this
Speaker 2:wild podcasting.
Speaker 1:Serious podcasting. You know, David, you know, they say, you should never podcast weekly. You should only podcast strongly, And he is a strong podcast.
Speaker 2:Broadcaster. He also doesn't have a fixed publishing schedule
Speaker 1:He doesn't.
Speaker 2:Which is cool. He releases episodes when he finds them that they're ready.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to listen to this one from, just released or there's two from Michael Ovitz. Who is Michael Ovitz is a fantastic book. I read it, when I was, I think, in college or just, just graduated. And then I had the chance to meet Michael Ovitz in, 2021. My buddy, Rompton, had me over, with with Michael at Michael's house in LA.
Speaker 2:One of probably the single coolest property that I've ever been on in my entire life anywhere globally. Truly a one on one house, and he's got fantastic taste in, in all things, cars, watches, and and art.
Speaker 1:Did he talk about his, history with CIA at all? Creative Artists Agency?
Speaker 2:I was just impressed with Ovitz's ability to understand exactly our playbook with Party Round,
Speaker 1:which we
Speaker 2:were building, you know, Party Round at the time. So he immediately, he immediately, you know, understood the opportunity, and and it was just, despite having at that point already been out of CIA, he just, and and mostly focused on investing. He's one of those guys that will just be doing very significant deals, for his, for his entire life. So, excited to dive into this one.
Speaker 1:And you know one of the best things about these particular founders episodes?
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:They open with ramp ads.
Speaker 2:Right away.
Speaker 1:Right away. Right away. As soon as you as soon as you click that in your RSS feed, David Senra is gonna be dropping
Speaker 2:He's one of the best ad smiths of all time.
Speaker 1:He is. He gives
Speaker 2:you a run for your money.
Speaker 1:He is. And, you know, he makes it clear. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:And so we love David, and we love that he's also partnered with ramp, also promoting ramp.
Speaker 2:And I gotta give a shout out to Logan Brand. He posted this morning at 05:40AM. He said, who's putting up numbers like t b n, t b p n in the battle for ear share? It's hard to compete with the with the brothers when they just love it more. Hashtag ramp.
Speaker 2:And that's true. We love what we do, and, we feel very lucky to be able to do it every single day.
Speaker 1:Sounds great. Well, we got three minutes until Wilma Nidus is calling in.
Speaker 2:Let's talk. Quickly cover this post from from Rex, Salisbury. So he said AmEx is losing market share to companies like Ramp that have a better product. Their answer, buy an expense management company for 600,000,000 built by the founder of Concur and his son. Wonder how that will work out.
Speaker 2:And so Center, I had never heard of. I mean, it seems like
Speaker 1:it worked out really well because the the founder got $600,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They just personally wired him 600, and that was it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, starting a business with your dad and then quickly selling it to a legacy incumbent, goated. Goated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congratulations
Speaker 1:on the deal. Good luck, but ramp's gonna be you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the challenge here is this does not I don't I I never had the ability to or or the opportunity to use center, but it's hard to actually feel like this is that that this is suddenly gonna make Amex's product, competitive with ramp or alternatives.
Speaker 1:And you know
Speaker 2:Because the issue is center clearly didn't have penetration within the sort of, like, high growth market. And obviously, you know, it's possible that they serve a lot of mid market companies. But,
Speaker 1:and so it goes into the big organization and kind of like language. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I saw some other posts about how, you know, is this a business acquisition? Like, are they buying it for the, you know, customer base and cash flows? Is this a product acquisition? Like, is this gonna make, Amex's product, more robust, or is it basically an acqui hire? Feels, you know, way too expensive for an acqui hire.
Speaker 2:But the thing I like about this, I like to see m and a getting done.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Center had raised a series, c of $30,000,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Back in 2023. So good to, get some liquidity for the founders, the employees, and the investors.
Speaker 1:I do feel like, you know, AmEx is, like, bleeding cash. They're spending 600,000,000 on this thing. If they really wanna compete, they should get on ramp. Yeah. Because they need to control expenses, and they need to save time and money to really compete.
Speaker 1:And so, AmEx execs, if you're the CFO of AmEx, I'm sure you're listening, you should sign up for ramp.
Speaker 2:Check it out. Check it out. Tell them the technology brother sent you. Tell them the technology brother sent
Speaker 1:you.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we I'm excited to have Will on.
Speaker 1:This is perfect timing. This is exactly how I wanted to time it up. We have two posts that were coming in. I believe Will's here in the chat. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 1:Can we hear him? Will, how you doing? Welcome How
Speaker 4:are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:To t b p There
Speaker 2:he is. You're a little out of frame there, but let's see if there we go.
Speaker 1:What are you doing? Great. You're good. You got me in front. You're perfect.
Speaker 2:Right away, I gotta give you credit for something important, which is introducing John and I. You you, you did it.
Speaker 4:Thank you for the 70% equity in the Technology Brothers. I was really excited to tender that in this most recent round. We're really proud of what you guys have done.
Speaker 2:Now you had, amazing taste and insight and, you know, taste. You you I remember you the intro was basically, like, you guys are the only two people I like in LA you should meet. Something like that.
Speaker 4:Glad TPG could buy all of my equity in this beautiful brand in this last round at 200 times forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to have you on. You've been on the show many times before.
Speaker 1:As a poster.
Speaker 2:As a poster. First
Speaker 1:time as a guest.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. It's, we're looking forward to having you as a regular.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I wanna get your reaction to this post from from Ayla. She says, going for aimless walks is one of the worst things. Give me a coffee shop, a bookstore, a friend's house. I will walk eight miles.
Speaker 1:No problem. But around the block, are you insane? Why would you want each step to be meaningless? Your outdoor time dumped into an empty void. And I feel like you've had a couple bangers about, about walking.
Speaker 1:I have one here from you. I've met many people who turn their lives around by walking around aimlessly for a couple hours a day. What's your take on walking? Would you recommend it to the next generation of will monitis'?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think you gotta walk. Like, it's the only way to get comfortable with yourself. You're sitting alone. You're silent.
Speaker 4:You're not staring at a wall. You're moving. I think Ayla's life might be meaningfully different if she's hitting, you know, 20 k, 30 k, 40 steps, 40 k steps a day. Really, the difference between, you know, boys and men happen in between that 30,000 step a day goal. So for Ayla, I'd prescribe, you know, 50,000 steps.
Speaker 2:That'd be a good start.
Speaker 1:I did you actually put up 20 k yesterday? Like, are you on are you in that tier? I feel like getting to 10 k no brainer. But Yeah. What what do you actually recommend?
Speaker 2:But but to be clear, getting to 10 k is extremely difficult.
Speaker 1:It's very difficult. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Our lifestyle now, which is show up to our building.
Speaker 1:Gonna get treadmills. So we're gonna be walking while we do the show. I only walk in there. Do you think that's a do you think that's a a suitable substitute for actually walking outside or should we just have a film crew worth
Speaker 4:activity. You you gotta be outside. You gotta be
Speaker 1:in the area. Counts if you're actually outside.
Speaker 4:Worthless. It's not good for yourself.
Speaker 1:So you think we should have, like, you know, TV camera production trailer following us while we shoot the show, while we're walking around Yeah. I don't see
Speaker 4:a reason why this desk can't be on wheels moving with you. Like, this show should be happening in Loop, Central Park All Day.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How
Speaker 1:is New York these days?
Speaker 4:Beautiful. Spring's here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Already?
Speaker 4:The the issue with New York is that 20 k steps a day in the winter is, like, dead later. Right? Like, you just can't do it. But in the summer, like, you can hit 40,000 step days. No trouble.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. 40 k days.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah. Yeah. The last time I was there, you actually the meme worked on me, and I walked all the way from, I don't know, uptown to downtown and back, and it was fantastic. And it took, like, hours and hours and hours. It was Doing the loop of Manhattan
Speaker 4:is, like, a great once a year occasion.
Speaker 1:You could take you up to the place where you have
Speaker 4:to walk all the way down to the loop like that. So that's a perfect day in the city.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Talk to us about hobbies. You've got one that we're particularly interested in. Woah.
Speaker 1:He won an award for it. Yeah. He's an award winning Award winning. Model boat enthusiast. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I think, like,
Speaker 4:the best hobbies in the world are the ones where the average participant. It's, like, eighty five years sold and post economic. And I'm a crowd member of Central Park Model Yacht Club, selling, you know, comically small and some comically large model boats. Really hard to get out on the water in New York, and it's much easier to get on the water in Central Park. You know, you can sail around remote control, go quite fast when some races.
Speaker 4:It's a good time.
Speaker 2:Is that a model boat right behind you? Is that the sail of a boat?
Speaker 4:Six six six feet of model boat right behind me. My office has been relegated to, to storage.
Speaker 2:Talk about the rise of Christianity in tech.
Speaker 4:I think, you're you're tracking, like, a a greater rise in Christianity in the West. Right? Like, I think we tried this kind of post religious thing through the eighties, nineties, '2 thousands, and it just seemed like it it led to universal depression. I mean, particularly in tech, Trey Stevens leading the way there, Trey Michelle right on the West Coast. But I also think in New York, there's incredible young Christian movement happening.
Speaker 4:Like, Church of the City of New York is baptizing, you know, like, a couple million people a week at this point. It's incredible how quickly this is going. The question is how do you turn this into adorable movement that lasts over time? Slightly worried that this is gonna be like a five year wave, gonna be trendy, gonna fade out. Christianity is the most important thing that's ever happened to me.
Speaker 4:I don't know how we fade that out over twenty years, but it feels like a relatively important thing to focus on.
Speaker 1:Are you worried about, kind of Christianity becoming a LARP or cultural Christianity being a substitute? Like
Speaker 4:yeah. This this like feels like the issue. Right? Like even when you go to service in San Francisco, it does feel a little bit like this is like a networking event.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 4:Like, why am I here for services and also pitching my startup? Right. It seems like it's good that there's like an elite, you know, an elite Christianity that, you know, elite somewhat lead cultural taste here. This seems good. But the fact that we're treating it somewhat like a golf club is a little concerning.
Speaker 4:I do think the larp, like, all up to the Gondo Burrows, but the the things that come downstream of that feel feel not particularly great.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. What where what which companies, specifically in the private markets are benefiting most from the sort of from AI within health care? What what companies are you excited about? I'm sure you get pitched, pretty much every company in the space. If they're not pitching you, what are they even doing?
Speaker 2:What what areas do you think are are actually getting? Maybe not, you know, I I would say, like, consumer adoption, but, like, real enterprise adoption. You obviously worked in this in this problem space for for quite a long time.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the the the take I have here is that legacy health care companies are actually gonna be the winners during this wave. I think as you see kind of AI adoption happen in health care, you're starting to see widgets get adopted. Right? Doctors requesting ambient scribes.
Speaker 4:You see big companies like a bridge coming out of that. But ultimately, ambient scribes are the front door to the electronic medical record system. They're certainly not the entire suite of software that a physician might use. And unlike the world we're used to in tech, the person who purchased the software and the person that uses software in health care are not the same person. Right?
Speaker 4:Physicians who are using it, hospital admins procuring it, there's a big divide there, which means they have different competing priorities. I am radically more excited by the opportunity of big legacy health care software businesses taking modern AI innovation, installing it onto their user base, and scaling that out than I am any kind of novel, brand new startup. Like, I think we will see a thousand kind of AI enabled executive fiscal startups happen over the next six months. I don't think any of them are gonna last. I think we'll see a thousand pill mills that will spin up over the next six months.
Speaker 4:I think they're all going to jail. Right?
Speaker 3:Health care
Speaker 4:is just not a place of rewards. It's kind of net new novel distribution plays. But I do think legacy distribution in health care is the most underpriced asset in the world right now. And if you can take that, plug AI on top of it, very interesting outcomes. Do you
Speaker 1:think there's alpha in being, you know, a young cracked AI engineer implementer, but instead of starting a company, going to work for one of those legacy companies, working your way up, becoming the CEO? Yeah. Tremendous alpha. I mean, if you
Speaker 4:think about, like, how big like, install base is the most under priced thing in software right now. Yeah. I think everyone's used to seeing these companies go, you know, zero to a hundred and then, you know, probably back down to zero. Right? This is Jeremy's thing, the iron condor law or whatever.
Speaker 4:Right? But I think there is, like, something really underappreciated about a company that has had, like, you know, a hundred 40,000,000 in reoccurring revenue over decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like, that switching cost that install Kate toss that velocity and the ability to pilot software on top of that install base at scale is just something you can't beat. Like, I don't think you can do that from a net new startup that trust that brand that install. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Do you think any of the bigger VC funds maybe going public will have the money to buy into that and then drop AI on top of it? Hard to know. I mean,
Speaker 4:I think a lot of this is ground up adoption. Like, I work at a large, you know, publicly traded EMR right now, and we're certainly seeing AI happen in every aspect of our product suite.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But it's it's really a matter of making these tools successful. Right? And I think as you see a commodification happen at the model layer. Right? Maybe OpenAI is not worth hundred and $40,000,000,000 or whatever when you can install llama and run them locally and build these product features.
Speaker 4:As we upskill software engineers in these companies and, like, very smart people go and work for them, I think the outcomes will just be better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you have any insight into why SBF is getting, to podcast from, jail? Because John posted about this yesterday, which was a good line. If if you can now tweet and podcast from jail, is that not sort of putting out a signal?
