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The most profitable podcast in the world.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You know the problem with those, like, billionaire resorts that everyone goes to? Amman. Amman. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, we're, like, the most expensive resort network, basically. Like, well above the Ritz in the Four Seasons. Yeah. But there's an obvious problem. They're not venture backed.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's hard to. You wish you could put more capital into
Speaker 1:them. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Because they're so profitable on a per door basis.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That, I actually think that we need 10 more Imans.
Speaker 1:We do. And so that gave me an idea. What if we start a venture backed Aman?
Speaker 2:That's it. Aman v b.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Venture backed. And so the so the idea is that is that this is a place where venture investors could get exposure to something that they already know very intimately. And, of course, like, when you think about who can run your business better than you.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:The only person is an investor, a VC. And so you you you during the fundraising process, you let the investors know, like, this is not your average fundraise. Like, we are gonna want you to dig in. You're gonna need to spend 30, 45, 60 nights a year at our properties as
Speaker 3:part of this investment. Basically, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:A real operator. Exactly. Basically, like yeah.
Speaker 2:A real operator. Exactly. I like to use that word. Yeah. Operator gets thrown somebody, I think this guy, Michael, on Twitter was talking about VCs use the word operator to embellish their resumes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because it sounds a lot cooler to say I was I'm yeah. Former operator than yeah.
Speaker 2:I was an associate PM.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was a sales guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was one of the first, like, BDR hires at this company. Operator. Operator. It just sounds like
Speaker 1:I mean, it sounds like special operator.
Speaker 2:Twisting the knob.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Twisting the knobs, but also, like, maybe you're kicking doors in a round. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But in this case, it's like, yeah. There's allocation for you if you commit to acting as a part time general manager of the property.
Speaker 1:Giving feedback, bringing more than family.
Speaker 2:Checking guests in Yeah. Cleaning bathrooms, cleaning out I mean, really get your hands dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You just need to create the flywheel of, like, oh, this is a this is the stealthy way to justify even more trips to Aman like properties with my LP dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like sometimes venture capitalists, myself included, can get a little bit too disconnected from the the real asset itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you're just lobbing money over, you know, lobbing money over to the founder and they're taking it, they're putting it to the work and they're putting it to work in their business. Yeah. There's something about getting into the asset and what's a better asset to immerse yourself in than a physical three-dimensional space. Right? This is not software.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:A hotel is a product. It's an experience. And it's good opportunities because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a hotel. Right? VCs aren't necessarily gonna add value to a foundation model.
Speaker 2:Right? They don't have to know how. But but when But
Speaker 1:what are they truly experts? Breaks a
Speaker 2:when a when a guest breaks a glass at a restaurant, they know how to use a broom. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Get in there and clean it up.
Speaker 1:Do you know the history
Speaker 2:of Oman? So history of Oman.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So to my knowledge, it is owned by effectively a Russian oligarch. And when you're staying on an Aman property, you really get that sort of makes sense. I was there I was at one of their properties last January or this January, I guess. And there was a lot of Russian being spoken.
Speaker 2:Sure. And this is, like, you know, peak Ukraine war. Yeah. So it was it was interesting sharing, you know, sharing elevators and hallways and restaurants with,
Speaker 1:the I just love the the the, like, the foundation story or the founding story is in 1988, Amman Resorts' first destination was holiday home in Phuket, Thailand. His plans soon developed into an idea to build a small boutique resort with 2 friends, and they invested their own money in the venture as no banks would lend, the project due to the small number of planned rooms. The resort opened in 1988 with nightly rates 5 times higher than local competitors. They were just, like, let's go not 20% higher, but 5 times higher.
Speaker 2:And it's actually still pretty much exactly.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like most most Carlton runs you at 34100.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It depends on the result, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then and then a month could be, like, 3, 5.
Speaker 2:No. I think yeah. The the Which are in
Speaker 3:the role.
Speaker 1:Hot nights.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Desirable properties at, desirable times a year, like, $5 Yeah. For the entry level Yeah. Room, which is basically as big as our studio, you know. Wow.
Speaker 2:Our studios here significantly Yeah. Larger, than their
Speaker 1:There there is something to that though, like, the we were talking about this with, like, Erewhon, like, just going, like, up market up market, like, actually giving you
Speaker 2:But going
Speaker 1:to play Yeah. And do something unique.
Speaker 2:The death zone is probably 20%.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Just 20%. Slightly premium. Slightly premium.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was
Speaker 1:because you can't really afford to do anything fancier. It's so you're just, like, maybe making a little bit margin. It's all this, like, fake branding whereas
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, if you if you genuinely have 5 times higher revenues, like, there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The interesting thing so we stayed there with a couple of friends and another couple, and they had stayed there before and so they were just, like, like, these
Speaker 3:are the dates.
Speaker 2:Just book it. So we booked it. And I showed up and I didn't realize till getting onto the
Speaker 3:property that 2 full meals a day on
Speaker 2:on the hotel property or at any of, like, their 10 partner hotels restaurants okay. Everything except alcohol. Yeah. So once you're staying there, I was I was, like, if nobody had mentioned this to me, you could've just given me the bill the whole time because you don't go there expecting it was the experience of having, like, being at an all inclusive resort.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:And it was sort of funny we were joking around being, like, could we eat 10 grand Yeah. Yeah. More than Wagyu. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's technically, like, all you can eat. Right?
Speaker 1:I mean, that with that price structure, you can't afford not to go.
Speaker 2:You can't afford not to. Yeah. So I recommend them on if you're Yeah. You're bulking and you wanna do a clean bulk. Clean bulk.
Speaker 2:As they call it, where you get 90% of your calories. Yeah. A five Japanese Wagyu. Yeah. Go to stay at Aman.
Speaker 1:I love it. Did you watch the Tesla event?
Speaker 2:Of course. Of course.
Speaker 1:What do you think? It was a it was a fountain of virality for me. I had 2 banger tweets come
Speaker 2:out of it. There you go. I mean, you wish they would hold an event every week.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I mean, it's, like, it's it's prime for for x content. Everyone just wants to post about it.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the moment that stands out to me the most, aside the visuals of the new technology and stuff, are when Elon went, alright, now let's party.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And then
Speaker 2:it didn't go or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he
Speaker 2:was like, okay, now let's party or let's drink. You know, it was sort of, the timing was was a little bit awkward for overall, like, was it I don't know. It was it was strange. He seemed do you think it was all the the political stuff? Like, he didn't seem he didn't seem locked in.
Speaker 2:He certainly wasn't on.
Speaker 1:I heard someone say, like, yeah, his first love is SpaceX. He's, like, he's a rocket guy and and but Tesla's gotten a lot bigger and he loves the company. But, like, that was the company that he had to he had to step into and be the CEO and invest in and, like, save the company and make it work. Whereas, like, in in a perfect world, like, he would just be spending all his time on space stuff because that's what he was, like, obsessed with. But I I found it very odd that he didn't acknowledge.
Speaker 1:And this is something that pretty much all CEOs do, but you could usually get around this, like, acknowledge, like, the state of the market. Like, there is a very clear, like, bold thesis for the Tesla strategy of, like, not doing what Waymo is doing. Like, not doing lidar. Not starting with limited runs. Not having expensive, you know, hardware that that they, the company way like, Waymo owns these vehicles.
Speaker 1:They clean them. They have a staff now. They might spin that out at some point. But right now, like, the the cost structure is purely internal
Speaker 2:tool. Ever spun out a successful product?
Speaker 1:No. This would be the first one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it almost seems like
Speaker 1:I'm not even talking about spinning out Waymo as a whole, which which I think a lot of people think they should do because it just has a different economic structure than Google ads. It's just wildly different. Even if it's gonna be a great business, like they should split that at some point. But I'm just talking about like, like the, like, they've, like, they're buying the cars from Jaguar and then they own and operate them. Like, you could easily turn this into, like, a franchise model, right, eventually.
Speaker 1:And they might. But, not even that. Just Elon never articulated this idea that, like, we have more cars on the road than Waymo, and we're collecting more data through the cameras. And so even though they're
Speaker 2:yeah. In theory, much more capital efficient if you don't have to
Speaker 1:pay for driving around and stuff. Yeah. Exactly. So he just kind of, like, threw out, like, it was, like, it was almost, like, it was pointed to consumers and then that stock sold off, but it felt like
Speaker 2:it was anybody anybody that's a bear can now easily without any, you know, real objection from Elon go, okay. So Tesla is generally promising what Waymo is already doing today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not even a tiny scale, like, they're doing, like, a 100000 rides a day or something
Speaker 1:like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's pretty meaningful
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And growing exponentially Yeah. And the Tesla robo taxi vision still feels, like, there was no clarity even around dates. And I think that it's sold off because the market is now very much used to Elon putting out dates and timelines that are unachievable in order to push his own team almost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the market is basically saying, okay. It's all good if you wanna overpromise and, like, push your team internally. But if you're not gonna meet the deadlines that, you know, they haven't even I I saw this. I don't think they've they haven't delivered the Roadster, obviously. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's still a bunch of people that Have paid. And stuff. Like,
Speaker 1:massive. They don't sell a convertible right now. They don't sell a convertible, a full size SUV, or a minivan, which are like 3 of the most popular these are like really important segments of the market if you want to dominate. I I would think I I was I don't
Speaker 2:I spent all my time in minivans
Speaker 1:Or convertibles. Right?
Speaker 2:Know in between. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And yeah. It I I I wish they'd have a little bit more breadth in there. And also just, like, different designs and stuff. There's a lot. I did I did like that they were pulling some of the cyber truck design.
Speaker 1:Design. Like, the the event did, like, look like the future, which I think is good. And I think that he should have stressed that. That it's like, these Waymos, like, are ugly. Everyone knows that.
Speaker 1:And so him saying, like, okay, one of our principles and our deep beliefs is that, like, aesthetics matter to these to the success of these projects. And then what else matters? Well, scale of the data. Like Yeah. Like, everyone in AI, they constantly repeat, scale is all you need.
Speaker 1:Scale is all you need. Right? Like, you just need bigger and bigger transformers, bigger and bigger LLMs, scrape all the web, get all the video, get all the audio data, compress it down, and then you get magical results. And that's what the true believers in, like, this end to end machine learning, like, theory around self driving. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What George Hotz is doing at comma, like, all of that is around this idea that if you just get a ton of data, you won't need any of this crazy like like, Waymo famously, like, hired a they have a cone guy who, like, just does the software to, like, identify cones on the road. And and, like, the the end to end model, it's like it's as if, like, you know, Chat GPT had, like, you know, a special guide just for, like, commas or periods or exclamation points. Right? It's like that's not how it works at all. In fact, they just have, like, one master model that just looks at the huge soup of, like, trillions of words.
Speaker 1:And then Yeah. And then it
Speaker 3:it learns all of that from context. Right? Yeah. And you can learn what a cone is.
Speaker 1:And Tesla's kind of gotten there almost context. Right? Yeah. And you can learn what a cone is. And Tesla's kind of gotten there almost.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. They're clearly, like, they're being,
Speaker 3:like, shortcut right now.
