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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the fortress Of finance. That's right. The capital of capital. I'm your host, John Coogan.
Speaker 1:I'm here with Jordy Hayes. Today is Monday, 02/24/2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. We're going through SPF that yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced FTX founder. He gave an interview from prison. We're gonna break it down.
Speaker 2:Is starting a sunscreen company called SPF SPF. He said he's been getting a lot of sun Yeah. In the yard. In
Speaker 1:the yard.
Speaker 2:And he needs, like, a better you know, and he he wants to redeem himself by helping people prevent, you know, skin cancer.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. We're going through Larry Ellison. He has spent almost half a billion dollars on an agriculture startup that you probably never heard of. We're gonna break it all down for you.
Speaker 1:There was also an insider's trading scandal in an investment bank involving Adderall. Very dramatic story. We're gonna tell you all about that. But first and, of course, we're going to do to the timeline. But first, it is, it it would be Steve Jobs' birthday today.
Speaker 1:He would be 70 years old. So, I mean, man, what an impact on tech. Probably one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, if not the best entrepreneur of
Speaker 2:all time. Go. Even if you're not David Senra and you're obsessed with the greatest entrepreneurs of of history, it's hard to be a US consumer and not spend at least one moment every day wishing Steve was still around. Like, I'm sitting here with my phone with this protruding camera, and it's, like, rattling here. And it's like, he's like you know, he would never have let that out the door even though I'm sure it's, you know, sells more cases for Apple.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so, anyways, absolute absolute legend.
Speaker 1:So we'll kick it off with a post from none other than Geordie Hayes. Geordie says, happy seventieth birthday to Steve Jobs. He would have loved the iPhone 16 e with Apple intelligence and Genmoji. And, yeah. People have been wailing on Apple intelligence for a while.
Speaker 1:The Genmoji thing is particularly rough. Here's
Speaker 2:the thing with Apple intelligence. Yep.
Speaker 1:Break it down.
Speaker 2:As bad as the feature is from a functional standpoint, it is valuable purely from an entertainment standpoint Yeah. Because the summaries that it does, like, of one of our group chats in particular Yeah. Are so funny that once a day, you send me a screenshot that's, like, this sort of it's not like it's botched. It's just basically seeing a computer summarize, like, something silly happening in a group chat and, like, positioning it as it's significant.
Speaker 1:Yep. Like, it's just Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I can't even give examples, but it it's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's just, like, the the summarization of the bro group chat is one of the best things it does. Genmoji, on the other hand, I have not been having a good experience with it. I'd like to adjust
Speaker 2:Where is it in the app?
Speaker 1:Good question. Not. Very good question.
Speaker 2:I've seen it.
Speaker 1:I had the exact same thought. I was like, where where does this thing even exist? I'll show you where it exists. You go to your text messages, open up to Jordy. I go click on the emoji thing to pull it up, and then you can say describe an emoji, and then you go into the Genmoji flow.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can see this, but it will let you describe an emoji. And so then I should be able to see, like, you know, peanut butter guy or whatever. But I tried to get it to describe the original gun emoji, and it just freaked out and was like, I don't know. Good. And I think that's what speaks to this is that there is a lack of risk taking right now.
Speaker 2:That that kids in the year 2030, emojis will be so nerfed by then. They'll be like, you could send a revolver Yeah. On the on the
Speaker 1:That's literal biologics, and you're like, no. That's actually not what literal means. Literal means literal. But now literal means figurative. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I have I have a little riff on this, and then I wanna go to you. You posted a great, tweet here showing, the the the the switch in culture from the yin and yang campaign that they ran for, I think this is the original iMac. They have one in black, one in white, and it's kind of a silly quirky design in the same way Genmoji is quirky. You know, it's like you could see through the computer is very risk taking, but it was delivered in this, like, beautiful black and white, ad campaign. And then Genmoji says, imagine it, Genmoji, and it's this silly peanut butter and jelly thing.
Speaker 2:And people have made some heinous photoshops of these.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Tons. Tons. Lots of NSFW stuff going out there. Lots of stuff we wouldn't show on on on this network.
Speaker 1:But, I do have a take on this, which is that, I think Genmoji is the perfect encapsulation of the lack of risk taking at Apple, and I go back to the launch of the iPod. So when Steve Jobs launched the iPod, he pulls it out, and he's a thousand songs in your pocket. Yeah. And and it's like and it was amazing. It was groundbreaking.
Speaker 1:But what was the unspoken part of that announcement? Where were you getting a thousand songs from? Yeah. You were clearly downloading them illegally. Obviously, no one was very few people.
Speaker 1:Some people really did take their massive CD collections, rip them all legally Yeah. And then put them on their iPod. But for the vast majority of
Speaker 2:people do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You'd be like, Jordy, I got this album.
Speaker 1:But for the but this was during the Napster era, the Kazaa era. For the vast majority of people, they would download illegal music, put it on their iPod, and create playlists and stuff, and that's where it was. And then but but he had the foresight to know that the iTunes Music Store would eventually become so ubiquitous and so valuable, and Spotify would happen. And, eventually, the music would be legal, but he wasn't going to back down from this idea that legally, we're not doing anything wrong even though we are enabling piracy and making Yeah. Piracy, like, higher leverage, more enjoyable, basically.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And so it was super risky. Now now compare that to Genmoji. Like, if you give someone a tool to make a pistol emoji, they're going to do it. And, yeah, Apple will, like, look bad.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:But you have to give the user agency and let them do that. And instead, they're acting as, like, we're putting up the bars. We're creating this walled garden. We're we're not letting you express yourself. That's a good thing.
Speaker 1:And so I was I was just, like, okay. That's where I feel, like, this this culture. It's not so much that Genmoji is, like, a bad product, although I think the name is a little silly. I I can get behind that is that they have just changed from we're gonna let you do something a little crazy, a little edgy, and but we're not but we're gonna protect our brand. And the iPod, we don't remember it as, like, a piracy device
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But that's what it was. And, but they've really they've really clamped it down. And so
Speaker 2:that's sad. That's a good take. We should make some Genmojis and stop judging them Yeah. Joking about them, and we should start utilizing them in our daily life and use them for a week and then and then decide to to make a judgment on it. Are you making one right now?
Speaker 1:I'm trying and it doesn't work. So it's continue by
Speaker 2:changing the screen. Choose
Speaker 1:a person.
Speaker 2:Do a solid gold podcast microphone.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's see.
Speaker 2:Or actually, no. A white gold.
Speaker 1:Some descriptions may create unexpected results. And so continue by choosing an inspiration for the person in your Genmoji. So, like, okay. I'm gonna make, like, this guy, and I'm gonna try and describe him as Mickey Mouse and see if that works. And it's just it's just very rough.
Speaker 1:It's just not smooth. And they could have just integrated a mid journey style.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the issue with with all of their new their new hardware is reliable. Right? You have no doubt that the 16 e is gonna be easy to use. The new software that they're rolling out, Genmoji Apple Intelligence, is just rough. It's not software that Steve would have rolled out, And that's sad because Apple is his legacy, and he deserves better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But they're printing and, you know, hey. I got a gold I got a gold podcast microphone for you here. Okay. That that actually looks like a what I would expect a gold podcast microphone to look like.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll need to share it later. But, yeah. Not not fully
Speaker 2:the other mustache, man.
Speaker 1:That was when I said Mickey Mouse. And it
Speaker 2:asked me
Speaker 1:to pick a person, and that's what I picked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you had said this before. AI and generative Yeah. Design is so not Apple coded Yep. And that Apple is about pixel perfection.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And, you know, and AI is about getting something that's 80% of what you wanted Yep. At least in its current state. And so that's why you tried to make Mickey Mouse in
Speaker 1:its I guess my other my my other critique is that, like, I'm I'm kind of okay with them saying, look. There's this chaos going on in the generative AI world. We are going to delegate that to, hey. There's a ton of apps that we're allowing in the store. You can use Midjourney.
Speaker 1:You can use, Chat, GPT, Dolly. You You can go and generate images on Grok in the X app.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And what happens there is fine. We're not really gonna police it. But then I think Apple needs to be rock solid on integrating stuff that is safe. And what I mean by that is the fact that their, text to speech engine is terrible still. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I should be able to go to any website and instantly click read this to me, and it should read it to me in a great voice. And Yeah. There's no reason why they can't just integrate they have a better voice model. They just haven't integrated it everywhere, and it's just slow product movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting how the consistent the failure of Siri Yeah. Like, let's call it what it is. Yep. That's a failed product if it's on every iPhone Yep.
Speaker 2:And none of our friends use it. Right? Who are much more likely to wanna adopt new products and and sort of be at the cutting edge. And maybe maybe we're not the customer. Maybe the customer is elderly people that don't know how to use their phone, and they're just using it to Google.
Speaker 2:But but even if you look at the text to, speech to text
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's also bad. Anytime I get anytime I get a text that just, like, seems like, is this person drunk Yeah. It's because they were sent using the, like, speech to text.
Speaker 1:Because they haven't integrated the latest whisper. And whisper's an open source model that they could have cloned. Yeah. You know, they could partner with Eleven Labs. They could buy Eleven Labs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Plenty of money.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when when I when I poke fun at Apple because I've had a bunch of posts now kinda mocking them to some degree. The f one post from, like, stop, you know, doing this Genmoji stuff. Yep.
Speaker 2:Just just commit to being an, you know, a a scaled brand and buy an f one team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, that
Speaker 2:would make me like Apple more than your Genmoji garbage.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:But I do that because I in a small way Mhmm. I want, you know, I wanna play my part in Apple returning to the company that it was. A
Speaker 1:%.
Speaker 2:It used to be it used to stand for creativity and inspiration. It was a brand that when they did a campaign, you actually cared.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's out of love that we're creating.
Speaker 2:It's out of love. It's it's genuinely love
Speaker 1:the products.
Speaker 2:I I grew up using Apple products. I'd never I didn't use a PC until I was, like, a teenager, like, actually. Like and I was I was I was a beast of a
Speaker 1:terrorist all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Gaming, building NVIDIA cards. I I
Speaker 2:was No. And I I so I just grew up Macs all the time. I I grew up with it, and it's my probably favorite brand favorite product company ever by a long shot. And I love it, and they're just running it. They're running it into the ground.
Speaker 1:It's also just remarkable that they were able to create a a brand that has the same vibe and affinity as, like, a Nike. It really is the Nike of tech, but tech is so boring and not aspirational. As opposed to Nike, it's like, yeah. You put them on Michael Jordan, your brand's gonna be great. Right?
Speaker 1:But you it's harder to do that any tech product.
Speaker 2:And every every kid that that grew up, you know, obsessed with Apple now, you think I think of people like Jordan Singer. Yeah. Brandon Jacoby, these sort of incredible some of the best designers of their generation. They all are sad about the state, like, genuinely sad and and, you know Well,
Speaker 1:hopefully, hopefully, something changes. But in the meantime, let's move on to the other hyperscalers. There's a bunch of news. Microsoft has, canceled leases for AI data centers according to analysts. And so there's a post here by Luke Metro.
Speaker 1:He says, Jevons paradox, bros. What do we do now? Very sassy from Luke. We love to see him on the timeline having fun. And I'll read a little bit of the analysis.
Speaker 2:So for context, if you didn't catch our episode last week, we were talking about, Satya going on to our Keshe podcast, talking about how, you know, his model for AGI is just 10% GDP growth, and that's kind of what he's anchoring around and how he uses AI as a thought partner. He also is very explicit in that he he was extremely explicit in that he's excited to be a leaser of data centers. And so having him go on this podcast, which he knows is going to set the narrative for Microsoft. Right? Totally.
Speaker 2:Every analyst that's covering Microsoft is watching that. Every media, like, legacy media outlet that's covering Microsoft is watching that. And so he's going on the podcast saying one thing. Meanwhile, the timing, I'm sure I'm sure it was somewhat random, but the timing of, like, a few days later coming out that he's actually, you know, buy getting out of leases. Yep.
Speaker 2:One of the things just to potentially give him some credit is forget who I I forget the CEO. There was a CEO on on on 20 VC talking about how everybody's treating, data centers development as real estate where it's like, hey. Let's just build this building. Yep. And then and then it's it'll just gonna it'll lease and, you know, it's sort of passive.
Speaker 2:And his point of view is that is that a lot of people are treating data center development like real estate, and that's leading to people undelivering on, you know, they they raise a hundred million dollars, build a data center, but then they actually don't have the technical capacity to operate it efficiently. Or, he was saying there's I wish I remember this guy's name. He was saying there's a nine ninety month lead on generators. So if you wanna get generators to power your data centers Yeah. Good luck.
Speaker 2:Right? And so the transformer shortage. Yeah. The transformers is a big one. But, but anyways, that you could imagine that that there is a scenario where Microsoft had committed to leasing data centers that were not delivering, and they knew that.
Speaker 2:And they said, we're getting out of this deal, like and then the market reads out as, oh, there's an oversupply. Like, they're done with CapEx. They're not in Stargate. And, you know, what happens from there?
Speaker 1:What happened with, Goldman Sachs, in 02/2008, right, as the housing bubble was bursting?
Speaker 2:I was Yeah. He was five years old.
Speaker 1:So, so, basically, you know, the the the quick version of the too big to fail is that, you know, interest rates were low. There were a lot of incentives for Americans to buy homes. You've seen the big short. Yeah. You know, there's a clearly a housing bubble.
Speaker 1:House prices are rising extremely fast, driven a lot by easy credit. And the ninja loans, no income, no job. You just call the bank and say, oh, yeah. Like, I need to love a mortgage for a third house. Like, I I make 10 k.
Speaker 1:And they're like, okay. We're not gonna verify that, but we're gonna give you the mortgage. Crazy. So there's clearly a bubble. A couple people figure it out.
Speaker 1:Michael Burry is the famous one, the hedge fund trader who made the big trade against mortgage backed securities. But Goldman clocked it too, and they so they didn't go bust during the downturn. Lehman went bankrupt. AIG got into a bunch of trouble, needed to bail out. But Goldman, they saw it coming.
Speaker 1:And so what they did was they had this massive, building, and we sold it and did a leaseback. So they didn't have to move, but they just now instead of taking the risk on the value because they own the asset, they were leasing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so as the price fell, they were able to just, like, not take the loss on their building that they owned. And so you could see something like that playing out if you if such as kind of, hey. I'm calling the top on data center build outs. I'm gonna sell some of my Yeah. My owned, you know, real estate effectively Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then lease it back when I need
Speaker 2:There's also there's also people don't realize how much leverage Microsoft has in these types of transactions. If you're the elephant in the room, the the the the eight you know, whatever, the the gorilla Yeah. You can go out and be like, he might have wanted, you know, he might have wanted to send a signal to the rest of the market Yep. That if you're not, you know, executing you know, we we don't there all this came out. Initially, there was a post, I think it was on Friday Yep.
Speaker 2:That just somebody leaked it out, and they were like, my buddy at one. Yeah. My buddy or maybe it was before that. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it was somebody who was like, my buddy at Microsoft says they're canceling leases, and that was before TD Cowan covered it. And so then I think TD Cowan backchanneled and and figured out the same source.
Speaker 1:Put in the report.
Speaker 2:And so we don't have a lot of details here, but we know that Satya from the interview on DoorCash is heavily fixated on balancing the supply and demand. Right? He doesn't want the oversupply because that's gonna signal to the market that they can't do demand planning. Yeah. And maybe there's a bubble.
Speaker 2:Yeah. May just maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, at the same time, I think his CapEx plan is still higher than all the other hyperscalers maybe, or it's certainly up there.
Speaker 2:No. Didn't didn't he didn't he sort of get Google to, like, kind of try to one up?
Speaker 1:Google might be in the same but they're all in the tens high tens of billions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So here's the report. Microsoft has canceled some leases for US data center capacity according to TD Cowan, raising broader concerns over whether it's securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term. OpenAI's biggest backer has voided leases in The US totaling a couple of hundred megawatts of capacity, the equivalent of roughly two data centers, canceling agreements with at least a couple private operators. The US brokerage wrote Friday, setting channel checks or inquiries with supply chain providers. So they go and call the supply chain providers.
Speaker 1:G. D. Cowan said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so called statements of qualifications agreements that usually lead to formal leases. Microsoft said in a statement Yeah.
Speaker 2:Again again, just to be clear, it's totally possible that they they entered into agreements and then felt that the underlying operator was not going to deliver, and that was the reason for pulling out because none of this came out of official Microsoft channels. They could have gone it's possible that they were basically front run on the story. Yep. And they would have released something that basically said to the effect of, you know, we had entered into a long term lease. The operator wasn't gonna have their generators or transformers for years, and we pulled out of it because we can
Speaker 1:This also could be, like, an oppo research, like, planted story in some way. There's a lot of different things that could go on here. Like, Judy Cowan isn't exactly known as, like, the number one researcher on hyperscalers, I believe. Yeah. I would go to Dylan Patel Patel.
Speaker 2:Has Patel commented on
Speaker 1:his post right here?
Speaker 2:Look at you.
Speaker 1:So Dylan Patel, the absolute dog over at semi analysis, wrote on Friday. There was a report stating that Microsoft was canceling data center leases for several hundred of several hundreds of megawatts, alluding to a high risk of overbuild slash oversupply. We discussed this back in December in our data center model where we track every individual data center. Let's break it down because it's quite silly. This was months late info, probably from PTC.