Speaker 1:What is the punishment? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, like, you know, like, as a VC, a
Speaker 4:time pulled off your sentence. Right? Like, this is, like, punishment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what's your take on that broadly? You always, at least within the group chats, you you always have good takes here.
Speaker 4:I I just think SPF is, you know, this incredible fixture. I will be shocked to see if he serves this whole sentence. Yeah. He has, like, very strong proof that if you don't need enough money to the right people, you can kind of bend the world around you. I sincerely hope he stays in jail for a very long amount of time.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Can you tell us, do do you have any good anonymous you don't need to name names, but good stories of of of frauds or or malfeasance in the startup or financial world that you think might be, illustrative or educational for the listeners? I mean, I I think, like, I have a
Speaker 4:great tweet about this, about kind of the deep tech fraud playbook of how to build, you know, a billion dollar company without shipping any technology. And I think we're seeing some incredible innovations happen in the deep tech fraud arena right now where we have companies that are raising, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that, does not exist, will never exist, and, is plainly impossible on the face of it based on, you know, basic inverted maturing understanding of physics. Has that happened for years though?
Speaker 1:I mean, that's happened for years with, like, Solyndra, Theranos. Like, this this playbook seems to be repeating itself forever.
Speaker 4:Is there anything else you need to do? Like, incredibly tested, you know, playbooks here. Right? The acquisition of mass amounts of LA based real estate. Right?
Speaker 4:Arm tattoos from the CEOs. Sure. Biceps. Like, this is just, like, fundamental innovations on the art that we haven't seen in a long amount
Speaker 1:amount of time. Got it. Got it.
Speaker 2:Well said. Will, you are are you 27? No?
Speaker 4:26.
Speaker 2:20 six. You've, come of age in a kangaroo market. You've played it very well. The kangaroo market, for those that don't know, we talked about this on the show yesterday. You know, historically, you had bull markets where things go up, bear markets where things go down.
Speaker 2:Kangaroo markets, you're just sort of, like, bouncing all over the place. What's your general read? In my view, we've seen more top signals in the last three months than any point in my, adult life. What's is there any more gas in the tank? Are we are we in a sort of, like, tech, tech supercycle, or is it just down only from here on out?
Speaker 4:I I think we had a couple more 10 x that's left to go. I think we got the ceiling is far from where we're at now. I just think we have a couple, you know, 10 x sell downs on the way to it just feels like the rate of, you know, up, down, up, down is only gonna increase for fragility in the market's gonna skyrocket to
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:As you see, like, billions of dollars in venture chasing, you know, clogged plugins that, you know, write some basic code for you. We don't understand how any of this stuff works. Fragility is gonna go up. Markets gonna cycle a bunch. Mega cycle feels crazy.
Speaker 4:It just feels like if you're not making money along that path, I don't know what you're doing.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts on leverage right now?
Speaker 4:I I there are two great Jeremy Gaffan idea. Two kinds of guys in the world. Right? Cash Chads, Leverage Kings.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 4:I am a cash chad. I run my accounts net cash. I've never had leverage in my life. No credit cards, debit cards only. Right?
Speaker 4:There are certainly guys that live on the leverage hierarchy are able to run that. Not my playbook. Two different kinds of people in
Speaker 1:the world.
Speaker 2:Interesting. That makes sense. You guys
Speaker 1:are Just advice for young people.
Speaker 4:Advice for young people? Don't take out credit cards. No credit card debt.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 4:Buy buy comically large model boats. They're a very good store of value.
Speaker 2:I I got another one. Speaking of young people, do you think there's an opportunity to go, downstream of the teal fellowship and offer funds to middle schoolers to, drop out of middle school to pursue, deep tech, hard tech,
Speaker 4:impactful access. With ramp employees. Right? Like, we find every 14 year old that works at ramp. Right?
Speaker 4:We find everyone that Zach Zach Frankel has recruited from local Bay Area middle schools, and we give them a million dollars to start an expense tech startup. I feel like that is just clear alpha in the market right now. We need to go younger. We need to go into the benches of ramp.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To the benches of ramp. To the benches. The benches from the benches to the trenches.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:That's where we need to go.
Speaker 2:What are you, what are you reading these days? I know you've got, rare books and and manuscripts. Maybe some of them you can't talk about, but, what's top of mind?
Speaker 4:I am working on republishing an amazing book that I cannot say the title of, but it's a history of political corruption in Louisiana in the 1960s. It is so good that the author that wrote it was shot 14 times in the chest with a shotgun by the subject of the book. That's That's how you know you're writing something important. And that's how you know your writing's been good. I recently purchased the rights to that.
Speaker 4:That should be coming at some point in the next two to seven years as soon as I figure out how to actually publish this thing. But really focused on political history history right now. I think there's a huge amount of alpha left there.
Speaker 1:What about a, what about a book that's already in publish or already in print?
Speaker 4:Best thing I read recently was a Brent Beshore recommendation that I am scrolling through my Amazon trying to find the name of.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Oh, another good one. Santa Monica Partners letters letters on small cap investing, kind of a classic of the genre, on finding undervalued businesses traded on very weird and esoteric markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Talk to us about the transition from, you know, semi illiquid, startup founder to, much more liquid post exit founder. Are you, have you been focused on getting illiquid again by making a high volume of startup investments? Are you more interested
Speaker 4:in focused on getting illiquid by buying very large model boats? I think this is kind of where the market's going. I think it is it is clearly an underpriced asset, and I'm moving size in the model boat industry right now.
Speaker 1:Are you looking at any, startups that might act as, like, marketplaces for model boats? You know, we're part of
Speaker 4:the vessels. Liquidity is a bad thing. You never wanna mark to market. You never wanna be able to liquidate assets. Ideally, the perfect asset is impossible to liquidate and impossible to mark.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right? It's just like a black hole you put money into. Yeah. And this model boat, I have my eye on built from wood, from Henry Kissinger's desk in the West Wing.
Speaker 4:Just it's a perfect asset. It's impossible to mark.
Speaker 2:Cool. Impossible to mark. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, it's been great having you. You guys are here.
Speaker 2:We look forward to as, the cycle, you know, continues to, you know, make progress and unravel, we'd love to have you back on the show to, to discuss. To have
Speaker 4:you guys.
Speaker 2:Excited to send
Speaker 4:us to collect my equity on this enterprise.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yes. You deserve it.
Speaker 1:You deserve it. You worked hard for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You did. Thanks, Will.
Speaker 1:Have a great Friday. Bye.
Speaker 2:What a guy.
Speaker 1:What a character. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, the character on x Yep. Is a very authentic representation of of Will. Yep. That, it's always refreshing when you meet somebody that you you sort of know online Totally. Or that has a sort of online persona.
Speaker 2:The online persona is, you know, exactly the same as the offline persona.
Speaker 1:He had some riff a while back about, like, VC ghostwriters making, like, like, $700,000 a year or something. And it, like, threw all the VCs into it into, like, a complete frenzy because they're, like, wait, are people doing this? Like, should I be spending this much money on my ghostwriter?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he he he's a fantastic way to manifest these things.
Speaker 2:I would I would really love to know if there was any truly exceptional posters that were just a % ghostwritten because ghostwriting Yeah. Is pretty easy to track, when it's when it's sort of, like, mid, hosting.
Speaker 1:Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah. Every every everyone can buy, like, the the yeah. The mid the the default, just kind of, like, the threads, the the the the the the current thing memes.
Speaker 1:All of those are very demonetized. But truly inspired bangers, very, very difficult. For example, Pavel Asparuhov posts, I've got two and only two hiring criteria. One, do you have that dog in you? Two, are you nice with it?
Speaker 2:Not ghostwritten. We gotta put that in Banger archive. Not ghostwritten.
Speaker 1:I think I think it actually has been on Banger archive. I think that's where I found this. But, yeah. When we ran into Pavel, he said the nicest thing anyone could possibly say about your post, and he was like, do you guys write those? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because he was like, you guys, like like, I love the account.
Speaker 2:We specifically decided to turn it on.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because we realized we were covering the top posters in the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You need
Speaker 2:to be that we could compete.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. You gotta be in the arena.
Speaker 2:You gotta be in the arena.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Otherwise, you won't be respected.
Speaker 2:Let's cover some posts. Alexis should be joining any second.
Speaker 1:Okay. So YC? Paul Graham?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Paul Graham says it will be Y Combinator's twentieth birthday in four days. I'm pleased to, I'm pleased by how young YC still feels as an organization. It would be dangerous for YC to become too established since YC is training startups. It has to remain startup ish itself, but it requires a constant effort to stay that way. We talked to Gary Tan yesterday about that, and, it's yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it it it it it it's so interesting because it'd be so easy for YC to scale up and become just a massive asset manager. But, of course, it would lose a lot of what makes it special.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And I think Gary is, yeah, reinventing, what would they call it? Like, re founding the company when you take over? Like, he needs to make aggressive changes. And so people see those and they're like, oh, like, you know, AI is writing all the code or they're doing defense tech now. It's like, no change would have been death.
Speaker 1:Yep. He has to take risks. And then some of those will be rolled back. Some of them will be successful. But you only get power law outcomes when you're when you're testing lots of, like, really high variance stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the, YC is in a situation where they are in a highly competitive environment. Right? There's so many alternatives to YC's capital. You can go raise if you're a exceptional founder, you could go and raise from the Collison Brothers, from the Airbnb founders,
Speaker 1:the ones that are I I truly think that the the biggest change was that when y c started, it was it was $17,000, and then it scaled up, and now it's 500. But Sand Hill Road VC Firms, their doors were closed to Stanford new grads Yeah. Which is unthinkable now. Every single Stanford new grad can easily get a meeting at a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm that is completely ready to write a 500 k check.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so all of a sudden, what YC is is not just, hey, we're willing to take a shot on a kid with a $20,000 check and see what they do. Like, the Airbnb guys could not have gotten funded directly. Like Yeah. They, like, they were not in full.
Speaker 2:There's some iconic pass emails out of the original where where people, like like, clearly weren't taking it seriously, weren't taking a meeting.
Speaker 1:It used to be if you wanted to start an, an if you wanted to start a company in tech, that meant you're gonna build a website. And building a website required racking servers and buying hardware. But, of course, the cloud computing era happened right as YC started. And so all of a sudden, there was a big, opportunity to do a whole lot more with a lot less. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's all all all the AI it's interesting. It's like it's like, could they go back to 18? Because, you know, like, they're they're giving 500. You made
Speaker 2:it work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like like like, maybe, you know, like, I'm I'm actually, you know, I'm excited. I mean, I love that that, you know, the the the YC founders get 500 k and they can go and do stuff, and I think it's great. But, I think it's interesting to to to I I'm I'm very interested in following what happens with PMF or Die because they're spending a lot less. They're spending 25 k, which is very much in, like, the 02/2005, the Alexis Ohanian era of YC.
Speaker 1:Like, it is crazy that they he that he built Reddit with, yeah, 20 k to start.
Speaker 2:Yep. Wild.
Speaker 1:And and you can still do that. And maybe you can do it more now because of the the the AI tools. It's not quite as different as, like, from going from CapEx to OpEx. Yeah. Because it's it's going from, hiring extra software engineers to write more code to paying a a bill.
Speaker 1:So it's it's so it's not a it's not like a cash flow management change. Yeah. But, it is interesting. The Will Menitis group chat is is popping off, I assume. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Judging by your face. Sure
Speaker 2:is. They're live texting us.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:I I say, I wanna pull up this video and watch. Ben, I'm gonna send it to you quickly if you can pull it up. I wanna I wanna play the video of the dig announcement, that we're gonna be discussing with Alexis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's play that. Jason Kerman's texting me. Those live numbers look good, baby. I haven't checked them, but thank you, Jason.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that you're looking at my stats so that I know. I'm sure we'll review
Speaker 2:after tax. Book, that that Roboy recommends. Score takes care
Speaker 1:of itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The podcast downloads take care of itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Jason fully believes that. Like, he just goes and makes something, like, brilliant for, like, months and months and months, and then, yeah, it goes viral every time because he's not, like, over on over engineering it. Anyway, Ben, let's kick it over to the Alexis Ohanian video announcement.
Speaker 1:So what we've got today is dig.com. It's the two g's, digg.com. Now actually give the power back to the people. Dig rewrites the Internet's front page.
Speaker 5:I gotta dig. Gotta dig. Gotta make this story big.
Speaker 4:Tech darling, Dig skyrockets with millions of loyal
Speaker 2:I was not
Speaker 6:start up to online.
Speaker 2:Era. Please welcome back to the show, Kevin Rose. You. Like, none of those images of Kevin Rose on all the different, you know, magazine covers. No.
Speaker 1:I was pre just the moment. I was posting.
Speaker 5:Hear that awful snap? Oh, another
Speaker 1:I'm sure I visited
Speaker 3:Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot.
Speaker 1:You don't wanna live in the past, but now we actually have the technology to make better, healthier community experiences.
Speaker 3:This is a team up I never
Speaker 1:would have imagined twenty years ago. This is so funny. Rose, it makes sense that you would be relaunching dick.com as its original founder, but teaming up with Alexis Coe Oh, good shot. Oh, that's a great shot. I love it.