Speaker 1:And there and there was this uncanny
Speaker 2:valley where,
Speaker 3:like, for
Speaker 1:a while, like, if you compare gpt 1 to just, like, Grammarly or, like, some rules based spell check and grammar check, the rules based one would be much better. And you'd be like, I I don't wanna feed my my, you know, my English homework through GPT 1. It's gonna just hallucinate. Like, I remember testing g even GPT 3 when it dropped. I I I told I said it one of my friends was addicted to this video game.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was, like, create a 10 step plan for him to, like, quit playing this video game. And it's, like, step 1, step 2. And by the end, it was, like, it was, like, teaching him to play the game again because it had hallucinated and got down the done the opposite. We're back. Because, yeah, because everything online
Speaker 2:was If I can get him to play it again, I can get him to quit again. And if quitting twice is better than quitting once.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so and so for when when when GPT 123 were out, like, they were so bad that the rules based, like, less less full featured,
Speaker 2:strategies work. It's funny to think about, historically, let's say, a high school student is doing their Spanish assignment Yeah. And the teacher, they would use Google Translate and use some sort of exotic string of words that's, like, way more advanced and the teacher would call it out and be, like, we haven't ever taught you how to combine these. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where did you learn it from? I think you used Google Translate. Whereas now, if they use they use like an LLM, it'll just hallucinate something completely exotic and also very incorrect.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And because it's more complicated, the students seem less likely to catch it because they're just like, but Anyways Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. So so on on the data thing, it's it's it's interesting to me because, like, Tesla does have more data. Yeah. They have more cars on the road.
Speaker 1:They're collecting more data. So they should have more scale eventually. Now Google does have more compute right now to start and they also have they also have those crazy, like, they're driving all over the world in places where Teslas don't go. So they do have, like, a more exotic data set. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Going back to your original I
Speaker 3:don't know.
Speaker 2:Going back to your original point, he had the opportunity to address address the entire world. Shareholders
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Customers, his team, the press, the media, and everything. And he flopped on almost all of them even though the technology was so like, the like, it was almost like a 10 out of 10 visually. But then everything else was even even with the the, the humanoid, like, optimists, humanoid robots. If he had addressed that and been and said something along the lines of, like, right now, there's a human in the loop, and here's how you could apply that. Right?
Speaker 2:You could be 3,000 miles away and using an Optimus robot to complete complex tasks. Yep. And even if you have to step in, you know, one minute out of every hour to do something that's slightly that needs some level of human input, it's fine because you get to be at 2 places at once. Right? And here's the path of how we get these to be fully autonomous.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But instead, it gave ammo to Josh Wolf and all these other people online to be, like, dude, you're just, like I caught you. You just yeah. I caught you.
Speaker 1:I caught you.
Speaker 2:And you're tricking people Yep. And you're no better than Trevor Milton or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Which which ironically is the exact path that Waymo took to teleoperation has been critical in the Waymo rollout because
Speaker 3:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:mean, they had they had safety drivers in the cars for a long time, which is not even teleoperation. And then still to this day, they have humans over, like, it they're they're operating at a higher level of abstraction. They're not physically in front of wheels, but Yeah. They have screens and they're watching all of these and they can and if if one of the Waymo's is in trouble, they can just beam into it immediately and take it over.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I wonder And
Speaker 1:that's a very different model from person.
Speaker 2:Does the driver is the passenger know when somebody in a Waymo has beamed in?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I heard some stats, like, one one intervention every 17,000 miles or something. So it's pretty rare right now, and, obviously, that's gonna plummet. But I wonder and and and that number might be off. For 1 yeah.
Speaker 2:For every one intervention, I've I'm wonder how many times where somebody's tele operating in
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, is, like, on red alert because, you know, it's just, like Well, every time I'm in Waymo guy in in some guy in India is just like falling asleep at his desk and the alert goes off.
Speaker 1:He's like, woah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he's like, I'm in Louisiana in a Yeah. Yeah. In my way.
Speaker 1:I mean, every time I get in way, ma'am, I'm always, like, break twice if you're tele operating this right now. Yeah. Like, speak to me through the car. Yeah. But I I actually I have no idea.
Speaker 1:I I don't think that they would wanna reveal that. I have always thought that I always thought that it's it's it's Waymo's, like, ace up their slave. Because if the fever pitch of, like, this is too dangerous ever gets really, really high, they can always pull out and and be, like, actually, there are humans watching everything. So there is a human in the loop, so it's way less scary.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and their ability to, like, dial that up or dial that down And it's is great for, like, a regulatory perspective.
Speaker 2:Tesla could even you know, if they had a more clear vision of what this ultimately becomes
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They could say something along those lines of, oh, by the way, if you want to drive your Tesla for 10 hours overnight, we can have somebody who's teleoperated available Interesting. To join you for your journey
Speaker 1:or whatever. I see. See. See. I I I disagree with that in the sense that, like, I I think Elon does have a very clear vision, which is no lidar, no teleoperation.
Speaker 1:He is he's he's trying to jump straight to the high margin economic model that makes sense in the long term future, and it's just taking him a longer time to ramp
Speaker 3:up to
Speaker 1:take out there.
Speaker 2:I have no doubt he has a clear vision.
Speaker 1:But he didn't he didn't articulate. He didn't articulate. Exactly. He should have said We're
Speaker 2:sitting here. We're piecing it together. We're guessing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it it comes out and he should have just said, like, look. Yeah. This is a concept car. There's no mirrors.
Speaker 1:There there's no rearview mirrors on here. We probably need to put those on legally. But you'll also notice that there are no ugly lidar spinning around on here. Yeah. And that is a decision that we're sticking by.
Speaker 1:And that is that is, in some ways, why we're behind, but why we will be ahead and more profitable in a few years. And that's why you should be excited as an investor. Yeah. But he didn't really acknowledge any of that. I do think, like, some of the distinctions here are important to tell our operation thing, like, the economic model, like, the fact that he's trying to sell these, like, these are all interesting decisions.
Speaker 1:But you have to put them in the context of, like, what what is actually really happening in the market today. You can't just come out there and and act like you're the first person to try and launch this company when there's another company that's actively running.
Speaker 2:And also, my part of it is he has the biggest audience direct audience in the world Yeah. Through x.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why would you not do standalone events or do, like, Tesla week and have, like, a different
Speaker 1:night The optimist is 1 and
Speaker 2:Because the hard thing is you just kind of, like, went through it
Speaker 1:all. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is our vision for the future of public transport. This is our vision for robo taxi. This is our vision for optimist. And it was all, like, you have the resources and the attention in order to you could have done one event per week for a month. And imagine what the stock would have done if you spent the time and, you know, theoretically, spent the time to, like, lay out an extremely clear vision and treat it as I'm gonna give you a master class on our thinking and why we're already ahead in these areas.
Speaker 2:I think it's usually I advise, like, early stage companies to do this. There's a there's a tendency for companies to try wanna announce a lot of big stuff at once, and it's usually a waste of all of that those moments to do it all at once when you could spread it out over a month or 5 weeks and be constantly sort of top of mind in building that sort of cadence with the audience. So I think, ultimately, probably a mistake to just, like, word vomit Yeah. Major, major, major announcements
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not give each of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. I I think he yeah. I mean, I I I think back to, like, Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone. Like, I'm pretty sure there was slide in that deck that had pictures of all the other best in class business phones at the time, and they all had keyboards.
Speaker 1:And he was like, ours will never have a keyboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that distinction like, you could clearly tell that he was calling out BlackBerry directly. Yeah. And he didn't get sued for that. It wasn't defamation. And Elon seems like more of, like, a wild man when it comes to communication.
Speaker 1:And yet he didn't he didn't actually articulate, like, is he going to war against Waymo? Does he think Waymo's bad? Like, what are they gonna I don't think
Speaker 2:the average consumer Hold hold
Speaker 1:my hand a little bit on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Does the average consumer shareholder understand the difference between Yeah. Lidar and the technology Tesla's using? Yeah. You you sent me this Dustin Curtis analysis.
Speaker 2:The Tesla event could have
Speaker 1:told a huge inspiring story about the future, explained the philosophy behind what they're building, and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better. Instead, Musk randomly and briefly showed off a couple of world changing concept vehicles, casually introduced a humanoid robot, and then threw out some dates and prices, as though he was making them up on the spot. He raised a 100 questions, ignored them all, and then after complaining about parking lots, he said he wanted to go party. There was no concept of a bigger plan, not even a cohesive theme. Tesla is doing incredible stuff and changing the world.
Speaker 1:It's insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work. Yeah. I I I kind of agree with that. But I wonder I I I do think about it in the context of, like, some good
Speaker 2:Imagine Jack Dorsey announcing all those products. Like, he probably wouldn't be the guy to build any of these products, but he would have, like, even having, like, slides with a good cadence Yeah. That he was on and able to just sit up there and, I don't know, getting the whole world's attention and then just being like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting to compare with with SpaceX because, like, a few days later, there's, like, that amazing, the the super heavy came down and they caught it with the chopsticks and the Mechazilla like structure. And that was just a video of the thing actually happening. So it was just like, yeah, they had said it, but I don't remember no one remembers, like, a press conference about that Yeah. Being a plan.
Speaker 1:Like, it was, like, maybe mentioned on podcasts and stuff and then it just happened. And it and it was, like, okay, this is just a thing now. I guess we're just catching rockets. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, amazing. And, like, yeah, I I think that I mean, there isn't much storytelling there. But very quickly, you can see, like, oh, wow. Okay. If they catch it and it's already on the pad, well, you're gonna be able to refuel it in hours instead of days.
Speaker 1:And so you can send up and if you watch the whole video from that from that launch, the rocket is only gone for, like, 8 minutes. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? It just goes up and then it comes back down because it doesn't need to get that high up and it's just boosting it and then it comes back down. So it's like 8 minutes and so you can see, okay, this is gonna get really, really insane when these things are, like, really pumping.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, like, no one's even waiting for, like, the next like, SpaceX, like like, you know, conference. Like, it's just like, okay. He's done some of this.
Speaker 2:Not tell.
Speaker 1:He did the crazy he did the crazy, like, point to point one where he was saying that, like, you're gonna be able to take a rocket across the country in, like and and be from, you know, New York to Tokyo in, like, 15 minutes or whatever. And now watching them catch the rocket, I'm, like, yeah, that's gonna happen. Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. It might be really expensive, but it seems like it's definitely gonna happen.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because he's deciding how to market both companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because the Tesla thing was just marketing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To shareholders, to future customers, fanboys Yeah. It's just marketing. Yeah. The SpaceX thing is actually not marketing. It's just they were just proving that they could do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's just one step along their journey. But it's interesting that you wonder how he treats those 2 different things. If SpaceX was already public, would he have taken a different approach to to that whole event? Right?
Speaker 2:Or does he feel, like, I don't need to market anything. I'm just doing things.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's so much more visual watching a rocket land even over a car, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if Tesla was private right now, would he have done the Optimus demo? Yeah. Maybe not. Probably not.
