Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to technology brothers, the number one live show in tech. Today is Wednesday, 02/19/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today.
Speaker 1:We're breaking down Velar Atomics, Isaiah Taylor's company. They raised a banger $19,000,000 seed round. Then we're moving on to Mira Mirati.
Speaker 2:Sorry. That's awesome. I
Speaker 3:knew they were raising around. I didn't know what they were calling it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it got me good. You get my, like, authentic reaction. There's just nothing there's there's no better humor to me than raising around and then, like, naming it something that, like, breaks the sort of generalized narrative. Like, a 9 $19,000,000 is just a typical series a. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And businesses, if you raise $19,000,000, will be evaluated as though you raised a series a
Speaker 1:to some degree.
Speaker 3:But calling it a c is just so Chad. Isaiah is Chad. Kip is a Chad. Yeah. We gotta go and actually we should just record a a remote pod, like, from Well, they're
Speaker 1:doing it demo. We should livestream it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that today?
Speaker 1:No. No. I I I don't know if it's today, but we'll, we will, we'll we'll definitely be covering the company, and we'll break that down. We're also going through, Miramarati's new company. It has a name.
Speaker 1:It's called Thinking Machines, and the website is thinkingmachines.ai. Don't use a wwww.thinkingmachines.ai does not resolve. You have to drop the w w w.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if you search thinkingmachines right now, it'll pull up their website. But if you click on the website, it will say this site can't be reached. So you then have to go into the URL box and delete the w w w part
Speaker 1:Got it. Hit return,
Speaker 3:and then you'll get the website. So
Speaker 1:Do they have
Speaker 3:Let's hope they're better at Do they
Speaker 1:have, like, technology people on the team yet?
Speaker 3:Or is this Yeah. Maybe they I mean,
Speaker 1:I know Fundraising people.
Speaker 3:Mira is the CEO now. Okay. So maybe they don't have a CTO, and maybe they just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're not not some of the greatest programming in the world working there. Anyway, IT can be a challenge even for the greatest companies. I mean, OpenAI was struggling with the, the login page for a while. Remember when ChatGPT launched, like, it wouldn't keep you logged in, so you had to keep logging in with Google.
Speaker 1:So Very annoying. Anyway, we're breaking down Elvia Mage and how Bernard Arnault is dealing with the Trump, presidency. And then we're gonna talk about Airbus and how they're coming for Boeing. It's an international global fight in the race for an airline that doesn't crash all the time. And then we're gonna break down the timeline.
Speaker 1:So let's go to Isaiah Taylor. We got some breaking news. Congratulations to Velar Atomics. Big Isaiah says, I'm excited to announce a $19,000,000 seed round led by Riot Ventures who you know some of those dudes over there. Dear friend.
Speaker 1:Ally Corp with participation from amazing new partners such as Steel Atlas, Day One Ventures, Stifel Bank, Naval, Balaji, and Charlie Songhearst. We've also completed two important milestones. Yeah. Absolute dogs in there. Great.
Speaker 1:So Isaiah says, first, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype Ward Zero at our Los Angeles facility, the fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be, unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. So that's, that's next week. Hopefully, we can go. If we can't, we'll be live streaming it and covering it here on the show.
Speaker 1:Second, we're also excited to announce a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. The goal of this project is to develop and deploy Ward 1, our first nuclear reactor, and, the world's first operational gen four microreactor. This is just the beginning. The goal of Bellar Atomics is to make the world's energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. To do that, we must That's
Speaker 3:such a
Speaker 1:a pace.
Speaker 3:That's such a great tagline. Make the world's energy. Yeah. It's very simple.
Speaker 1:You almost expect it to be like, make the world's energy cleaner or make the world's energy more.
Speaker 3:Make the world's energy.
Speaker 1:Period. Yep. Period. Because in the energy business. To do that, we must set a pace of building and iteration to rapidly scale and commercialize our reactor architecture.
Speaker 1:Today, we set that pace. I can't overstate my gratitude to the Bellar to the Bellar Atomics team. In the last twelve months, they've proven themselves to be to not, to be not only one of the most talented engineering teams in the world, but also the most determined. I'm inspired to work with them every day and to bring their work to you. Huge thank you to everyone who participated in the seed.