Speaker 1:Whoever shot this is really good. For a long time and rightfully so. And it was great. Like, I'm excited for this as, like, a media project, like a story. You know?
Speaker 1:I I I don't know if if I've been like, oh, I really need dig right now, but I'm I'm down. No. I think this is one
Speaker 2:of those things where the asset had been been basically languishing. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember I advertised on Dig at some point, I think, in 2018, '20 '19. And it was it was seemingly like, the the content quality was down dramatically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so trying to return it to its former glory is a worthy undertaking. And then the other news from Alexis this week, we're basically just gonna start covering it, and we'll get some at the very least, we'll get some good backstory. Oh, Alexis just tweeted that he's coming on in five.
Speaker 1:So I guess the,
Speaker 2:I guess the audience,
Speaker 1:Guilt tripped him in.
Speaker 2:Guilt tripped him in. Thank you, brothers.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Everyone tweeting Alexis.
Speaker 2:I wanna cover the Alexis, TikTok announcement. And then with him, we can,
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is so funny. I mean, we need a we need a board of, like, people that have talked about buying TikTok added to the list. But but my my my true and and hard line stance is I will support literally any American buying TikTok. I don't care if you have $5.
Speaker 1:If you say you're gonna buy TikTok, you have my support. Yep. Because I'm I'm there for it. And So we we magic is real.
Speaker 2:We got at t VPN
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On TikTok. Yeah. And I I think we're gonna just post a video up there that says, like, posting this video every day until an American owns TikTok. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's right.
Speaker 2:Really willing to to sort of invest Yeah. In building an audience on the on the on the Chinese platform. Yeah. So I'll read this time article. It says Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian has joined billionaire Frank McCourt's bid to acquire TikTok.
Speaker 2:McCourt's Internet advocacy organization Project Liberty announced this week that Ohanian, an investor married to tennis star Serena Williams, had joined a consortium called the People's Bid for TikTok. Alexis had posted, I'm officially now one of the people trying to buy TikTok US and bring it on chain. Ohanian said in a series of posts made on X, Project Liberty says it will provide more users more control over their online data. If successful in its bid, Project Liberty said the technology will serve as the backbone of the redesigned TikTok, ensuring that privacy, security and digital independence are no longer optional but foundational. When asked by an ex user on Monday what he would call TikTok if he purchased it, Ohanian said TikTok, freedom edition.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Under a federal bill passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by president Joe Biden last year, TikTok was required to cut ties for the China based parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban by January 19. And, as our audience knows, Trump extended, the deadline for TikTok to find new ownership until early April. So we're really coming down to the line here. And, McCourt has a consortium which includes Shark Tank stars Kevin O'Leary.
Speaker 2:We gotta get Kevin on the show to talk about that.
Speaker 1:He's gotta get Trump's attention. I know Alexis isn't huge Trump supporter or anything, but he's gotta get the attention of the president. Yep. If he wants to get this deal done, I say he goes and buys a bunch of billboards outside of Mar A Lago.
Speaker 2:That is a play.
Speaker 1:And you know how where he would do it? Ad quick.
Speaker 2:Ad quick. And you know what? Yes.
Speaker 1:Ad quick. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I'm thinking what you're thinking. You're thinking what I'm thinking. Thinking what you're thinking. Ad quick, raise their, Alexis is a big backer of ad quick and Alexis is joining the chat.
Speaker 1:So, we'll bring him in and we'll do an AdQuik ad read. AdQuik is out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream, Alexis. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:How you doing, gentlemen? Sorry. I kite.
Speaker 1:You're all good.
Speaker 3:It was running late from the pediatrician. Not looking Not for me. Yeah. But for my youngest.
Speaker 1:Hey. Of course. We understand. We're, we
Speaker 2:have kids too. Business dads too.
Speaker 1:Thank you for leading that. Important. Family first. Always. Always.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry. It was it was a tough one too because it was one of those immunization days. And when I'm the parent who does the pain doctor visits. My wife does the sort of the middle normal ones.
Speaker 1:That's rough. Ouch. Poor deer eye. Lotta.
Speaker 2:Okay. Hand squeezing.
Speaker 1:So should we start with should we start with TikTok or dig?
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's a few things to talk about, aren't there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Busy week for you. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1:Well, we just watched the dig video announcement and we have to find out who shot that video for you because the cinematography was fantastic. The reveal when they pull to the side of the of the laptop and they reveal your face there, perfect storytelling. Movie magic. So, yeah, break it down. How did this come, come around?
Speaker 1:Is this just like a crazy, group chat idea that then just got out of control and now you're just doing it?
Speaker 3:Gosh. How did it start? You know, I I had never spoken to Kevin Rose until, like, five or six years ago.
Speaker 1:No way. And and
Speaker 3:when we started talking, we just realized we had so much in common. I I I I learned I had, in all of that animosity and jealousy, a tremendous amount of respect for him that it probably took
Speaker 1:me a little
Speaker 3:bit more maturity to appreciate. And we just vibed. And then every now and then, he would text me and be like, hey, dude. Do you think I should buy dig.com and resurrect the thing? And I was like, yeah.
Speaker 3:Sure. Go for it. Yeah. In in the way that one supports a a friend thinking about a thing, that seems a little outlandish and a little crazy. But, you know, it it had gone through a few different owners.
Speaker 3:And, actually, when it was first on sale, I had debated Oh. Buying it when the company went bankrupt.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 3:told Kevin this later. I was like, I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like this one last f u.
Speaker 1:But I'm so happy I didn't do that.
Speaker 3:And and then, I don't know, five months ago, he was like, dude, I'm gonna do it, and and I would love to do it with you. And I said, that sounds like a great idea.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. It sounds like a fantastic idea.
Speaker 2:Talk about Talk
Speaker 3:about And there you go.
Speaker 2:Talk about, like, the the actual competitive dynamic between you guys back in the day. Because looking at, like, even looking at the video, you guys were clearly battling for cover stories on on on magazines and things like that.
Speaker 1:Well, he's touching us.
Speaker 3:It wasn't even in in my mind, I thought it was a battle. Yeah. And this was a sign of being a first time CEO and frankly, being focused on the wrong things in this regard. But I was so jealous of the fact that he was he was the Silicon Valley poster child. Remember, you know, we were in the first batch of Y Combinator, which was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working out of an apartment in Medford and then Somerville.
Speaker 3:We had raised a total of $72,000 at demo day. And, you know, here was Kevin Rose who was this tech celebrity who had millions raised from true Silicon Valley VCs and and, yes, was on the covers of magazines, was was getting so much press. And I felt like I I didn't feel like we were getting a fraction of that press and that coverage, and and I was very jealous. And, again, I I think focused on the wrong stuff, but it just felt like he was an easy he was an easy target. And and, look, in his defense, he was first.
Speaker 3:Did did come first. In in our defense, and I have the email to prove it, we did not know about it when we started Reddit. It was about a month into the company we'd already launched
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That we'd finally learned about Dig. So shame on us for not doing enough competitive analysis. But they had about a seven month, eight month head start.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, what can I say? We we won the long run, but now now we both get a second second chance a second chance to do it again.
Speaker 1:Chance. So so so what are you envisioning for the product? Have you announced anything, or are you ready to think about what will be different? I mean, I'm sure you don't just wanna re resurrect it exactly as it was.
Speaker 3:Maybe for v one, let's say. Okay. The goal for v one is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for dig where where it left off. Maybe not version four, but just before that.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And then modernizing some of the obvious stuff.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:But look, this will not be, you know, the first version that gets out there is not gonna be feature complete with some of the big, you know, forum platforms out there. But it's gonna hit the nostalgia notes. And then, you know, some of the stuff we've talked about publicly is and this is what was going on in the in the chat, which was, you know, technology, it's cliche, but in the last couple years, we've all had our brains melted by what software can do, and AI in particular, and just even simply some of these these foundational, large language models are capable of doing some really dope stuff that if you were building a text based forum software today, and you built it from first principles, and you said, okay. Well, what are the most important parts of this platform for the most valuable users? You know, it's it's the less than 1% of your user base that's actually doing the heaviest lifting of community management.
Speaker 3:And and so how do you start there by saying, how do we build the best tools using AI so that you don't spend your job being a janitor having to go through an inbox of wading through things that are violations of community norms or just violations of the terms? And, actually, you know and and if you talk to enough of these folks, and Kevin slyly ran ads, polling thousands of them to To just say, what are the things you wish you had? What are the things that should exist? And it turns out, you know, even, again, using today's technology, you can solve a lot of those problems out the gate. So that as, say, a volunteer community manager, you're now spending the bulk of your time not doing janitor work, but actually, like, doing the fun part of community building.
Speaker 3:Right? Coming up with cool contests, you know, highlighting memes and and great submissions from the community. And, and so that that's what I would expect to come pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Do you think First version. Yeah. Do you think that x, you know, killing links, you know, we all kind of understand that it that it probably makes sense for x as a business. Right? But it's disappointing as a user.
Speaker 2:Is that part of what's creating an opportunity for Dig, to come back and and potentially thrive?
Speaker 3:It's you know, I had not thought of that. It is so annoying that we all have to put it in the second tweet. But but to your point, it does make sense,
Speaker 6:from
Speaker 3:their standpoint. Look. At at the end of the day, if you build a community platform well enough, I'd imagine, you know, at least a majority, more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community. Right? At Reddit, there were self posts, and that was just an invention by some random Redditor who guessed how to sort of hack and make self referential links.
Speaker 3:But but I do think there is an opening as you as you mentioned it. Yeah. There there is an opening for, like, more traditional just link sharing. Like, here is some cool thing on the Internet. Go go take a look.
Speaker 3:And you know what? Actually, as I'm thinking about it live, the other wild trend, you've seen this guy Levels who's who's code vibing the flight simulator.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, we've not fully processed apps as content.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that that might be because, right, how
Speaker 1:does one get to that app?
Speaker 3:Well, it's gonna have to be a URL, at least for the time being. And so maybe that's maybe that's the other secular shift we're seeing is that people are gonna be spinning up entire apps as content that
Speaker 1:will obviously need a place
Speaker 3:to get to and and links.
Speaker 1:Yep. Related to that, obviously, beachheads are super important when you're building a platform that can kind of anyone could use it. Reddit now has Reddit's for all sorts of different communities. What was the first beachhead for Reddit, and how are you thinking about early beachheads that could be interesting communities for Dig to kind of latch on to early on?
Speaker 2:I think the Reddit beachhead was Alexis. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was just you. Right? You know, being
Speaker 3:the guys.
Speaker 1:It was. No. No.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was. You were weren't you, like, the first twenty users?
Speaker 1:Like, you know Alright. Well
Speaker 2:I mean I mean it in both ways. Right? You were you were
Speaker 3:In in defense of that strategy, it was 02/2005. So you gotta understand, we had to convince people that you would want to come here to this site, the Spartan site, and submit a link for other people to vote on. But, but we didn't have comments. So it wasn't like we were, like, congratulating one another for our great posts. But, yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The first few months, we had a bunch of alt accounts we were posting under to make it look like there were different people, not just nothing over that's my username over and over again posting links. But then, you know, again, it was also it's hard to learn lessons from because back then it was actually novel. And so, like, the first community needed to be, r slash programming because we started with
Speaker 1:a bunch of other developers as our early adopters, and then we realized normies would not wanna see,
Speaker 3:like, an Erlang tutorial on the home page. So so we shoved We we we created those communities as a way just to basically keep the front page looking a little bit more open to everyone. But I do think I think the first beachhead for Digg relaunched ends up being the look, I'm 41, almost 42. It's like the it's like the old head nostalgia for a vibes y Internet. Now you guys don't know that because you are so young, but but for the gray beards, there was a time when the Internet was just it's like a much chiller place.
Speaker 3:And and I think it's the nostalgia for that. So I assume it's gonna be a lot of the, like, older geeks who were, you know, big dig fans who love, you know, video games and comics and, you know, a couple
Speaker 1:of other things that could
Speaker 2:be done. Idea of this just general idea of the vintage Internet. Right? There's so much demand for vintage broadly in consumer products. Vintage vintage cars.
Speaker 2:Right? Records, etcetera. Pokemon cards. Right?
Speaker 1:Because they
Speaker 2:all ask you about Chromatic. You about Chromatic just
Speaker 3:playing on my Chromatic here before There
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 3:I do actually take this with me everywhere I go.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it it makes sense. You know, before we get into TikTok, I wanted to ask you, how would you if if you were in control of x as as somebody who built, you know, one of the biggest social, you know, platforms in the world and and read it, if you were in control of x, how would you control this sort of dynamic where this quote, unquote slop content is what, this sort of stated verse revealed preference issue. Right? Where on x, people say they want to to learn and get informed, but then the videos that actually, you know, get real engagement are, you know, some type of meme or it's or it's JD Vance. How how would you approach it?
Speaker 2:Because I think every x user given at least our corner of x, we're tech native. Yeah. Many people are building similar products. Everybody's got an opinion. What's what's yours?
Speaker 2:How would you is x perfect in its current state, or do you see ways that, that you would improve it?