Speaker 1:Probably would have just because,
Speaker 2:like, teleoperated Yeah. Exactly. Teleoperated humanoid robots are not
Speaker 1:because you could just do an investor day for your private investors.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't need to publicly signal. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. And then the competition is just wildly different. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Google is I mean, there's a lot of, like, you know, problems with the company. It's a little bit old, but but it's not Boeing. Right? Like, they have, like, some of the best machine learning engineers in the world. Like, they have a lot of resources.
Speaker 1:It's still a very young and agile company compared to, you know Yeah. ULA, like the Lockheed Martin Prime, you know Yeah. Joint venture. Should we move on to, did you read this, this the 10 things that matter right now in Seed VC by Sam Lesson?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Did you read this? I might have shared this.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think I think the one of the reasons I shared this is
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that, Slow, Sam, Yoni, Will, all those guys Yeah. Carved out their own style of content marketing Yep. That looks so unprofessional yet, which is just them taking notes and Screenshot. Screenshotting it and sharing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It often has, like, the the red line underneath. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It still has the red line.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It still has the the spelling mistake
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Marker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it works. It just shows that that's
Speaker 1:like how
Speaker 2:they get it. Figured out. They have created an incredible magnet for the types of people that they wanna meet and doing it in their own way
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is honestly smart because they've adapt they've they've realized that the blog in the context of Twitter is almost dead. You can't get visibility on links anymore.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so they're, like, okay. We're just gonna, like
Speaker 1:Screenshot it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then I would say that overall, none of them are super savvy around brand and design and stuff like that, and they wouldn't pretend to be, but they've carved out their own, like, very, like, distinct thing
Speaker 1:where
Speaker 2:you see a bare screenshot.
Speaker 1:It's on a pretty good cadence. I feel like there's always something happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like you you get a screenshot essay, like, every every couple weeks or every month. And it's always, like, just near the frontier of the discussion, which I think is good. It's kinda interesting. Did anything jump out from you to you, like, in the actual piece?
Speaker 2:You know, I think a lot of this stuff is good marketers tend to get a a number of good ideas and then just keep repeating them over and over and over. So I think this is summary of, like, their broader thesis that they've had on seed investing for a long time and really trying to brand themselves as seed investors even though they have, you know, pretty solid AUM. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think going going down the list list, following the shift in focus, to great entrepreneurs, I think What about
Speaker 1:Capitalist about about, like, the next generation of, like, Gen Z founders being disillusioned by the fundraising treadmill, wanting cash flow profitability, these types of things, like, more like a rebranding of the lifestyle business and, like, it seems like he's thinking about that more and and seeing, like, okay, it's possible that the next amazing venture back founder just doesn't really get on the venture treadmill. Yeah. And that could be rough for my business and he's kinda, like, processing that. That that's what I took away from it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that Not
Speaker 1:how real it is though, but
Speaker 2:They've been and I know this from hearing it directly from founders that they've recently backed where they are pretty upfront with their founders where they don't care which path their companies try to take. Yeah. I think it's just about this general encouragement that capital efficiency is cool.
Speaker 1:Bryce from ADVC is doing something similar. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's okay if this is your last round.
Speaker 2:He's been on that. Yeah. He's been on that forever. And even if you talk to Bryce, he's not against venture capital. No.
Speaker 2:I think that the
Speaker 1:He just doesn't wanna wind up with the money half of the portfolio is, like, completely faking it just to get to the next round to, like, scale up and then they wind up as zombie corns.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The thing that I talk thing that I feel like comes up a lot when I'm talking to companies is it's the stupidest thing in the world to go start a fundraise or to ever in your business be, like, we're never we're only gonna finance our businesses one time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then
Speaker 2:that's the last time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like nobody every business that is enduring uses financial instruments Yeah. At different points in their life cycle for different reasons.
Speaker 3:It might
Speaker 2:be Apple
Speaker 1:is issuing bonds. They have a $100,000,000,000 in cash.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Why do
Speaker 1:you do that?
Speaker 2:So you coming out, I don't give anyone any points at all for being, like, oh, yeah. We're never raising again. It's, like, that honestly is it shows a kind of general scarcity mindset and fear of dilution or it honestly makes if when I hear a founder go, I never wanna raise again. All I hear is, I wanna own 45% of my company forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like, because
Speaker 1:Well, it's not that it's it's like the the decision to pick a particular financial instrument should be driven by the dynamics of the market and the business and and, you know, whether you have do you have an insane amount of really valuable r and d expense that's going to get paid back a thousand fold when you have a monopoly on whatever? Like, well, obviously, venture capital is perfect. Or is it just OPEX and marketing dollars? Like, maybe that should be financed with debt or is it inventory or CAPEX? Like like, pick the financial instrument that's correct for your business.
Speaker 1:When you say, I don't want to raise more money, that's that's different from saying, oh, I actually understand this industry really well. I understand my business and how we fit into the industry. And because of the way we're operating, we venture capital is not the right fit for us at this scale. So instead, we are financing the business this way or this way or that way. But but coming into it as being like, okay, step 1, I'm going to, like, write off one particular financial instrument.
Speaker 1:And then step 2, I'm going to, you know, build whatever and maybe it aligns
Speaker 2:with that. Or the or the even worse is I don't like fundraising. Yeah. So we're just gonna raise it. I'm, like, the skill set needed to raise money is the same skill set needed to find and close customers, hire great people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's a lot of people that benefit will be better fundraisers if they just have a phenomenal business. But but, yeah, I think I think it's been an interesting. You can tell you can learn a lot about a founder by how when a VC goes out and is, like, it's okay to tell us that you only wanna raise one round. Like, how they react to that tells you everything about their ambitions.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and and what they're optimizing for. Right?
Speaker 1:And how much they understand their business in the market.
Speaker 2:I think, like, these yeah. There there's this, like, general fear of dilution Yeah. Because there's all these horror stories of companies going public.
Speaker 1:And now didn't need to raise that much money. Yeah. They IPO'd pretty profitably very early.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yet they still need the public markets to raise
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but but but they did stop raising money pretty early. Yeah. But it wasn't because they were like, fuck UVCs. I don't like venture capital.
Speaker 1:It was because it was like, okay, this is actually a profitable business built on top of and there's a monopoly power here and there's scale and, like, it's not as essential that we just raise raise raise raise versus, like, I don't know, like, you know, you look at, like, the the money pit that has been, like, the virtual reality saga and meta. Like, it's a huge investment, tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars. But, like, if it pays off, it's really big. Like, that's obviously a good use for, like, burning cash. And then there's plenty of other examples where
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, SpaceX has raised a lot of money, burnt a lot of money, but it's paying off now that they have a SpaceX now or, Starlink's doing so Yeah. Starlink's doing so well. And so it's, like, yeah. It's just, like, very very dependent on the particular business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's better for founders to say, here's how much money I need to hit these milestones.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And as CEO of the company, my job is to make the price per share go up
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Continuously. Yep. And if there's opportunities where I can take on capital and increase the rate of increase in the value of the shares, then I'll repeatedly do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because that's the thing about dilution is nobody's clawing back your shares. It's simply that you're increasing the number of shares, but it just make the share price go up more. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're doing your job, it's all accretive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, I I think,
Speaker 1:well, here's another one. Another screenshot. I think this is from Yoni. This is, so so Yoni, it's he's at slow. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he wrote a screenshot essay about the bull case for OpenAI. And then Eric Newcomer wrote a piece about the bear case for OpenAI. I don't know if they were I don't know who was responding to who here. But Or
Speaker 2:if they were even or just 2 guys shouting into the void.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. But but but I thought they were interesting. And I and I think, you know, we've talked about OpenAI and the and the price, a a a a few times.
Speaker 1:But I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on in AI that we should talk about. Specifically, the the energy stuff that's going on downstream of all that, and then a little bit of, like, you know, how, like, kind of the knock on effects from, like, the big deals. Like, there's there's, like, I think we're gonna see a lot of notebook LM type startups, and then we're also gonna see a lot of the power generation companies shift into AI driven narratives already. We're already seeing this, like, this Kairos Power company, just did a huge deal with Google to generate 7 new nuclear reactors. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:The irony of woke Google employees having to realize that, oh, nuclear is actually kinda makes sense.
Speaker 1:I don't know if they ever had a problem with it. I think it was always like I think
Speaker 3:it was
Speaker 1:oil and gas. Yeah. I think I think the anti nuclear stuff was like it was like the version of woke from, like, the seventies. Like Yeah. Like, post, like, Cuban missile crisis.
Speaker 1:But but the in the modern era, like, most, like, you know, Google employees are probably pretty pro nuclear. It's not as heretical as, like, people think. It's been, like, pretty mainstream. It's certainly mainstream right now. But I think the other real, like, factors, like, Google and other and the other hyperscalers have all committed to big ESG commitments to be, like, net zero.
Speaker 1:So they did a lot of work to build out renewable energy sources for their existing data centers, which was fine when they were just serving ads. And it wasn't that intense. And now they're like, okay. We need to 10 x our energy budget as we go into, like, the AI era. And how are we gonna do that without burning fossil fuels?
Speaker 1:A lot of a lot of, you know, AI folks are worried about that. And we talked about this last time, like, XAI is just like they're pulling from everywhere. They're they're burning natural gas, but then they're also pulling from the grid, and they're doing solar, and they're just doing everything they can possibly do.
Speaker 2:What's Mark? You remember when Mark was, tweet sending pro fracking tweets?
Speaker 1:Which one? Mark?
Speaker 2:Is that right? Mark Andreessen. Oh, Andreessen. Oh, yeah. This was only, like, 2 years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. It was, like, drill frac.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I I have this I have this interesting theory that, like, if we had a if we had a president in the turn of the millennium, like, instead of Bush, you had someone who was very in tune with the technology community, we never would have gone to war in the Middle East because
Speaker 2:War in the Middle East was never about energy.
Speaker 1:You don't think so?
Speaker 2:But that's not a topic
Speaker 3:for
Speaker 1:us. But but but because the like, the the at at least at the time, there was, like, this big narrative, like, oh, we're going there for oil. Yeah. But what actually wound up happening? Well, like, America didn't really get that much oil from the Middle East.
Speaker 1:That's that's not the the end conclusion of the wars in the Middle East. And the fracking innovation led to energy independence. So, like, the technology was there the whole time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It would just wasn't recognized. And so it's potentially it's at least at least one possible narrative is, like, an an ignorance of technology backed us into a corner that led to more international aggression. That's so true. Anyway, good time to be
Speaker 2:Anyways, anyways
Speaker 1:Good time to be an energy company because
Speaker 2:That's funny. Yeah. People that
Speaker 1:tech companies are going after you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I do think one thing is, I had a thesis for a while Good. That a lot of the anti oil movement was funded by, like, there's a scenario where the the GCC, the Gulf, you know, countries, kingdoms, whatever you wanna call them. There's a scenario where they're, like, hey, what if we spend a $100,000,000 a year campaigning against works in oil and
Speaker 1:gas? No.
Speaker 2:And that's insane. Yeah. We know, like, I know people in pretty much every single industry. Yeah. I know one guy who who has a small, like, S and B Oil Drilling
Speaker 1:Business. Something related to that.