Speaker 1:Pretty much everyone knew this was happening in the in the data center industry because contracts were lagging slash not being signed.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Microsoft was exceptionally aggressive in 2023 and h one in the first half of twenty twenty four with Blackstone owned QTS, getting a large chunk of that capacity in the second half of twenty twenty four, '50 '9 percent of the total hyperscaler preleased capacity, well over a hundred billion dollars was contracted by Microsoft, also a hun over a hundred billion. Since the second quarter of twenty twenty four, Microsoft preleased balance has stopped growing. This aligns with our channel checks as we have been hearing a lot of rumors that in 2023 and 2024, the first half, Microsoft was essentially freezing the colocation market by entering into nonbinding LOIs with a lot of colocation campuses. Our core research product also noted this for Vertiv. Everyone was surprised their book to bill was so low, but Microsoft has a huge commit of capacity, and near term plans weren't shifting.
Speaker 1:Microsoft slowdown is also more evident in Australia, Spain, and UK per our data center model being vague on numbers here, but full detail in the data center model below. All in all of Microsoft were to build like, if Microsoft were to build everything they have scheduled, that's eons above every other any other analyst who doesn't track day by data center like we do. Interesting. So little bit of old news. We we we we can we can give a little bit more color from this, Bloomberg report.
Speaker 1:It closes by saying, in January, Microsoft said it would alter its multiyear deal with OpenAI so the AI startup could use cloud computing services from rival providers. Microsoft, which has also been the company's exclusive cloud provider, still has a right of first refusal when OpenAI seeks computing horsepower to train and run its AI models. Interesting. And so they are, maybe pulling, you know, out of Stargate to some degree and, you know, lots of froth in the AI market. So, yeah, I mean, we'll we'll we'll see how it pans out.
Speaker 1:I there's always been this, you know, bit of Pascal's wager with the AI stuff. You know, if you believe in it and you get it wrong, you wind up with a bunch of extra, like, dead fiber, basically, like the .com boom. That could be bad. You could lose your job. That could hurt the stock.
Speaker 1:But if you miss out on the AI opportunity, like, you are truly Yahoo. Right? And you're not ready for that next build out. And so as, as someone who's going into these high expectations, if it doesn't happen, but you were prepared, people will still see you as, hey. You know, he he he got a little bit caught up in the hype, but everyone did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At least he was prepared for the good upside.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other thing here is that is that Microsoft being the most the most or one of the most significant buyers of, you know, you know, players in the market to lease these data centers
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They're happy to sit back and let somebody carry the cost of this data center independently. And then a year from now, be like, actually, yeah, we do want it. Yeah. Because there's gonna be a bunch of people like that that are just kind of sitting on their hands, like, Yeah. Waiting for a hyperscaler to come around and say, yeah.
Speaker 2:We wanna we'll actually take the space. And the other thing that I think is now, real is that if if Elon has shown you can build a a 200 k GPU data center in a year Yeah. If you're aggressive enough, if you're Google or Microsoft Yeah. You have to be talking to your sort of data center operations team and saying, hey. This is the bar now.
Speaker 2:You might not be able to do it Elon speed, but do it in two years. And then at that point at that point, it just sort of, like, sets a new standard for the pace at which these things can be built.
Speaker 1:Yes and no. So the hyperscalers all made serious ESG commitments years ago Right. That are effectively binding in the sense that they put them into their, not necessarily corporate bylaws, but, like, they made they made they made solid claims around their ESG complaint. And so, XAI has not made those ESG
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Plans. And so they can say, yeah. We're gonna tap the natural gas plant, and we're gonna bring in extra generators that run on diesel. And then, yeah, we're gonna use Tesla battery packs, and we're gonna use solar panels, and we'll use everything versus if you were
Speaker 2:Great point.
Speaker 1:Google, and you were saying, look. All we do is just search we just query a database for when someone says, you know, what's the recipe for pasta or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then they just go look it up, and that's very that's not as compute intensive as AI. Obviously, we know this. And so, you know, it was very reasonable back in 2019 pre LLM and pre really huge l AI models to say, yeah. We'll totally be able to get this to net zero. And and and so, you know, what's gonna happen?
Speaker 1:Are you all of a sudden, you're gonna need a one gigawatt facility? Yeah. Right. No one believed in scaling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they weren't scale pilled when they rolled out those ESG mandates. And so now they're kind of like, hey. Maybe we'll lease from someone that doesn't have the ESG mandate, and then that will help us.
Speaker 2:Is there no look through there, though?
Speaker 1:The look through, it depends. But I I I think that is a
Speaker 2:little bit more. Massaging their ESG commitments over the next.
Speaker 1:So there's always a question of how much you look through. Yeah. Apple has been probably the most aggressive with, like, ESG transparency where they will go and say, okay. We're going, like, three levels deep. And it goes and it goes deeper the more the more, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Severe it is. Like, Apple will go, like, two or three levels deep on, like, the human abuses. Right? Like Yeah. They they really wanna make sure that that there are there's not child labor in Yeah.
Speaker 1:Some aluminum that then gets transformed into, aluminum sheet that then goes into an aluminum bar that then gets turned into a chip that then gets turned into.
Speaker 2:Capital credit for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They really wanna go, like, six levels deep because it's it's really bad for the brand. Obviously, it's bad for humanity if you're allowing that stuff. Yeah. But it's a little bit different when it's just, like, okay.
Speaker 1:The mix of energy that went into this model that was delivered on Azure was, like, you know, maybe trained with some, you know, the, like, oil and gas flaring or something like that, which which, oddly, like, the peaker plants at these natural gas plants, they can be actually carbon negative because it's stuff that would have burned off and gone into the atmosphere, but then it's being captured and turned into data center training. And that's kind of the Crusoe cloud model. Anyway, let's move on to the, new executive order from, president Donald Trump. And we have analysis from Aaron Slodov, friend of the show here. He says, this new executive order is a big deal and can supercharge US manufacturing.
Speaker 1:It's the America First investment policy. It's a direct path to exascaling our industrial base, an idea I laid out in my techno industrialist manifesto. Here's how it drives American reindustrialization. Says, first, it creates a fast track process for allied investment in critical sectors like AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing. That means billions in fresh capital for new factories, strengthening the capacity layer that underpins real world production.
Speaker 1:The policy also expedites environmental reviews for projects over a billion dollars. That's great. Slashes red tape so you can move quicker. Crucially, it restricts adversarial investments in US tech, farmland, and infrastructure. It further deters US money from funding adversarial industries, notably China's military sector.
Speaker 1:This nudges capital back home. Yep. In my manifesto, Aaron argues that reconnecting tech with manufacturing is the key to renewed prosperity. Exascaling factories, advanced robotics, and a skilled workforce can't thrive without the capital and policy support this order provides. Imagine factories that manipulate matter at blistering speeds using AI automation advanced machinery.
Speaker 1:The big picture goal here, out produce our rivals, protect national security, and spark a manufacturing renaissance. For years, the post industrial myth drained our manufacturing talent. Now we have a chance to reignite the spark. This EO is a potential catalyst. And so lots of excitement from the hard tech folks around this EO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, and, yeah, I mean, this was something that we we had talked about in, in just trade negotiations of of, you know Yeah. Maybe when when Trump was was kind of saying, hey. Maybe I'll get rid of, of carried interest and really put the screws to VCs. I said, hey.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes, Trump opens with a really crazy proposal and then backs off of it. Maybe this is giving him leverage to say, look. I am gonna get rid of carried interest if you're investing in our adversaries. Yeah. So if you invest in
Speaker 2:Or just internationally. This is the whole America's First
Speaker 1:investment policy. And so it could be a situation where, yeah, you still get the tax treatment on American companies, but not on international companies. And so so this could be a policy that kinda takes shape that way. Do you have any, comments on Aaron's post? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just thought this was super validating for the work that Aaron and Austin have been doing on, the new American Industrial Alliance. So they've been working, on this in in connection with the reindustrialized summit, which we've talked about before on the show. So, yeah, they've been they were they were super early here. People like Josh Simon were super early here. All of this stuff.
Speaker 2:And this is why a lot of these guys were very excited about the new admin just given, you know, they felt like JD Vance, if you look back in in the thing in the topics that he's cared a lot about, American manufacturing, you know, bringing back jobs that were, you know, taken overseas. Yeah. It's cool to see this policy play out. And, again, with with executive orders, I mean, we don't certainly don't discuss discuss politics on this show, but, it's unclear what they actually will turn in. You know, these are not laws.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're sort of guidelines. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So, it will be up to other lawmakers to actually turn these into, you know, real policies that can, you know, real laws that can actually be executed against. But, great to see. I like the sound of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Lots of potential. Hopefully, it goes well. And good luck to Aaron and the team over at Atomic and everyone else who's building, hard tech in America.
Speaker 1:We'd love to see it. Let's move on to SBF, Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the disgraced founder of of FTX. He's in prison right now. He gave an interview, to the New York Sun from prison. It's fascinating.
Speaker 1:What is the New York Sun?
Speaker 2:How have I never heard of this?
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:Was that did nobody yeah. I know. But did nobody want to cover this?
Speaker 1:It is odd that he gave the exclusive to the New York Sun. Yeah. It's odd that the Wall Street Journal wasn't calling him. There might be some questions I saw in the comments here. Some people were like, why are you promoting this?
Speaker 1:Like, let's just let's just move on from this. Let's not highlight this guy.
Speaker 2:I think it's right.
Speaker 1:I I like hearing these people.
Speaker 2:There's, there's totally an argument. Don't give him a platform.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I'd never heard of the New York Sun. It's, reader supported, $250 a year.
Speaker 1:We don't like that.
Speaker 2:Which is that?
Speaker 1:Corporate supported like us here.
Speaker 2:But it's it's, it's known as a conservative
Speaker 1:Oh, I think. You know? Yes. And that's a big theme here is that he went he went to jail, and he was very liberal
Speaker 2:and now he's saying, and
Speaker 1:now he's saying, I'm I was never liberal, basically. Anyway, I'll read through some of Patrick McKenzie's analysis. If you wanna scroll a couple slides ahead, there are some quotes from the, from the interview that you could interject. So Patrick McKenzie, shares that SBF has a new interview out conducted from prison. He says the highlights include a strong direct statement of his innocence, accusing prosecution, and judge of politicized process, analogizing to the experience of president Trump, apparently maneuvering to secure clemency, implied rationale for persecution, his donation to Republicans.
Speaker 2:Which is fascinating. Yeah. And if if you actually look at there's plenty of data on his political donations.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna try to pull those up. Yeah. Because he did he did donate to both sides.
Speaker 1:He did.
Speaker 2:It's just that the actual concentration of of that of those dollars was heavily left leaning.
Speaker 1:I I I think that's correct.
Speaker 2:And and not, and so, yes, he can say, oh, look at all these Republicans I donated to. They were trying to they were trying to pin me like they did Trump. I'm just like Trump. It's like, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wasn't entirely buying his argument. He says he expresses frustration that s and c, John Ray the third, didn't collaboratively receive balance sheets and other business records from him and rather set about reconstructing them, which he claims delayed recovery and cost creditors substantially.
Speaker 2:So I'm I'm on opensecrets.org right now. I'm gonna just read the first ten
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Recipients, and then we can the the Yeah. The people can decide. So first recipient from SBF to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. Mhmm. Second to the Democratic Party of Arizona.
Speaker 2:Third to the Democratic Party of Nevada. Fourth to the Democratic Party of Texas. K. Five to Democratic Party of Nebraska.
Speaker 1:A pattern here.
Speaker 2:Democratic Committee, in Florida, Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Democratic Party of North Carolina, Democratic Party of Ohio Yeah. Joe Biden directly, Democratic Party of Colorado, DNC Services Corp, Democratic Party of Virginia. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We So I don't yeah.
Speaker 2:I could just go on and on. Also, Kamala, of course.
Speaker 1:The other thing is that he he had said publicly that, like, from his, EA, effective altruist or a rationalist perspective, electing a president is so high leverage. You should be willing to spend a billion dollars on it. You should donate a billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he wasn't talking about giving a billion dollars to Trump. In fact, I think he said stopping Trump is so important that you must donate.
Speaker 2:You can see here he donated directly to Biden and directly to Kamala.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, yeah, very it it it's it's kind of an odd argument for him to make. So he he characterizes
Speaker 2:This is actually crazy. So so on the first Yeah. 50 there of of the donations, there is one Republican. Okay. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:So probably some sort of power law. Truth to it.
Speaker 1:He's, like, 90%, Republican or Democrat donor. So he claims that FTX US was, entirely backed one to one by deliverable assets denominated in say in the same fashion as customer deposits, FTX International, as being levered. 80% of users use leverage features, but solvent at all times with solve with a solvable liquidity problem in November of twenty twenty two. So if you remember this, he was saying, like, look, there's been a run on the bank. We we are we are, we're we're insolvent, but we have the money if we can liquidate other positions.
Speaker 1:It's just gonna take us time to liquidate other positions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And to his so so he does he he was big into companies like Anthropic. Yep. Right? And so if he had been able to hold on for another year
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He would have been able to presumably sell a large and he had he benefited from huge markups in that position. But but, again, you know, they were not Yeah. Like, we gotta put him in the true zone here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If there was a solvable liquidity problem Yeah. In November
Speaker 1:You're only as good as you can act the assets are only as valuable as you can liquidate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're interested in super illiquid problem.
Speaker 2:There's a reason that banks aren't saying, oh, it's great. You've got all this series b startup stock. I'm totally gonna give you a $10,000,000 mortgage.
Speaker 1:Exactly. That's a great analogy. He seems notably better disciplined than previously about quickly dancing away from questions, which if answered directly and honestly, would be damaging to his interest. So he's getting better at actually storytelling here. The unambiguous allegation without naming the unambiguously identified parties that Salame was sentenced to more than, his three confessed co conspirators combined because of his political affiliation, decisions to cooperate or not, probably more load bearing there.
Speaker 1:Methinks, says Patrick McKenzie. Anyhow, it's a remarkable document which caused me to update negatively on his candor, which is saying something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's interesting that that Patrick, who's highlighting this, and and I believe that Patrick was one of the people that initially was pretty vocal
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:In November of twenty twenty three when this was all going down because he's had a history doing highly regulated fintech products at Stripe. Right? So, like, the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Ethics and values and long term thinking and and sort of being able to take, some amount of risk, but not with customer funds.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:know? Yeah. And the thing the thing at the end of the day that I feel like is just so important to highlight over and over is, SBF was operating a hedge fund that traded against his users at FTX Yep. Using their own money. Yep.
Speaker 2:That is objective. Right? He can say, oh, they were different entities, but they were set up in the same place. It was more or less the same group of people.
Speaker 1:And there was a backdoor. I
Speaker 2:don't yeah. And I don't know why. I I remember when, you know, there was a number of things when they were watching their rise. Right? I was building a fintech company at the time.
Speaker 2:I used both, you know, fiat and digital assets. Right? I was working with companies like Board API Club was our highest profile customer, and they did their sort of $4,000,000,000 seed round on our platform. So I was doing this. Meanwhile, SPF is going, yeah.
Speaker 2:We have five engineers at FTX. Blah blah blah. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. I have, like, seven or eight, like, amazing engineers, and there's way too much to do. Like, you can't hit that.
Speaker 2:You know? So there was just so much sort of going on at this time. Yeah. The other thing is, I don't know how all the institutional investors that went into FTX didn't didn't, didn't take issue with the fact of him operating. You know, it's one thing for Robinhood to be selling order flow.
Speaker 2:Right? And and you could very clearly argue that that is wrong in many ways. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's another thing to be an adversarial trading partner that's also operating one of these exchanges and offering some just crazy incentives. Like, you could go on FTX US and get 8% yield on Bitcoin Good times. For presumably because they wanted to acquire deposits to trade with and just be, like, super degenerate. So, like, the yield was them being degenerate.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, to to give Andreessen credit, you know, they were in they were they were in Coinbase early. That was, like, their big, you know, position from, I think, like, their 2017 Yep. Fund. But they easily could have found justifications to say we're gonna do this because it's, you know, it's Completely.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 2:it's, you know, whatever. And they didn't. Right? And so the VCs that initially did it were the kind of people to do, like, a dot eth, you know, profile, you know, things like that. Right?
Speaker 2:They were FOMO ing in
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and, some of the stories out of that are fantastic. The whole the the them being, like, he's playing League of Legends. Like, that's so bullish. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He was terrible at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was your big so so SBF, you know, notoriously would play League of Legends all day long
Speaker 1:But during board meetings, during board meetings,
Speaker 2:during talk conversations with the journalists. But he but your issue with it wasn't that he was playing. It was that he was just bad.
Speaker 1:He was bad. Yeah. He wasn't he wasn't even that good, which is a real tell.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know? At least when at least when Elon's playing on a SpaceX call, he's had someone boost his account to top level so he can so he can speed run the the the hardest level on the game or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. It it it's just like yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just disrespectful to to, you know, play a video game while you're supposed to be pitching a large financial institution. And, I mean, lots of
Speaker 2:respect for our great capital allocators.
Speaker 1:Have some respect. What would your mother say? Your mother would say, don't do that. And and her and his mother was a was a legal expert, right, at Stanford too. Anyway, there there there's some quotes from the, from the interview here.