Speaker 3:So full disclosure, you know, I launched, it's not a television series, but a content series, Off Season, OnX, in partnership with x.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I probably
Speaker 3:use if you looked at my tracking, on my apps, I'm sure I use x more than any other social media platform Yeah. Today.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:So I am what and but why? The best question. Right? Why? Because the people and trends that I care most about in our little insular world, like, that's where
Speaker 1:the news is made. That's where
Speaker 3:in order to do my job well, that's how I rationalize it to myself. Yep. As a builder, as
Speaker 4:a tech builder, as
Speaker 1:an investor It's work. It's a work app.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's work. Yeah. No. It's obviously not. But when I'm doom scrolling, I I comfort myself saying, like, no.
Speaker 3:Actually, this is helping me identify trends and things.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:And and I know that it could be better, and it probably I think it's more fundamental. And if you could apply this in different ways to I think Instagram has its version of it, TikTok has its version of it. The the algorithm rewards the thing that pushes to, extremes because it gets it generates outrage and people love gaming systems, especially when those systems mean more attention and more money. And so you see it across all these platforms. And some some places it's a little bit more benign because YouTube is longer form content.
Speaker 3:You know, it doesn't feel as aggressive, but it there's definitely a flavor of it there. Yep. But I think as long as what you're optimizing for is me opening my phone and you as the developer or head of product trying to get me to spend as much time as possible, you're gonna eventually end up with some version of the algo feeding you more of the stuff that gets more of the attention and the outrage and whatever, which just feeds more. I think community platforms have the best shot that I've seen because what you're signing up for there truly is the intent of I like this community. Right?
Speaker 3:When a community website gets to scale and I'll never forget. So I started r slash gaming. And to this day, the culture of r slash gaming is a reflection of me, an old gamer, Because what I was talking when r slash gaming was more nostalgic even back then in 02/2005 than what was the new game. And at some point, the gaming community on Reddit said, listen old man, we wanna know about new titles, so we're gonna create r slash games, which is much more about new releases. And and you could see a cultural rift in something that seems pretty obvious, but, like or or maybe subtle, but to the people in it was really important.
Speaker 3:So I think if you're subscribing to based on community, you're coming in with a different set of expectations. And so you have a chance to build something that doesn't necessarily lead to the, can you make a thing that'll piss as many people off as possible, which is what Twitter does so well. And I've got I've got friends who who I think kind of make a living shitposting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's an incredible art form, and I and I have to commend them on it. But, like, it's a symptom the the reason that exists and it's so so viable is it's a symptom of the platform just rewarding, you you know, what gets you to, you know, stay in the app for longer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. Talk I mean, we gotta hear about we gotta hear about the TikTok bid. There needs to be a decision made by by April. You're entering the mix.
Speaker 2:We love to see it. Break down kind of, like, your guys' angle, what you wanna do with the platform post acquisition, and and maybe some of the other people involved.
Speaker 3:Sure. Well, look, I you know, Frank McCourt's the big dog here. He he called me up and was like, hey, I'd love to get you involved. And and he already had his instincts were around building something on chain, you know, using this and the massive user base of TikTok to, you know, basically overnight, not literally, but overnight bring a bunch of people into this world where they now actually control, let's say, their reputation online to a certain extent because they they have the the sort of currency they've created there with that account and that identity. Look.
Speaker 3:It seems like I mean, Elon even replied to my tweet saying there are more people bidding on TikTok than not
Speaker 1:at this point. And that's that's a touche.
Speaker 3:That's right. There's a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And why not?
Speaker 1:I support them all, to be clear. I support them all. I want it.
Speaker 3:Are you not doing it yet?
Speaker 1:Are you I don't care if you have $5. If you have $5,000,000,000,000, I if you're an American, I support you buying TikTok.
Speaker 3:Well, that's exactly. And that that was my that was my reply. As long as it ends up outside of the control of the Chinese communist party, great. It's a win. Like, obviously, I'd I'd rather us win.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of course. Any of those options that's not, Chinese controlled is a win. And I've I've been outspoken about this for years and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is what it is. But I do think there's something really interesting about, you know, we're at this point where and look, I've been at day one seeded Coinbase in 2012, like, ETH presale. Like, I I have I've wanted to believe in a version of this future for a long time. And right now, you've got amazing CEOs like Brian Armstrong who've brought us so far so far into making it even just a standard and a and a store of value and I Bitcoin really specifically. But, like, can we get to that next point where we have a technology that just sort of underpins a lot of people's lives casually?
Speaker 3:And and and again, no one's gonna use any of these apps because of the technology. They're gonna use it because of what it does for them. And you either spend years building it up and, you know, everyone's got a version of it, everyone's doing it, but nothing's really broken through or come close yet. This is such a fun hack to getting mass mass adoption for this technology. That was the thing that was most interesting to me.
Speaker 3:And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it look, if it did come to fruition, you know, there's still lots of things to figure out and solve for. But there are
Speaker 1:enough bright minds who are
Speaker 3:already in my inbox, who are very excited on the on the crypto front, to lend their axes. So, so look, I again, as long as it ends up in American hands, I'm thrilled. But
Speaker 1:I'd obviously love for us
Speaker 3:to take a stab at it and really see what it takes to bring over a bunch of netizens to, the on chain world.
Speaker 1:That'd be great. We have five minutes. I wanted to know, are there any underrated Reddits Reddit communities that you think might be worth taking a little tour into? Like, live? No.
Speaker 1:No. Not right now. Just, I I I whenever I run into something, it's There's a
Speaker 2:lot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a lot of crazy
Speaker 2:stuff. Our kids watch this show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, it's a safe to work one, but but every once in a while, I find a Reddit where, like, I got into three d rendering, and there was Reddit on the Houdini for and it was just, like, these people are the they're the CGI artists who do the the the horses on Game of Thrones. And they're just amazing artists, and they just know so much more.
Speaker 1:Right? Wow. And I was just like, I need to know everything about this, and I'm getting really up to speed. Even with their memes, I learned through osmosis from that. And I love when I find a little community that I can just be like, oh, I'm not an expert.
Speaker 1:I'm totally tourist, but I love that stuff. I'm wondering if there's anything that pops up. Even if it's just like, you know, nostalgic, like, I don't know. I see you have a microphone there from t h in ears. Anything.
Speaker 1:Oh, god.
Speaker 3:I gotta remember the URL. Digg.com.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. That one. There we go.
Speaker 2:That one. We'll be on there.
Speaker 1:We'll be on there.
Speaker 2:I actually have a I have another another question for you. You're you're, like, pretty much a pure play consumer Internet guy. Right? Obviously, in the in the in the his in the in the great history of of your investing career, you you've invested all over the place, but you seem to be somebody who, you know, when others sort of, you know, sour, you know, especially, you know, it it almost became a meme of, like, consumer Internet investing is just so hard that a lot of people just give up. We it's very obvious now that there's a bunch of, you know, we've seen this, with, you know, one of the players that we have in PMF or Die has taken multiple consumer apps to, like, millions of dollars in revenue in in super short period of time.
Speaker 2:How do you think about, you know, consumer investing now in the age of AI? You're sort of, in many ways, refounding dig, but I'm sure you're looking at, you know, hundreds of deals a month, I would imagine, or at least a quarter. What's most exciting to you right now? It feels like the the the kind of a moment that that you'd been waiting for similar to crypto, but this feels like, you know, obviously, the next wave.
Speaker 3:Dude, it is consumers definitely gotten exciting again. And look, I got weird. Right? I I think the the best, the the greatest gift that I've had with my investing track record is having a certain amount of freedom from LPs, and and, like, 10% of our AUM is is my own money too, which which doesn't hurt. But, like, you gotta think 02/2020, the year I left Reddit, one of the first investments I made was in a women's soccer team called Angel City.
Speaker 3:Starting that team up for it cost a million dollars to buy a franchise back then in the same league today, an expansion fee, like, literally just the amount paid to start a team was a hundred and 10,000,000. So the valuations have gone up. Angel City is now the most valuable women's professional team in the world at just shy of 300,000,000. And literally five years ago, that was the craziest idea. And I I tweeted the entire grand plan and just said, this is another valid opportunity.
Speaker 3:It's venture scalable. Here we go. And and so I love being told I'm gonna lose all my money and it's crazy. And so I found opportunities to your point in consumer that still, you know, turns out the business model of the sports team is actually very similar to Reddit. But with AI, software got exciting again.
Speaker 3:And shameless plug, the latest one that we just talked about was called Doji. Now I am clearly not a fashionista, but this team figured out how to make AI avatars. I mean, look at those pants. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Figured out
Speaker 3:how to make AI avatars with just a few reference photos.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Actually look I mean, I could never
Speaker 1:Yeah. But That's a wild fit.
Speaker 3:This is this is this is gonna be and again, it all comes back to user experience. Right? We spent a year or two seeing, oh, look at that. Like, we blew the Turing test out of the water. We're seeing all these dope bells and whistles applications, and we're just our we're just now starting to see what people can do with that tech, and it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 3:And I think we got through the first wave of, like, get rich quick apps. No disrespect. Hustle's gonna hustle. I love it. No tea, no shade.
Speaker 3:But we're now getting into what's what's a consumer app that's not just gonna make you, I don't know, turn into a piece of cake and get cut in half, but what's an app that's gonna make a fun social experience? And it might just be remixes of old things. Dig. I know from another old consumer founder that you might hear another one of these types of stories in the next couple weeks. Maybe it's out by Southwest.
Speaker 3:And I think you're gonna get to see this rebirth of apps that we all knew that can be demonstrably better now because of this technology. And then we'll see some new stuff like Doji that just like, this try on app, there's a version of that that has existed and sucked for decades. And what it took was a few technological breakthroughs and a great user experience and voila. And so, yeah, it is a great time for consumer. It's a great time for hard tech.
Speaker 3:I've done a few space tech companies now.
Speaker 1:I obviously love hardware. Like,
Speaker 3:it's it has never been more fun to do this job. And and again, the world does not need more investors. So if you hear this and think, oh, I wanna do that when I grew up, start a company first.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:It's so much better. You'll be so much cooler. It's better for society. You'll make more money. Like, do that, and then come over the dark side after.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:We we we see you pop up on, paparazzi photos on the world tour. What's the next big event you're excited for? Is there anything on the calendar that you're looking forward to in 2025?
Speaker 4:My wife
Speaker 3:is like, do you wanna go to the Vanity Fair party?
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 3:Like, no. Of course not. No. I that was the last one, I guess, I missed out on.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe you have a plus two. I mean, we'll we'll tag along.
Speaker 3:Alright. You gotta you gotta marry up, guys. That is the secret. That's how I did it. No.
Speaker 3:I, there's there's nothing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I don't know. The
Speaker 1:Well Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I'll just I'll just surprise you. In fact, if it's a true paparazzi photo, I won't even know that it's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, subscribe to Alamy stock photos, and you can see the latest of what Alexis is on here.
Speaker 2:Here's a good question. I I asked John this yesterday. So Starship, you know, disintegrated last night. It's unfortunate, but, obviously, they're iterating quickly. How many, how many successful, SpaceX, you know, sort of trips to the moon do you need to see before you're gonna get on it yourself?
Speaker 2:John's answer was was three. So
Speaker 3:Does John have kids? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I know. I know. I know. He's got he's got three.
Speaker 1:I have three kids and a very high risk.
Speaker 6:You have three kids now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, I know.
Speaker 3:Rats. Holy shit. This come a long way from the solid days.
Speaker 1:I know, man. Yeah. It's wild.
Speaker 3:Wow. Oh, glad that's nuts. No,
Speaker 2:I would
Speaker 3:not do that. I, Stoke Stoke is my horse in that race. Okay. As an early investor there, and I love Andy. I love that team.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I'd say the same thing. SpaceX has changed the world. We're all in their debt. They've opened so many doors for humanity's civilization, but I don't need to be in the first million.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I I have no interest. I not interested. Now, supersonic plane,
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 3:told Blake when I sent the wire, I was like, bro, get me a seat on the boom. Let's go. Again, I don't
Speaker 1:need to be
Speaker 2:seat on the boom. The burst.
Speaker 3:Right? Let the professionals do that. But, like, that's way more appealing to me because it space no. I I Alien and Aliens were my favorite movies as a kid. Yep.
Speaker 3:And so no good comes from space as far as I'm concerned. And that's without even not knowing that xenomorphs don't really exist, no good comes from that. That's why there's a pulse rifle on my wall.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go. Yeah. I mean Always stay strapped with the pulse rifle.
Speaker 2:Anybody that has a man cave like yours, is is not in any hurry to leave. It is, truly, truly a work of art.
Speaker 1:Well, this is fantastic. Thanks so much for joining the stream. We'll have to have you back soon. You're always welcome.
Speaker 3:I appreciate it. One more shameless plug. I wanna say and you guys you gotta keep me honest on this. Was I the first investor to ask if I could invest in this pod?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You actually were.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were.
Speaker 2:And I think and I think it would have been I think it it would have been a thousand x.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And,
Speaker 1:I'm still here, guys.
Speaker 3:I'm still here.
Speaker 2:You saw you saw the potential. You were you were Yes. You knew these guys aren't building a podcast. Yep. They're building
Speaker 1:Empires. An empire.
Speaker 2:The TV version.