Speaker 2:Something related to that. I know one guy. Yeah. And if you go back 30 years ago and you asked how many of your friends work in oil and gas, it would probably be within our networks or, like or the kind of network that we might have had 30 years ago, there probably would have been 20, 25% of people were, like, yeah, I work in oil and gas.
Speaker 1:So you're just such a massive Even just a couple years ago, I didn't know anyone who worked in energy, period. Yeah. And now I know nuclear and solar founders. But for a long time, there were and and Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We know more nuclear. We know new
Speaker 1:We know way more nuclear and solar people. Yeah. But they are not generating a lot of power yet. They're they're still in
Speaker 2:the future scale. So here's here's the the the, the theory, the the very insane, tinfoil hat theory of mine is that if you spent a $100,000,000 a year campaigning against how bad oil is, you could probably have that you could probably prevent 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of supply from coming online because it's just discouraging people from going and saying Sure. Oh, I'm gonna buy this piece of land and I'm gonna start fracking. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is just like a part of the sort of it never people didn't even think most people in our generation weren't thinking, oh, wait. Oil is like the most in demand substance in the entire world. It is massive industry. I should just go do that, you know. So, anyways
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I mean, we know he's at Velar. He's going into oil and gas, basically. But through a renewable Yeah. Pathway, which is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:What else should we do in in AI? Tyler Cowen was on a podcast. He, he's he says that in the air in the era of AI, you should everyone needs to up their networking game because relationships. And he even said improve your physical presence, which I think was
Speaker 2:Your aura?
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's aura, but it sounded like get jacked or like, you know.
Speaker 2:Likeability is gonna matter.
Speaker 1:Likeability and and connections are personal relationships are getting
Speaker 3:to be Centra Centra is one of his probably
Speaker 2:top three learnings from studying history's great entrepreneurs is that relationships run the world. Yep. So that tracks. Yep. Cohen.
Speaker 2:I heard Cohen listened to
Speaker 1:the podcast. I heard an interview with a guy who spent something like a couple $100,000,000 on a mega yacht, and the operating expenses on a mega yacht are something like 10% annually.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like a 10 to $20,000,000, like, money sink.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he said, but if I do one deal on this boat, it'll pay for the whole thing.
Speaker 2:There you go. It's amazing. That's the the logic everybody needs to be applying to it. Should I go to Erewhon right now? Well, if if I meet one person if I meet one influencer that Yeah.
Speaker 2:That post about my CBD toothpaste brand and for all my smoothies for the whole year. Yeah. That paste brand Exactly. And pay for all my smoothies for the whole year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the sad thing is like there there is like the degen version of that which is like going to the club and like getting
Speaker 2:hammered. Like, you
Speaker 1:know, it's like not good.
Speaker 2:Or the yeah. The
Speaker 1:Notebook l m. We already talked about that.
Speaker 2:I actually met I met one of the designers from Notebook l m last night.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Yeah. That's sick.
Speaker 2:And he was, like, imagine having I think it's like a 6 or 7 person team at Google that created it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was talking about another founder that I invested in.
Speaker 1:Out and get it and raise money?
Speaker 2:No. I don't think that's how it works.
Speaker 1:No. No. It'll be, like, I mean, he can just quit and build something competitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I think I think it's probably a higher ROI for him to stay within Google and be the creator of the hot new thing. Because apparently because think about it. When when, I think Google TV started as, like, a 5 to 10 person project internally.
Speaker 1:What's Google TV? Never heard that. You mean YouTube?
Speaker 2:No. Google had, Fire Stick? I think it no. That's Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazon Fire Stick.
Speaker 2:Google had a TV product.
Speaker 1:Chromecast.
Speaker 2:Chromecast, but it was no. They have they have some,
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You can, like, watch baseball on YouTube TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Google TV started as, like, a 5 to 10 person project internally, and a founder that I back was on that original team. Yeah. It went within 2 years was a 500 person Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, so, like, yeah.
Speaker 2:So this guy from the OPLM is, like, he could go from being Yeah. You know, on this tiny team to a hyperscaler Sure. Within
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This tiny
Speaker 1:And then you choose and I'm sure there's more to come. But talking about the the value of relationships in the AI era, who was it? Brett? What's his last name? The he he's been at, like, Twitter.
Speaker 1:He just raised, $4,000,000,000 valuation for an AI agent startup.
Speaker 2:And so That was a good
Speaker 1:who who why can't I think of his name? He's on the board of OpenAI, wasn't he? I forget. Brett Taylor?
Speaker 2:Brett Taylor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's been the CTO of Meta, a bunch of companies. He's like, there is no technical moat deep enough to justify a $4,000,000,000 valuation for an AI agent startup. It's based on Brett's ability to cross sell to everyone in his contact list, get to to $450,000,000 ARR and sell for $10,000,000,000 $10,000,000,000 to Amazon in 36 months. Very real.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be
Speaker 1:Good enough. That's gonna
Speaker 2:be a quote tweet in 18 months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Should we do brother of the week?
Speaker 2:Brother of the week. Where to start?
Speaker 1:Technology brother of the week. But first, I need to tell you about Patek Philippe. When it comes to luxury timepieces, there's one name that stands above the rest, Patek Philippe. Since 18 39, they've been crafting some of the world's most exquisite watches, each one a masterpiece of design, precision, and heritage. Now Patek Philippe isn't just about telling time.
Speaker 1:It's about owning a piece of history, a tradition passed down from generation to generation. These watches are meticulously handcrafted by some of the world's finest artisans. They represent more than luxury. They symbolize craftsmanship and timeless innovation. So if you're thinking about an heirloom piece or just looking to make an investment in your own style, there's no better choice than Patek Philippe.
Speaker 1:Visitpatek.com to discover the collection. Patek Philippe, you never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. Tell a personal story about your family traditions. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I didn't come from I I I actually don't really have that many family traditions, But, you know
Speaker 2:The tech is 1.
Speaker 1:Well, it it it will be. And and see that's the thing is that there's this, you know, famous proverb, the best day to plant a tree is, you know, 20 years ago, the second best day is today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can just start family traditions. Yeah. And as soon as you start them, they can become family traditions.
Speaker 2:If to in my eyes, family traditions that stimulate the economy
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Naturally, since the economy is good, it's naturally choose
Speaker 3:family traditions that require capital
Speaker 2:expenditure Investment. In order Sure.
Speaker 3:In order to
Speaker 2:simulate the
Speaker 1:economy Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that the economy improves and, naturally, everybody benefits.
Speaker 1:Right? So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Family tradition that your your own internal family can cherish and and sort of carry on throughout generations, but then also hope, like, I would hope that you would want your family traditions to benefit the world. Yeah. Stimulating the economy Yeah. Benefits, you know, everybody.
Speaker 1:I I yeah. I really do think that, you know, exercise for the listener. If you don't come from a family that has a lot of crazy traditions, like, start one today. Create a handful. Start 1.
Speaker 2:Start 1.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that's great. So on to, technology brother of the week. You you flagged this guy.
Speaker 1:I actually don't even have his handle here. Maybe we should do someone else. Yeah. So Oh, well, there's actually 2 people in the running. So so so that's number 1.
Speaker 2:This guy, he, you know, made this brave video. He decided, you know, as hurricane Milton was approaching his condo, he decided to stay with all of his supercars and, stay, you know, at his condo with all of his supercars, not evacuate, and it was because all because of sports betting and his success with sports betting that, you know, he's willing to risk it all because he knows he can just if he even if he loses everything, he can just start sports betting again Yeah. And make it all back in
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, 48 hours or something like that. Right?
Speaker 3:All it you're only you're only
Speaker 2:3 individual parlays away from generational wealth. And so I think he's trying you're only 3 individual parlays away from generational wealth. And so I think he's trying to he might have been using this opportunity to sell a course, but I think there's this broader there's this broader, there's really a broader story here, which is, like, if you become the type of person that's worth a $100,000,000 Yeah. You can make that $100,000,000 Yeah. You know, in a multitude of ways, a multitude of times.
Speaker 2:Right? And so
Speaker 1:Well, the reason that I think he's a technology brother is that he this is only possible in the modern era using the latest and greatest technology. He has Starlink. A generator in Starlink.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that even when the power goes down, the Internet goes out from the hurricane, he can continue to sports bet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The games are not gonna stop. Exactly. Doesn't mean you can be you can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis futures. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. And The outcome of a cricket game.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. And
Speaker 1:what's happening in the soccer world?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I hope that somebody's in India, you know, eventually getting, you know, approached by some storm that they would be making betting the dolphins. Risky bets on, you know, stuff that's happening here. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. So so he has some stiff competition. We got Ryan Salame, the former c co CEO of FTX, who's reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and half years on campaign finance fraud charges, posted this on link on LinkedIn today. I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as inmate at FCI Cumberland.
Speaker 1:Who do you give it to between these 2? Posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic. Does it deserve technology brother of the week, though?
Speaker 2:I I think we gotta save brother of the week when he comes back and starts a world positive venture Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:And announces that, you know, hopefully, you know, generates 1,000,000,000 of dollars in returns for shareholders and uses that to sort of pay back the victims of FTX. I think brother of the week has to go to this guy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:We'll put put his name up and we'll link the video. Colehausen? Colehausen. Colehausen. Colehausen.
Speaker 1:You're officially the brother of the week.
Speaker 2:One of the first brothers of the week. Okay. And hopefully, he's still alive.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because there's small chance that he didn't make it. If he is alive if he is alive, we know that he's still
Speaker 1:Selling courses.
Speaker 2:Betting and encouraging other people to follow suit. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you think of this concept? There's a company called Back Market that is selling older technology and encouraging you to downgrade. So they're reintroducing the iPhone 6 s SE 11, 12, 13, mini 14 refurbished. And they're also selling, what looks like an old Sony HD Handycam camcorder. And, Tyler here says fascinating concept and really good name.
Speaker 1:Imagine something similar may happen with software. What what what's your reaction? I mean, this is So this is a phenomenally viral. 50,000 likes on this. Like, there is serious demand for for nostalgic tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was shocking. I mean, like, it is a great ad and then
Speaker 2:This goes this goes into almost every technology consumer tech product has been over engineered. Like, all I want is for Sonos to release a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync 4 different speakers Yeah. And spend an hour and a half setting it up. And then right as I'm having people over, 2 of the speakers get disconnected Yeah. And I'm just, like, could I just, like, run an extension cord between all of these Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just, like, let them run. Right? Between all of these Yeah. And just, like, let them run.
Speaker 3:Right? So I think things have been over engineered, like,
Speaker 2:you're seeing this in the in ultra luxury, you know, cars that almost all the I think we've maybe talked about this going back to analog.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bugatti's are intentionally have these very tactile switches.
Speaker 1:The utopia.
Speaker 2:I think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle Craigslist and unbundle eBay, there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses. So, bezel, is a company I backed that that's like the stock x of watches. Right now, eBay is still the number 1, you know, seller of, you know, luxury watches online. The issue with eBay is that you could spend $20,000 on a Patek. Actually, not gonna get the kind of Pateks we like for 20.