Speaker 1:Delian from Founders Fund is in the comments saying congrats, Isaiah. Santiago, good friend of the show, noted, hanging in
Speaker 3:the room for Christie. I don't know.
Speaker 1:This is great stuff team. Onward.
Speaker 3:I don't know what I don't even remember exactly why, but we owe Kip, who's on the Valor team Yeah. A bottle of Dom for something that he did last year. You remember that?
Speaker 1:We were gonna go brother of the week.
Speaker 3:Brother of the week. I think we were gonna hand deliver it, and then he had to go to The Philippines for
Speaker 2:a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 3:Couldn't do it.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:So congratulations to the whole team, and congratulations to Kip because we are gonna be coming to the Gondo at some point to deliver you a bottle of
Speaker 1:A bottle of Dom Perignon.
Speaker 3:Well deserved.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Yeah. Well, congrats to the whole team over there. Excited to see, what they build next and get that stuff rolled out. Lots of exciting stuff going on in nuclear.
Speaker 1:I I I think, like, the big, the big question is always, like like, nuclear was was so contrarian and so, like, offensive to venture capitalists that even, like, a few years ago, it was something that was uninvestable. And so you couldn't really raise any money even if you were experienced. Isaiah is obviously, like, on the younger side more of, like, the the the new, like, outside the box thinker.
Speaker 3:He's got a few kids.
Speaker 1:So He does.
Speaker 3:That that automatically adds a decade.
Speaker 1:It does. If you're in your twenties attack
Speaker 3:and you have a few kids, people will treat you as though you're a decade older.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 3:I I feel like I've benefited from that to some degree just because Yeah. You know, having kids, it's just Yeah. You are a different person after you have kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But my point here is that, like, nuclear energy as a category for venture capital investment was extremely difficult to get done, contrarian, not not easy by any means, very hard to finance, very hard to build. Yep. Oaklow went through, like, years and years and years before spacking. And now it's, like, the hottest category because everyone's worried about, AI and and Yeah.
Speaker 1:The energy generation Well,
Speaker 3:now it it really is like in a in a environment that is, you know, you in a world where there's maybe less regulations around nuclear Yep. Ten years from now, nuclear energy technology companies will be tremendously more valuable.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:So, like, that is, like, the main that's, like, the main Yeah. Sort of thesis right now. And so you could've Yeah. When when Isaiah was starting the company, you have to imagine that in his view, a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now is sort of obvious at the time. Totally.
Speaker 3:It was like, we actually need a lot more energy and nuclear energy was demonized. If you remember, somebody told me this, the woman that talks about, like, that super pro nuclear on TikTok, like, she was
Speaker 1:at one of the first Isabelle Bumekay, I think.
Speaker 3:So she was apparently at one of the first, hereticons. Yeah. But then this year, like, new being pro nuclear wasn't heretical at all. Exactly. It was just, like, the default tech.
Speaker 1:So she was just kinda hanging out. She was like, I don't really have any new, like, things to bring you because, like, you guys all agree with me now. Yeah. It was great. So now, like, the problem is is, like, we need the energy today.
Speaker 1:And even fast teams that move really quickly like Isaiah's, you know, you can't build these things in a weekend. And so now we're in this weird scenario where, you know, everyone in the AI world, all all the data center build outs are like, hey. This stuff can't come to market fast enough. And it's like, hey. You know, the VC should have been back in this a decade ago instead of kind of sitting on their hands.
Speaker 1:Anyway, quick size gong for Isaiah. Boom. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Great connection there, John.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Well, let's move on to, Thinking Machines. So, should we do the overview first and then we'll give a little bit of background on, on Mira? Thinking Machines launched their website, thinkingmachines.ai. Reminder, don't use the w w w.
Speaker 1:It will not resolve. Yep. Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company. Interesting because notably, Ilya Sutzkever, SSI, is not a product company purely focused on on, on superintelligence directly. Yep.
Speaker 1:We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools that to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. I agree. The the scientific community's understanding of Frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's public people's abilities to use AI effectively.