Speaker 1:Appreciate the support. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:You'd be one of our first calls if if we ever did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is so good. It's so good for
Speaker 3:the ecosystem. Y'all's vibe is is perfect. The branding is on point.
Speaker 1:Like, 10
Speaker 3:out of 10. Taste, you've heard enough people say it. It is so true though. Taste in this era is going to be a hundred times more valuable as intelligence, thank God, is getting democratized than a commodity. And so it's it's an amazing time to have great taste, and this is the time to be
Speaker 1:better for what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Here's our vision for it since it's very relevant to you. We wanna give, you know, interesting people that are doing big things all the benefits of having their own big podcast with none of the work. Right? Because, like, you don't pitch. You don't want to you know, you could work on spend all this time making a podcast and maybe even put sponsors on it, make a million dollars a year.
Speaker 2:It's not gonna change your life. What if you could just come on TVPN anytime you had big news? Because that is what we're setting up. The next time you've got news Smart. I I'd love to have you back on specifically when all the TikTok stuff is getting worked out.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, you win it, but whether or not, you know It's
Speaker 1:great having it.
Speaker 2:You'll have some great points. We got Sam Lesson here. It's a party.
Speaker 1:Alexis, what's going on, man? What's up, Sam?
Speaker 3:Hey, dude. I'm sorry, buddy. I was gabbing with these guys.
Speaker 1:Hey, Sam. No. It's fine.
Speaker 6:I was whacking some tennis balls. I was late. Oh, man. But night like, look.
Speaker 1:We got the microphones in white hats.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You're like, you're my technology brother.
Speaker 1:Dude, there you go.
Speaker 3:Teenage engineering. That's the best.
Speaker 6:The subtle way to say I paid too much for my microphone.
Speaker 3:No. You paid the exact right amount for quality.
Speaker 6:There you go. There you go. Alright. What's going on, guys?
Speaker 2:Alexis, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 6:Peace, guy. See you, Alexis.
Speaker 1:Not too much, Sam. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:How is tennis?
Speaker 6:You know, I'm just I'm only bummed because I really had this vision in my head. I was gonna come join you guys and wear a tuxedo. I just didn't have time today.
Speaker 2:Next time, I iconic photo on your website. I think
Speaker 1:the slow so everybody listening, just go to go to slow.co. It's just it's just the
Speaker 2:partners the partnership wearing tuxedo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's a great photo.
Speaker 2:Ben, you should, you should work on pulling this up. But, but now you have a good excuse. You're playing tennis. If you had more if we had more time in the transition there, you could have maybe we could have got Serena on for a second to,
Speaker 1:give you some I'm
Speaker 6:heading to I'm heading heading to Indian Wells in a few hours.
Speaker 3:Oh, no.
Speaker 6:You guys are student Wells fans?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we actually do nothing but
Speaker 1:do this
Speaker 2:show. We never go out with our families. Basically.
Speaker 1:But India's Fair enough. I'm just trying to fit the
Speaker 6:role of stereotypical venture capitalists for you. Come from tennis. Go to tennis.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 6:Where Tuxedo the
Speaker 2:whatever. Like is the the honesty. Too many venture capitalists, like, try to basically, they're they're larping like they're not venture capitalists. Right? You know, they they put on, like, a I I advise my friends, like, don't put up, like, a fake Zoom background to try to hide the fact that you're in this sort of, like, $30,000,000 home, you know, like, just just embrace it.
Speaker 2:Like, founders want to partner with people that are very successful. Right?
Speaker 1:So just authenticity. And I mean, we saw this with the SPF thing, like, people fake, like, oh, I'm not rich, and then you it blows up because he was, like, complete fraud and the whole, like, I don't know. I I I'm I'm very I'm very short, like, faking that you're not, like, successful with
Speaker 6:your success. Pro honesty and pro whatever. Authenticity.
Speaker 1:That's what it's about. It's not about, like, the flexing or, like, showing off. It's just about, like, just being who you are.
Speaker 6:No. I agree.
Speaker 2:There's hopefully, you've you've got a full kind of thirty minutes here, before you head to Indian Wells. I feel like there's a ton of stuff to cover. I wanna give you an opportunity to, talk about your, billboard that you guys Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:We're very proud of our billboard. This is our first slow outdoor marketing.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 6:So if you're cruising north on the one zero one, you're gonna see our billboard, which, you know, is a burning pile of money around
Speaker 3:a castle.
Speaker 6:And the and the tagline is AI is not your mode. And it's just like we were just driving on the 101 and every fucking billboard is like AI this AI that and we're like this is just like piles of money burning on the one zero one so we decided to burn a little of our own money
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 6:kind of make the opposite point So it'd be fun. I like having a billboard. I think we're gonna do more billboards.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Billboards are extremely underpriced.
Speaker 1:Well, we're sponsored by a billboard company. Next time you buy billboards, go to adquick.com.
Speaker 2:And tell them we sent you. Tell them
Speaker 1:you know someone sent you.
Speaker 2:No. I love it.
Speaker 1:So talk about Outdoor
Speaker 6:advertising is the future, gentlemen. None of this targeted stuff on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It can go it can go much more viral. It it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Talk about, yep. Basically, break break down some of the ideas behind the billboard. Yeah. You know, we we've covered every single big AI fundraise this year. We've covered the big companies that are trying to roll it out.
Speaker 2:Some are doing it better than others. Just today, there was a new, DeepMind team that spun out and raised at a at a $500,000,000 valuation to do
Speaker 1:Oh, cheap. Cheap. Cheap.
Speaker 2:Yeah. These aren't typical slow deals, but you you have a good perspective on the market. Like, give us
Speaker 6:some We've been pretty consistent on this for for two plus years. I mean, I wrote a deck in 2013. I'm sorry. Not 2013. Twenty '20 '3.
Speaker 6:Not that long ago. That was kind of about kind of with a moment in venture capital, what the fuck venture capital. And the basic point of it was don't confuse the fact that LLMs are powerful technology. Like, there's stuff you're gonna do with them that are gonna be great for all sorts of businesses with the disruption itself being a good business. My partner, Will, says this a lot.
Speaker 6:The big guy on the website, he's always like, just because technology is disruptive doesn't mean that's where the money is made. You have to think about the business model disruption and what's really going on. And, you know, just I think we are in a super cycle of memetic venture capital money lighting on fire in AI right now, because and there's a bunch of structural reasons for it. We talked about that. It's like LPs have too much money in too big of pockets.
Speaker 6:They gotta figure out where to jam it. Right? GPs, there's no there's no narrative that makes sense. But guess what? If your LPs are gonna pay you to jam money into AI companies and get paid the fees on it with a with a, you know, a Go Fish card, it's not a bad deal.
Speaker 6:Right? If you're willing to just spend a lot of money. And so but we've just been incredibly sure this. Now it doesn't mean we don't love companies that are enabled by AI. You know, I I like what I call AI cherry on top businesses, which is a business that fundamentally is great.
Speaker 6:Right? It's fundamentally but then there's a non obvious ideally cherry on top. Right? Which is that AI gives it new leverage. You know, I'm working on a new company with, with Joe Lonsdale and their team That's right.
Speaker 6:Which is called Merit First. And that's an example of a company where, like, actually, structurally and sociologically, AI does add something new as a type of company that should have always existed. It was hard to build before, now you can build. That stuff is all great. But this, like, large model fight to zero, I mean, it's just it's kinda wild to watch to be totally honest.
Speaker 2:Talk about Facebook's, just met as opportunity broadly in AI. If you were still working at the company, how would you you know, do you think their, our position overall is, like, they're doing a lot of things right. There's been talk recently about, you know, having a a standalone, you know, app, which could make sense. But it doesn't even feel like they've been that aggressive with sort of Productizing it. Productizing it.
Speaker 6:Well, yeah. My my view on meta and AI is quite simple. It's a classic, which I love. Heads you win, tails you win situation. Right?
Speaker 6:It's the best way to the reason the stock has gone up so much, I think, of anything as you look as an investor, you're looking around, you're saying, where do I definitely win on AI regardless of how the breaks go? And the answer is gonna be meta. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They're unlike Google, aren't gonna get disrupted in their core business on this. They don't have a search business. They don't have a look up business to disrupt. They have a shit ton of engagement attention, and they sell ads. And you know what definitely gets better with LLMs?
Speaker 6:Ads. The targeting gets better. The creative gets better. You just win. Right?
Speaker 6:And so at that point, you know, the reality is is, like, I think they're incredibly well positioned. You know, people are argue that these numbers are huge. They're spending on LAMA, whatever, but you gotta look at it as a percentage of market cap. It is a tiny percentage investment, right, to cover cover their ass. Right?
Speaker 6:And to make sure that whatever innovation happens in AI, enough of it's open source and the funnel is wide enough that it all ends up back in them. They don't get cornered and stuck out in the wilderness. Right? So but it's an incredible I think they're an incredibly good place, from I think they're probably in the best place of any large tech company. And I'd say moreover, like, you know, the way I've always thought about this and what I see is AI, unlike prior innovations, like, unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the Internet is just so good for the big companies.
Speaker 6:Right? It's easy to slot in. It commodifies. I mean, this is like you can't you cannot think of a better extending innovation for a large company, right, that already has the infrastructure, the data center teams, and the whole nine yards. It's like, this is just all upside for them.
Speaker 6:And so I think
Speaker 2:what you see is, like, a good
Speaker 3:to them.
Speaker 2:And low margin, basically.
Speaker 6:Well, unless unless you're Apple and somehow you got stuck way out in the wilderness. But, like,
Speaker 1:they're
Speaker 6:in, you know, the Googles, the the Amazons, the Facebooks. I mean, that is they're in great shape. And then if you're a tiny company, there's just so much leverage all of a sudden that, you know, there is a lot of cost cutting. There's all sorts of things you can do that's cool. You just don't wanna be in the middle.
Speaker 6:As with most things in life, you never wanna be in the middle. And, you know, candidly, even companies like OpenAI, or should we say nonprofits like OpenAI, the problem is they're kind of in the middle. You know, they can't compete with the hyperscalers from just access to capital perspective. If this is a capital game, they're gonna lose. Right?
Speaker 2:So do you think,
Speaker 6:and if they're and if it's not a capital game, it's a deep seek open source thing, they're also gonna lose. So, like, the key in life is just never be in the middle.
Speaker 2:Do you think that, SoftBank can realistically spend $3,000,000,000 on agents with OpenAI this year?
Speaker 1:Or should we All
Speaker 6:I can tell you this is I I joke it's a joke, but it's true. One thing we've learned, we've been doing slow for ten years. Whenever SoftBank buys, you sell. Right? Like, they are the worst investors in the history of the world.
Speaker 6:Right? And so it's just like I've watched them crush so many companies by overcapitalizing them, by get they're like, you know, they it it's hilarious. I love their decks. But, no, it's like it's complete house of cards.
Speaker 2:House of cards.
Speaker 1:Was it always that way?
Speaker 6:Masa's nuts. Right? Every once in a while in his history, he's been nuts enough to nuts his way into some amazing opportunity that saved his ass. Right? But, like, you know, I mean, you can the the he was the original LOL deck guy.
Speaker 6:Remember his unicorn deck with the unicorns and that he's like The egg. He's an incredible marketer.
Speaker 2:So so why haven't why haven't we seen Masa taking bigger swings, you know, in the early stage. It seems like
Speaker 6:because Masa always comes in late and overpays. That's his thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right. But but but, obviously, with the vision of a like a massive infrastructure, just put a million dollars into every new company, just write tons of seed checks. Like like, is it is it just an infrastructure problem?
Speaker 6:Like, why they just don't index the entire seed market?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, it's an interesting question. I wonder so historically speaking, when big funds try to index the seed market Mhmm. There are two problems. One is someone wakes up and does the math and they're like, this doesn't make any sense. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, even if you have the million dollar check at seed, if you're trying to deploy billions of dollars, like, it's just an irrational business model because the the multiples don't make up for the fact you have to move gross dollars. Right? So the best case you're doing at seed then is just marketing. Right?
Speaker 6:You're like, I do seed to market.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Hey, Des. I'm on the Technology Brothers podcast. You wanna say hi?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Come see me.
Speaker 6:Wife, Jessica?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course. We we
Speaker 6:You came over to the pool
Speaker 1:house. Hey. How are you?
Speaker 2:We wouldn't really be able to do the show without your team, your team's coverage. We we basically feature your articles, you know, every day. So,
Speaker 5:thank you. Grateful. Congrats on all the success you guys
Speaker 2:have been talking to town. Now we we
Speaker 5:subscribe in for?
Speaker 2:No. We subscribe to the information. I I have to think we're one of the number we have I hope we're one of the number one referral partners because we we get the paid wall articles, and then and then we cover them, but we don't cover the full thing, you know. So we we basically are, you know, pushing people behind the pay wall. So it's great.
Speaker 5:We gotta strike a deal, so I'll leave you guys, but then, you
Speaker 1:know Let's
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 1:Let's figure it out.
Speaker 5:Referral revenue your way.
Speaker 2:Well, no. No. We're just we're happy to support.
Speaker 1:Happy to support.
Speaker 2:Great great to meet.
Speaker 1:Oh, look
Speaker 6:at that. It's a it's a guest on the guest. I love it.
Speaker 2:A podcast drop in.