Speaker 2:But, but let's say you wanna spend $60,000 on a Patek. If there's a 25% chance that it's fake, that's not really a risk that anybody should take. And so they took what eBay did well already, which was having a lot of inventory and added authentic authentication. And the same thing is what rent the run rate to this as well. You if you're buying a $2,000 vintage Chanel jacket.
Speaker 1:Cars and bids Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:the same thing. I mean Yeah. Bring bring a trailer similar Yeah. But disaggregate because eBay Motors really was big, but people are peeling the stuff off and adding, like, specific features.
Speaker 2:Yep. So yeah. I think I think as long as until something like a backtrack or bezel truly become dominant, there's still these opportunities to, like, unbundle these.
Speaker 1:So what do you think is more viral about this? I mean, I don't even know if this is their launch, but it's clearly their introduction to, you know, a 1000000 views and 50,000 fans. Yeah. Actually Do you think do you think the concept is more viral or the execution in the sense that it's, like, great copywriting on a subway and then someone wound up just taking a photo because it's subway ad. Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the IRL, but maybe Probably
Speaker 2:for itself. What's funny is I I looked at this ad and I was, like, that's so cool, like, just great campaign. And then I went to the website and it was a bunch of vintage electronics, and I was, like, nah, nah. I haven't been back since. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, but I think this is a good example of of just the power of branding and, like, a really good marketing campaign. Who knows if it'll make it an enduring business, but
Speaker 1:My my worry with this stuff is, like, a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances. And it's it's this the the the car world is talking about this. How, like, you know, would you ever want an earlier Model 3 or would you always just want the latest Tesla Model 3? Like, you would always just want the latest one because it's it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone. There's no real benefit to downgrading.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:As opposed to the old cars where it's, like, oh, yeah. Like, a Lamborghini Countach is gonna drive in a very specific way that, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:The issue is you can sell the device, but you still don't really control the software. Yeah. Like, Apple can be, like, we don't support this anymore.
Speaker 1:Or just doesn't run that well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They'll force you to upgrade, but it runs terribly. Yeah. And so I think what would be an incredible product, and I don't even know if it's possible to deliver at scale, is if you could actually go back and run, like, iOS 4 on an OG iPhone, and it would just be so fun and I
Speaker 1:mean, you can get the very first iPhone. They're getting expensive now, but it doesn't have an app store.
Speaker 2:No. That's a whole
Speaker 1:It just comes with what it has. You get maps.
Speaker 2:You know, like, just buying Apple Apple products when they release and leaving them in the box is, like, the best performing asset class
Speaker 1:in the world. Best performing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and maybe it's not NVIDIA, but, like, it outperforms, like, the s
Speaker 1:and p. Yeah. They they grow eventually. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So anyways, good example of a good campaign and how there's not, you know, it's not too late to, unbundle these behemoths.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In terms of the the other kind of, like, trad technology, we we gotta go back. Huge huge push against online dating recently recently. Have you been following this?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it is so somebody shared this chart of how couples meet in the United States. And the online is just a rocket ship from 19.90 where it's basically 0 to 2020 when it's well over 50%. Now there is a community note on this that's not it's not live, but I clicked on it because I can see what's in there. Power. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and somebody was trying to, you know, fight it out in the community notes claiming that, oh, well, this cuts off right during COVID. Maybe it's gone down. And then they cite some other study that was done by Zola, the wedding registry. So they pull people, and it said that now, Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school. And I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection.
Speaker 1:And I think people doing weather industries on Zola
Speaker 2:is specific.
Speaker 1:So this is this is a survey of of, like, 6,500 people randomly, by some academics. And and Zola is, like, a very specific subset where they're, like, just pulling their users.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing, like, this elaborate registry, you're probably, like, higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in an IRL setting as opposed to online. And so I I I disapprove that community note.
Speaker 2:I think, everybody can be bearish on everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that cigarettes are bad. Yeah. But you're not gonna,
Speaker 1:you know Until there's something better comes along.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex, which is the primary human motivation. So you're just not gonna if as long as these apps are able to offer what they're offering, they're only gonna become like, it's interesting that, it does seem that it does seem that people are, like, our society is now very like, from a dating standpoint, dating apps are driving the majority of connections, like, that kind of seems like it's a thing, yet people are not people can overcome the addiction. The only thing more powerful than the drive to just, like, meet whatever for people to
Speaker 3:meet the opposite sex seemingly is finding your
Speaker 2:person and, like, you end up giving, Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. So, thankfully, the the positive is that that it seems like, you know, finding your life
Speaker 2:partner, wife, husband, whatever, seems to get people to quit these things. So they're you can't really say that they're addictive even though they're they're dominant. Right? I did I did have something funny. So Monday, I was catching up with a buddy who started started a couple different companies with a certain tech billionaire, and he was telling me that said tech billionaire is upset desperately wants to fund a new version of seeking arrangements, which is like the the sort of high end, you know, like sugar daddy Sure.
Speaker 2:Like specific dating app. So maybe a contrarian move on his part. Why?
Speaker 1:Like, wait. Is there a problem with seeking arrangements?
Speaker 2:I'm assuming. I'm assuming.
Speaker 1:A business.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like This is somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like This is sad. Better. So he wants to, you know, accelerate sugar baby Yeah. Relationships.
Speaker 1:I I don't even know how the economics work on there. It doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because that's the beauty of, like, the OnlyFans business is that they're taking a cut of the entire, like, economy between the simps and the women. Yeah. Yeah. But it's hard if it's if there's if there's potential for disintermediation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's The
Speaker 1:whole still fundamentally. The Only fans model is that they never meet in person. And so it's always intermediated by a platform that can take a fee. And that's why they're so insanely profitable. Yep.
Speaker 1:What do you think of the idea of, if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates, he should purchase Match Group, the company that controls Tinder and Hinge over half of the online dating market. Make a make a bunch of changes. That was
Speaker 2:So Elon's a capitalist. I don't think he's fundamentally even x. Yeah. X, yeah, he purchased it to defend free speech, but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of companies. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's, like, it's hard to argue that even And also, what is he He can he can he has a great position to take, which is, oh, I didn't buy this to make money. I don't care. I'm sure he'll take it public again someday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's, like, he can he could take it public at a loss and say, look, I did this for free speech or whatever. But let's face it, he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him, and he could lose $10,000,000,000 on x and make it back 10 x over with SpaceX or Tesla.
Speaker 3:Or whatever.
Speaker 2:So it's not a I don't think he's gonna he's not the guy who honestly, if he bought Match Group and was, like, I'm gonna reengineer this to try to increase the birth rate and everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would would destroy enterprise value. Yeah. Because, of course, these, of course, the incentives are set up in a way all the way from the CEO to the the of of match to the individual leaders of their different brands, all the way down to the lowly product manager who's just like, fuck, I just wanna increase DAU. It's just 10%. Like, that'll get me my next, you know, raise or whatever that I can I need to from
Speaker 1:the associate? Increase the CTR on this one button. Yeah. Yeah. Or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, anyways, match group is but it's it's funny because it's everybody wants to say that match group is all bad, yet there's millions of couples out there that would never have met Yeah. And their lives are completely Yeah. Like, better because match group products exist.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's one of those things, like, nothing is ever as good as or as bad.
Speaker 1:The other yeah. The other interesting thing is, like like, you know, even even if Match Group was in, like, the, you know, charitable let's call it, like, a charitable donation range. Like, let's say it was, like, $10,000,000 company, but it still had the outsized effect that it has on society. Like, Elon could just be, like, I'm going to burn $10,000,000 because I feel like changing the work or 10,000,000. Let's call it 10,000,000, like, super low, like, nothing.
Speaker 1:Like, it's a rounding air for him. So he buys and he shuts it down. Well, like, that's not gonna stop someone else coming in and doing the same thing. Like, it doesn't work like that. Like, the the the there's clearly some sort of, like, market demand here and you can't just, like, you can't just go around doing, like, this this, like, odd brand of, like, capitalism, philanthropy mix.
Speaker 1:Like like Yeah.
Speaker 3:You you
Speaker 1:I I I I think the solution here I I do think people are clamoring for a solution to, like, plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates. But, the the the answer is is Don't capture the app. Yeah. Yeah. You you actually need to build, like, a better cultural institution and and figure out how that can scale and be profitable.
Speaker 2:You need to make it, you know, punishable by jail if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them, you know.
Speaker 1:In real life.
Speaker 2:In real life. Yeah. Like if a guy, like if a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking, this is a cute girl and doesn't say hello, I'd like to take you out to coffee. That can be punishable by up to 10 years.
Speaker 1:10 years in prison. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so just
Speaker 1:every government's gonna solve this. Yeah. I think I think we're looking for free market solutions here. Yeah. And the free market solutions are probably, like, someone going and building something that's a that that that's a really cool like, I heard one person pitch, this is kind of wild idea, a CrossFit for militias.
Speaker 1:So the idea is, like, if you want if you want strong militias in America, which maybe you don't, but if you do and you want the the you want the ability of, like, of, like, local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in
Speaker 2:in a bigger scenario,
Speaker 1:you have some sort of organization. You could do the same thing where it's, like, you know, some sort of new CrossFit community something like that where it's like it's it's a scalable organization, but it's about something else where people can meet and bond.
Speaker 2:No. I want to fund Discord for local militias.
Speaker 1:Discord for local militias. Okay. Okay. Vertical SaaS
Speaker 2:for militias. Sure. Everything from
Speaker 1:I don't even know if there
Speaker 2:are that many militias around.
Speaker 1:Are there
Speaker 2:No. But we need to stimulate more. Okay. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. So yeah. If you could manage everything from communication to inventory to recruiting to dues Yeah. To training Good.
Speaker 2:To compliance.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a big business to be built there.
Speaker 1:I mean, I do love the idea.
Speaker 2:And my Yeah. Dad group chat in the neighborhood are are all early users. And yeah. And you even link it into, you know, scrape, active, you know, police reports, warnings.
Speaker 1:You bring in Dude, Batman.
Speaker 2:Data. So it's basically, like, you know, getting, you know, you get a push notification and then you, like, rip your suit off. Yeah. And then underneath is like full, you know, military.
Speaker 1:I think dudes would sign up for it. I do like the idea of of, you know, like, okay. We're we're revitalizing, like, the American military and working with the DOD with all these defense tech companies. But, like, what happens if we get overrun and, like, you know Yeah. Some foreign com foreign country is, like, on our shores.
Speaker 1:Like, we need militias and we just need to we need our own insurgency and we need to be prepared for that. I mean, fortunately, we have the most guns of any country. So shouldn't should be Going back to
Speaker 2:mess, going back to the fixing fixing, the reason that I don't think, I don't think dating I only think it's gonna get I don't think it's gonna get better, really. Yeah. Like, I think the future that we're seeing today, which is hyper financialized dating, which is you're on this app and if you pay more money, like, you can have better odds at success and all this stuff. But then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in, you know, Texas would date somebody in Ohio and then, like, form a relationship that way. But the issue is that, on until recently or until the last, like, couple decades, most people that got married were born within, like, 5 square miles of each other or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that was actually positive and that people would look around and see and just, like, be more committal because they're, like, well, this is the best person for me in my neighborhood. Right? Or my city or whatever.