Speaker 1:And despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, we're building thinking machines, labs to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable. That was not very gripping copy if I'm being honest. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can tell they're not marketers. Yep. But the aura around Mira and the business and the team is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, they clearly, like, didn't even set up their domain properly. Like, they they don't wanna have like, I look at them as, like, probably being in a similar boat to SSI.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Where SSI by being the first to kind of come out and say, like, we're not gonna do any marketing or really any launches, or we're not gonna release any products until we have AGI or safe, you know, superintelligence. Yeah. They kind of, like, took that opportunity. And I I bet you Thinking Machines is like, I wish we did that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, but, but, yeah, again, like, this is one of those things. If if this was if this was the first foundation model company, it would be gripping. But this is, like, language you could just copy and paste it onto any Yeah. I mean site or hiring page.
Speaker 1:At this point, you know, there I wanna issue a challenge. If you're an OpenAI cofounder, I challenge you to start a company that's not a foundation model.
Speaker 3:Well, I think so. I was corrected. So Mira was actually not a cofounder of OpenAI. He just served as the CTO Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:In many ways,
Speaker 1:just viewed as a cofounder. Is it possible to work at OpenAI and then leave and start
Speaker 3:Yeah. Your idea was to start, like, a Supplement company. Supplement company.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Just
Speaker 3:like, it would actually Yeah. There's there's a lot of alpha in doing the thing that that doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint. Right? Because if Mira Mirati had a supplement company, I'd be like, I'm buying all my supplements One
Speaker 1:hundred percent.
Speaker 3:This because, like, she would only work on this if it was, like, the most
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Of course. She's glimpsed the machine god and said, we need more creativity.
Speaker 3:It's always been underpriced to be diced.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so yeah. I mean, the the the question is, like, you know, obviously, there are so many companies working on this exact problem right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We we the only thing that's interesting here is, like, where are they contrasting from the others?
Speaker 3:And it's now established that they will, like, thinking machines will have a state of the art model in probably a year. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You would have to imagine that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's actually so Elon had this sort of infrastructure advantage. And, in many ways, Mira has, like, the actual hands on. She's a technical CEO who's gonna know exactly how to basically
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, get back to the point where she was with OpenAI. Right? So it's not, like, starting over from zero. So the
Speaker 1:question is, yeah, do they, do they try and build something, a cluster? Do they try and work with one of the hyperscalers? There's a ton that would be happy to work
Speaker 3:with her.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. Yep. Because it gives them more leverage. Because even if you're if you're like, oh, we're yeah. We're Amazon.
Speaker 1:And we have I think Amazon does have a custom, like, TPU style chip. Yeah. And they are loosely aligned with Anthropic, but why not work with Thinking Machines and get more leverage
Speaker 3:over their Anthropocene solution?
Speaker 1:Anything then. And so what And those
Speaker 3:that mean scalers and the model companies are willing to just intermingle and make Of course.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah. And and it's and for if it's for good reason. So it's like, yeah, if I'm Amazon and I say, hey. You know, Thinking Machines, yeah, go out and raise $500,000,000, send a hundred million all over to me, and, yeah, I'll give you 20 k GPUs and let you train a Frontier model.
Speaker 1:The more interesting thing is, like, where does the product go? Because I do think that there is really interesting opportunity for different product, functionality and different problem solving there.
Speaker 3:It's interesting because their website, AI that works for everyone, emphasis on human AI collaboration. Okay. That that's exactly how ChatGPT, more flexible, adaptable, and personalized AI systems. Okay.
Speaker 1:You're not telling me anything here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Maybe you're adding like, it does seem that chat g p t is flexible, adaptable, and can be very personalized if that's what you want out of it. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, honestly, this this this this is really dream. Like an oil guy. It's like, this is commoditized, and it's like oil. Like, our vision is to, like, provide energy that will power industry and automobiles for generations. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, just like every other oil company. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's like, that's probably profitable. Congratulations. You're gonna make a lot of money, But, like, you're not doing anything new here necessarily. I don't know.
Speaker 3:It's interesting too. They say science is better when shared. So they're not committing to being open source. Yeah. But they say we plan to frequent frequently published technical blog post papers and code.