Speaker 5:Well, I'm just delivering your mail. Thanks. Have fun. Bye.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Nice. Okay. Talk I I want I want more hot takes from you on on kind of all the on on all the hyperscalers. So so what's going on with with Apple?
Speaker 2:Are they just a luxury goods? Are they the the LVMH of tech? Are they just gonna kind of continue to to make the same products forever? Are they done innovating?
Speaker 6:Look. Here's the reality. It's really fucking hard to make phones. Right? And, like, really hard, especially in the modern era.
Speaker 6:It's really hard to imagine that they're going away anytime soon because of that. At the same time, you know, I don't know if you guys get the, the Apple intelligence summary zero text. Oh, yeah. But they're, like, comically bad. They're hilarious.
Speaker 6:That's just the
Speaker 2:best part.
Speaker 1:Tell you the opposite of what the text says.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, it is useless. Right?
Speaker 1:And so I think it's I think it's valuable in that it's so funny because I'll screenshot them and send them into the group chat and be like, really? You guys were talking about this or something? And that's funny, but it's all it's purely accidental humor.
Speaker 6:It's insane. Right? And so I'd actually think that the I would argue that Apple's intelligence, text message product might be the perfect exhibit for an antitrust case. Right? Where you're like you talk about consumer harm, right, as, like, the kind of bar for this.
Speaker 6:It's like, this is what we're gonna get out of AI. Right? Like, it's comical. Right? This is really funny as a I love LOLs.
Speaker 6:So, like, I'm into it. I think it's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 6:It was the first time I left it. To God. Jessica's phone on their newest iOS update, it deleted all somehow, like, all the contacts. And so she now just has phone number. Like, it is comically bad.
Speaker 6:But the problem is on the flip side is like the camera's good and it's hard to make phones.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Right? So like I don't, I'm still like I don't who who no one likes green bubbles. Right? And so the reality is is like I think we're a long way away from Apple going away. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But my god, are they in a weird place right now. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is unfortunate. My point of view is like, I just want better AI, and I know that they'll just be able to wait and just dominate the monopoly and then eventually roll
Speaker 6:something out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, the very basic thesis is is if LVMH is a luxury goods conglomerate and they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, should the sort of digital tech equivalent consumer tech equivalent of that be worth trillions of dollars? Like, yes. Like, they're not
Speaker 6:Well, maybe. But look, LVMH is there was an interesting moment. You guys remember I think this is, like, a few years ago where there was this moment where LVMH or I guess the CEO of LVMH is the richest guy in the world. Right? And somehow, like, it inverted and, like, tech was worthwhile.
Speaker 6:It was, like, a crazy inversion. You're, like, wow. So the meta story of our society right now is that it's not the innovators that are worth the most. The meta story is that it's like fake luxury signaling that's the most valuable thing in the world. And that was not a good thing.
Speaker 6:That was not a good moment for my
Speaker 1:book.
Speaker 6:With,
Speaker 2:with with with Facebook. Right? Like, Facebook was a huge catalyst for, you know, Tech becoming the number one source of wealth or not? No. No.
Speaker 2:No. Luxury spending. Right? Because now it wasn't like, oh, your your watch or your car is no longer just, like, you know, being seen by your local community, but it can be seen by the whole world and you can sort of signal out, you know, status.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's interesting it's an interesting social dynamic. Right? Because on one hand, I'd argue that Instagram has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, all of a sudden, like, fitness is cool because, like, you can say you're hot and being hot is, like, way more expensive than a watch. Right? And so, like, actually, that's the way like, being well rested is the luxury good. Right? And, like, so, you know, kids kids are like the most expensive in the world.
Speaker 6:So all these things that you can, like, now socially signal as, like, I'm fucking rich easily and, like, those certainly supersede your Birkin bag. Like, those that's like cheap luxury. Right? That's like mass luxury at best. And so, like, there's this weird dynamics going on.
Speaker 6:Now you all on the flip side, the reality is is, like, look. I've got I don't know. You guys you guys play with the the Meta Ray bands?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We don't have
Speaker 6:them over
Speaker 2:here.
Speaker 6:Freaking great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? And, like, I do think that you know, about luxury and fashion, like, if Meta had released not Ray Bans
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right, they then, like, they wouldn't be as cool even if they were exactly the same, and they probably wouldn't have sold as well. So, like, I'm not, like, a luxury guy. Like, I don't have perfect insights or taste on this, but there is there's weird stuff going on about how you what what luxury really is, how you display taste, how you display wealth, and certainly things like Instagram had had a big impact on that. Totally.
Speaker 1:Related to the Meta Ray Bans, are you at all, like, a DAU, MAU of any other augmented reality or just, like, consumer hard hardware technology like Apple Vision Pro, Oculus, any of these products at all?
Speaker 6:I Apple Vision Pro has gotta be the most expensive product per minute of use in the history of the world. I I obviously bought one immediately.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I've used it precisely zero times since the first week I had it. It's an incredible demo. Right? When you think about I've actually tried to do the math on this.
Speaker 6:Like, it's more expensive than private planes per minute of use. Right? If you looked at, like, the overall, like, so I
Speaker 1:have the exact same experience.
Speaker 6:I I was a big Oculus. I I think that Oculus is actually pretty good at this point. I've you know, look, I'm a Facebook loyalist. I, like, bought every version.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I went I, like everyone else, played a bunch of zombie shooting games during the pandemic with friends, and it's super fun. Like, I'm into it. I think it's a really hard sell, though, when, like, your life is pretty good. Right? Like, I think the reality is is, like, VR and, like, immersive experiences and all other realities are kinda great if your life sucks.
Speaker 6:Right? Because I mean, like, I'm gonna, like, live in a video game. But, like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stuff is, like, it's just it's not if you have a good life and kids and, like, do stuff, like, what's the point? Right?
Speaker 1:Go play real tennis instead of VR tennis.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like, I like Wii tennis, but I like real tennis better. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's great. That makes sense. One more. Do you have a prediction around, Google?
Speaker 2:Do we have a new CEO there at all in the next five years? Are they all in on Sundar?
Speaker 6:On Sundar?
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 6:don't know. Is it like is that just, like, based in some news or rumor? Or is
Speaker 2:that No. It's purely based on it's it's purely based on, Google has not managed to release an, an AI product that hasn't been riddled with issues. And it feels like, it it it does you know, we we you know, you obviously, can poke fun at Moss's picking ability and call him somebody that sort of signals the top or whatever. But, you know, OpenAI and Chat g b t have hundreds of millions of users and, you know, maybe they're not replacing that sort of commercial search activity, but, like, much of the informational search, it feels like, the golden goose is threatened for the first time.
Speaker 6:It's a really good question. I mean, here's the way I think about it is Gemini is actually a pretty sweet product. The problem is no one uses it. Right? Like, you know, so is, like, the notebook l m product.
Speaker 6:Google actually has a bunch of very, very good products. Right? I think their problem is they're so big, and they're the marketing and, like, driving of those products is extremely hard, for them. And, yes, I think they are the company that more than any other company in the world is in the position of both being way ahead in certain elements of AI and, like, has a huge advantage, but they also have the most to lose. Right?
Speaker 6:And so I think that's a very challenging thing for any company. If you look at, you know, the history of companies like I mean, the best example from history, is is was it Kodak, right, that invented the digital camera? Right? And, like, they invented it, and, like, they fucked it up. Right?
Speaker 6:And, like Yeah. And, like, you understand why, though. Right? Which is you have a bunch of these business concerns. Now the interesting thing about, Google is I think Sundar is a very good guy and competent manager, managing an enormous infrastructure, but you do actually still have founders with meaningful control in the picture.
Speaker 6:And I actually think that's good because I think they do really tough things. It's extremely helpful to have the broad sort of founders. Right? The question is it just has to be wielded. And so I think the bigger question is you look at this, like, what I think was it Larry Page's letter about, please try to go to work sixty hours a week for AGI?
Speaker 6:Did you see this? It's like all around
Speaker 2:the world.
Speaker 6:Larry launched
Speaker 2:a new start up today or
Speaker 6:yesterday. It was like a wildly funny thing to leak. Right? Because everything's gonna leak. But it's like, I actually think it's less a Sundar question and more like, do the founders step up and just, like, broad sort this.
Speaker 6:Right? Because that is if you that is kind of, I think, what probably has happened, and it's not a technology problem. Like, honestly, I I think Gemini is actually probably
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It it for a lot of things the best product. It just is, like, terribly marketed.
Speaker 2:Yep. Makes a lot of sense. That makes sense. You know, you guys, you know, you've spoken out against, you know, venture becoming the sort of asset management business starting to look more like, you know, private equity in some ways. At the same time, you know, that's on the fun side.
Speaker 2:On the company side, we've seen, the sort of venture style roll ups where people raise venture capital dollars to buy, you know, companies. They're gonna and it's a great deal for the founder, right, to raise 20 on a hundred and then just buy, like, profitable companies in theory. It's better economics than than traditional PE, but you guys at SLOW have supported I'm blanking on the name of the portfolio company, but, but what's what's your portfolio?
Speaker 6:We've done a bunch. Metropolis, team shares, whatever. I mean, like so here's here's basically talk show I gotta give you. One is I'm not act I am personally a snob about venture capitalists being asset managers because I don't think it's that creative or important or interesting. I will say as a GP, it's a great fucking business model.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 6:And so, like, the the seed business model we run is definitely less consistently and meaningfully profitable than, like, being a 16 z in a platform. There's no question. Right? Like, so if you just wanna make money as a and saying I earn DPI to justify more AUM is a very smart thing to do. Right?
Speaker 6:It's just not that fun.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 6:And so, like, I'd rather do the fun part of the business, which is saying I take money in, but I take in the money I know how to make lots of money on. And then I run around saying, I told you so I was right from seed. That's, like, more fun for me. Right? And so I think we get to, like, separate those as, like, I do intellectually dislike it.
Speaker 6:I don't think it's a bad business model. On the roll up thing, look, we started doing this before all the cool kids were doing this. Right? So if you look at, like, the two probably most important deals we've done in this, one is team shares. We see that from zero.
Speaker 6:I I bought four I bought 10% of the company originally for $400,000. Right? We've kind of bought up from there. They've acquired well over a hundred small businesses. They built a whole platform for scaling them.
Speaker 6:It's a killer business. It's kind of a and they've done a lot of really smart stuff, but there is kind of a technology leverage roll up strategy to it. You know, you can look at something like, Metropolis, which is another pretty iconic deal, which, again, we were the seed investors in. We were early seed investors in when it was a tech company. And we realized that it turns out that SaaS is a terrible business model, right, in a lot of verticals.
Speaker 6:It's it's it's SaaS is just like everyone has this idea that SaaS is a great business model. It's not. Right? It it's it's you get paid later. It's hard to sell.
Speaker 6:And, you know, the thing if you think about it, let's say, like, it's a transformative technology. You go to a CEO and say, I have a transformative technology and change your whole business. It's gonna make you 50% profit. You can't then say, give me 40% of the profit. Right?
Speaker 6:They're like, fuck you. We'll give you your SaaS fee. Right? So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers, right, and then deploying your technology. But that credit that's predicated on actually having a better technology.
Speaker 6:Right? And so this
Speaker 1:is the thing
Speaker 6:I think people get wrong is, you know, when venture capitals go fund roll ups with the yada yada yada, there's some tech leverage in them or no tech leverage. That's ridiculous, and it doesn't make any sense. If you're a if you're a smart, venture capitalist, smart founder, you say, hey. I'm gonna prove that I can be way better at this than my competitors, than anyone else in the industry. And then by the way, it turns out for whatever reason, this is a hard software to sell.
Speaker 6:It's conflicted. I can't get paid what it's worth, the whole nine yards. Then going to PE folks and saying, hey. We're gonna prove this out. We want cheap capital.
Speaker 6:We're gonna go buy all our customers, I think is a great strategy. Right? So the kind of the devil's in the details in terms of how you do this. And when we're we're into it, I mean, we did there's one called TML, the lumber manufacturing we're really excited about. We definitely do this, but we have a pretty specific bar on what this is.
Speaker 6:And it's not just like buying pool cleaning roll ups.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you talk about creators?
Speaker 2:I wanna hear Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We love creators. I mean, this Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanna hear I wanna hear who you're bullish on and then what the anatomy of a deal that looks like a a banger with a creator looks like.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So here's the basic option. As you guys, maybe know, like, we just announced this $65,000,000 vehicle
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Which is pretty groundbreaking. Right? What we invest in is not c corps. We invest in seed creators. So think, I own a niche.
Speaker 6:Right? I'm doing a million in top line. I've got a million followers. I'm growing really quickly. And here's the key fact.
Speaker 6:As you do the breakdown, you're like, I'm an awesome creator. I've built this community. I I I am the the leader of it. I'm admired. I have this scarce thing.
Speaker 6:I've l low, you know, low, CAC on high LTV folks. It's fucking sweet. But you're doing a million in top line. After expenses, taxes, you're living fine, but you don't have investable capital. We're like, we'll give you the investable capital to build c corps and businesses.
Speaker 6:Right? This is a new pattern of c corp generation and building we really believe in at seed. Now how do we get there? We got there because it's really hard to invest in seed creator businesses because the equity and the value of the community is held outside the company. And so Jane wakes up in five days, and we love the community.