Speaker 1:My wife, like, super easy. Yeah. Just, like, oh, like, family's here. Everything's here. Yes.
Speaker 2:We should get married. Yeah. So, yeah. I think that the era of optionality
Speaker 1:Seeing seeing the entire pool across Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it doesn't even matter because the thing is if somebody's using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop using dating apps, they're still gonna go on Instagram and see the same number of Yeah. So eliminating even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever. It's not gonna stop. Instagram is the bigger
Speaker 1:That isn't interesting, like, like, obviously, like, I want the free market solution here, but it would be interesting if, like like, legally, you couldn't have a you you had to have some geo restriction on, on on the matching. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or it's, like, you can only get you can only get 5 matches a month. Yeah. Something like that. We're we're yeah. We're limiting matches.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's ever gonna happen.
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. That's right. I just I think whatever you're seeing today is what exactly what you're gonna see for the most part.
Speaker 1:The relentless march of techno capitalism.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even the, even the present prevalence of I I I don't know if this made it in the stack, but there was somebody tweeted. I think it was, like, on the, character AI Reddit. And it was, like, so long their favorite character that they were
Speaker 3:chatting to. I finally met someone. Thanks for thanks for,
Speaker 2:teaching me how to someone. Thanks for thanks for, teaching me how to talk to a woman. Okay. It certainly helped. So that's, I guess, one positive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. If, like,
Speaker 2:if if if the sort of incel audience is chatting with these AI bots and they're like, damn, I I low key have game. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I have
Speaker 1:thought about that where Is this bot? Maybe maybe there's a scenario where it's like you like like the a boy is talking to an AI girlfriend boyfriend. And because they're on the same platform, the the 2 AIs, you can kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data to know because you know every interest about the boy because you've collected, you know, hours and hours of communication and you've connected hours and hours of chat logs with the girl as well. And you can look across the network and say, wow. These two people are actually perfect matches.
Speaker 1:We should just inter introduce them and disintermediate. And then the AI's leave and then the and then the real life boy and girl meet and they're like, wow. It feels like I'm talking to the AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend that I've talking to for the last year. I'm glad I gave it so much training data
Speaker 2:to And then they meet up and watch a catfish.
Speaker 1:I've been leading my you're you're talking to the AI girlfriend. You're like, yeah. I'm I'm I'm jacked. Like I can bench 400.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like,
Speaker 1:oh, well, like, we have a girl over here who wants to date someone who's who could
Speaker 2:bench 4 100.
Speaker 3:Why are you
Speaker 2:You have to post proof. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, you're sorry. Unfortunately, unfortunately, we had issues on the platform with people, people embellishing their bench, one rep max. Yeah. We actually will need you to post proof of it. Yep.
Speaker 2:Make sure you're in a well lit area. Yeah. That that is clearly not using fake weights. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's funny. I I wanna talk about this, this, like, you know, zombie corns dead venture companies. So, it started with this tweet by Tara or Tara.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Very surprised that the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised it too high of valuations and are now in a state of purgatory. And I think you know this guy, Siva. Is that right? Or or you you just saw him? But he says I have some mutual funds.
Speaker 1:He says, DM or email me. We bought a few companies that raised 50 to a $100,000,000 from VC and we're stuck behind a large prep stack. I've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to no upside is exhausting and demotivating. We can provide a landing spot for your company and a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd like to do other things. This is my bad signal to founders or investors that see founders stuck in these situations.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, who is
Speaker 1:Zerb companies that Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company for, like, a big outcome.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like the like, she had a really successful exit Yeah. Yeah. And it catalyzed a bunch of people.
Speaker 1:To be like, oh, how do I
Speaker 2:Actually, I I actually don't know the details, but I think people did very well.
Speaker 3:Okay. I
Speaker 2:saw, like, employees tweeting that were like, woah, I'm rich now. Okay. Cool stuff like that. So she has a big outcome. Bunch of people are like, woah.
Speaker 1:How do I do that? How do
Speaker 2:you sell your company?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because people still have this perception that I don't know. A lot of venture backed founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised at even if they're not or even even their seed valuation. And that's, you know, whatever. So but what I think is funny is is you have these people. So Jeremy Gaffan Yep.
Speaker 2:Was probably over a year ago, maybe at this point, he goes on Invest Like the Best. He starts talking about special situations. Everybody's like, woah. You've been doing like and he's giving examples of deals that they've done at tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business. And he's calling them, like, log jams and special situations where he's coming in as a somewhat neutral third party saying, like, how do we how do we deliver what party saying, like, how do we how do we deliver what everybody wants?
Speaker 2:The VC wants oftentimes to just, like, take a write off or Clean it up. Clean it up
Speaker 1:or stop having
Speaker 2:to spend any time on it if they're on the board. They don't wanna deal with it anymore, if it's not gonna return their fund. So he's solving that for the VCs. He's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and and whatever the core team is that allows them to save face and hopefully see some ROI or walk away entirely if they wanna do something else. But I think it's funny because now you have Jeremy who has his new fund, who's fully focused on this.
Speaker 2:So you have to imagine he's gonna be ahead of a lot of these other, you know, people that are coming out and and now trying to compete here. But Jeremy is competing with Tiny Capital, Andrew Wilkinson, who's still trying to do the same deals, you know, even though to my knowledge, Jeremy was the guy, like, really leading the charge of that practice. And so all these guys who are running holding companies are basically now, like, doing, like, distressed finance. You know? They're just coming in, like, trying to find value and unfuck these situations.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, I think it's great that these these players exist in the space. It's generally positive, I think, for pretty much all the stakeholders. But the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is gonna make I met the increased competition. We'll see if it if, I don't know if the venture industry has could support as many of these types of players as they can micro funds. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder I wonder what the wheelhouse deal looks like for or, like, like, where where is their value when there's a log jammed, like, b to b SaaS company? Because I feel like if you raise some money, you didn't get to product market fit, but you're in the last era. It's like, okay. Well, you probably aren't doing, like, a AI first approach.
Speaker 1:You're probably doing something else. Maybe you have some customer list. It's like I I I I struggle to think of, like, why I personally would wanna own one of these companies, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you think about it? So imagine a company that raised that raised, $25,000,000 Sure. And gets to 5,000,000 of ARR. Sure. And they're not profitable.
Speaker 2:In fact, they're burning a lot of and they're not profitable.
Speaker 1:In fact,
Speaker 2:they're burning a lot of
Speaker 1:money Sure.
Speaker 2:And they stopped growing. Yep. Suddenly, that company is companies that don't make money Yep. And are not growing are worthless.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They are not growing are worthless. Yeah. They're worthless. Especially if they're losing money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:And so you take one of these 5,000,000 ARR businesses that's not really growing anymore. And if you wipe out the pref stack, massively decrease costs, focus on sustainable growth, you could probably sell that business for $25,000,000 in, like, 3 to 5 years. Right? I'm just saying, like
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying it's easy. Scratch, like I'm not saying it's easy.
Speaker 1:Without without any more without, like, putting up significant more capital, that feels hard.
Speaker 2:Not necessarily though. I mean, so here's Maybe
Speaker 1:if you're plugging into something that has, like, heavy synergies, like, sure. It's like, okay. They have a product that we can
Speaker 2:cross sell
Speaker 1:or something.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying it's I'm not saying it's easy. Yeah. But I'm just saying if you have if a 5,000,000 ARR business with a $25,000,000 prep stack that's not growing, if you wipe out the prep stack, reduce costs, and find a way to grow sustainably, and then you get profitable. And then in 5 years, you go to a strategic and you say, like, hey, you guys should actually buy this for $50,000,000 because it's accretive to your business. Yep.
Speaker 2:The person that bought the business for 5 whatever, you paid $5,000,000 for it, you're gonna do great. Yep. So that's why all these people are circling being like, mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I really wanna see the the the the the, like, the histogram.
Speaker 2:And it's actually it's actually good to give VCs love to add value via intros. Yeah. And so, Siva and Jeremy and Andrew are all gonna be, like, pretty much
Speaker 1:Buddy buddy with all the VCs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Getting those getting those calls and intros. Hey.
Speaker 1:Hey. This company stopped. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Talked to
Speaker 1:this one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just wonder
Speaker 1:I just wonder on, like, the histogram, like, how much capital is going into each deal? Is there any other structure? Is it just is it just
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. The the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you're buying a business, you know, there's totally possible you could buy a business for 5,000,000 of ARR with 5,000,000 of ARR for $2,000,000 of cash Yeah. $3,000,000 of debt. And if you sell the business for $25,000,000, it's a pretty good multiple on your cash.
Speaker 1:It's just it is kind of high stakes. It's kind of high stakes because, like, you gotta cut costs fast to to pay for the debt, and then you've now cut costs and now you have to grow. Yeah. And while maintaining margins in this new era, because you're not like this hot company trading at some premium. Everyone knows you're like this turnaround.
Speaker 1:It's tricky.
Speaker 2:I like it though because it's a simple it's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility. Yeah. Right? Because Jeremy's done a bunch of these deals. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I it doesn't seem like that's simple of a strategy. More seems like something that Jeremy No.
Speaker 2:It's simple. Fun these fund thesis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:Very difficult to execute.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's important it's much worse to have a very complex fund thesis Yeah. And a very complex execution.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:At least have one of them be simple. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of them be complicated. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Because I don't know. There's just not that many nobody right now, nobody wants to buy a business that's for the most part, it's not that strategic to buy. If you're if you have a company that's working, it's not that strategic to buy a cost center.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But if you can
Speaker 2:turn it into, like, a profit center and something that's accretive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I wonder I wonder how much of the I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually gonna go on.
Speaker 2:The what?
Speaker 1:I wonder I wonder how much, like, hack and slash is actually gonna go on in in those deals. Like, like, I'd like Twitter is kind of like the famous example of, like, a really bloated company, 5,000 employees. It's now below 2,000. It's getting closer to a 1,000. Like, that is remarkable.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Yeah. The hard thing
Speaker 1:about a $25,000,000 raise. It's like, well, maybe they got to what? 50 employees, so they could go down to 10? Could they go down to 20? Like, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, that doesn't seem that the person is
Speaker 2:if you're going after these SaaS companies or consumer apps or whatever they are, you're still at 5,000,000 of revenue and trying to be super capital efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're still threatened by all the next YC batch. Exactly. We're building SaaS for, you know
Speaker 1:With AI. With AI. It's like the next hot thing
Speaker 2:and They're gonna burn money to, like, acquire those same customers.
Speaker 1:That is really tough. Yeah. But if you found some niche and and, like, the revenues are pretty strong and Yeah. Sticking around.
Speaker 2:It's just interesting. There's the, the start up community generally has this attitude that anything is possible. Yeah. And when they think of private equity, they're, like, oh, yeah. You just buy companies for one price and sell them for more and, like, look at this deal.
Speaker 2:Like, what if you did that with this? Whatever.