Speaker 1:So the whole oh, we're not thing seems extremely fake now Yeah. By this. And, also, the whole idea that it's, like, Sam versus a unified block of of anti Sams is also completely debunked because it's like, why don't all you guys just go work at Anthropic or SSI? Why why do you all have your own companies? Oh, well, like, it was probably drama between everyone here.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone's like
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, like so look at the current team. I'm just gonna read some people out because it's absolutely stacked. Yeah. Alex Gartrell
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Former leader of server operating systems at at Meta, expert in Linux. Alexander, co creator of advanced voice mode at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And the segment anything model at Meta. Previously previously post modal, multimodal post training lead at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Andrew, this is just in alphabetical order, by the way. Yeah. ML systems research, Andrew Tullock, ML systems research and engineering, previously at OpenAI at Meta.
Speaker 1:Meta. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Barrett Zof, who's the CTO, formerly VP of research post training at OpenAI, cocreator of ChatGPT. Yeah. Next guy, Bryden, formerly post training research at OpenAI. And if you just go down the list, it's basically, like, the founding you know, some of the most important people to work at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Question is just, does this actually matter? Because in in in 2,005, you could have gone and said, hey. We're getting people from Bell Labs and Yahoo, and we're getting people from AOL from AOL and all the top people, and we're gonna have them build a social network that's better than Facebook. And it was like, nah. It didn't really matter.
Speaker 1:Like, it was actually just like a couple college kids could actually innovate and create something that took off, and And it took off so hard that even when Google threw tons of resources at it for Google circles or whatever their product was called, that failed. And then whenever somebody else came up, Azaka would just, like, buy it. And I don't know. It's like, how much does the crazy stacked engineering team matter when it seems like there's a ton of crazy stacked engineers that they're over in China building deep sea, and they're at x AI, and they're at the anthropic. And, like, we keep hearing that every
Speaker 3:single team is stacked,
Speaker 1:and they can produce a frontier model in a week.
Speaker 3:Well, yes. I mean, just going to I'm still down the list. I'm gonna skip a bunch of people. Luke Metz, research scientist and engineer, cocreator of chat g p t. So it's like, when you're putting the cocreator of chat g p t, like, deep in your team list Yeah.
Speaker 3:And not even giving him a picture, that's when you know the team stacks.
Speaker 1:So It is stacked.
Speaker 3:Like, in in many ways, they should just have their logo and then the current team and, like, skip all of this jargony
Speaker 1:stuff because, like, that would be
Speaker 3:more Yeah. That would be more meaningful. But imagine the pressure right now on on existing OpenAI employees no matter how long they've they've they've worked there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And how how big their their plans are
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You don't just have, like, one heavily funded competitor from a former team member
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:That's recruiting you. You you could potentially have four or five heavily funded foundation model companies, not even talking about perplexity and sort of, like, app layer companies that are trying to recruit you at all times. Yeah. So it's just, like, the craziest, dynamic, and they will make documentaries about, all of this.
Speaker 1:For sure. Well, she's got the stone cold gaze in the Guardian. Let's move on to the profile of Mera because I think she has an interesting, background in history. Let's do, how OpenAI interim chief, Mira Mirati, helped launch AI into the mainstream. Born in Albania, Former Chief Technology Officer is charged with calming the waters after ouster of Sam Altman.
Speaker 1:When Mira Mirati made an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last October, OpenAI was just a month away from releasing chat GPT. Do you wanna, yeah, like skip skip around here? Mira Mirati as the chief's comp as the company's chief technology officer, has been in charge of leading the teams that were pushing out the artificial intelligence chatbot that would throw the AI technology and debate over its usage into the mainstream. On his show, Noah asked Mirati how she grappled with the implications, AI has for jobs. I gotta cough.
Speaker 1:You can keep reading.
Speaker 3:Implications.
Speaker 1:She says, there were a ton of questions that we're wrestling with every day. Little did anyone know that a year later, a person whose job would be affected would be Mirati's boss, Sam Altman. Now, Mirati has replaced the rising star as CEO. Oh, she was CEO for a while. I forgot about that.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So many people have been CEO of Open it up.