Speaker 6:We love her. She's like, oh, fuck. It's actually not this. It's that. It's not mister beast burger.
Speaker 6:It's fucking feastables.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 6:do not wanna be in that scenario. Right? Like, no one wants that. It's bad for everyone. We wanna be able to invest as in a as aligned the way as we possibly can with creators.
Speaker 6:And so we were like, look, we do this effectively with founders anyway. We don't take board seats. We wanna be first check-in. We're trying to be collaborative holistically with them. We wanna be aligned with them.
Speaker 6:If they win, great. If they lose, c'est la vie. What is the equivalent in creator? And, like, that's kind of what we're bullish on. So I think, you know, it turns out in creator, like most things, the transparent deals, the super buzzy ones, Masa style, they always get super overpriced.
Speaker 6:Right? Because everyone knows them and they say, oh, we like creator. Creator important by creator. Right? We're much more interested in providing capital where it's scarce, which is we think seed creators and we think on this model.
Speaker 1:What about putting those two things together? Have you thought about going to a creator and saying, hey. You would be perfect if you owned this business that already exists. We buy the business, give it to you, repackage it, and then you're kind of the marketing front end. Is that a crazy idea or have you
Speaker 6:It's not a crazy idea. And we get pitched it all the time actually, you know, in different verticals. Like, you have the god of lawn care who wants to buy the lawn care companies.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 6:It's not crazy. But I do think it's complicated to get right. Right?
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 6:think, like, you know, there's a thing I like to say about seed stage investing, which is no fucking bank shots. Right? And the more variables that have to be right domino style, the less likely it is that the thing actually happens. Right? And so for me, it's like, ugh.
Speaker 6:Like, so you want tech leverage and a roll up, then we're gonna put a creator on top and that it does. Like, something will not work. Right? And, like, that makes it a hard bet. Now it's but it's intellectually not wrong.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 2:With, kind of two follow-up questions. On the creator fund, do you guys have, like, a no zeros policy? Right? A lot of these creators generate revenue from ads. Right?
Speaker 2:So if you invest a million dollars and they generate, you know, a couple million bucks a year in ad revenue, like, even if they don't make a banger company, like, you'll get your money out eventually? Or or how do you think about it?
Speaker 6:Here's the way we think about it. It's a great question. We're not that interested in your ad business. Right? Like, we just don't really care.
Speaker 6:Like, there's no enterprise value generated in that. It's really nice non dilutive financing sometimes, but, like, it's not what we're playing for. We also are not interested in taking some creators last cent. Right? Like, if you're just, like, you're making a million bucks after you pay taxes and whatever else, you're living okay.
Speaker 6:We're not gonna be even like, hey, by the way, we want our 10% of your ad revenue. We, like, we don't care. Now there is a scenario we do care about protecting. Right? Which is if you take our money, you know, we're doing the seed thing.
Speaker 6:We start a few companies. They don't quite work. But in the process of spending our money, because you marketed yourself and whatever else, you get 10 times bigger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then
Speaker 6:you're like, you know, I kinda just like Super Bowl ads. I'm just gonna do a bunch of Super
Speaker 4:Bowl ads.
Speaker 6:I'm gonna make 50,000,000, 20 million dollars next year on that. We'll we'll want our piece of the upside on that in that model. Right? But, like, our whole thing is about alignment, and we're certainly not primarily interested in your ad dollars. Right?
Speaker 6:It's not like a slope. You know? Now, look, it does safe it's a it's a safe financing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:To do it. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Mister beast is marked around $5,000,000,000 right now. It's a private mark.
Speaker 6:I wouldn't read that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm I'm assuming that everybody that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars into mister beast or billions wants to get their money out eventually. It's hard to imagine anybody buying it, you know, outright.
Speaker 2:Right? Do they, do you see mister Beast going public in the
Speaker 6:next few years? I am sure that's what he they want to do.
Speaker 1:Like, how do you And how
Speaker 2:does that and and it's
Speaker 6:it is
Speaker 2:is it is it a stock that trades, you know, kind of like true social where it's just based around attention and and does I think it's a meme stock.
Speaker 6:It's a meme stock if it gets out. Right? It's just a meme coin on steroids. You know, the reality is is, like, it's not again, I actually credit Jimmy, mister beast. He's done a few very important things for the creator space.
Speaker 6:Right? One thing he did is he's made a lot of creators dream a lot bigger, and that's great. Right? Like, I appreciate that, right, from a perspective. I also think, you know, he's really, I think, been a good example on a beacon of creators aren't just creators.
Speaker 6:Like, they can start businesses, like, whatever. So there's there's been an aperture opening that he's really helped with that I think has been great for the industry. Now that said, you know, I do think there's some structural problems with his quote, unquote business, Right? As a creator business. Like, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 6:Like, one, we we care a lot about, the LTV of customers. Right? And his audience is so broad and candidly pretty poor. Right? Which means that, like, they're not great customers.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, there's a reason you sell chocolate because it's one of the only things you can sell to everyone that's cheap. Right? And, like so there's, like it's not, like, the best audience. It's also, you know, the reality is he does a lot of his media stuff.
Speaker 6:Like, you know, the you know, everyone's excited that he gets a hundred million dollar Amazon contract, but then he spends more than that on the show. Right? Like and so it's like, it's just not clear to me that in the hyper competitive entertainment space with a broad general audience that that's, like, an amazing business. But look, it is definitely a cult, and I'm sure there's a bunch of, like, 20 year old kids that will grow up and trade it like a meme stock. Right?
Speaker 6:And, like, that could be fine. Right? It's just not like a thing where
Speaker 1:you're looking at it. You're like,
Speaker 6:this is a money printing machine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:it's Which is what I'm
Speaker 6:more interested in.
Speaker 2:To my, to my knowledge, you're thinking about the slow creator program where you would want one of the creators underlying companies to go public, but not the creator holding company to go public and that there's some grand risk to the creator if you're having a financial asset that's trading based on your popularity. And if your popularity goes down, you get even more unpopular because, you know
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we've I've been interested in this kind of how you think about financing people with equity versus debt for a very long time. I started my first company in 1999 when I was in high school. It's called LifeCapital.com. And the idea was basically some version of this.
Speaker 6:Right? And so I I think that thematically makes a ton of sense. Right? As the world gets more unequal and outcomes are more discontinuous, debt financing does just broadly not make sense for people. Right?
Speaker 6:The equity model. And we've invested in a bunch of versions of this. Right? Including some of it recently. So I do think it's a very interesting spit specifically for the creator fund.
Speaker 6:Again, you know, you kinda are, you know, you are what you eat. Right? In this case, we, like, eat LP dollars and, like, from an eating LP dollar perspective and, like, what the structure is, the good news is we really think there's an opportunity to deliver normal ass c corps, SKIMS, whatever you wanna call it. Right? That start with creators but are perfectly huge amazing companies to back from seed.
Speaker 6:Right? And so that is what we do with that. Is there residual value to the HoldCo pieces? Yeah. There totally is.
Speaker 6:Like, in ten years, because these are ten year funds, do you have to figure out how to wrap that up or resell it or, like, retreat? Absolutely. But, like, candidly, this market is moving so fast that the way I think about this is, like, we're investing in launch pads for amazing c corps that are driven first and foremost by amazing communities that are led by amazing founders that are creators. Like, that is what we're doing. And, yes, at the end of a ten year cycle, which then has a bunch of extensions on it, you do figure out what you do with the residual assets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. I have so many other questions here. I mean, the the the main one is, how quickly are you pushing creators to, are are you thinking of these creators as a catalyst for the c corps that they're spinning out? Because one thing I've seen from spending millions of dollars with influencers is, like, oftentimes, you'll spend a hundred thousand dollars with an influencer.
Speaker 2:It it performs well, like, if it's it's sort of, like, a broad consumer audience, and then the performance can drop off over time because, you know, you know, there's only so many buyers in in the audience. How how do you think about, you know, the almost no creator is big enough to sustain a venture scale, you know, c corp by themselves. Right?
Speaker 6:Well, it depends on verticals and how you're looking at it. Again, like, when you think about creators, it's such a broad space and used so broadly that I think you can you can mean a lot of different things. Right? And so, look, one of the dirty secrets, which you know it sounds like, is in the venture capital world entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's the secret CAC always goes up.
Speaker 6:Right. It always goes up. Like there CAC goes up, not down. Right? And so, like, what you're experiencing is that.
Speaker 6:It's like if you spend money with an influencer, they're the people who wanna buy the thing anyway. You reach them. It's cheap. And then you hit a wall, like, if it's just, like, a general product you're selling. Right?
Speaker 6:And so you have to think about it as a launchpad from that perspective. You know, we wanna back found creator founders who come in and are they wanna be entrepreneurs. They're, like, pitch us business ideas. Like, they have their list. They're like, okay.
Speaker 6:Like, I know my audience in lawn care, in terrariums, and you name it better than anyone in the world. Here's the 10 things that no one knows. And by the way, I can sell them, and I know it it I'm selling it to myself. Like, I'm the leader of this, and I understand the space better than anyone, and I have access to the community, and they trust me. That's what we want.
Speaker 6:Right? We don't need them to come in and be like, here's the business plan a %. In fact, we we kind of just but we do need that list because if you come in like, I'm a creator. I have the audience, but I don't know what to do. We're like, well, we don't are you an entrepreneur?
Speaker 6:You're just gonna make more media. Right? And we're like, the media is fine, but the media has to support real businesses.
Speaker 2:Yep. That makes sense. Cool.
Speaker 1:Anything else?
Speaker 2:That's all I got for today.
Speaker 1:You're the man. Last question. Who's a better grill master, you or Zach?
Speaker 6:Oh, definitely Zach.
Speaker 1:Okay. I had no. Fantastic.
Speaker 6:I mean, look, I wouldn't say I'm bad, but, like, I think that man has invested in the craft of grilling, in a way that I have not.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:We'd love to have you as a regular. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Anytime you guys wanna reach out is I really love the show. It's super fun. I love what you guys have done, and we love bullshitting. So
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:You love the yap. We love the yap.
Speaker 1:It's a match made in heaven.
Speaker 2:It's a match made in heaven.
Speaker 1:Well, enjoy
Speaker 2:the new
Speaker 6:We'll have on a billboard someday. That'll be fun.
Speaker 1:We should. Yeah. We should. That'd be great. Well, enjoy Indian Wells.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the weekend. Have a great
Speaker 6:Happy you, guys.
Speaker 1:Let's have dinner. It's great.
Speaker 6:Have a fun. Bye.
Speaker 1:I noticed on his, website, slow.co, it looks like they have the biggest guy, and they made him
Speaker 2:They made him
Speaker 1:sit in a chair. I've started to do because John do that before. Oh, wait. How tall am I, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Six eight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you. Six eight.
Speaker 2:A lot of people just don't even believe it. They say there's there's never been a podcast a six eight podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's I'm kind of the Conan O'Brien of tech, tech podcasting, I suppose.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Many have
Speaker 2:said that.
Speaker 1:He's really tall. Let's go to speaking of, physical appearance, let's go to Ali Debo. She says the only moat, it's not AI. It's dropped dead gorgeous, good looks and generational wealth. I love it.
Speaker 1:Very TV coded post. I had to throw it in there. She sent me a text message because she, we featured her show. She was actually getting dunked on, but we featured it. We had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:And so thank you to Allie for keeping the timeline
Speaker 2:fresh site. Post the perfect amount to to, you know, get Engagement. Engagement.
Speaker 1:A little bit engagement.
Speaker 2:And she's got a she's got a social app. I believe it's for, Swish. Right? Swish. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For photo sharing
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which is cool.
Speaker 1:And they're partnered with some huge Rolling Loud, the largest, concert or something like that, and they're powering it. They they she's really good at doing these, like, deals even though it's a small company. Yeah. Yeah. Teal Fellow too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was funny, when Apple Apple came out and and announced their sort of, you know, their photos app is rough. So Yep. And I'm sure she's not super threatened by that. But, they also came out with these events.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Part of full. And it was, I think, competing with what Ally's doing too, but I don't see Tim Cook dead getting deals done with Rolling Loud. He's he's too busy at the John Summit Show.
Speaker 1:At the John Summit Show.
Speaker 2:Backstage, you know. Who knows? So Ally's in control, but, great post.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, should we move on and and finish out the timeline and wrap up the show?
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's go to, Visakhan Versami. He says even kings and billionaires wanna be posters and podcasters. King Charles is launching his own Apple Music radio show to showcase his favorite music.
Speaker 2:You know, they've they've they've brought the Brinks truck for that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Signing King Charles. I love it. I mean Get him a show.
Speaker 1:Network.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should explore, you know, maybe he does some angel investing. Yeah. He could host, you know, an angel investing.
Speaker 1:We were we were pitching Trump getting back in the media game, you know, because he had his own reality TV show. We were talking about maybe JD is the first one with a with a podcast or something. Yeah. But and, who's the California guy who Newsom has a showdown? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So why not? Why not, a radio show? I hope King Charles gets on there, introduces every song, takes requests, does some radio stuff, winds up doing the news.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Maybe we'll have him on the show.
Speaker 2:King Charles,
Speaker 1:open invite. Should we go to George Mack? Yep. My most contrarian belief, we could increase the global economy by two to 3% by installing large whiteboards in every home. I love George so much.