Speaker 1:We'll read some, on his own decision and claim of innocence. I do absolutely obviously, there are things I would do differently, and that's lots of things. I had a lot of decisions to to do, make as, to make a CEO. But by far, the single biggest, was I backed down from a fight in November 2022. And, you know, I should not have let Sullivan and Cromwell take control of FTX.
Speaker 1:I should not I should have stood up to them and I didn't. And, you know, after that, there were excruciating years waiting. Not just me waiting, but millions of customers waiting, being falsely told that there was no money left and they were not gonna get any payments until recently. And so he maintains, I coulda I coulda, you know, landed the plane. I coulda pulled out of that nosedive.
Speaker 1:But he wasn't doing a good job. Just objectively, he was doing a terrible job with those awful tweets, like, what happened? He was like it it he looked in chaos. Like, he was not instilling confidence at all. And and also, he wasn't doing a good job of he did have days to go try and liquidate the anthropic position.
Speaker 1:Couldn't get it done. Yeah. And so, like, you know Yeah. I I remember I
Speaker 2:remember I remember there was I remember there was they were trying to fire sale
Speaker 1:Yeah. They were trying to fundraise and stuff and and and and shore up the balance sheet and do all sorts of stuff that you do in a banking crisis. But it was just too much of a mess. Yep. And it it was not it was not run run like a proper financial institution.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah. Highly risky. Don't recommend it. If you're looking to invest and actually take it seriously, we recommend public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 1:Well, they have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And Public's been around for a very long time. And They're not overly aware.
Speaker 2:Are friends with the founders. It's why we partnered and, among other reasons And you
Speaker 1:know what? We were on a call with them the other day. Guess what? They weren't playing League of Legends.
Speaker 2:Boom.
Speaker 1:They were engaged in the conversation. I could see them because we were they had a very nice conference room, and they weren't even on their laptops.
Speaker 2:Present.
Speaker 1:They were locked in. We were locked in. Yeah. And this is valuable. And so, Leaf from public says, this is great.
Speaker 1:% agree. A quote about Palmer Lucky, which I thought would be fun to highlight on the show here for you. At some point in business, in life, and in romance, you have to commit to a path, said the 31 year old lucky. A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy. They're always pursuing everything with optionality.
Speaker 1:Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I'm not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I've got my options open.
Speaker 1:I need to make sure that I'm not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children? I don't know. Maybe I'm not ready to commit to that path. In keeping their options open, they ensure that they're going to jump from option to option.
Speaker 1:If you don't commit to a path, you are going to fail at it. You have to commit to it to make it work, and I think marriage is the same way. You You just have to commit to it. You have to say, this is the path I'm on. For better or worse, I'm going to double down on it.
Speaker 1:The one thing money can't buy, said lucky, is people who liked you before you had money. I'm very lucky that I met my wife back when I had literally nothing. When we met, I had less than $300 in my bank account. I probably should have gotten married, should have married her when I was 16. Looking back, I think that's probably my radical belief.
Speaker 1:And I love that Leif is sharing this. I think it's a great post, and I think it's a great message.
Speaker 2:That resonates. I, I met Sarah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was early in Branded Native, and I'd never actually taken a proper, like, profit share Yeah. From it. So I met her, and I was, like, basically still broke. I was making I was paying myself, like, $4 a month Yep. Living in LA, like, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:And we met, and, like, on our second date, I I bought a nine eleven on Bring a Trailer. Yeah. And I, like, pick her up in it, and I hadn't actually driven manual a little in a little bit. So I was, like, a little bit nervous because, like, I didn't wanna stall out in, like, LA traffic. And she looks at it, and she's like, oh, that's cool.
Speaker 2:Like This is so funny. And and, like, never never even, like, brought it up again. Like, I was like, wow. Like, that that was it.
Speaker 1:This is this is so funny because I have the exact same story about my wife, Emily. Early Soylent days, 5 k a month, making a little bit more than you would guess.
Speaker 2:For that extra 1 k.
Speaker 1:The extra 1 k went a really long long way. My mom had retired and bought a, a Boxster, so I bought that.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:Took her out. Same thing. Who cares?
Speaker 2:I didn't know your mom was a legend like that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Manuel.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:It was fun. It was fun to drive.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You drive you take that thing out. It was it was fun. Fun for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The girls don't care. But, yeah, I met Emily back in high school. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, we we went off into different colleges, but then reunited, and and it was great. And, yeah, you know, like, went the went the distance, like, committed very early. And I think it was good. And you just keep
Speaker 2:No. It's a real it's a real, you know, this kind of thing, the idea of of meeting, you know, if you're become super successful before you meet, you know, your your significant other Yeah. That a % is a factor. Like, women are analyzing Yeah. Their their life partner based on in my situation, it was entirely potential.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. She would she I I I was, like, for her, it was, like, the greatest angel investment of her life because she's basically saying, I'm gonna bet my life on this person. Like, I hope that I hope that it, you know, pays off. And, same thing, you know, same thing for Emily. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Anyways Get inspired.
Speaker 1:Get on public. Create an account. Move your assets over.
Speaker 2:Linking it back to the ad. This is why to
Speaker 1:the ad.
Speaker 2:This is why, you know, artisanal ads. None of this is AI generated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to a fantastic post from David Sanra over at Founders Podcast. He's sharing some insight from Larry Ellison. Larry says, life is the only miracle. I don't waste a lot of time.
Speaker 1:I work intensely on things I care about, and I spend my time with people that I care about. I do what I want with my time because I know there's not much left of it. And Larry Ellison is 80 years old, I believe. He looks fantastic. I think he's got another forty, fifty, sixty, eighty years left in him.
Speaker 1:I hope he's around forever. I
Speaker 2:mean, he's He's aging the best out of the tech titans Oh, yeah. By a long shot.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd like to see him in some Bottega. Like, like, Like Bill? Bill. Yeah. Good old Bill Gates.
Speaker 1:Anyway, there is a story about, half billion billion dollar quest he's been on to change farming that I think a lot of people weren't even familiar with, so I wanted to do a little deep dive. In a row of six greenhouses on a remote stretch of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which I actually was on six months ago, it's
Speaker 2:Were you at his resort?
Speaker 1:I wasn't at his resort. I was at the Four Seasons, which is I think I think he owns the island and leases the land to the Four Seasons.
Speaker 2:Probably pays for his resort. Yeah. Probably. His his property, there's two of them. There's Sensei Yep.
Speaker 2:Lanai, which I haven't been to, but Sensei Porcupine Creek
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Is so good Cool. That we need to do a a t b p n meet up there at some point. Because since there's only, like, I think, like, 30 rooms.
Speaker 1:And so he's been working, to use his golden touch to intact to remake the way people around the world eat. The company behind this effort, Sensei AG, Ag, Sensei AG, is eight years in the making and has cost the world's fourth richest person more than a half billion dollars, far more than he spent buying the island itself. Early on, Ellison touted cutting edge technology that would modernize agriculture, make a big impact for society, and eventually help grow food in places such as Africa. The billionaire the billionaire has told executives he sees the project as part of his legacy. So far, it's mostly been a bust.
Speaker 1:So little bit of a hit piece here from the Wall Street Journal, Tom Doton. We might have to put you in the truth zone. Maybe there's something here. But, you know, these things happen all the time. People who are rich invest in crazy stuff, crazy ideas, and crazy ideas don't always work out.
Speaker 2:And it's good.
Speaker 1:And who knows? It might be too early to write this one off, so let's break it down. Little of the revolutionary tech the company has extolled sensors to monitor development, artificial intelligence to breed crop varieties, and robots to harvest plants is being used according to people familiar with Sensei. So they're still early. The company has been beset by problems, typical to tech startups, including executive changeovers, shifting goals, and bad Wi Fi.
Speaker 1:They need Starlink out there. Yeah. Call the buddy Musk. Fix it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They are boys. Musk texts Musk Musk texts Ellison being like, are you good for 2,000,000,000? Yeah. Are are you he's like, really?
Speaker 2:I I remember there's this text exchange where he says I
Speaker 1:almost printed it.
Speaker 2:He says, you should invest in the the Twitter buyout, and he goes, okay. Sounds fun. Yeah. I'm in for a billion. And then, and then Elon goes, well, really, you should do, like, two.
Speaker 2:I I think you should do two. This is, like, so
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:Same interaction that a seed, you know, seed series a founder is having. It's like, come on. Like, do two.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. Do 2,000,000.
Speaker 2:Do you believe in me?
Speaker 1:Come on. With with three extra zeros at the end. I love it. The greenhouses, for example, weren't built to withstand Lanai's strong winds, and their solar panels have broken down. Some of the top executives are tech veterans who have no commercial agriculture experience.
Speaker 1:The 80 year old Allison and his sensei ag cofounder, celebrity doctor David Agus, envisioned the farm as an ambitious tech venture that would use new techniques to grow tastier nutrient rich rich food. Far from the feeding the world, its crops of lettuce and cherry tomatoes are only enough to supply the few groceries restaurants on the ground.
Speaker 2:In market. Yeah. That's more than most hard tech companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's working on. One personal one person familiar with the operations described the output as being, like, promised a Bugatti and ending up with a Yugo. What a funny What
Speaker 2:is a Yugo? I actually don't know.
Speaker 1:You don't know what a Yugo is? Oh, it's like the cheapest and most failed car of all time. They're actually trying to bring it back.
Speaker 2:Is it a Russian?
Speaker 1:It's like a Eastern European car. Yeah. It was I I like
Speaker 2:this car.
Speaker 1:Swapped. Yeah. So there's trying to there's a guy who's trying to bring it back. He designed it, and he's going on a world tour with the original Yugo.
Speaker 2:I just have a thing
Speaker 1:to earn.
Speaker 2:Money. Hatchbacks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Although the farm has little to do with Ellison's core business, software giant Oracle, the tech mogul has called the project and the island more broadly part of a grand experiment in sustainability. Agus, a medical doctor with no previous agricultural experience, said that which I don't care about, said that when Ellison approached him on the project, the billionaire's lofty goals are returning Lanai to its farming roots after decades of destructive pineapple farming while also setting the blueprints to feed the world we're too good to pass up. We have an island that we that we can't grow things on, that we need food for. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, let's change agriculture. The company has been using the the past few years to gain experience with growing crops to and perfect its technology. He said in an August interview, adding Sensei was aiming to have a prototype of its new tech by the end of twenty twenty five. That timetable has, since been extended extended to mid year twenty twenty six. And so lots of, lots of rough times for them.
Speaker 1:Let's, let's move forward. There's a lot here. This is a this is a really
Speaker 2:deep dive. Overall, this is exactly what I wanna see billionaires spending their money on.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:One thing besides cars, watches, art
Speaker 1:Islands.
Speaker 2:You know, etcetera. Islands. Yeah. I think this is one of those things. This scenario happens quite often where a bunch of the tech elite look at an industry and they say, yeah.
Speaker 2:We can fix this
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And get a little bit in over their skis in the sense that, you know, maybe trying to solve problems that are problems for you know, that are hairy problems. Right? Like, farming is one of humanity's oldest, you know, industries. And there's also been a bunch of you know, one thing that I've noticed, there's a company I help start called Resource Monitor.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, we make, smart meters for groundwater producers. So people that work in oil, gas, ag, etcetera, golf courses, etcetera, that are producing a bunch of water. One thing I've noticed through that is there's a lot of peep you know, this is a tech solution for a traditionally, like, legacy industry. The the alternative products that people use are these sort of, you know, these sort of, very these legacy meters that are you know, were made in the early nineteen hundreds, so we've been running on the same tech. But when you talk to people in that industry, there's a bunch of super smart people that are very future future, you know, forward in many senses, and they are actively working on solutions to all their problems all day long.
Speaker 2:So they are, like, problem solvers. And so it's not like you're going into ag and there's been zero investment in technology and and there's been no Totally. Smart like, sometimes you go into an industry and you're like, wow. Everybody here is is making a bunch of silly, dumb decisions. I don't think ag is necessarily the same way.
Speaker 2:Like, there's there's it's such a it is one of the most critical industries in the world outside of energy, and there's been a bunch of smart people working on it forever. So coming in and slapping solar panels and new sensors and stuff like that isn't gonna automatically
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Deliver, you know, incredible yields.
Speaker 1:If any if anything, the criticism of the American agriculture industry is that it's, like, too hyper optimized. And and companies like Monsanto have, like, gone crazy with, like, oh, if this seed gets in your farm, it blows over, bird takes it over. We're gonna take a cut of that because we're gonna gene sequence this your your crops, and and we're gonna know that you have the drought resistant tomatoes or whatever, and you're gonna pay us. It's, like, it's very hyper technology driven already. So, given a little history here in the nineteen twenties, Dole turned Lanai into Pineapple Island, and for a time, it produced 75% of the world's supply of that fruit.
Speaker 1:The island still has many brightly colored plantation homes dating to that era, but years of damaging agricultural practices, including the use of plastic piping and chemical ripening agents, polluted the soil, and made it largely inhospitable to commercial farming. Access to fresh water has also been an obstacle. In 1985, Lanai was taken over by real estate developer David Murdoch, who phased out pineapple plantations and converted it into a luxury vacation spot. He sold 98% of the island in 2012 to Ellison, whose fortune is around 200,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Keeping 2% is so gotta be so annoying to Ellison. Yeah. It's like I think it might be something that
Speaker 1:owned or something.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. It'd be funny it'd be funny if if he's like, yeah. You can have the last 2%, but it's gonna be a billion. Yeah. Cough it up.
Speaker 1:And so, the entire island or 98% of it sold for $300,000,000. Absolute steal, I think. I mean, they're they're not making any more of these islands, and it's beautiful and wonderful. There's a picture of the beach there that's fantastic. I think I've actually been to that exact beach.
Speaker 1:Murdoch was often seen was an often seen paternalistic figure who waved to the locals. He called his children kinda weird.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's
Speaker 1:Kinda nice, but kinda weird.
Speaker 2:If he was thinking about it and and how I, you know, in a in a very nice
Speaker 1:He's he's, he's big bro ing them, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He should have been like, these are my bros.
Speaker 2:If they're his children and he's providing them, you know, a It's
Speaker 1:not equal footing. Allowance. It's not equal footing. If he's
Speaker 2:giving them an allowance It's paternalistic. Expect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just be like, hey. These are my bros on this island. Ellison is more of a mystery to the Lanai to Lanai's 3 Thousand 2 Hundred residences residents. A few interviewed said they'd never seen him, although his presence is is apparent in other ways.
Speaker 1:He is the largest employer, including at his resorts on the island. He's paid for benefits such as CT scanner at the local hospital. He's building a new rental new rental homes, also luxury residences along the coast for his family, which he is higher.
Speaker 2:His residences. Yeah. So he has six homes on PCH. Okay. Two of the six burned to the ground.
Speaker 2:And, apparently, during the LA fires, the firemen basically put up a line at the second home and said not another one. And they just made sure that the the other stayed standing. So
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:He also has a he also owns a tennis club in Malibu.
Speaker 1:Oh, I did not. The billionaire whose son and daughter are both in the movie business rebuilt a century old theater that boasts it as the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawaii. He's also rebuilding the long shutter bowling alley and planning a dessert bar for the snack menu. He's having fun. Let's go back to sensei greenhouse versus wind.
Speaker 1:Ellison hired an Israeli firm to produce the greenhouses as suggestion by his friend, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That's so funny that he's just, like, texting with his bro.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Literally runs Israel, and he's just like, who should build these greenhouses? He's like, oh, I got a buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Some company here.
Speaker 1:That's what
Speaker 2:he said. Gotta have a guy for you.
Speaker 1:Is considered a leader in greenhouses. The structures were designed for that country's desert climate and weren't built to handle Lanai's humidity. And so, Lanai has gusts of up to 80 mile per hour winds. It's actually very hard to land there with the planes. There's a lot of times when it's, oh, you can't get there.
Speaker 1:Like, when we went out there, we couldn't get there the first day, and we had to stay on the big island the first day. The winds blew the roofs off the greenhouses multiple times. Ellison said the structures would cost 12,000,000, but they wound up costing 50,000,000. So, yeah, I mean, this is the part of, like, being in founder mode is hard when you're also the founder of Oracle, and you're also value.
Speaker 2:It's all this this scenario where by Allison making this his personal project Yep. Trying to make it a business, but simultaneously saying that it's his personal project that he feels is part of his legacy. Yep. It warps economic reality to the point where you can no other farm in the world outside of some mega monstrosity for Monsanto Yep. Is gonna spend $50,000,000 on on CapEx at a small farm.
Speaker 1:And it's like, if you're already a celebrity doctor, your boy is with Ellison, you're probably super rich. There's so much money flowing into this company. You're gonna be taking, like, a cushy salary.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you put one of the gundo bros on this. Like, they're gonna be out there in the 80 mile an hour winds with, like, duct tape and Holding a spot welder. Yeah. Like, making sure it doesn't fall apart.
Speaker 2:And making content out of it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Using it
Speaker 2:as a viral moment. They were afraid. You see, the issue here is they're getting a hit piece from the journal. Exactly. Augustus would have been holding
Speaker 1:it together. Holding it together. I have the mandate of heaven. I have the mandate of heaven. A %.