Speaker 3:There's a what do you call it? Musical chairs for a bit there.
Speaker 1:Musical chairs for sure.
Speaker 3:In a surprise statement, the company's board of directors said on Friday that Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board and that it lost confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI. That line not consistently candid is just so perfectly general.
Speaker 1:Like, we will see never came out and said what it was.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the crazy thing is that Yeah. All the all the back channel communications
Speaker 3:It's also not necessarily wait
Speaker 1:until you find out. Wait until you find out. You're gonna you're gonna side with that. And then it was like, he launched the best consumer product ever without really telling us. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who cares?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So questions remain over exactly what happened between Altman and his company's board, which includes respected technology researchers and business leaders. Yeah. But the board said that Mirati can provide the company with a smooth transition as it looks for a permanent replacement. And then they, like, immediately added Emmett.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Emmett was in
Speaker 1:for a while
Speaker 3:in there
Speaker 1:for a few days.
Speaker 3:Which lasted, yeah, for a few days.
Speaker 1:And then Sam was
Speaker 3:So, anyways, here's some backstory. Bharati joined the company in 2018 as vice president of applied AI and partnerships, positioning herself to play key roles in the company's development of its AI chatbot systems in DALL E, which uses AI to create artwork. She was promoted to senior vice president of research product and partnerships in 2020 into chief technology officer in 2022.
Speaker 1:That makes no sense to me because ChatGPT launched or or GPT three, which was barely commercial, launched in 2022. So, like, the first two years, vice president of applied AI and partnerships, like Yep. I don't know. That's interesting. Like, they must have known that the products were going to become highly commercializable on track.
Speaker 1:I I I don't know. It'd be interesting to hear, like, what she was doing at that time because it makes it totally makes sense that it's like a go to market role almost. Yep. But everyone else was very surprised. They're like, oh, this research lab has something that they're selling now.
Speaker 1:Like, this wasn't in the plan. This is so un this is so, like, shocking. But it's like, yeah, maybe they knew back then that, yeah, like, companies would wanna generate art for ads or whatever. Yeah. Like, they need to vend Dolly into places.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's interesting. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO. So this this profile was written, like, during the turmoil, basically, in The Guardian. I guess this was, November of twenty twenty three. Let me give a little bit of backstory on her.
Speaker 1:It's kind of interesting, actually. Born in Albania, Maratti moved to Canada when she was a teenager to study at an international school on Vancouver Island. She got a mechanical engineering degree from Dartmouth and eventually made her way to San Francisco where she would lead product and engineering teams at Leap Motion. Did you do you know the story of this?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, the whole, like, narrative of just being born in Albania Yeah. And then ending up as in America raising billions of dollars and and being at the frontier of innovation is just Legit. Is is one of thousands of, you know, any any sort of, like, hardcore anti immigration people is one of, you know, thousands, but a very high profile example of why immigration has made America such a dominant force in technology.
Speaker 1:It's just it's just a very unique thing about America that someone can come in and become the
Speaker 3:We need to we need to reposition the the pro the super pro immigration people need to reposition immigration as brain drain. Oh, totally. And just being, like, we are draining the any competitive potentially competitive economies
Speaker 1:of, like, all of that stuff. Is what Elon's position is, with the h one b stuff. But the reason I wanna talk about Leap Motion is you know who the CEO of Leap Motion was?
Speaker 3:I don't. I don't. David Holes?
Speaker 1:No way. The founder of Midjourney.
Speaker 3:No way. And so
Speaker 1:and Leap Motion was I mean, great company. It was a hand tracker for virtual reality. So it was this little, like, USB stick looking device that then you would put your hand over and it would track your hands. You could put it on the front of a VR headset and very, like, DIY it into the Oculus back in, like, the hacker days, and it would do some basic hand tracking. They tried to sell a company at Apple.
Speaker 1:They get completely rugged. Apple had, Apple had They, like, re engineered it. Printed, like, welcome to Apple. Here's your email. Here's your corporate badge for everyone at Lead Motion allegedly, or, like, according to the reporting.