Speaker 3:But private equity credit to the
Speaker 2:gentleman that we know in that industry, equity credit to the gentleman that we know in that industry, like, they are not there's not a lot of efficiencies that you can get in private equity.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to founders, and that's why this, like, content marketing is, like Sure. I've been in your shoes. I understand. You know, I've been there, done that. You know, it's, they're gonna they're gonna actually so their, yeah, so their edge is that their edge is that private act traditional PE funds are not looking at these, at these companies as much, and they do not give a shit how the founder feels.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that is an edge by itself. Just caring about the founder.
Speaker 1:Let's do this one. Do you know do you know this guy? Bern Hobart? I love this guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He just
Speaker 1:wrote this book for Stripe Press on bubbles. He's gonna be a heretic on. Good to Amazing. He's pro bubble. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Who is not?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he believes It's
Speaker 2:just one more bubble.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I actually told him about that on a call. Yeah. And he was like, yeah. He and he has an interesting theory that, the, that in fact, it is not the, the, like, Main Street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses.
Speaker 1:Because if you look at wealth inequality during financial collapses and recessions, wealth inequality decreases.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:Because on average, the Main Street investor invests on a much more regular cadence. It's the professional investor that's actually winning and yeah. We're winning and losing more dramatically at scale. Yeah. It's very fascinating, because the the the narrative is typically like, oh, the the, you know, the the the financer, the rich guys dumped on retail.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's not really what happens if you just look at the broader, broader picture. It's certainly true in, like, the micro. Like like, some people got dumped on. Some people dumped.
Speaker 1:But, but more more broadly, the economic equality actually goes down during crashes. So but I I love this tweet. It didn't get very many views, but I thought it was very interesting. It says, there's a dubious micro cap I've looked at that makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol. The main active ingredient is caffeine.
Speaker 1:So what they really sell is deconstructed 4 Loko. Can't tell if that's a bowl or bear cake.
Speaker 2:When's the last time you had a 4 Loko?
Speaker 1:College.
Speaker 2:Damn. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:haven't had opportunities since then? Maybe at Reticon we should crack we should crack open
Speaker 1:On stage.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I was telling me that. He was, like, I showed him with I showed him the document and he was, like, he was, like, there's one problem. I control f for 4 low code. It wasn't in this doc. So we definitely have to get some real ones.
Speaker 2:That's so great.
Speaker 1:100% of it.
Speaker 2:And we'll do an ad for 4 loco.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's perfect. Yeah. I I I remember, like, you know, when the 4 loco ban happened, like, you know, everyone was kind of stockpiling, like, a case or 2. But the original 4 loco is, like, impossible to to acquire.
Speaker 1:But it's just the
Speaker 2:original. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The original formula. I mean, it really is rare. It's rarer than your than your, you know, 1st generation iPhone that's on still in the box.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine driving through some forgotten town somewhere in America and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty.
Speaker 1:Thirsty. I think thirst has anything to do with it.
Speaker 2:You're thirsty and you go to look in, you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're, like, what what is that? It's like, it's not even refrigerated. So it's like, everything's lukewarm or whatever.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh,
Speaker 2:you got it. Dust.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you, like, scrape it off and it says, like, it and it says expired
Speaker 1:in, like, 2,008. Yeah. It was like 2,009, 2 thousand right?
Speaker 2:Oh my And you just immediately, like, start hitting it against your head.
Speaker 1:It's like water. It's like a mirage in the desert.
Speaker 3:I have
Speaker 2:I don't have any negative memories of 4 Loco. I certainly wasn't my go to, but I think it was a great product and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what well, what about, bowler bear case? I will tell you that this company is truly a micro cap. I I d m'd him and asked him and it's about a 50,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Should be smaller.
Speaker 1:It should be smaller.
Speaker 2:Well, whatever their earnings are, it should be it should be smaller.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the thing with the deconstructed 4 Loko is, like, that already kind of exists. The Red Bull Vodka and then the Gentleman's Red Bull Vodka which, of course, is the espresso martini. And so the the idea of mixing caffeine and alcohol, people do this regularly. They find ways to do it.
Speaker 1:This is classic. The the question is, like, yeah, will will people really pick up on this? Because they are they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I there's another one of these hangover cures Yeah. That hangover cures or fixes are funny because
Speaker 1:Tough business.
Speaker 2:You're basically saying that,
Speaker 1:I'm irresponsible, but I'm responsible enough to buy Thank you, sir. A hangover cure.
Speaker 2:These are great cups.
Speaker 1:That's really tough. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It it's always hard to to be No.
Speaker 2:No. The real reason is you're saying, you just poisoned yourself. Here's an antidote. Yeah. Antidotes don't promise that you're gonna feel good.
Speaker 2:They promise that you're gonna live, you know. Okay. And so, or that's like the theory of an antidote. So, yeah, to me, you're just just commit to drinking is gonna make you feel worse than you otherwise would. Temporarily, maybe better and then worse.
Speaker 2:So I think it's I've never I've never invested in any of the companies that have there's clearly demand. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a friend who runs one that's doing pretty well. They focus on, like, weddings too. That's like a it's been a growth area because everyone's gonna be drinking at the wedding. So if you can get into the wedding planner network, then the wedding planner can present this as like, oh, this would be a lovely gift for everyone. You put it in a little gift bag when they arrive.
Speaker 1:They take it before they drink. It's actually like a biotech company. They have like really good science and so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol. It really does
Speaker 2:work. ZeBioTic?
Speaker 1:Yeah. ZeBioTic. Have you tried it?
Speaker 2:Somebody was telling me that ZeBioTic is like I won't I I don't wanna misspeak. Yeah. And I don't wanna talk poorly about anyone's, a for profit enterprise. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But,
Speaker 2:but, but, yeah. No. No. You know, I tried Zbiotics and I was like, this
Speaker 1:Didn't work?
Speaker 2:Didn't work. And, you know, I don't know. I'm very I'm very affected by alcohol, though. Pretty much Yeah. The next time I drink alcohol and probably the the only time in q 4 will be at Hereticon.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:On stage 4. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is it is always hard because it's like, if you have the forethought to to think of taking a
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pre alcohol, hangover cure, you also might have the forethought to, like, mix in a glass of water or just drink
Speaker 2:glass.
Speaker 1:So it is not Or you just It's a very tough business.
Speaker 2:Get a bigger dinner
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or drink more water.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, any any business that's
Speaker 3:Or have
Speaker 1:your blood boiling it. Like, any business that's predicated on, like, you doing less of, like, the 7 deadly sins is always tricky. Like, you know, the the the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's one of the struggle. Right? To me to me, if I was gonna invest in a, hangover cure, it would be somebody recreating John McAfee's, like, protocol, which
Speaker 1:I see. You should Pull it up.
Speaker 2:Then you should pull this up or put it on the screen or something. But his protocol is, like, you know, how he always, like, whenever he does a video and he's no longer with us. Yeah. But
Speaker 1:Well, allegedly.
Speaker 2:Allegedly. We don't know. Allegedly. Yeah. He's probably listening to this right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The he'll have to go on these rants where he's, like, how did I drink 4 bottles of gin a day for 6 years in a row, and and, you know, still managed to hold the federal government hostage for 200 days in a row. And he had the whole outline just like crazy biohackers stack that he's on that, like, is like helping with his liver and all this other stuff. And so he actually had it dialed. So like the McAfee stack is if somebody wants to build that, I'll I'll back that.
Speaker 1:I'll back that.
Speaker 2:Because it clearly works. Okay. The guy was like drinking like We're
Speaker 1:gonna do a deep dive
Speaker 2:He wasn't just partying. He was drinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he He's like he's like putting as much effort as Brian Johnson is into into surviving, but also like Into just But just refusing to not drink.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great. Yeah. Like the easiest win possible. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How can I
Speaker 1:how can I survive well?
Speaker 2:No. Probably, like yeah. I would've would've
Speaker 1:Still doing the single worst thing I can possibly do for my body. Yeah. Wow. What do you think of this, Dennis? Is you're busy trying to get into foundry mode while the 18 year old Zoomer clipping Kai Sanat and Aidan Ross on TikTok has a higher ARR than your entire b to b SaaS startup.
Speaker 1:Why why do you
Speaker 2:like this one so much? I mean, I just think that I just think it's amazing, if you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some 18 year old, you know, 18 year old would be making would be making millions. He would be like, yeah. That was what I envisioned for America. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, just
Speaker 1:It is interesting. I I, you know, to go back to Jeremy Giffon,
Speaker 2:one of By the way, Giffon
Speaker 1:is Is it Giffon?
Speaker 2:No. I think How
Speaker 1:do you
Speaker 3:say that?
Speaker 2:That's Giffon. Giffon? But it's so funny because his his, favorite business ever is like Lazard. Yeah. And Giffon just happens to feel like it's already in the same realm of of,
Speaker 1:Is that the fun name? Giffon, Caffon?
Speaker 2:Giffon and Company.
Speaker 1:And Company? There you go. Lazard. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I mean, he told me this one interesting thing was, like, he just like, one of the highest signal, you know, data points that you can get on a founder when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time. They've never done a business before is just show me a Stripe account with money coming in
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And simultaneously a high school report card that happened the same time. Like, all I care about is, like, you made money while in high school.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let me show you let me show you this picture.
Speaker 1:And that is a great signal. And and I think that it's interesting because the the the this seems ridiculous. The 18 year old Zoomer clipping Kai Sanat, Nathan Ross clip clips on, TikTok. But that 18 year old zoomer is probably the next great b to b SaaS founder. Like, probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:not unreasonable to back that person.
Speaker 2:You evolved from the lowest common denominator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and and that is gonna get retconned from this low status clipping Aidan Ross clips on TikTok to, oh, yeah. I had a social media management company or Yeah. Oh, yeah. I I, you know, I had a I had Yeah.
Speaker 1:I had a picture. No.
Speaker 2:This is my first company. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let me see. Yeah.
Speaker 2:J man designs.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Literally, when I was 12, I figured out that I could get skateboards manufactured in the Midwest for $17.50. Wow. And I got my mom's help designing a graphic, and I got I raised the money from my aunt who gave me, like, $500 for the first round. And I bought a bunch of boards. And my number one sales channel was friends birthday parties.
Speaker 2:So when my friend's birthday was coming up, I go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard Yep. At $40 or $36 or whatever. I was making, like, 50% margins. I should have gone higher. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lot of, like, flexibility. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You got a Zillow in the house, show up. Actually, this is $200 skateboard.
Speaker 2:$200 skateboard. No. But I that was like my the first way that I made money that wasn't Yeah. Mowing lawns
Speaker 1:or whatever. Yeah. It it is truly a story. Experience Truly entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:That the formative experience for an entrepreneur, it's one thing to do a service like copywriting Yeah. Or any of these other graphic design. Yeah. Yeah. Getting buying a product for one price Yeah.
Speaker 2:And all you do is resell it.