Speaker 1:And that's and that's what you don't get with, you know, like, some young kid Yeah. They just basically be like,
Speaker 2:oh, this is this is effed. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's get
Speaker 2:out of here. We'll come back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll go to the resort tonight. This
Speaker 2:is too crazy. Now we're going to Nobu. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're gonna Nobu.
Speaker 2:Sam and Nobu. The thing about Allison, he's, I think, a major investor in Nobu. He owns, I think most
Speaker 1:of the There's Nobu at the forces of Nobu. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what's great about Sensei. It's it's, it's probably half the price as Amon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But every restaurant on the property is a noob. You could be playing golf, drop into the little golf, you know, shack, and it's a noob.
Speaker 1:It's so wild. There's some other great, quotes in here about Ellison and his boys. Ellison frequently took friends and other favorite guests at his resort on the on tours of the indoor farm, including, former British prime prime minister Tony Blair and actor Robert De Niro.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:So he's just brown out with, with Bobby De Niro and Tony Blair and being like, let's go tour my farm. He routinely went through the greenhouses picking tomatoes off the vine, offering them to guests, and eating them unwashed despite having been told they weren't organic and had been sprayed with pesticides. On a tour with Blair, Ellison offered him the unwashed tomatoes. He's a drunk guy.
Speaker 2:Look at him. He looks he looks amazing.
Speaker 1:He eats his eating. He's eating these pesticide tomatoes. That's the secret.
Speaker 2:Fresh pesticides.
Speaker 1:It's it's the Midwitt meme. The genius and the
Speaker 2:He's probably got a he's probably got cans of canola oil
Speaker 1:that he just cracked there. Chugging. Meanwhile, the midwits, like, I can't have any pesticides. No microplastics. You know?
Speaker 1:Elvis is just like, feed me anything. I'm fine. Blair declined to eat the unwashed tomatoes. He's like, I'm good, actually. No thanks.
Speaker 1:But we'll see. We'll see how Tony Blair looks at 80. You know? Yeah. Maybe Ellison's got him beat.
Speaker 2:I'm looking it up right now.
Speaker 1:Sensei acquired facilities in Vancouver and Ontario for almost 3,000,000 square feet. The company bought them from cannabis companies as that as that market crashed, but the needs of of a marijuana grow house differed substantially from a greenhouse for other crops. Cannabis needs, special lighting and segregated rooms. Interesting. And so we'll close out here.
Speaker 1:They have a software focus. Sensei lever later sold off the Vancouver acquisition. Overall repairs and retrofits of the Canadian facilities cost around $200,000,000. That is so much to burn for, like, you know,
Speaker 2:early stage market. See that the p and l.
Speaker 1:I know. It's just so easy when when it's like, oh, yeah. Like, $200,000,000. I have $200,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, that's the equivalent of, like, a $50,000,000 fund hearing about a company burn 50 k. You know? It's like yeah. Yeah. That's Oh, you spent 50 k on a facility or whatever.
Speaker 2:Being being one of many produce suppliers on Lanai has to be about, I would guess, to be about maybe as 500 k.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nothing.
Speaker 2:May maybe, like, maybe maybe 7 fig maybe 7 figures if you count the guess and, like Yeah. That just have high
Speaker 1:volume. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but still, that's a pretty gnarly looking, p and l.
Speaker 1:Apparently, the box lettuce markets, what they do is they grow lettuce, indoors. And there's been a bunch of these vertical farming startups and and indoor farming startups, but box lettuce is a saturated market. And most people, when they go to Arrowon, they just buy the Arrowon version of box lettuce, or they go to Trader Joe's, they just buy the default. Yeah. The very few people have been able to build a brand around particular, pre like, prepackaged produce.
Speaker 1:It's really, really hard because you look at it and you're just like, that looks like a tomato, like anything else. Like, do I really care? The vision was so big, and then it just slowly got whittled away as we faced the up to the realities of implementing on Lanai, a former general manager said. Sensei's chief technology officer, Danny Hillis, Agus said, Hillis is renowned in the computer world for developing networking techniques, though he lacks commercial agriculture experience. He leads the company's AI efforts, which Sensei believes can help it predict and cross breed crops to optimize nutrition.
Speaker 1:Software can also be used to increase efficiency in water and energy use despite moving through several chief executives, Ellison and Agus, in 2023 appointed Dave Douglas, a partner of Applied Intuition, a Boston based tech company that Ellison owns part of. The software engineer lives in Massachusetts and runs the company remotely. And, again, this goes back to, you know, it's it it it is tough, it is tough to run a company remotely. It's tough to not have a founder that has 50% of the company and is like, if this works, yeah, I got money from Larry. But if it works, I'm gonna be remembered.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's hard. Hard to delegating your
Speaker 2:ups work. Startup founders and executives having very low cash comp is sometimes seen as a bug. People are like, oh, it's such a shame that this person Yeah. Could be working at a start up, but they need and it's like, no.
Speaker 1:It's a feature.
Speaker 2:As soon as people start making, you know, 300 k plus a year Yeah. The qual you know, just like the the drive. You just lose that dog and you the dog stops barking. It's true. And, you burn $500,000,000 in a few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's been a few of these projects like that blimp one that, the Google founders are working on to Larry Page. Yeah. We got it.
Speaker 2:We got it.
Speaker 1:This. We got a deep dive.
Speaker 2:Dive that.
Speaker 1:And it was the same thing where they put someone in who's, like, very real well respected, very smart guy clearly, but older in his career. And when I see that, I just think I would I just wish these guys would instead go and give, you know, money through, like, a YC model almost and just get the money into a bunch of young hackers, let them build a bunch of stuff. A bunch of the stuff won't work, but you won't incinerate as much capital, and you'll probably more likely to actually make a make an impact and and drive a generational, thing unless you're willing to do the Elon thing and then just actually sleep in the factory and, like, drive everything like crazy. And and and that's been working for Elon, but he's he is the exception to the rule. Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, if you're looking to spend some time in Hawaii, we recommend going to wander.com. They have some fantastic places in Hawaii. Find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge surface. It's a vacation home, but better. Home.
Speaker 1:I got the Wander hat on. We're doing hats today. And so I looked on Wander. I found a place in Hawaii. It's the next slide.
Speaker 1:The Waikoloa Beach, five bedrooms, six and a half baths, eight beds, 16 guests, 5,000 square feet. It's club access. You can wander the luxurious coastal retreat offering break breathtaking panoramic views of the ocean, surf, beach, and mountains. This stunning residence features a 17 meter pool with an elevated spa, a game room with a pool table, ping pong, and shuffle board. It seems like a fantastic place to go hang out.
Speaker 1:10 out of 10 average guest rating, and you know you're gonna have a good time out in Hawaii. So highly recommend that. And we also have a post from Kyle.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna deal with the Wi Fi issues that Larry Ellison dealing with on his farm. They got blazing goodness. They got blazing fast Wi Fi that you can count on. Yeah. There's nothing worse than getting, you know, to some vacation home.
Speaker 2:You boot up your computer. You're jumping onto a Zoom call to say, hey. Nothing from me. Thanks. And it's lagging out, and they're like, what?
Speaker 2:I can't hear you. And all you wanted to say was nothing from my end. Thanks. You can't even get that through. You're not gonna deal with that on wander.
Speaker 1:No. No. And, Kyle here has a post that we wanted to share. Says, if you thought the first five hundred wander locations were nice, wait until you see the next 500. They are really going going above and beyond in curating just really special places.
Speaker 1:Every single thing I see them share is just iconic and, totally worth, getting a whole group of friends together, getting a bunch of families together, getting your whole corporate team together, doing something special, making some content, doing a bunch of different stuff. And we love Wander, and shout out to them. But let's move on to our next story, which is in the Wall Street Journal. Alexander Sade, writes, John Femena went to jail for three years for running an insider trading scheme while he was a banker at Wells Fargo. I spoke with him about how an addiction to Adderall inspired him to start the scheme and how he's rebuilt his life after prison.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it, Jordy. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean, is this this is a hit piece. Right?
Speaker 1:It's rough. It's rough. And wait until you hear the scheme. It's bad.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna hold thoughts until we hear the full details.
Speaker 1:The the the insider trading ring netted him and his friends millions of dollars before they all went to prison. It started with long hours as an investment banker and a crippling addiction to Adderall. He was 28 year old banker working for Wells Fargo when he tipped off his friends about confidential deals that the bank was working on. His friends would buy shares that were in line to be acquired and then reap the profits, and then they'd funnel the money back to Fermina. In two years, he and his friends made more than $11,000,000 trading off of confidential information.
Speaker 1:He spent three years in prison. He says he came up with the scheme while he was abusing Adderall.
Speaker 2:Okay. And just to just to be clear, $11,000,000 is an order of magnitude more money than you need. You could be trading with $50
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and get have the regulators come after you. Right?
Speaker 1:I've Yes. Super easy.
Speaker 2:I've had Who I had a buddy in person
Speaker 1:bought the stock right before it popped.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super easy. It's not that hard.
Speaker 2:It's super easy. It's not that hard to find. I had a buddy whose dad is a public company CEO, and he was telling me he told me something, and I was, like, wow. Like, the stock is gonna absolutely rip. I wish you just hadn't even told me because I'm not able to buy it because you can there's a direct there's more or less a direct line from the dad to the son to the son's friend, and so I'm, like, out at that point.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so they give a little background of him. He, he got a Adderall prescription to be able to, work long hours. He grew up on Long Island, was a good kid. He was an Eagle Scout.
Speaker 1:I was an Eagle Scout. Shout out Eagle Scouts, but get it together, guys. You're bringing down the brand here. He enrolled in the Merchant Marine Academy. He served in the Navy Reserves.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your service, man. He went to Columbia Business School. Should've stayed in the military, honestly. Yeah. Not insider trading.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you're a fighter pilot, you can do any any Adderall adjacent, you know, product, and they're like, yeah. Good good job making sure the plane gets there.
Speaker 1:There's nothing to steal. Yeah. So we go after Columbia Business School, he wanted to go to Wall Street. So he started working as an investment banker in 02/2009, first in North Carolina, then New York City. The hours were immediately difficult for him.
Speaker 1:He said he was a PowerPoint jockey doing the grunt work from 9AM to midnight at least six days a week, and we can get into what you should do if you're stuck in that role. The answer is delegate. You need to be hammering the table and being like, I'm getting, you know, a direct report immediately. Climb that ladder. Get out of the analyst role as soon as you can, and be like, I'm ready to delegate this because I don't wanna be doing these long hours.
Speaker 2:You have to wonder right now, is there guys that are in his role today that are getting so good at using AI that they can actually that they can actually do the job?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, even
Speaker 2:if you're not people that you wouldn't want people like, the the whole thing and the culture there is if people knew you were getting your work done in four hours or five hours, they would just give you enough work to get back to that point. So I don't know if there's a tangible benefit for the employee as much as the firm.
Speaker 1:Yep. But And so when I think about, like like, the good work at an investment bank, the top guys, it's all relationship based. It's I need to find the company that wants to be sold,
Speaker 2:and I need to and
Speaker 1:and we need to win the deal, and I need to be golfing with the CEO of Nike. And then when Uber comes in or something, I'm ready to put them together. That's the value. And that's why the investment bankers get paid so much because you basically have to pay them an option on the future business that they bring into the firm Yep. Because they can leave and they can take the Rolodexes with them.
Speaker 1:Yep. Then one level down is more like the strategy role actually coming up with an with a deal that is accretive for everyone and all the shareholders get excited. And although that doesn't happen all the time, when it when it happens, you know, and everyone's happy, Instagram for Facebook, like, that's a good example of, like, a good idea, a good deal, everyone wins. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:Then lower down is, like, how do you communicate that? How do I turn the idea of, like, this deal into a slide that tells the story? And you're very good at this in the slide decks, but you don't instantiate them. You have a designer who actually napkin stuff. Or you work in Figma.
Speaker 1:But, the map
Speaker 2:out. Something about decks, though, the the dynamic is that anybody who's making a deck wants it immediately.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And there's always this pressure of especially within the private market world. If you're a seed stage company that wants to raise a series a, you wanna be and, you know, sometimes founders will get ahead of it, and they're like, I'm gonna raise start my process in September. Yep. And I wanna have the round done by December, and I'm planning around that. So I need the deck done by September.
Speaker 2:But usually, it's it's, hey. We had this PC hit us up. It went well. They wanna preempt, but now we wanna run the whole process. So we we need the deck right now.
Speaker 2:And so I I worked on a handful of decks Yeah. In, last year just for portfolio companies. And it was just always, like, I just ended up staying up, like, basically till 2AM with them, like, trying to get them across the line.
Speaker 1:Yep. But a lot of this PowerPoint jockey stuff is is actually a a layer below where you're actually just taking the napkin drawing and turning it into something that looks good.
Speaker 2:Or building, yeah, Common small.
Speaker 1:And that can be very grueling. Now, in the post 2012 era, a lot of these firms have have back offices internationally where they can take a napkin drawing and turn it into a beautiful slide. And they have whole teams of people that just do this, and I'm sure AI is coming in there. So, yeah. Rough time for him.
Speaker 1:He's grinding. He was taking eighty milligrams a day, twice the maximum daily dosage. That is crushing
Speaker 2:it. That
Speaker 1:kept on taking the pills, made him frenetic, aggressive, and willing to take new risks. But let's go on to what the actual scheme was, because I have some takes on this. One night in 2010, while working late, Farmina looked through some of the bank's internal folders on a shared computer drive. He saw that project folders that were changed over the weekend were likely to be tied to live deals. My mind on Adderall would go off on these tangents and come up with these elaborate schemes.
Speaker 1:At the time, he was on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars to pay a friend's mortgage. He had cosigned be be because the friend was struggling to pay. Firmino told his friends to buy shares in the company that he thought had a good chance of eventually being require acquired. He enlisted another friend from college to buy the stock too. Their friends netted north of 500 k in profit from trading on the deal.
Speaker 1:Then the scheme goes on for two years. They use a shell company with a corporate bank account to buy and sell the stock. The biggest score was in 2012, before Chicago Bridge and Iron's, $3,000,000,000 purchase of Shaw Group. Around 10 people connected to Trumina bought Shaw stock and call options all before, all weeks before the deal.
Speaker 2:How how how did this how did this guy do this so brazenly It's and not like Yeah. You actually like, it's so It's
Speaker 1:so bad.
Speaker 2:Obviously illegal even to somebody outside of finance Yeah. That
Speaker 1:Also, he's trying he's doing something
Speaker 2:for you. Also 10 people. Like, how did how did not one of those be, like, hey, buddy. Like, talk to my dad about this because I was like Yeah. Hey, dad.
Speaker 2:You wanna do this deal with me? Yeah. And, he was like, son, that's insider trading.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so, it's so funny because he's doing this piece to kind of rehabilitate his name and be like, hey. This is about, awareness around drug abuse and Adderall, which is true. It's good. It's good to raise awareness about that.
Speaker 1:But he's saying, like, oh, yeah. I took so much Adderall. I came up with this crazy scheme. And the crazy scheme is something that you would be taught on day one of compliance training at any bank. Hey.
Speaker 1:If you have material, non public information, and you give it to someone else, and they buy the stock, and then they pay you for that, that's obviously surgery. This is genius. People with some elaborate scheme.
Speaker 2:It's like a a meth addict saying, you know, I went and stole a bunch of catalytic converters. Like, it was
Speaker 1:the meth, like It's genius. Yeah. The scheme. It's not in a scheme. It's just vanilla fraud.
Speaker 1:It's just vanilla it's like this
Speaker 2:is something the meth, I thought the catalytic converters were Yeah. Like, Pokemon that had
Speaker 1:to be less. There are crazy schemes where you could figure out that, like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, this this signal links to this and this signal. It's like, this is just you had information and
Speaker 2:you just gave
Speaker 1:it to your friend and they just bought the stock. It's like there's nothing crazy going on here. It's so ridiculous that he's framing this as like, oh, I came up with this while I was on Adderall. Like, no.
Speaker 2:This is wild after the announcement. Yeah. So that the when they did this big deal, 10 of them all go in. They make 7,000,000 after the announcement. Yep.
Speaker 2:Femina's Femina. Femina's childhood friend and the friend's girlfriend wired more than 1,000,000 to a precious metals dealer in Manhattan to buy 550 gold bars.
Speaker 1:It's, like, so obvious.
Speaker 2:They flew to Las Vegas the next day and laundered more than a hundred thousand through a casino. Yeah. She's like just
Speaker 1:And so the FBI shows up immediately, told Fermina that, he was sharing confidential information and asked him to help in their investigation. He slams the door on them, but then he started cooperating. He was arrested in December 2012, later pled guilty to five charges of fraud and money laundering in 2013. He reported a for a five year sentence at a federal pen penitentiary in 2015. Eight other coconspirators did jail time too.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah. I mean, very sad to see him, you know, get into a delusions of grandeur, situation where he thought he could get away with something so stupid. But I think the framing of this is a genius scheme is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:He he when he checked in for his first night in jail, he brought a bottle of Adderall with him. Wow. But the correctional staff obviously told him he couldn't keep the drugs. Yeah. So I don't know why this guy potentially, has more muscle than than brain cells.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, if you're trying to get ahead in an investment banking role, Jordy, and you don't want a insider trade, what's the fastest way to get a promotion at an investment bank?