Speaker 1:This is such a funny, funny idea to just like, you would Mandatory whiteboard. I mean, George, if you don't know, I mean, he's a fantastic thinker and writer and poster. And, he he's, like, very into, like, modeling things out, creating frameworks, creating flowcharts. And so, of course, he thinks, like, you know, you just need to be, like, one foot away from a whiteboard to whiteboard out, the problem and solve your problems at any moment. But we need to get a whiteboard in here.
Speaker 1:We don't do nearly enough whiteboarding. What's your take on the whiteboard walls? Do you think that paint is, like, toxic and
Speaker 2:terrible? I don't enjoy using whiteboards.
Speaker 1:You're Figma only.
Speaker 2:Love kind of making graphics in in Figma Yeah. And using that, Figma maximalist.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I've just never been, I I love, you know, creative pursuits and writing and and all these things, but, I went to a Waldorf school. I've ever told you about this. Are you familiar with Waldorf? They have, like, similar to Montessori.
Speaker 1:So they made me think so. Yeah. Yeah. I
Speaker 2:went to the school at
Speaker 1:a five star hotel?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:I think it's it's it's, it's an educational philosophy
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:From Rudolf Steiner emphasizing a holistic approach to education that nurtures intellectual, artistic, and practical skills with a focus on imagination and creativity. Well, that's fine. So I credit my Waldorf education for, my, you know, a number of my sort of, creative abilities. But they forced us to paint and draw and knit and do all these things as kids and I wasn't good at I didn't have the patience for drawing. I just didn't have the patience.
Speaker 2:So I thought I didn't like art. Yeah. I thought I didn't like, you know, creative, tasks as a kid, but I just didn't like I've never liked drawing Yeah. Writing. I I I I
Speaker 1:And now you're an artist and your paintbrush Keyboard warrior. Shure SM seven b. Exactly. Podcast like keyboard warrior. Keyboard warrior podcast Twitter fingers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. But but generally, I I I think that, people seem to love whiteboards. There should be more of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like it.
Speaker 2:Be fun to have one here that we could write on, you know Yeah. KPIs, stuff like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Nick. He says 500 people run the world, but they collectively use, like, 50 therapists and listen to everything they say. So really, fifty fifty therapists run the world. I think it's accurate.
Speaker 2:Follow-up, and those 50 therapists have been trained by, like, five teachers.
Speaker 1:Teachers. Oh. It's all downstream from something. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's funny funny conspiracy. I don't I I I I wonder if this is actually true at all or just, like, something that was completely hallucinated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A Bill Monitis post.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't I can't imagine that this is true that, like, yeah, Satya and and Sundar are using the same therapist or something.
Speaker 2:Funny because therapy so often I haven't had a therapist since I was, like, in high school or
Speaker 1:something like that.
Speaker 2:It never worked. I was never big into that world. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, Tom Cruise route.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just watched Tom Cruise movies and get fired up. I think it's more about talking out loud about the things that you're working through and coming to many of your own conclusions. Right? By just Or
Speaker 1:going for a long walk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A walk.
Speaker 1:50 k steps.
Speaker 2:50,000 steps. 50,000 steps. Putting up 50,000 steps in a day. Five times So most people's goals.
Speaker 1:It's so much. That's when you're just walking all day long. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on. Speaking of walking, running, going long distances, Zach says, package your obsession into one thing that compounds one brand, one output, one core product.
Speaker 1:When all thoughts are directed towards one channel, a violent rainstorm is captured in one infinite well that sustains and compounds beyond your wildest imagination. Good writer.
Speaker 2:He's writing a book?
Speaker 1:He is. Yeah. Oh, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Now he's sell
Speaker 1:a ton of them. Yeah. I mean, he's over a million on Instagram now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. And and and, I mostly wanna highlight his execution on his new consumer app, which is building kind of a social layer on top of these Yeah. Fitness trackers and,
Speaker 1:good name too. It's called Aura. Right?
Speaker 2:Aura.
Speaker 1:It's a very on trend. You were trying to get Aura farming to go viral, and we were kind of we were almost too early on it.
Speaker 2:I failed.
Speaker 1:But I think it's probably breaking through now, and I think people will now start to get it, maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you wanna make money on aura farming though, you you had to be in it, you know Early? Months ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably. Probably.
Speaker 2:Should
Speaker 1:we go to Emily is in SF?
Speaker 2:Okay. I'll read this one. Yeah. Pissed off a lot of people.
Speaker 1:It did.
Speaker 2:So, timeline
Speaker 1:and turmoil, folks.
Speaker 2:Timeline and turmoil, not my content. But, let's see what Emily has to say. She says, to me, the greatest sadness of all is the banality of most people's lives. I'll spend time with my non elite friends, and it's clear that they're it's clear that their lives are devoid of heroism and lore. They lock in, clock in, but they fight no great battles, and they dash no great foes.
Speaker 2:They drop by thy club or thy bar, but find no great loves there. They travel the world, but is by no means an adventure. They return home, but they are not welcomed by a triumph. No. All they have are their succulents and the pile of dirty laundry they failed to do before they left.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Absolutely brutal.
Speaker 1:Does the does the golden retriever long for great battles?
Speaker 2:Brother Will is in the comments here. There was quite a lot of comments That was it. Ranking people that, are in the TB verse. And Will says, what's your network? Which is a great follow-up question to a post like this.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, but no. Great great
Speaker 1:It's the Chad hominem.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good argument. What's your bench press?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I mean, I I think,
Speaker 1:There there there is some truth
Speaker 2:there, obviously. There's all there's always some truth to, any anything that composes controversial.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:There's no truth. There's no controversy.
Speaker 1:But, again, we are in the you can just do things era. So if you are surrounded by succulents, maybe, you know, lock in, clock in, go develop some
Speaker 2:lore. Invite Emily on the show. I wanna see how the heroism and lore in her life, how she's locking in and clocking in to fight great battles, how she's finding great love at the club or the bar Yeah. How she's adventuring around the world.
Speaker 1:You can just sign up to be the first person to go on Starship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Hey. Flight nine flight nine is coming up.
Speaker 1:Strap me in.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:You can just choose to change everything.
Speaker 2:The firmament has an eight o lead against SpaceX right now, but, we're feeling good about the ninth flight. We're gonna
Speaker 1:be good.
Speaker 2:And, Emily, take it on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's do it. Anyway, fun post. I love this one from Palmer Lucky. We've talked about call of duty and how important it is to the global economy before he says the call of duty franchise has done more to engender support for UK Us military cohesion over the past two decades than just about anything else, especially with military age males changed my mind.
Speaker 1:% accurate. % accurate. Yeah. Who's that Soap? McTavish?
Speaker 1:Do you not know the characters in Call of Duty?
Speaker 2:It's coming back to me.
Speaker 1:I didn't Oh, little three finger moment. Oh, I can't I can't identify Soap McTavish.
Speaker 2:No. I know. I remember what he looks like. I just I
Speaker 1:just go blanked on the name because I'm not a real gamer. Oh. Oh. Oh, Mogged. It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need more Call of Duty games. We need more We
Speaker 2:should get a Soap McTavish, like, sound effects.
Speaker 1:If I'm wrong on that, I'm dead. I I think I'm right. But I
Speaker 2:I John Soap McTavish.
Speaker 1:No. You actually are wrong.
Speaker 2:Soap McTavish is the guy with the the the buzz cut.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. I'm wrong. Who is it? Okay. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's someone from Call of Duty. I don't even know. I I I played the first Call of Duty, the very first one, when it came out, played Call of
Speaker 2:Duty. Captain Price.
Speaker 1:Captain Price. That's right. Captain Price. Price. Oh, Captain Price.
Speaker 1:It's great. Anyway, wait. Ben, can you pull
Speaker 2:up best Captain Price moments?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you can you pull up a Call of Duty, compilation? Let's just watch that for the rest of the show. I wanna see some Okay.
Speaker 2:I've got some quotes from Captain Price.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's let's learn some lore.
Speaker 2:History is written by the victor. History is filled with liars. If he lives and we die, his truth becomes written, and ours is lost. They say truth is the first casualty of war.
Speaker 1:We We gotta just start tweeting these out.
Speaker 2:Shep bangers. Shepherd will be a hero because all you
Speaker 1:need to change the world is one good lie and a river of blood. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:We get dirty, and the world stays clean.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We Get Dirty, and the World Stays Clean. The story of podcasting. Throw this on. Right.
Speaker 1:What the hell kind of name is Soapley? How a muffet like you, past selection? Link bird, this is brother six where I'm going. Just watching Call of Duty.
Speaker 2:These are core childhood memories. Yeah. Yeah. Kaboom.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is so good. Open fire. We need a Elister. Oh, those are great. It was a
Speaker 2:great price.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Call of Duty. What I would love to just take
Speaker 2:What kind of name is Soap, How'd a Muppet like you pass selection?
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. It's great. To just go back to the timeline, we gotta get soap out of here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great. Shepherd is using site hotel bravo. You know where it is. I'll see you in hell. It's great.
Speaker 1:Anyway, moving on to something extremely important. Lot of, lot of pro America VCs out there have been asking us for car recommendations. We got a good one for you. Twenty eighteen Ford GT asking price, $8,990.
Speaker 2:Giving it away.
Speaker 1:Giving it away. Finished in shadow black with reentry black, white, and white interior complimentary by our Anarchy Forged Wheels and Boden Autohouse Titanium Exhaust System. Go check it out.
Speaker 2:Don't like the wheels. Those are easy enough to swap out. But this is a whole Bowdoin Auto House. This is, like, their their entire aesthetic, which for some is exactly Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:Not enough not enough VCs with the Mansory body kits and and the stance Yeah. Under lighting. But we're
Speaker 2:we're We know what they say, John.
Speaker 1:Build a house one brick at a time.
Speaker 2:Truth is the first casualty of the world.
Speaker 1:It's great. I don't know how many more we should do. Let's go to Yacxin. Of course, has been on the show before he just says, this is the most important website in the world.
Speaker 3:X users agree
Speaker 1:with the X tag. I love it. Yeah. If you're ever just having a low period in your, in your timeline, just post this is the greatest app. And bunch of people come out, the stands will support, very self referential, but you gotta put up numbers every once in a while.
Speaker 1:You know? You love it. Should we go to Jeff Lewis?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is an interesting post. He says, I now talk with categories of quote, unquote people in this order of frequency. My family, my team at Bedrock, our broader Bedrock business relationships across entrepreneurs, LPs, top talent across industries, government, and others, ultra close friends, LLMs, friends, other.
Speaker 1:So LLMs are now like climbing the right
Speaker 2:others like the HVAC guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I guess, like, not
Speaker 2:too frequent.
Speaker 1:That is odd. What what I thought was interesting about this is that I use LLMs a lot. I don't think of myself as as talking with them. Like, I don't think I'm I don't think I'm having a conversation with Google. I don't think I'm talking to chat GBT or Grok when I use it.
Speaker 1:I I I feel like it's much more in the tool realm for me. But I'm wondering if I'm missing missing out on something. I know voice mode's getting better, but I haven't really gone down the sesame rabbit hole or the voice mode where I'm really just, like, chopping it up with them for a long time. I did have a pretty good experience driving in, and I asked I asked the voice mode on GPT 4.5 just to kind of, like, tell me the the top stories in the Wall Street Journal, kind of break them down, and then I could kind of steer it. But it was still a little awkward.
Speaker 1:It didn't feel like actually talking to a person or a friend. It was very much just, like, comes up and then, you you know, ask the next question. Should we move on to Blake Robbins? I thought this was a great take and under discussed place
Speaker 2:to end the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is great. So we've talked about levels before. He built a flight simulator game. He vibe coded it, with a bunch of AI coding tools, went viral.
Speaker 1:He's now making something like $56,000 ARR or something. He's climbing. He's making money. He's selling blimp ads in them. He's selling f six f sixteens.
Speaker 1:He has in game purchases. It's very cool, and he's documenting it all. But Blake has a good point here. He says, the success of Levels flight simulator game is really a story about effective distribution, leveraging his massive audience, not just AI game development. And I think that's a % right.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:he is using that audience, but then the audience is remarketing his game by just raging at it Yep. And and raging over the quality or Yep. His monetization strategy. And so it's really a great story of not, you know, having distribution, but then, you know, properly leveraging that, distribution by by building something somewhat, controversial.
Speaker 1:I'd love to close there, but we got one more. We gotta go to Nat Friedman, former brother of the week. Nat Friedman is preparing to transport scrolls to the scanner. He's not stopping. He's not resting on his laurels.
Speaker 1:He's he's scanning more scrolls. The scrolls must be scanned. I love it, and I'm very excited. So good luck to you on that transportation. Hopefully, it goes smoothly.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, they aren't damaged in transit. I've really enjoyed following the Skrull story, and, you know, we we gotta talk to more of these Skrulls folks. They're always super interesting people. The Skrulls universe, the cinematic universe of everyone working on the Skrulls, Casey, Hanmer, bunch of other people. Very, very fascinating.
Speaker 1:Anyway The Skrull verse. The Skrull verse. Stay tuned for more. We'll see you on Monday, and have a great
Speaker 2:Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.