Speaker 1:This is this is my first job too. Yeah. My first, like, entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it on eBay and being willing to ship internationally. And so figuring out that that, like, certain companies with this very niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally. And so I would just be like, yeah, I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And a lot of people that wanted, like, the best audio file gear would be, like, dude, if you can buy this for me and, I will pay the extra shipping cost and the premium to do it. And you just go figure all that stuff out. It was only possible because, like, the Internet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and fundamentally, I still bring that up to founders when they're thinking they're, like, trying to over philosophize their businesses.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And, like, are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price? And if so, how much more?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if depending on the market Yeah. Like, that's either gonna lead to you creating a big business based on the margin profile
Speaker 1:or not. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so many people forget that, and and I've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life of fundamentally, it's about making something for one price, selling it for more than
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just starting with, like, a basic widgets business and
Speaker 2:Somebody's gonna clip this and be, like, 2 guys discover business. It's basically, like, here's the thing. So, like, if I have this piece of paper right and I can get this paper
Speaker 3:for a dollar
Speaker 1:So let me
Speaker 2:just check. And And you're willing to pay $2 for this this, print out of a tweet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what else do we have? We have a couple more things. I wanted to see did you actually dig into this story about Marc Andreessen giving 50 k in Bitcoin to an AI agent?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I did. It was over, it was
Speaker 1:Dramatized by AI doomer?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dramatized by an AI doomer. Doomer. Turns out, like, the money, like, went into an account and, like, was never actually touched. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:It's not like the AI was, like, I'm gonna use this to do that. Yep. It was just sort of, like, Mark sends it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then, calling calling Mark Mark. This reminds me somebody I was at dinner the other night and and somebody brought up Epstein. And for some reason, I was, like, unrelated. And I called him. I was like, no.
Speaker 2:But Jeffrey would have why why are you calling him Jeffrey? Like, what's wrong with you? Oh my god. Is there something that we need to know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. But, yeah. I think just just there's gonna be more examples of this where people are like, look
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's sentient. The problem
Speaker 1:with the truth terminal thing, I mean, it seems really cool. I hope that it's, like, real and someone's actually doing stuff. It seems like a very avant garde art project, but you never know. Again, tell operation, is there a human in the loop here? So even even with the
Speaker 2:And there's an incentive to be, like, oh, if people think this is an AI
Speaker 1:They like it more because the bar is lower. It's like what we discussed the other day about the the, AI influencers are making 50 k on Instagram OnlyFans or whatever, and it turns out it's just a real woman. But if if a real woman says, oh, these are AI generated people are like, oh, wow. This is incredible. This is the best AI model I've ever seen.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's gonna be a lot of that, like, faking it both in the teleoperation, both in this, and and just having a filter there. It is interesting. Are you familiar with, like, move 37? This whole story? So, in, when when Google DeepMind, Demas Hassabis, was, was trying to beat Lee Sedol in Go, the the Go master.
Speaker 1:So, computers have beaten chess and they'd become superhuman at chess, but Go was computationally much more complex. So
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Something like, you know, instead of being, like, trillion possible board positions that you could potentially search with a supercomputer, it's like quadrillion to quadrillion. So it's like impossible to just brute force it. But they applied deep learning, scale. They played they they trained and they played, you know, billions of simulated games. And eventually, the AI became very good.
Speaker 1:Everyone thought that Lee Sedol, who was the world champion, was gonna wipe the floor. And he wound up losing. Yeah. They made a whole documentary about it. It was crazy.
Speaker 1:And in there, there's this moment where they're playing. And at move 37, the the computer, DeepMind, places this piece, like, way off of the board where, like, no one not off the board, but, like, it's a legal position. It's just a very weird play. Like, no one would ever do this. No human would ever do this.
Speaker 1:And and everyone was very confused. They're like, oh, there's, like, a bug in the software. Like, something's weird about this. But and and Lisa, it all, like, got up and was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, this is weird.
Speaker 1:Like, I don't get this. This is not how people play this game. And that move wound up being critical, and they won because of this move. So it was, like, true discovery of, like, a novel strategy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that is, like, what we're looking for in intelligence. I when when you say, like Yeah. An AI system is intelligent and superhuman, that's where we're getting there. And with LLMs
Speaker 2:Yeah. The real the the thing that would be interesting is if there was this AI, like, agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multisigs on Solana. Oh, yeah. Or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is.
Speaker 3:It's just like
Speaker 1:Again, there was a rumor about that too. Yeah. Very unlikely. But even even like so these move 37 type moments, I I've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence, a poem, a paragraph, something that feels like inspired and and, like, a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LLM. We won't know
Speaker 2:we won't know that it's that that, OpenAI has reached singularity until, an agent on the OpenAI, like, built on the OpenAI platform buys a McLaren p one to gain the favor of Altman.
Speaker 1:P 1 or f 1?
Speaker 2:Well,
Speaker 1:I think he would
Speaker 2:I think he would
Speaker 1:He'd respect both.
Speaker 2:He'd respect both.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I don't know. It's it's interesting. It's definitely getting a response from the from the crazy AI doomers. Doomers.
Speaker 2:Doomers gonna doom.
Speaker 1:But but I like that Mark, like, you know, yellowed 50 k to this project. Like, that's fun. That's what he should be doing. Like, that's awesome. I'm excited.
Speaker 1:To
Speaker 2:reach it by an
Speaker 1:order of magnitude. Probably on the next run, you know. Did you read Sequoia's generated AI thing? Their whole paper application layer is important.
Speaker 2:It's a bit too serious for our bones. I think so. No. It is. It is.
Speaker 1:It is so long. It's one of those things where
Speaker 2:the funny thing. The only thing that I'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago, everybody was, like, the application doesn't matter, building at the application layer is
Speaker 1:a Yeah. Wrappers are stupid. Wrappers are
Speaker 2:stupid, and now it's, like, all in on wrappers. But then a year from now, I think it'll be back to, oh, you know, like, I don't know. It's just funny to think that that only, like, software is dead through the end of software. So this report is coming within 6 months of the end of software. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. So who's right? Both both of them are right. You know, like, that's honestly it's honestly my opinion is is I think that long term, both of them are right and that software is gonna be massively disruptive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But there's still gonna be massive value accrual to specific products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the computing hardware companies were valuable and the software built on top of them was valuable after the dotcomboom. Yeah. And even the telecom companies were pretty valuable. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the whole stack is valuable and there's probably value accruing all over the place. It's great. Everywhere
Speaker 2:you look.
Speaker 1:I mean, it really is like it makes sense that, like, the value accrual wouldn't live just only one place. Of course, there's gonna be like a winner but from a venture perspective
Speaker 2:Everybody's incentive the the anybody that's running a foundation model is incentivized to say, we're gonna capture all the value. We're gonna do all these things that you say you're gonna do. We're just gonna do it innately through the core technology. And then Yeah. Everybody that wants to deploy money is is saying Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You want it. It's it's it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is gonna accrue to individual teams and products and apps and things like that because then you can YOLO
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bets, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The question is, like, and I don't know if they addressed this that much, but, disruptive innovation versus sustaining. Like, will the existing because there's already a crop. There's already a, you know, a multibillion dollar SaaS company in every major category. And so there's also now a YC company doing AI in that category as well.
Speaker 1:Is AI disruptive to those companies that are maybe only 5, 10 years old and doing well? Like, I mean, you know, ramp is like they're not being disrupted by AI. They're like the first one to implement it because, like, they're they're still on the cutting edge. They still have the agile team. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I and I wonder, yeah, how much of this is gonna be completely new versus just, the existing tech companies are able to just roll in. I don't know. Keep an eye on it. Anything else?
Speaker 2:There's always more technology. Always more technology.
Speaker 1:I think we got through most of the tweets. I have been using those, meta glasses more. Oh. The Ray Bans. The video ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The video ones. I With the kids? With the kids, I went for a walk, and had my hands full with dogs and babies and it was great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm able
Speaker 1:to take some photos. The photos are not that great, but the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the AI while you're walking around hands free. You just say, like, hey, Meadow, like, what's the, you know, what year was the declaration of independence signed or whatever? You tried to describe Ben. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It just gives you it just gives you, like, little facts and stuff, and it's, like, a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for, like, a random question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:think that's kinda cool.
Speaker 2:You're getting you become the cell tower that Yeah. Yeah. Data is being transmitted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're too much. I actually watched the Huberman Club about that.
Speaker 2:EMS?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, and he had someone on who is like a brain scientist and who's basically, like, it's chill. So, you know, I think, there's like there's like the scientists agree. Now the scientists agree, but, like, we gotta come up with a new tier for, like, even more conspiratorial tinfoil podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The tinfoil bros. Yeah. The tin tin man.
Speaker 1:Just the bros, not bro scientists. Yeah. Just bros.
Speaker 3:Do I
Speaker 1:need to pretend to be a scientist?
Speaker 2:Dude, we should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here. Like, just like a really really high high quality one.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I think we crushed it. We think we did Yeah. All this stuff. Let's wrap there.
Speaker 2:Oh, ending, our our, you know, potential vice president
Speaker 1:bragging about not Knowing what a VC is?
Speaker 2:The thing is is here here's the funny thing. Politicians used to be able to travel around the country saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with 0 consequences. Oh, yeah. And now almost every single talk that a politician's ever gonna have is gonna be clipped and almost immediately published. Yep.
Speaker 2:And even, you know, there's always they're always running the risk of being clipped out of context. Yep. But Tim Walz can't it's you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that were you know, he's clearly pandering to a specific audience of being, like well, the funny thing with Tim Wall is the guy says he doesn't own any stocks or any financial instruments. He doesn't have retirement savings. He's just planning to live off of the government forever.
Speaker 2:Like, he came out and said, oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. He has his pension from being in the government or whatever. He says he has no he sold his house.
Speaker 2:He doesn't have any he's all in. Like, the guy's all in. You gotta give him credit for that. But he your own exposure to anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He has zero exposure to stocks, the market, or whatever. So this is the guy this is, you know, the the, it was a Dan Loeb who is who is tweeting and saying, like, is this the guy that we really want, you know, making decisions around, you know, the economy Sure. You know, whatever. But, yeah, Tim Wall is going and, you know, he's probably speaking to some group of, like, I don't know, agriculture Sure. Manufacturers.
Speaker 2:Manufacturing being
Speaker 1:Where the VCs aren't in that parallel.
Speaker 2:Apparently, the guy I'm running against is a venture capitalist.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know what he I don't even know what a venture capital is. And it's, like, dude, you can't even if you even if that's true
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you wanna win this race, like, why are you going and bragging about something?
Speaker 1:There's literally a fairly large constituency of, like, VCs for for your campaign. VCs for Kamala. Yeah. And then also it's, like, the Obama administration, the the the organization that they met with outside the government more than any other during the the administration was Google. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Democratic Party is, like, well entrenched with tech and venture capital. Like, this is, like, well established. And so, you know, like, playing this, like, oh, I don't even know what that is. It's kinda silly.
Speaker 2:I feel like he's been the last week has been interesting for him where there was a pic of the or not the picture that the video of him going hunting
Speaker 1:I didn't even see that.
Speaker 2:Where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that to sort of, you know, get the mail vote. But back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun. And then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is is, like, you're kind of alienating both crowds. These guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is. And I think that middle group that doesn't know what
Speaker 3:either is
Speaker 2:is not gonna be that influential in your in your election. But anyways, that's enough politics. I'm looking forward to the next episode. Yep. Me too.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.