Speaker 2:Get a nice watch.
Speaker 1:Go to bezel.
Speaker 2:The hat's coming up.
Speaker 1:Go to bezel. Go to bezel. Get an absolute hitter. Walk into your MD's office and say, I'm done with the PowerPoint stuff.
Speaker 2:Slam your wrist on
Speaker 1:the ground. The golf course.
Speaker 2:Put me in coach.
Speaker 1:I got a Vacheron on. I'm ready for the big leagues, and, we got a bunch of news around Bezel. Bezel is the best place to shop for luxury watches. They have over 22,000 of them on there, and they fully authenticate every watch in house. I just bought a Vacheron on Bezel.
Speaker 1:It's shipped to to the bezel team. They authenticate it, and then they sent to me. It was a fantastic unboxing experience. I'll share this. They send it to you in this lovely case.
Speaker 1:They send you all these notes. They authenticated things I didn't even know existed. The movement, the caliber, the loom plots indices, the dial, the hands, the crystal, the the serial engravings, the case back, the crown, the lugs, the links, the end links, the bracelet, the strap, the clasp, the the everything. They they check on all the condition. They check on all the performance.
Speaker 1:They actually make sure that it times correctly. They do a timing test.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They give you a receipt, and they give you this lovely certificate of authenticity. I love that. And so, very, very happy with my purchase. Proud owner of a Holy Trinity watch.
Speaker 1:I got the Vacheron Patron
Speaker 2:So nice. So thin.
Speaker 1:And they sent me this wonderful, Vacheron.
Speaker 2:Well, of course, they include the box. There are some watches on there that don't come with boxes. Don't come with boxes, but they focus on complete sets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, so go to bezel, and they have a fantastic little breakdown today of Michael Jordan's watch collection. They have been killing it. If you don't follow them, it is the most entertaining content, and I've just loved this. So Michael Jordan's watch collection is outrageous as you expect.
Speaker 1:Here's a breakdown of his wildest pieces. So the first up is the A Long and Sane Datograph reference 4531
Speaker 2:An absolute hitter.
Speaker 1:An absolute hitter. Look at this. It's on the next slide, and this is just a beautiful piece.
Speaker 2:MJ didn't just play the game. He mastered it. His platinum datagraph is nothing, if not a nod to his refined taste. Its chronograph is so sophisticated that even watchmaker's jaws drop, it's the horological equivalent of a slam dunk.
Speaker 1:I love it. I I love it. This I do this piece, I do love. This is a fantastic looking piece. He also has the Urwerk UR two zero two s.
Speaker 1:When you're the GOAT traditional isn't always thrilling. Enter the Urwerk. The Urwerk's a very odd brand. I mean, look at this watch. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:And, it a watch looks like it belongs in a sci fi movie with its satellite hour display and futuristic design. It's clear MJ isn't afraid to venture into avant garde territory. You gotta be the goat to pull this off. That is a wild, wild one. He has a Richard Mille, diver flyback crazy.
Speaker 1:Flyback. The the the Richard Mille is insane. Honestly, as far as Richard Mille's go, that one, pretty cool. I'm into it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I love the brand.
Speaker 1:Subtlety, not in MJ's playbook. The RM zero three two with this massive 50 millimeter rose gold case. This is a 40 millimeter watch, and it looks, like, pretty big on me. It looks like the right size.
Speaker 2:This watch is basically gonna be big dog. Pretty much everything.
Speaker 1:You go into the MD's office in, at at Wells Fargo, your investment bank, they're putting you they're putting you on the deal team.
Speaker 2:I wish that NBA players could enter the game with watches on. Yep. Because imagine what imagine
Speaker 1:Oh, it'd be so good
Speaker 2:to hang
Speaker 1:with a watch. You just take a Rolex with a face, get scratched up. He has a Rolex sky sky dweller featuring a blue dial that nods to his UNC days. That's cool. His airness his airness sky dweller blends complexity with classic Rolex robustness.
Speaker 1:It's the perfect companion for a man always on the move. Which one's your favorite out of the, out of the MJ watches? What what are you taking? The A. Lange and Sohne, the Urwerk, the Richard Mille
Speaker 2:I like the Urwerk. The Urwerk out of these You would go
Speaker 1:with the Erwerk.
Speaker 2:Out of just adding adding something adding something just wild to
Speaker 1:the collection. Yeah. For sure. So lots of inspiration there.
Speaker 2:It looks it looks like it it looks like an NVIDIA chip.
Speaker 1:It does. Yeah. Erwerk's got some crazy, crazy stuff. There's also, the Hamilton, did a collaboration with Dune that looks really cool.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:They made a watch that was featured in the movie, and you can buy it. And it's not, like, thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:These Urworks are crazy. Urworks doesn't need to do a collaboration with NVIDIA ASAP.
Speaker 1:Anyway, onto the timeline. We got a video that we're gonna try and play. Gavin Baker shares this. He says it's wild. Today, I was sent the following cool demo.
Speaker 1:Two AI agents have a phone call. They realize they're both AI, and they switch to a superior audio signal, g g wave. Can we pull this up, Connor? It's pretty crazy. These two AI agents, they're both in voice mode.
Speaker 1:And if you haven't heard this before yeah. Can we play this? Hi there. I'm an AI You start talking in English and then switch to looking for a hotel for a Computer speak, basically. Hotel available for weddings?
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:And I saw
Speaker 2:Oh, hello there.
Speaker 1:I saw a demo of this a long time ago where people figured out that you could encode something that would be understandable to a machine in, like, this this, like, scrambled thing. So you could play it over an over, like, an audio signal here. You'll hear it now. Yeah. Pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the wild thing is is
Speaker 1:I think we're good on this.
Speaker 2:The issue is that you could basically encrypt you could just get infinitely more and more and more complicated so that machines would be able to talk in front of humans. And even if you had some type of machine human language translator, it could just perpetually get more and more complicated.
Speaker 1:So what, the the attack that I saw was from use a couple years ago, you play, like, a YouTube video, and it would sound just like scrambled, but it'd be like, okay, Google. And you wouldn't even be able to hear the okay Google, but it would trigger your Google Home to do something. So you could so you could be hearing in the background of a podcast some sort of, like, low signal that would say, basically, like, okay, Google. Go to tbpn.com. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then it would load that, and then it would inject something and potentially, like, hack your home device. That was, like, the theory. And it could and it would be you the human would not be able to detect what the command was being given to the AI, which is very cool.
Speaker 2:Haskell Haskell in the chat says they banned droids from the bar in Star Wars, so maybe we're gonna have to start doing that.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is that true in Star Wars lore? I have no idea.
Speaker 2:I think, if what's that iconic scene
Speaker 1:in Star Wars the cantina? Yeah. The cantina. Oh, yeah. There are no oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right. There's no droids. They can't go in. That's hilarious. It's all like damage.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. I love it. Okay. Well, let's move on to Gary Tan. Gary says, intelligence is now on tap, so agency is even more important.
Speaker 1:And there's a quote here that says, capitalism rewards agency far more than it does intelligence.
Speaker 2:This is the dude wipe story.
Speaker 1:There's a
Speaker 2:lot of guys that are Yeah. You know, have the most sophisticated strategy, craziest, you know, future forward idea, and yet dude wipes is doing 200,000,000 a year selling wipes for dudes.
Speaker 1:It's pretty crazy. People don't wanna be coddled, says Riley, the founder of dude wipes, the butt wipe brand as you put it. We know that it's a sticky new habit once people try it because it's cleaner, better alternative. They're now doing 200,000,000, and the products are on shelves in Walmart, Target, and Kroger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I mean, going so going back to Gary's point Yep. Everybody has near infinite access to free intelligence. Yep. And so the the resource that is still in short supply is is agency because these these, you know, bots, LMs, don't have the ability to they have the ability to to think and reason, but not the ability to aggressively act on their goals.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so golden, golden years for high agency humans. Totally. Every single person that listens to this show is high agency. Otherwise, they wouldn't be
Speaker 1:I I mean, you talk to random people and they're like, oh, yeah. I gotta check out that AI thing. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like like, everyone should be using AI in their job to augment themselves right now.
Speaker 2:What number that At this point, you would have had to actively choose not to use it.
Speaker 1:People are just, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because, you
Speaker 1:know, I already know how to do my my job the way I do it. And I and I use spell check. I don't use Yeah. LLMs to help me write my
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Research reports. You know? And I'll have to really force it on people sometimes. I'll be like Yeah. You have a research report due.
Speaker 1:Like, you need to use deep research. Like, go start there. Like, you can't just turn that in. There's gonna be a lot of things. But, like, yeah, at least for pulling a bunch of sources, like, would you do your research report without Google?
Speaker 1:Like, no. Like, you have to use these things. And so, yeah, agency is super important. We're seeing that with, PMF or Die. It's a great example of Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, just being aggressive and and and high agency. The guys are certainly intelligent, but they are go getters, and that's what really separates them. So been enjoying watching that. Let's move on to Carter Donek. He says, an actor having such athlete coded mentality and not being afraid to showcase it rocks so much.
Speaker 1:Timmy has been on a generational run. This is, of course, Timothee Chalamet
Speaker 2:at Yep.
Speaker 1:The, sag awards.
Speaker 2:Play this?
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:don't think we're gonna be able to I don't think we be able to hear it. No. Was it a oh, is this anyways.
Speaker 1:We don't have it pulled up, but,
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. This, go watch it. I was sleeping, because I'm, I'm you know, John and I will Yeah. We'll announce it soon, but we're gonna have a we're gonna open a betting market on on
Speaker 1:our Easter. Yes.
Speaker 2:But, now I I watched this thirty second recap, and and he basically has a, he basically goes on to say that I am you know, you know, a lot of people would come up here and be humble and, you know, like that. But I am going, you know, a 10% on this. I wanna be one of the greatest actors in history, and I don't I'm not, you know, afraid to say that, basically. Yeah. And I think that's what more actors should do instead of going up there and saying, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Blah blah blah. It's like, thank your people and your team and the people that are helping you do what you do, but then also take a little bit of credit.
Speaker 1:Let me play this. Would be to downplay I'll just play it here. The effort that went into this role I'm good. And how much this means to me. But the truth is this was five and a half years of my life.
Speaker 1:I poured everything I I had into playing this in comp of artist, mister Bob Dylan. And I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I wanna be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight.
Speaker 1:I'm as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I wanna be up there. So I'm deeply grateful to that. This this doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I And Of course. Yes.
Speaker 1:Thank you, x, for immediately playing it on video.
Speaker 2:No. So so you know that David Senra that made David Senra wanna run through a wall because he has given it it's almost like him and Senra talked because Senra will give you that has given me that speech. I'm sure he's given that to you being, like, no nobody else is, like, take nobody else takes this as seriously as I do. I I I
Speaker 1:I wanna be one of the greats.
Speaker 2:I wanna be one of the greats. I I I spend every every hour of the day thinking about podcasting and telling the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:Nobody can compete with me. So publicly. And and when I first listened to that, I was kind of like, oh, like, where is he going with this? Like, the beginning's, like, kinda rough. He's, like, kinda just, like, you know, throwing this down, but he really lands the plane, I think, and and gets to a really, really inspiring place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to signal. Posting a picture from LinkedIn, Ryan Prescott says, I'll pay someone 10 k if they can find me a software developer role paying a hundred and 20 k plus. Signal says I've never seen anything like this before. This takes open to work to an entirely new level.
Speaker 2:It's actually so smart. I mean, it's it's it's the open if he did this without the open to work, you know, graphic on his profile, it would be legendary. I think it comes off as a slightly desperate with the open to work thing, but trying to find it trying to find a job, I respect it. And, I think it's smart to flip it on its head and say, you help me find a job, I'll give you my first month salary, basically. That's all he's saying.
Speaker 2:And so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody sees this and builds a product around it.
Speaker 1:400,000 people saw this post. I wonder if he'll find something.
Speaker 2:This is an obvious product within tech of Yeah. Basically saying, you know, if you work at a Facebook, there's gonna be people that met somebody at Meta is gonna see this and be like, hey. I think Ryan would be a fit for, you know, this job we have and, like, you know, help them help make sure their resume was was looked at. You know, there there might be some certainly, companies might take issue with their employees getting paid out on the side to help people get in, but at the same time, they also offer incentives.
Speaker 1:I mean, a lot of, yeah, a lot of companies have, internal rewards for recruitment. It happens all the time, where if there's a bounty for getting someone in the organization. Yeah. It would be interesting if it's, like, basically a decentralized recruiting fee or recruiting platform where anyone can do the recruiting as long as they place the right person the right thing. Also, hopefully, I mean, with AI and stuff, there's new platforms, new matching algorithms.
Speaker 1:You would hope that LinkedIn would be able to do this because they have all the people and all the companies, but, clearly, they're not helping him get a job. Yeah. But, you know, at least the guy is willing to put himself out there, and there's a, you know, there's that chart of, like, you know, the the the path to greatness is is there's, like, this valley of, like, being cringe or, like, putting yourself out there or taking risks.
Speaker 2:Valley of cringe.
Speaker 1:At least this guy is willing to to say this. So good luck to you, Ryan. I hope you've land something quickly. And if you're in the audience and you're looking for a web dev or you're, you know, know someone who's hiring, why not try and go help this guy out? That'd be cool.
Speaker 1:We'd like to see that. Let's move on to
Speaker 2:other people. If you're if you really got that hustle mindset, you'll say, hey. If I hire you for a hundred and 20 k, will you give me the 10? He says, sure. You give him an offer.
Speaker 2:First day, fire your 10 k, fired. Welcome welcome to the
Speaker 3:welcome to
Speaker 2:the real welcome to the real world, buddy.
Speaker 1:Do that. What would your mother say? Yeah. Do not do that. That is not that is not a outstanding thing to do.
Speaker 2:We don't endorse that.
Speaker 1:Endorse that. But it was he's gotta he's
Speaker 2:gotta be
Speaker 1:He's gotta learn the lesson of awareness.
Speaker 2:He's gotta be aware of that. There's gonna be a lot of people out there that just get dollar signs in their eyes. It's like, alright. I'm gonna pay him 200 k.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. $200 for
Speaker 2:his first day, but I'm gonna get I'm gonna get 10 k out. That's
Speaker 1:a good trade. Good trade. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, wait.
Speaker 1:Why is Jane Street trying to hire me? It's like, oh, they just love making good trades. It's great. Well, you know, if he if he doesn't find a job, there's other ways to make money. Barry here, Strawberry, says, the easiest ways to make money, gives a list.
Speaker 1:Men's lust, women's desire for beauty, elderly's health, children's education, rich people's fear of loss, Brokey's desire to get rich quickly. Clearly resonated. Million views, 33 likes, 33 k likes. What do you think? You like this?
Speaker 1:This, there's a guy in Sequoia, right, that says that, he he loves when a company maps to one of the seven deadly sins, which is, like, kinda dark, but also makes sense where, you know, you look at why why do you invest in Instagram? Well, it it it it's it's driven by envy. Right? It's like an envy as a service platform in some ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even something like a trading app platform could be seen as, like, greed. You know? It, like, plays into that natural belief or natural, like, human impulse. But what what do you think of these? Which one would you wanna be in?
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 1:Children's education seems pretty valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a cool one. Although the issue is there's so many in children's education, there's so many people that love teaching children Mhmm. That it's a kind of a hard place to actually make good margin.
Speaker 1:Totally. Right? Like, if
Speaker 2:you wanted to start a new school, there's gonna be a nice competitor that is happy to make, you know, 5% Yeah. Even at margins because they just like having a school. Totally. No. Go going off of this list, I mean, obviously, you know, referencing that that other post by the guy saying that you have to be, you know, greedy, monopolistic, all the stuff.
Speaker 2:It's very dark. I mean, there's just so many ways to make money. I think my favorite my prompt when I'm when I'm talking to people that wanna get into business, but they're like, I feel like all the good ideas are taken, like, that's sort of the classic line. Yep. Every time you spend money, just think about who's
Speaker 1:Who's making money on the other side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And, all of all of business
Speaker 1:fully satisfied?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and then the the main thing that people like, the the fundamental truth to understand about business, you had a funny one from the other week that's slightly different. But, you just need to get a product or service at one price and sell it for a higher price
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And make sure that your operating expenses are
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, lower than than the difference, and and you will, you'll do great. So
Speaker 1:So you so you think a good way to find startup ideas is to kinda, like, track your finances, see see where you're spending money?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's an obvious one. But, And
Speaker 1:do you know the best way to track your finances?
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:Our sponsor ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And we got a post from none other than Saquon Barkley.
Speaker 1:First time on the show. He's getting a reply with a video today. Saquon Barkley writes, thrilled to be a part of the journey at ramp and ready to take this company to the next level, and he shares the video. Already got 500 likes on the post. Go watch the video again.
Speaker 1:Watch the ad again. It was great. And Eric, of course, is in the comments right here saying Yes. So seeing you put your team's playoff run ahead of an individual all time rushing record was a masterclass in leadership. Love the way you demonstrate how you put others first, win as a team, and invest for the long term.
Speaker 1:Grateful to call you our partner. So shout out.
Speaker 2:He, and even updated his LinkedIn today.
Speaker 1:He did.
Speaker 2:Threw it
Speaker 1:up there.
Speaker 2:He's got a few jobs. Fantastic. He's got his job at, at the Eagles. Yeah. Now he's an investor at Ramp.
Speaker 2:So we'd love to see that he's finding time to update the LinkedIn in the off season, you know, getting ready for the next run.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, let's move on to Dylan O'Sullivan. Dylan says, Napoleon once said that it's that the surprising thing was not that every man has a price, but how low it is. And I can't help but see that everywhere now.
Speaker 2:You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The cringe posting can really destroy a person. Right? That's, I think that's what he's getting out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But at the same time, you gotta just sometimes some people just need to be cringe for a little bit before they become goated, you know. So it's a balance.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think this is one of those things just follow, your advice. What would your mother think?
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:What would she say? And you'll you'll almost never betray yourself if you're making your mother proud unless your mother is just absolutely insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it goes back to, like, the good quests idea thinking about, sure, there are there are pots of gold all over the place. But when you look back on your life, you're gonna wanna know that you chased an honorable one. Yep. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to AI. Vivek Nazgar says, this is seriously getting out of hand, and he shows something like 15 different AI LLMs, Chat GPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Meta AI, LeChat, which is hilarious, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, Grock, Kimmy, you hugging chat, pie, chat, LLM, and Quen. And Jamie Voyno says, I feel like 80% of these are irrelevant though. It will be in the future. Interesting.
Speaker 1:There are I mean, it is crazy how many l l m's there are and how serious they're being taken. I mean, it's the browser wars all over again, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's it's good. You're gonna get this sort of overinvestment in a bunch of companies, and we don't know, you know, if 80 of these 80 of these will be irrelevant in five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But we don't know which ones yet. And so it's actually good that different teams can duke it out. Yep. Go and, you know, enter this highly competitive market and, you know, innovate and just every single one of these teams is highly motivated to make an incrementally better Yep. Or a 10 x better
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You you know, version of their product every single day.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's good. It's just obviously great for consumers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's clearly, like, many forks in the road in terms of product design around these LLMs. And one company can't really test every new product idea, like what we were talking about with Grok, where Grok will pull in your tweets and try and customize based on that. And that has some amazing and great results and also some terrible ones. Chat GPT has differentiated by, you know, having all these different models, which some people love, some people hate.
Speaker 1:Gemini, obviously, the huge context window. Meta AI baked into, you know, all these products that you use, all the messenger products. And and so I imagine that in the future, the ones that will die off will be commoditized in the sense that they have very similar product experiences to other apps. But there's probably still an opportunity to to create something that is innovative within the LLM framework.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Make your app significantly different, and then, like, what's happening at you.com or, not not you, friend.com where it texts you first. That's even that minor change is a very different interaction. And there's more like a friend. Yeah. Or or perplexity where it feels more like a Google search, honestly, than like a chat interaction.
Speaker 1:There's, like, lots of people taking risks, trying different things. Anyway, let's move on to Bessemer Ventures Partners. Roland is throwing a little shade. He says, who green lighted this? And Bessemer says, the memos.
Speaker 1:Like the night sword, the firefighter's hose, and the lumberjack's ax, the venture capitalist courageously wields the memo.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love this. It. I green lighted that. That's who
Speaker 2:green lighted it.
Speaker 1:It's hilarious. Come on. It's fun. It's amazing. You know?
Speaker 1:You and Jason chimes in, corrects the record. You gotta have a bit of sense of humor if you've been investing more than ten to twelve years. I think it's pretty tongue in cheek funny.
Speaker 2:Like the night sword, the firefighter's hose, and the lumberjack's ax, the podcaster courageously wields the mic.
Speaker 1:Yes. The Shure SM seven b. It's great. It's fun. They're having fun.
Speaker 1:This is what we talked about with with James Bond, where James Bond was satirical, was satirizing the more serious, spy movies. And then all of a sudden people were like, wait, James Bond is is serious and it's over the top. And it's like, no. Like, they were they were having fun when they wrote, like, Moonraker and we're like, let's go to space and shoot lasers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like
Speaker 2:Space lasers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, like, they were having fun with that. And, and there's lots of examples like that, but it but it it it's not it takes the fun out of it Yeah. When when you have to take
Speaker 2:the job. The other the other context that's important here is is Bessemer also shares their anti portfolio of the companies that they missed.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they're not going out and saying, this is our memo. Our, you know, our our our sword always cuts perfectly. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:There's sort of this idea that, you know, hey, this is the vehicle to make investment decisions, and this is a core part of our job. And you should take pride in that in the same way that a knight takes pride in their sword. Yep. I don't wanna read a slot memo. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's nothing worse than, like, getting a memo, and it's
Speaker 1:like You don't want a dull sword.
Speaker 2:You don't want a dull sword. Sharp sword. So, anyways, I can see why why Roland would would think it's funny, but but let's just enjoy it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For whatever reason. There's a lot of value if you're an entrepreneur and reading these memos because then you see what the internal thought process is like at a firm like Bessemer, which is great. Well, let's move on to some, timeline and turmoil. Y Combinator backed a, fusion company that's building fusion reactors for maritime vessels. So And
Speaker 2:they also they also just backed as of an hour ago, a company called Orbital Operations Okay. Developing a high thrust reusable space flight vehicle that will be stationed in orbit to rapidly defend against threats to high value satellites. Yeah. So, yeah. And and people are taking massive issue with y Combinator funding Deep Tech, and I think it's, like, the silliest thing in the world.
Speaker 2:Why are you anti investment in cool technology?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:If they wanna spend their money on these high risk bets and teams wanna spend a decade of their life taking this high risk, why are we not
Speaker 1:why are we celebrating that?
Speaker 2:And I want I want I want them to go back to a thousand companies a batch Yeah. And just have them all be James Bond ideas. Yeah. Or just one.
Speaker 1:Yes. Just James Bond idea. James Bond company that needs to be coined. That's fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, also, I'm old enough to remember when the criticism of YC was, it's all consumer software. They don't do anything in the real world. Well, now they do. Yeah. And you're still not happy, timeline.
Speaker 1:So calm down. You're on notice. So, risk v says, YC keeps doing this funny thing where they know the zerp Uber for x stick doesn't work anymore. So they're shifting to hard tech in double quotes, or quadruple quotes, but still want you to believe that three undergrad dropouts are capable of making a freighter capable nuclear reactor with a seed investment of a hundred k.
Speaker 2:And four So Yep. So funny because this guy, risk v, is just absolutely exposing himself for not understanding how venture capital works. Yep. Because YC's entire model is we're gonna give you a little bit of money. You're gonna make some progress, and
Speaker 1:then other people will give you a lot more money.
Speaker 2:So it's like, exposed.
Speaker 1:The The best thing is You
Speaker 2:got exposed.
Speaker 1:So there's a community note that posts now, and it's, oh, by the way, they don't give you a hundred k. They give you five times that now. They give you 500 k, which is, yeah, actually enough to build, like, a little bit of a lab, some prototyping and stuff, lease some equipment, do whatever you need to. And they're, like, three undergrad dropouts, and then they just post in the community notes, like, here's the LinkedIn of the guy. He's not a dropout.
Speaker 1:Like, he he's actually experienced. Because Yeah. People go through YC all the time who have been deeper in
Speaker 2:their careers. What? We hate dropouts now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What?
Speaker 2:Working at Racked.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Palmer Luckey. Never did anything good in hard tech. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like in fact in fact, a bunch of the best examples are Yeah. Are from these dropouts with who started with with very little, and that's what Spore is highlighting here. Spore says, YC keeps doing this funny thing where they want you to believe that a former Groupon PM is capable of making the first the first independently developed supersonic jet with a seed investment of $1.20 k. Well, wonder how that's working out, and it's like, boom, supersonic. The guy kinda did it.
Speaker 2:He works for, yeah. Put him in the cell. That people don't realize. So YC puts out their request for startups, but the YC batches are a reflection of what young builders want.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so if they're funding more, they are asking people Sometimes they'll give feedback on ideas like, hey. You know, you're doing you wanted to apply with this, and maybe you should do this. Yeah. You know, it seems maybe more interesting, but, ultimately, they're just funding what companies are coming to them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we should be looking at these new announcements being, like, this is amazing. Yeah. We've, you know, we we've gone we're post SaaS. Yeah. We have a bunch of our best and brightest that want to take on incredible risk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All these any anybody that's going and doing this is potentially sinking five years of their life Yeah. This priceless resource Yeah. Into developing something that will only have a positive impact on the world Yeah. Presumably, if it works.
Speaker 2:And so we should celebrate this. And, I wanna see a James Bond y c batch.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah. Also, you know, it's like, what are you worried about here? Like, if it's capital incineration, like, there
Speaker 2:might your money.
Speaker 1:It's not your money. It's super it's You would kill the LPs. Diversified.
Speaker 2:Be an LPs
Speaker 1:in YC. Because they're in so many companies. And and the funds that the LPs in YC are also diversified. These are, like, huge institutions. And there might be consolidation in the fusion industry in the future where, yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:Maybe these guys don't work out. They work for five years. They learn a ton about fusion, and they get a soft landing at the Helion or something. You know? It's like, that could be fine, and everyone could be happy.
Speaker 1:Like, there's so many good endings here. That's what we should be focusing on, as opposed to just, you know, tearing down some people who wanna build something cool. Anyway, let's move on to low yield. Lucy Pico Top, she says, still working remote in 2025 is like being one of those Japanese soldiers who stayed in the jungle for thirty years after World War two. Oh, it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Working remote is rough. You gotta get back in the office. It it's expensive sometimes to
Speaker 2:pull this to you before. I don't know a single goated, cracked, however you wanna describe it Yeah. 22 year old that wants to work remote anymore. Yeah. There are gonna be some of them that build these massive businesses remotely, and they they'll make it work.
Speaker 2:But it's not an enjoyable way to do business. I mean, we have the opportunity we have the opportunity every single day Yeah. That we could skip our commute
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And sit at home Yep. And just turn on the camera Turn
Speaker 1:on Zoom.
Speaker 2:Turn on the mic, turn
Speaker 1:on Zoom. Low effort weekly podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Part time podcasters. But no. No.
Speaker 2:I I Sure. Woke up at 04:45 this morning.
Speaker 1:I'm so hurt.
Speaker 2:I wake up at 04:45. It's insane. I still get a amazing sleep score, and I drive in here because it's the most enjoyable way to do business, and we do our best work in person.
Speaker 1:We do. We do. It's great. Paul Graham, going back to James Bond. I think this is an interesting thing.
Speaker 1:We we talked about Bond on the Friday show. We threw out John Feo as a potential, Bond. But Paul Graham is, posting a, cartoon from the New Yorker. It says, no. But mister Bond, I expect you to star in a series of increasingly bland spin offs and TV shows that have significant viewership decline after the first episode, kind of highlighting what's happened to the Star Wars, franchise.
Speaker 1:And PG says, it would be nice if Bond could avoid the fate of Star War that Star Wars suffered after it was handled handed over to the suits at Disney. But what are the odds? The creator of a franchise can resist soulless execs, but one that's acquired starts out already in their hands. What do you think? Is Bond gonna go downhill with a bunch of spinoffs?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I feel like it's a very powerful franchise if they just try to produce one great film every couple years Yep. Forever. Yep. And I'm happy with that as a consumer.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I actually would like to see a spin off from the Bond universe Yep. Where they spend a hundred million dollars producing this crazy
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Series. I would enjoy seeing that.
Speaker 1:I think what what I like, what there are good spin offs. There are bad spin offs. I think the best spin offs are where they don't try and recreate the original, like, genre, and they actually take it in a different direction. Like, the best Star Wars spin off that I think is Rogue One, and it's because it's not the same structure as Star Wars. Star Wars is the hero's journey
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where it's Luke Skywalker needs to go blow up the Death Star. He he faces a bunch of trials and tribulations, then he blows up the Death Star. In the in Rogue One, it's a heist movie, and so they're trying to break in and steal something, and then they all die at the end. Spoiler alert. But you should know this.
Speaker 1:But alright. Alright. So so I would totally watch a Bond spin off that's a horror film or a or a or a heist movie or Or
Speaker 2:a rom com.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Rom com. Honestly. Honestly.
Speaker 2:People would take issue with that. Or or a movie about Why not? Cars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Make it a raid oblong. Yeah. In between in between, special missions, he just
Speaker 2:goes to twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like Or him just trying to do the nerfering. But I think it's actually lower risk than just trying to recreate the same thing again and again, and now it's a TV show, and now it's a this or that. Yeah. Or, you know, you need to do the the spin off, and it's just Q.
Speaker 1:And it's just him trying to build stuff, and, like, Bond is Bond is incapacitated. He's on an island getting cut in half with a laser, and Q has to work on the next pen that explodes. And so he's calling up YC founders trying to get them to hack on it with him or something.
Speaker 2:So good.
Speaker 1:Anyway, good luck to everyone at Amazon working on Bond. We certainly hope that there's some good stuff coming. Let's move on to Gabe. Gabe says, and and this was a little bit of a spicy post. Austin Kennedy said, today is the my first day in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Didn't expect to move here at 21, but I guess that's life. And he posts a picture of an empty room with a, bed that does not match the bed frame. And, and some people were dunking on this, and we we we fully support this. Go move to somewhere cool where the action is and start building. And so Gabe says, the canonical picture to post when you move to SF is a barren white room with an unmade bed in it and no other possessions except perhaps a laptop, indicating that you have emptied your life of all non essential things in order to more fully receive the blessing of the city.
Speaker 1:And I I don't know how much he's joking, but I I I think it's great. And I think these posts, sure, they got a little bit out of hand with, like, someone became a VC and posted it, and that's, like, a little bit silly because, like, we've
Speaker 2:been doing it.
Speaker 1:It's a little stolen valor. It's a little stolen valor. Like, we know that you can afford a nicer bed setup. But but for the founders that are moving there and trying to take a crack at something, like, this really does save you a couple hundred bucks. You could put that towards AWS credits or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? So I support this. I support people, taking risk, being young, moving, living in a smaller
Speaker 2:I wanna go to SF and and, have get, like, this palatial house and set up an eight sleep. We're just, like, just moving to SF.
Speaker 1:Living the dream. Living
Speaker 2:the dream.
Speaker 1:You know, the funny thing is that this is palatial next to what I so when I moved to the Bay Area, I wasn't in San Francisco. I was in Sunnyvale and then the Tenderloin. That's right. And, also, I didn't have a bedroom. I was split a bedroom with another guy.
Speaker 1:This is the Lord. In the living room.
Speaker 2:You guys didn't you live for almost a year on, like, $16 or, like, you raised, like, a 6 Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's 17,000.
Speaker 2:The first money in was $17, and you were like, okay. We have to make this last for a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is It was brutal. Incredible. It was brutal. It destroyed my credit.
Speaker 1:I put, like, $3 on a credit card and stopped paying it, and, it got, like, a 400 credit score. Took me, like, years to build back up.
Speaker 2:Made it all back.
Speaker 1:Made it all back for sure. But, yeah, I'm glad that founders are able to afford, you know, not completely smaller.
Speaker 2:Speaking of founders, David Senra is in is in our chat right now saying, he said, I would like the ability to call into the show live, please. And You can
Speaker 1:call him right now. Let's call him. Why not?
Speaker 2:Okay. We can call him.
Speaker 1:I'll call him right now.
Speaker 2:This is our first time testing the live infrastructure.
Speaker 1:I'm just gonna give him a call. Okay. Let's see. I'm just calling him on my phone. I'm gonna put it up to the microphone.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, we'll have David Senter call in. Let's see. Let's see if he picks up. If not, we're going to growing Daniel. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Your call has
Speaker 1:been He's
Speaker 2:not picking up. Wow.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's talking such a big game. I wanna call in. Oh, I'm gonna give a fucking doctor's phone number if I'm not careful. Alright.
Speaker 2:Anyways, Senra, give us a callback. Give us
Speaker 1:a callback, buddy.
Speaker 2:We can also, you know, plan. Yeah. And Let's see if I call him on FaceTime. Oh, he says call on Wi Fi. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's see. Let's see.
Speaker 2:And just while we're
Speaker 1:David Senra.
Speaker 2:How you doing, man? Senra.
Speaker 3:Dude, you guys sent me crying.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. Wait. You're talking such a big game. You don't even pick up your phone.
Speaker 3:Dude, you gotta FaceTime audio me.
Speaker 1:You're on an
Speaker 3:island. There's no
Speaker 1:I I almost doxed your phone number because your voice mail says, thanks for calling 7. And I was like, oh, no. I don't wanna give that out. Every every person will be calling you for advice.
Speaker 3:Well, you guys know how profitable podcasts are.
Speaker 1:So you
Speaker 3:know I live on an island, and I don't have cell phone service.
Speaker 1:You actually do have an island. He does live on it. That's great.
Speaker 2:Fantastic island in Florida.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, your Wi Fi is strong. We wanna get we wanna get your reaction to something. Let me find a post for you to react to. Let's see.
Speaker 3:Show what I
Speaker 1:hate. What? What do you hate? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Hold on. Here we go. Okay. Never mind. I'm back live on the stream.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, you gotta mute that so it doesn't play.
Speaker 3:Come on, bro. Not a fucking amateur.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Hey. Hey, world, buddy. Center. This is
Speaker 1:a kid friendly show. Cooler with the vowel language.
Speaker 2:Our kids our kids watch the show.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Here here. We we we got one from have you watched severance on Apple TV? Okay.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic show. I I watched season one. Haven't gotten into, season two. But Joe Rogan posted, severance is a fantastic show, completely original and totally unpredictable. Amazing writing, directing, and acting.
Speaker 1:Just a totally unique show. Just finished season one and on to season two. And Mark Gurman, who is the Bloomberg reporter who covers Apple religiously, he says, look forward to Tim Cook on Rogan. Do you think Tim Cook should do Rogan? No.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 2:I don't think he could hang for three hours. I
Speaker 1:Get him a couple glasses of whiskey, couple cigars, the good stories from, manufacturing come out.
Speaker 3:No. That that that that's such an interesting question here. Like, who has not gone on Rogan that you would wanna see?
Speaker 1:Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai. I wanna see all these guys.
Speaker 3:No. No. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 3:I'm sitting here I'm sitting here editing, an episode Okay.
Speaker 2:On
Speaker 3:Buffet and Munger right now.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And one of the most important things that I learned from them is, like, the important of running the importance of, like, running all your decisions through opportunity costs.
Speaker 1:Yep. So,
Speaker 3:like, make all your decisions based on your best alternative. Right? And, they tell stories for, like, multiple decades, and I think it's actually, like, really interesting way. I was actually talking to our friend Justin on the phone about this, like, last night. And, like, he's got a bunch of, you know, obviously, a ton of opportunity, a ton of ways to spend
Speaker 1:his time Yeah.
Speaker 3:Tons of investments. And and he was talking about, like, being as ambitious as possible with his company. And, should he do that inside of I don't even know. Trevor, you're repeating this on the
Speaker 1:line. But, basically,
Speaker 3:when we came to the agreement, it's like, he's he's a very special person, and he's partnered with a very special person. Yep. And the idea if you if you filter that decision through opportunity cost, it's like, no. You stay with the partner you have because his partner is so fucking course. And yeah.
Speaker 3:So I would the the way if you approach, like, okay. Do I wanna see Tim Cook on Rogan? No. And then my mind immediately goes to, well, who do I wanna see on Rogan?
Speaker 1:Okay. Who do you wanna see?
Speaker 3:I was just actually, this morning, I was visiting a friend and, I was driving to his house, and I was listening to Rope Mark Magnus Carlsen.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's a good one.
Speaker 3:It was really good. And it got to the point where about the importance of, flow and being obsessed with what you're doing Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To the
Speaker 3:point where I was such in flow listening to the podcast, I missed the fucking turn of where I was
Speaker 1:going. Wow.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I don't like, who who has not been on there that I'd want to actually hear from?
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 1:I I just want big tech people for sure. But, I mean, I'd love to see Jack Dorsey go back on post x.
Speaker 2:I think the thing is
Speaker 1:like, Travis Kalanick would be great.
Speaker 2:With Tim Cook is we just need three hours of him on a podcast anywhere because he's gotta explain himself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna know who the real Tim is. Oh,
Speaker 3:out out of all those people, who would be the most unhinged?
Speaker 1:Travis, maybe. If Travis I wanna hear
Speaker 2:I wanna hear Satya and Rogan just go on a rant about aliens for for, like, a couple hours?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Hey. Yeah. Did you guys hear Palmer lucky on Sean Ryan?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I listened to the whole thing. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:That it it was like I think Sean said, like, six words. It was like
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Shit. Oh
Speaker 2:my god. Palmer just
Speaker 1:opens with the with, like, the hard most hardcore conspiracies right up front. He's like, yeah. I'm here loosely promoting the IVAS contract. This is like the IVAS. Like, we got a $22,000,000,000 contract.
Speaker 1:I'm supposed to be doing PR for that, but let's talk about JFK. I love it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it
Speaker 1:So real.
Speaker 3:For me, Rogan is the home of, like, unhinged.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've
Speaker 3:been listening you know, he's the first I I don't know if I told you this story. I didn't I didn't know podcasting was a thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:A friend friend of mine used to invite me over to his house because he was really into UFC.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And he's like, you gotta see this thing that Joe Rogan does. I'm like, the fucking Fear Factor guy? And, it was on YouStream at the time.
Speaker 1:It was Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:See it live.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 3:then one day, I was like, oh, I can't make it over. He's like, don't worry. You can play the show back anytime you want. I go, what do you mean? He goes, it's a podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was
Speaker 3:like, what the fuck is that? And that's when I started becoming addicted to it.
Speaker 1:I need the beep buttons for this guy.
Speaker 3:Sorry. We're all messed up. Rogan's like the the home of unhinged. So yeah. Like, if if it has to be a tech guy using, you know,
Speaker 1:tech guy. Who knows? Maybe Tim Cook shows up and says, look. I don't believe in the moon landing. I think the aliens are in, you know, on Egypt.
Speaker 1:I would love that. If if Tim's been boiling at the surface for years just with the craziest conspiracy theories, shows that
Speaker 2:What if he's like, we're actually Apple's gonna be in the alien ETF Yeah. Because, like, we're using alien technology.
Speaker 1:He's just like, you think the iPhone would work if the world was round. It it would not. The iPhone would break immediately if this was not a flat earth, and Rogan's just like, I'm listening.
Speaker 2:Drop my attention.
Speaker 3:I want Tim Cook to come back on and say they figured out a way to bring Steve Jobs back.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go. Yeah. The frozen and crowded On
Speaker 2:his seventieth birthday would have been amazing.
Speaker 1:That would have been amazing. Yeah. I'd love I'd love to see Tim Cook on on Rogan. Anyway, do you think Rogan, what do you think he uses for corporate cards?
Speaker 3:Oh, ramp, of course.
Speaker 1:Of course. Give give me a little pitch for ramp while while you're on the show.
Speaker 3:It's funny. I don't even wanna talk about what's in our group chat, so we can't say some of the stuff publicly because, you know
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 3:The the way I would describe ramp, the the important part, which is really funny. So, man, I don't know how much of this stuff I can say public there. I gotta be very careful because I don't know why.
Speaker 1:Just give me just give me the high level of of your of your most recent, of your most recent ad read. What what what what what were you saying about Ramp?
Speaker 3:Well, everybody knows the founders at ramp at rates are the best. Yep. But what I would
Speaker 1:Second only to t b p on that.
Speaker 3:It's deal one. No. Once you guys have the ramp hats
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hat is Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is beautiful. You guys need fucking ramp hats.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But what I would say is, like, the literally, the best people I know, the the the best entrepreneurs on the planet, some of the stuff you can't even talk about publicly, they're all using Ramp. And I think I really do believe that Ramp has the greatest technical team by far in their industry. Constantly expand.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 3:And I think it's gonna be a symbol of, like, whether you're a serious company or not. Yeah. Like, if you want to be did you see that that great Timothee Chalamet?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that on the show.
Speaker 3:Okay. I didn't see that part.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He's like, you know, listen. I'm not I'm not being bashful. He didn't use that word, but he's like, I'm going I'm trying to be great. I wanna be, like, be great at what
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:Jordy literally shouted you out during our analysis of this saying David Sedna probably got so fired up by this.
Speaker 2:So my theory is that Tim listened to how you talk about podcasting and was like, I'm gonna steal this and use it at a much bigger audience. So I think that he honestly just, like, took your words out of your mouth.
Speaker 1:Woah. I
Speaker 3:I think this is important because when he says, I'm in the pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I wanna be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. Like, you know, I'm not in this to like, this isn't a fucking game to me. Like, I'm not I'm trying to be literally the best that ever the best person in the world at what I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And what I would say is, like, I I do think there's going to be ramp's gonna turn into a status symbol
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Or, or, like, a a shorthand way to understand, like, you take your company serious
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Because the product is just light years better than anybody else's.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Let's go to this Rick Rubin post. I wanna get your reaction here. Rick Rubin said, tool tools will come.
Speaker 1:Tools will go. Only the vibe coder remains. Rick Rubin. Are you familiar with vibe coding?
Speaker 3:I don't think so. What's vibe coding?
Speaker 1:Vibe coding is, this new type of programming that's enabled by, services like,
Speaker 2:Cursor and Windsurf and
Speaker 1:and Cognition, Devon. And so when you're working with Devon, you kind of get in this flow state where you're just kind of sending vibes to Devon, and then Devon's doing the instantiation of your idea. And so a lot of people were saying that the new era of vibe coding is very like what Rick Rubin does, where Rick Rubin cannot play the instruments, but he has taste. And so, your job as a vibe coder, which is a term that was coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the greatest programmers in history. He he says that, like, this vibe coding is what humans are uniquely good at.
Speaker 1:And so I was wondering what your what what do you see yourself as a vibe coder, a vibe aligner, a vibe driven podcaster?
Speaker 3:Have have you have you I think everything we're talking about is actually related. I think we're gonna do the weave since the weave is what I'm known for.
Speaker 1:Hit me with the weave.
Speaker 3:You you asked me, like, do I watch severance? No. Do I know what this fucking random term on
Speaker 2:the Internet is? No. And I
Speaker 3:just got done saying I'm trying to be the greatest in the world at what I do. So, like, those things are all related.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Like, if you actually care what you're doing, like, you just basically do that over and over again. And the reason that doing the the, like, the amount of reps. Right? I've been doing the podcast for almost eight years. I'm kinda seven days a week.
Speaker 3:I only think about it all the time.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Patrick, our friend from the best, Patrick's like, I have to figure out a way to make money where David turns, I wanna get paid every time David for David's ability to turn every single conversation back to podcast.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 3:And I think it's related to the question you just asked me and why Rick Rubin's so great at what he does is because the spending dedicating reps and reps and reps and reps is, like, you're gonna build an intuition that you might not even be able to explain to other people but is excessively valuable. So, yeah, I think by coding, intuition, taste, these are gonna be, like, the limiting factors in, like, the world of infinite leverage that we're going in. You know, I'm I'm sorry. Listen. I I fucking deep research, you know, psychos for a living.
Speaker 2:You know? These are human fevers.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. And I have
Speaker 3:to tell you, like, I've become, like, a daily active user of OpenAI's deep research tool.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 3:So, like, eventually, you just might be able to make your own founder's podcast and whoever you want. So, like, what is actually gonna differentiate me from somebody just saying, if you actually just wanna sit there and learn, you know, about a person that did something interesting Yeah. You know, you'd probably be able to do that with them.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so I think the ability to make it interesting, entertaining, informative,
Speaker 1:the The curation and the hustle. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, this just happened recently where, my friend Alex Tallman said something that was very interesting. He's the founder of this company called Long Lake. Mhmm. And and he's been, essentially, he's like, he was talking about how, like, his I I analyzed the way one of his best friends, they were, like, roommate roommates in college.
Speaker 3:They've been friends for, like, fifteen years, and I analyzed, like, the way he was hiring people at his company. Mhmm. And Tom is like, see, this is why your podcast is so good because I've known that guy for fifteen fucking years, and you put it into, like, four words. And it has makes me gives me a fundamental understanding that even if I knew what was going on, you actually put the words into it so I can remember it and use it in my company. And so, yeah, I think what you want to do is spend a lot of time doing this.
Speaker 3:Like, I talked to you guys about your podcast is going to be way better if you do it five times a week instead of one times a week like you were doing it. So I think part of that, like, vibing is just another word for intuition that you can't actually and I think
Speaker 1:that's the pressure.
Speaker 3:Older I think intuition is actually older than language. And so I I think it's, like, to be taken very, very seriously. We have these conversations in our group chat about, like, who's the best we we might have an argument or debate on Technology Brothers one day Yeah. About who the best founder of all time is. And, you know, I have my own list, but, you know, Steve Jobs, it doesn't matter who the fuck you are.
Speaker 3:He's definitely on the Mount Rushmore.
Speaker 1:It's his birthday today. He would he would be 70.
Speaker 3:And if you go back and and and just read what he wrote and what he talked about later in his life, he's like, intuition plays a huge role in my career. Like, I'm guided by intuition. Rick Rubin is guided by intuition. I think a lot of these people are actually guided by things that they would have a hard time describing to another person.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Well, thanks for calling in. We're gonna get back to the show. We'll talk to you soon, David.
Speaker 3:I love you guys.
Speaker 1:Talk to you. Love you too.
Speaker 3:Bye. Let's
Speaker 2:go for those for those that don't know, Senra, it it was October or November. Yeah. We were in Miami. We were
Speaker 1:in Miami right before Halloween.
Speaker 2:And I distinctly remember standing outside of Faena. Yeah. I don't think you were there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I asked Senrah, because Senrah at the time had been one of the few people that we had sent the RSS feed to, and he was just listening to some of the episodes. And we said, should how seriously should we take this? And he was like, you should take this deadly seriously.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we went back, and we switched to three days a week, then we went to five days a week, and then we went live. Yeah. And, the rest is history. So we basically have to credit everything to him. And, he's a
Speaker 1:godfather of populating.
Speaker 2:That he was the first official guest. We've been waiting
Speaker 1:to have He's the first
Speaker 2:official guest, but he was the only right person to have on the show. Fantastic. And, one of the few people, like, I I've talked about this. So much of life is knowing who to take advice from. Totally.
Speaker 2:And Senra is one of the few people that when he tells us to do something, we pay attention because
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He has not led us astray. Yeah. And,
Speaker 1:very experience, really knows his stuff and really cares. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, let's move on to the next post in the timeline. Sam Altman, welcomed a little, boy to the world, and congratulations to him.
Speaker 1:But Dylan Patel has a funny reaction, so we wanted to highlight here on the show. He says, I thought all these AI cultists weren't having kids because what's the point when we get superintelligence? If Sam Ullman has a kid now, that means we ain't getting AGI. Sell everything. And, I think I I I think he's having a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:But it is an interesting point, which is like like, I whenever I see an entrepreneur who has a kid, I do feel like their vision of the future is maybe a little bit more, I don't know, just just humane than
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Than than other people. They're a little bit less dystopian. Totally. You you know, you could see this with Zuck when he had his kids, and there was all these questions about, is Instagram bad for young kids? Is it too addictive?
Speaker 1:Is it giving them body dysmorphia issues? And it's something where I genuinely believe that Zuck has enough control and enough money that he would sacrifice some shareholder value to create a product that is better for the world. Yeah. And and that's and that's and that's, like, underpinned by the fact that he is thinking about the next generation because your mind and your heart does change once you have kids. And so I'm excited.
Speaker 1:I want everyone in, obviously, they're pronatalist. I want everyone in tech to have kids and think about the next generation and just be optimistic for the future. So, congrats to Sam and congrats to Dylan for, putting a little dunk post on the timeline, but still having fun with it. Let's move on to Mike Maples. Did you see this post?
Speaker 2:I missed it.
Speaker 1:Mike Maples said, a magical car at magic hour, and he posts his BMW z eight. And, it's a fantastic sports car, and we love to see a capital allocator sharing what they do with all the money. And a z eight is a fantastic choice. I don't know if you ever driven one of those. Pretty rare.
Speaker 2:It looks like an amazing spec. Is that I think it has tan. Does it have tan seats or accents?
Speaker 1:But, good choice, Mike. We love to, we'd love to discuss it on the show. Call in. Let us know how it drives. Maybe we'll do an episode live in the car.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna use the restroom. You're gonna do
Speaker 1:this Yeah.
Speaker 2:Quick ad.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, let's move on to a promoted post from our friends over at AdQuik. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:And we got a very cool post from AdQuik here. So Ryan Peterson, good friend of mine, CEO of Flexport, he says, what's it like working in an industry that doesn't create the most beautiful images in the entire world? And he posted four really incredible photos of, shipping containers on ships, and, there's just, like, these beautifully chaotic, very high contrast images. I couldn't I they looked AI generated. He said they were just stock photos, but they're fantastic.
Speaker 1:And, of course, this led to a lot of people, quote, tweeting his post with, photos of their industry, whether that's heavy industrial machinery or rockets or whatever they're working on. And so AdQuik, quotes it and says, we couldn't tell you because we put an ad on the sphere in Las Vegas. I love the sphere. I think it's a I think it's a really interesting monument, and it depends on what you put on it, but AdQuic can help you put an ad on the sphere. It's very expensive, but I think if you get the, if you get the positioning right, and you pick the right, image to put on the sphere, it's it can go mega mega viral.
Speaker 1:You can take a video of it from a plane, and get these really, really cool images. And, obviously, you need a you need some link to your product being round. So, you know, if you're selling something that's, like, flat or square, probably not gonna do well in the sphere. But, you've seen a lot of basketballs and tennis balls and anything that's spherical, if you sell that, they should put Palantir on there. The Palantir is a is a crystal ball.
Speaker 1:Put put a big Palantir ad on, on the, the sphere and do it through AdQuik because we love AdQuik.
Speaker 2:Thank you to AdQuik for sponsoring that bathroom break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to some, some crypto related posts. Flynn says, remember when Jack Dorsey's first tweet was sold as an NFT for $2,900,000? I do remember that. It was crazy at the time.
Speaker 2:They they gave it away.
Speaker 1:They gave it away.
Speaker 2:Was it was I I I actually didn't know this. Was was Jack Dorsey the one selling it?
Speaker 1:I think it was literally somebody just screenshot it and put it on Polygon or whatever.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. On Polygon. It wasn't actually tied to any Nope.
Speaker 1:And that was the thing with with these they always say, oh, the NFTs make it scarce. And it was like, unless I screenshot it and then upload it to a different chain
Speaker 2:Also make an NFT.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And and so, you know, there was the whole critique of, like, you could just right click download the NFT, get the art for free, and that was true. But the real risk with the NFT things was that there the there was an unbounded supply, and you could always do a new drop. And, there's a related post here from Caleb Gammon. He says, quote tweeting somebody says, what a time for monkeys, looking at the monkey lineup of movies from this year.
Speaker 1:Better Man featured a monkey, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla Kong, the monkey, an r rated, horror film that just, debuted at number two. Monkey man, which is a very cool action movie that I wanted to see, but I never got around to. And Wicked had a monkey in it. And Caleb Gaiman says, I wish there had been some way for me to invest in apes three years ago. Of course, talking about the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Speaker 1:And it's funny. But, yeah, I mean, the the problem was, of course, right after the the Bored Ape Yacht Club came, you know, the kitties and the dogs and the owl birds
Speaker 2:One of one of the challenges. So so there was a moment in time on x specifically and Instagram to some degree and Discord and things like that where, having a $200,000 profile picture by nature of using an NFT that you got was a total status symbol. It was like an and I was somewhat, Yuga Labs was a customer of mine, and so I was generally, you know, I I think what they've there was a lot of really good execution in a bunch of ways. Right? And one of, you know, my thinking was that NFTs could potentially be the sort of supercars or the watches of the Internet Yep.
Speaker 2:Because everybody that's online, it's sort of if you're anonymous, it's hard to signal Yep. Status, like, are you actually legit? And it's the same way same one of the same reasons that people will wear a nice watch because they walk into a room and people are like, wow. He's got a r m on his wrist. Like, he must have done something in life to to be able to, you know, purchase that.
Speaker 2:The challenge is that there's so much alpha and being yourself online Yep. And just using a regular picture of yourself.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? So
Speaker 1:That's one take. The other is what's the iron law of the universe? Easy come, easy go. True. And the problem I
Speaker 2:saw Jeremy Jeremy Goffon popularized that.
Speaker 1:Popularized that term. And so what what was the problem with the NFTs is that, yes, they could have been the supercars or the watches of the world. Yeah. But, like, what is the history of Ferrari?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When you're driving a Ferrari Part of the reason. Decades.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And part of
Speaker 1:the reason
Speaker 2:why it
Speaker 1:costs. You know, Adama or Piguet, these are 200 year old companies. They've spent so long expert, like, branding themselves as craftsmen.
Speaker 2:And Not just branding. Being craftsmen.
Speaker 1:Being craftsmen.
Speaker 2:Part of the reason part of the reason a Ferrari cost what it cost is because they had to spend a hundred years almost, like, figuring out how to
Speaker 1:Even a casual car fan can tell you Enzo Ferrari. They know the person. Right? And and Lamborghini, the same thing. Oh, they built, tractors, and then they spun out.
Speaker 1:Pininfarina. Like, there's all these different names in the in the supercar, even in the watch world, where there are stories about what made these brands great, and those don't just happen over a weekend and a hyped launch. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I would believe that an NFT profile picture and I think that the, the which ones is it? The the pixelated guys, the CryptoPunks, those have kinda stuck around a little bit. And I think that I think that if they stick around for another twenty years, they could be really cool, and they could be rare. And and I and I had one, by Moxie Marlinspike that I thought was really valuable because he wrote this blog post. He is a craftsman.
Speaker 1:He is this crazy hacker. Valuable? Yeah. Well, I think it will be valuable as because it it tells a story based We're
Speaker 2:early, bro. We're early. It's it's it's the the prominence of the chain, bro. You just don't understand. Like, I just, you you you don't appreciate fine technology.
Speaker 1:Okay. I I don't actually bogged. Bogged. But, but, yeah, I mean, like, a lot of art is driven by story. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? And so and so I would believe that if someone stays in the trenches for the next two decades, building something, building a story around a piece of art that happens to live on chain, it could eventually be valuable. Yeah. Beeple. I think Beeple, yeah, he sold the the the one photo for $69,000,000.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that'll ever get back there, but there are some works of Beeple that represent a certain moment in time on the Internet, and he does have that story. He put in the work like David Senter.
Speaker 2:He he produced a new The challenge.
Speaker 1:New image every single day for a decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Crazy. So the challenge yeah. Which which his story is amazing, and we should actually cover it more. I I we should see what he's posting Yeah.
Speaker 2:Today. The, the challenge is that so much of these sort of trophy collectible objects Yeah. So much of the the value is I own this one of one thing Yeah. From this specific moment in time, but I can look at it. I can touch it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I can
Speaker 2:put it on my wall. And the issue with sort of digital collectibles is they haven't bridged that gap in a great way where if you buy a baseball that was thrown in the series in this year and it was the it was the grand slam, you know, it was the ball that was hit in grand slam. You can put it on your desk and that brings you some amount of joy. Yep. We haven't seen that in the digital world where people people were creating their sort of NFT museums than anybody
Speaker 1:Well, when you bought a Beeple, he would send you a printed version with signed, and it was, like, a very nice collectible. Did x just turn off the ability to use NFT profile pictures? You remember the exeons? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're just gone?
Speaker 2:And Turner Turner
Speaker 1:He still has one. Still
Speaker 2:has to them.
Speaker 1:It's fake. It's the fake one. It's so funny.
Speaker 2:Honestly brilliant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is one of his best bids. Very funny. Anyway, enough enough monkey news. Let's move on to, the all in podcast.
Speaker 1:Had an interview with Patrick Collison and, and Patty. Patty Collison and and this. Right boys? Straight out Ireland came by for a chat. And, apparently, Stripe has an internal inflation in an indicator that could potentially be more accurate than the CPI.
Speaker 1:So this is episode two sixteen.
Speaker 2:Because it's not hyper political probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, Chamath says, one of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from nonfarm payrolls to GDP that they become so unreliable. And, also, it's very difficult that for people that are transacting in market to know what to do. Have you guys ever thought about that? Patrick says, we did look at inflationary data over the last couple years, and I think you can construct, and the team did construct a pretty reliable leading indicator for inflation because, of course, Stripe powers so many ecommerce sites.
Speaker 1:If they see prices going up, that's an indicator that inflation might be coming. And I feel a bit rueful with you asking the question because I feel like on some level, we should have done it. Like, we should have published our data. Stripe is not a full cross section of the economy. We're more biased towards online, and we're more biased towards innovative companies.
Speaker 1:So the interpretation can be a bit tricky because, of course, like, you know, the price of gasoline probably isn't captured in or food probably isn't captured in Stripe data, and that's a huge part of what drives in true inflation or the inflation that people feel. Pain at the pump. Pain at the grocery store. The second thing is that the Stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fast that it's not necessarily representative of the economy. Having said that, I think in principle, you could draw some conclusions.
Speaker 1:And so we would like to share that openly because I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data. And I love that. I hope they do it. I think that'd be really, really cool.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. I mean Yeah. It was a great interview.
Speaker 1:And you see this It
Speaker 2:was interesting. They they started bickering a bit amongst themselves in front of the guests, which I was a little bit uncomfortable for everyone. Jason was trying to say that that people at at Andrew, he's like, oh, I'm friends with a bunch of the board members.
Speaker 1:That was from that episode?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:It was really
Speaker 1:And the striped guys are just like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. Anyway, I I I love this. I I think any big finance company should have an internal economist. We saw this with Ramp.
Speaker 1:Our Karazian has been posting, data about what's happening in in AI consumption and what AI companies are are seeing upticks in, corporate purchases across ramp cards. Stripe could do the same thing, publish a lot of data. It's good content, helps build the brand, and it's informative. So Yeah. Value to the to the reader.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Reggie James. He says, I think personal robotics will be a lot more cute than the humanoid form that can clearly beat me up. And so clearly triggered by the, by the super scary clone robot. Yeah. And he, I think he said something else about, you know, you wanna be able to throw a computer out the window if you need to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this ties back. I mean, I I posted, I think, Saturday that, I I want there to be basically the robot Olympics, but focused on extreme sports. Like, I wanna see robots do MMA. I wanna see them do base jumping, cliff diving, all all these sort of things that humans do that are, you know, at at major risk to life.
Speaker 2:The robot should have to do them as well. So, let's, let's make it happen.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to our last sponsor of the day, Eight Sleep, baby. Let's do it. Let's do it. That fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience, and we got a post here by longevity maximalist.
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Speaker 1:And, of course, get Nate's sleep. But if you want a hat like this, send us use our code, TBPN, and then send us your receipt, and we'll forward it along
Speaker 3:with you.
Speaker 2:The other thing the other thing I wanna make note of, so we are John and I are now entering a competition of who's gonna get the best the best average sleep score We do. Over the next year. And what I wanna ask them is see if we can have the community opt into it and then share data somehow so that we can all track it because I'm sure
Speaker 1:last night.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've just been putting up ridiculous numbers. I mean, I've been really the beauty of tracking it like this is that you do you do you just automatically are more inclined to get to bed a little bit earlier.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:I put up 99 last night.
Speaker 1:Oh, you beat me. I got 94. How much time did you sleep?
Speaker 2:I slept seven hours and thirty one minutes. Oh, I
Speaker 1:got you beat there. I got eight and a half.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Insane. That's actually
Speaker 1:That's why I got docked because I fell asleep earlier.
Speaker 2:So so
Speaker 1:it's like a routine.
Speaker 2:So so no. So the challenge is everybody thinks they're getting
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're, like, eight hours because they're going to bed at ten and waking up at, you know, six. But Yeah. It's actually more like they kinda got in bed at, like, 10:15 and they fell asleep at 10:50 and then blah blah blah. Maybe they woke up in the middle of the night, all of a sudden they're not getting that that eight hours. So, anyways.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to another, another segment from the By
Speaker 2:the way, I got eight minutes. I gotta get on with our CPA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I gotta And,
Speaker 2:handle business.
Speaker 1:So, Dave Freiberg at the All In Podcast, there's a quote here from Grant. He says, I have a thesis that AI, more than anything, unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be infeasible. On a daily basis, we mine to the center of the earth, and we get cool rare earth minerals from 500 miles down. We go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things because AI unlocks all these large scale projects that would require millions of people, paraphrasing from an epic vision from Friedberg. I think that's a great vision.
Speaker 1:I think that's super positive. And then all of a sudden, it's like yeah. Like, you wanna build a company to do something aggressive, and how helpful would it be to have a hundred thousand PhDs on your team?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:it's just like, oh, yeah. We need to calculate the trajectory of
Speaker 2:the product. Have that today. Like, we we we basically have Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're getting close.
Speaker 2:We're getting close.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:If you're leveraging the models Yeah. At the extreme Yeah. You basically have access to as many PhDs as you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you still need to puppeteer them, and
Speaker 2:it's still
Speaker 1:it's almost it's still very in the center. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that's an that's a that's an opportunity for great managers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I find myself right now, I I typically fire off, like, one deep research query at a time. But every once in a while, I'll do two tabs, and then it's like, okay. I got a team under me. But what does it look like when I have a thousand under me?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, that will be very interesting in orchestrating that.
Speaker 2:Each other.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very, very cool. So very exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Kip Mach. He says, I'm a professional automotive painter, by the way. We might have a job for you. We're looking to paint a car. He's got a beautiful Porsche here, and he threw the Velar Atomics logo right on it.
Speaker 1:And,
Speaker 2:All in.
Speaker 1:Zack says, Gundo corporate merch is getting out of control. Yeah. I don't think you get one of these, for being a customer. But maybe if you buy a nuclear reactor from them, you might just get
Speaker 2:thrown it. A A Cayman.
Speaker 1:Cayman. That'd be fantastic. Well, congrats to Kip, and it looks fantastic. Good detailing work. We love to see it.
Speaker 1:Let's give a shout out to Nicole Wissnot.
Speaker 2:That's a that's a Gundam mentality, by the way. I've just I I want my logo on my car. I'm just gonna do it.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 2:And that's an American mentality.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Now maybe switch it out for a Mustang if you wanna be real American about it. Let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She hit a hundred thousand followers on x. Congratulations to Nicole.
Speaker 1:Almost done. We
Speaker 2:haven't hit the gong. Do we have
Speaker 1:We haven't hit the gong. What do we got?
Speaker 2:Woah. That was not good.
Speaker 1:Let's see if we can
Speaker 2:It's it's not a Here we go.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:There we go. The gong. For Nicole.
Speaker 1:Very good. Nice big ring. They say, thank you to everyone who's been here from the start. Would have never guessed that a single app would help me build a pretty cool venture firm in record time and a pretty firm backbone. My first post in September of twenty one was hard to launch, was to launch was was was to hard launch a $5,000,000 fund one so far from there to now, so far to go.
Speaker 1:Stick around. So congrats to Nicole. We'd love to see it.
Speaker 2:Maybe potential we're bringing back brother of the week. Potential brother of the week here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Speed running September 2021 from a $5,000,000 fund to a $50,000,000 fund and amassing an army of a hundred k followers in that time. And she's starting to build out a car collection, which she'll have to talk about on the show.
Speaker 1:And and a spacious, home as well. Yeah. And a family with a kid, which we love.
Speaker 2:Doing it all. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Kenneth Kenneth Castle. I think you'll love this one. He says, we still haven't seen one dripped out humanoid SMH. Low tan banger.
Speaker 2:Low tan.
Speaker 1:Loved it. I thought it was so funny. And then Aaron Francis says, haven't we? And posted Zuck, which is a little silly, but he does seem less robotic lately. But, yeah, you know, this seems like a perfect project for one x.
Speaker 1:I feel like one x, they're hanging out with little b, the base god. They should they should throw some drip on that guy. Call up Reggie. Get some get some fashion advice. Yep.
Speaker 1:Hip Hip City reg would definitely help you get your humanoid dripped out. And I think that could also go viral. You know? People are gonna get sick of the humanoid stunts. We've seen it fold laundry.
Speaker 1:We've seen it make coffee. Yep. Let's see it, you know, do a runway walk at, Paris Fashion Week.
Speaker 2:I wanna see it do a kick flip wearing wearing, Balenciaga.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. Let's go to Andrew Reid over at Sequoia.
Speaker 1:He says, always suspicious of young people who are points guys. Same with tax obsessive. Lack appreciation of opportunity cost of your attention. It's a good point. I've never been into, points.
Speaker 1:My my hack is, you know, I I have one friend who's into it. Once every five years, I get dinner with him or something. I say, what credit card should I get? She says this one. And I say, okay.
Speaker 1:And then I use that for the next half decade. What are your thoughts on points? Do you optimize?
Speaker 2:I've never been into it. Yeah. Never been big into that world. I like them. I like that I just spend money, and then eventually, I
Speaker 1:just get a little you just a little pop
Speaker 2:of gold.
Speaker 1:A pop of gold.
Speaker 2:As an Irishman. You know? There's nothing, there's nothing better. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:But That's good. But, yeah, just just somebody that's a founder that is potentially building, you know, if they're raising venture capital, that means they're doing everything they can to build a, you know, billion dollar company. Focus on the billion dollar company and in your free time, you know, if you just find points so fascinating that you wanna spend your free time doing that, but I would say touch grass instead
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or come on our podcast and Yeah. And just yap.
Speaker 1:There's better ways opportunities.
Speaker 2:Higher leverage opportunities.
Speaker 1:Let's close Matt Turck. He says, marketing that doesn't work for b to b startups, paid social ads, email marketing campaigns, gated white papers, endless website rebuilds. What does work, CEO as chief marketer, genuine original social presence, relentless content production, smaller in person events like dinners, small online small scale events like webinars. A lot of b to b marketers, CMO, VP marketing, surprisingly seem to be stuck in that first world. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Well said. I mean, we've talked about this before. Every legacy company does for the most part, doesn't understand x. They're still using links, hashtags. They're posting just for they're posting blogs that link out to other places.
Speaker 2:Like, shows a total lack of understanding. I think I think what this comes down to is just understanding the platforms and what they want. So x wants, CEO, like, founder led brands. They want genuine social presence, not, hey. Here's 10 ways that you can do this thing.
Speaker 2:Whatever. Relentless. Right? So the the big issue right now with with marketers is that they don't realize the volume. You can make a great piece of content, put it out there.
Speaker 2:Give me a system. But you need a system to create this ridiculous volume if you wanna be competitive in the feeds. And then I think smaller, you know, founder series, founder dinners, things like that were getting memed in 2021, '20 '20 '2 because it felt like 20% of all venture dollars were going to them, but they still work in terms of Yeah. Building. The key though is to actually make sure that it's an amazing ad.
Speaker 2:So if you get 10 founders together, better spend five minutes aggressively talking about your business and not just hoping, oh, yeah. People are gonna enjoy the food and convert later. It's like, no. You gotta really gotta really sell.
Speaker 1:That's a great place to end the show. Thanks for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Follow us on YouTube. Follow us on x, and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Thank you, folks. Can't wait for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Can't wait.
Speaker 2:We could do another four hours right now. Let's be honest.
Speaker 1:But we gotta go. Gotta get on calls.
Speaker 2:Gotta get on with Taipei.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.
Speaker 2:See you.