Speaker 1:And the deal fell through at the last second because I think David Holes went in and was like, I don't like this corporate structure. Like, I'm not gonna I'm down. I'm not down. Like, I'm out.
Speaker 3:Like No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something like that. He, like, turned them down, and it was, like, kind of a mess. But then, clearly, he had just, like, incredible abilities to build and be a founder because even though Leap Motion it wound up being kind of like an acqui hire to a different company and kinda sold.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:But it's just crazy that she yeah. Yeah. That that is the Leap Motion. It's just crazy that she led product and engineering teams at Leap Motion because David holds like, it's like all the top technical talent in the valley essentially wound up working on AI eventually. They all they all moved over there.
Speaker 1:And so then she goes to
Speaker 3:move into crypto?
Speaker 1:Not many. All the best marketers moved to crypto, which we'll talk about that. We have a story on that which is great from Nick Carter. During a brief stint at Tesla, she played a key role as a product senior product manager in the development of the electric car maker's Model x. And so this is another interesting, like, sliding doors moment.
Speaker 1:She probably had meetings with Elon at some point.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Now she's probably got Elon's phone number. Again, you're leaving OpenAI. Why don't you go to xAI? You gotta start your own thing. It's just interesting, like, there's one narrative where it's like, hey.
Speaker 1:All these people are super talented. They're all super entrepreneurial. They all wanna run their own companies, get more equity. It makes more financial sense. But if it was truly, like, mission driven on, like, Sam, it was too chaotic.
Speaker 1:He must be stopped. You would create an alliance. Right? You would have to.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they're not doing it. Yeah. It's a good point. The revealed preference is that, actually, this is commoditized, and this is just about money. That's my take on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or wanting control the other the counterpoint to that is wanting control over what will be a super valuable important commodity.
Speaker 1:Asset. Yes. Exactly. Commodity, though. Not not this, like, God war.
Speaker 3:God
Speaker 1:war. If we're really going to war over this and the and the robot army, it's like, do you really think you wanna have the fifth strongest army when Elon and Sam are, like, warring? Or or should you just you. Or should you just create or should you just pick a side now? Right?
Speaker 1:And actually go and win. It it it so the game theory here, I think I think suggests that this is more about money than mission in in general. That's my take.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Mirati told Fortune magazine earlier this year that growing up in
Speaker 3:The other the
Speaker 1:other side of it
Speaker 3:is all these people are already so post economic that Sure. That potentially potentially, there is still an angle of once you have more money Mhmm. Than you could ever spend in your life
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Do you want to just just do the work that you really wanna do without we're dealing with the the sort of BS of of having a crazy Yeah. Boss that you don't necessarily trust Yeah. That you don't like Yeah. Whatever. Right?
Speaker 1:In some ways, this is like, getting a tenured position in a at, like, a Stanford
Speaker 3:At a research lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But you but you cannot do that because Stanford will never give you a billion dollars
Speaker 3:to
Speaker 1:build a 20 k GPU cluster. So doing the work of of academia now takes the form of a venture backed
Speaker 3:Yeah. There there's a totally a world where some of these foundation models spin outs from OpenAI just kind of twiddle their thumbs and and do cool research Yeah. But just never reach sort of commercial. I I'm not expecting that out of thinking machines or but SSI seems like it could be a good candidate for that. There were a couple
Speaker 1:of those. I mean, I mean, the story of character. Right? Where where it's like the guy kinda was like, oh, I got, like, insane product market fit, but I don't really like the market, so I'm out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was the read for for a lot of people that said that. I I don't know.
Speaker 3:Potential one shot.
Speaker 1:But the guy I mean, he just did Dorkesh, like, no. He he's he's and he seems like legitimately, like, a computer science genius.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, like, yeah. That guy should just be doing, like, computer science. He doesn't need to be worrying about, like, how can we squeeze more more pennies out of these, like, gooners that are, like, customers, basically. Like, it's not, it's not important work to him, and that's fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's the nature of capitalism in America. And to be clear, I'm not I'm not saying, oh, there these people are in the money in it for the money, and that's a black pill. I'm saying it's a mega mega white pill. Like, it's the best outcome here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It means that AI is going to go extremely well. It's going to generate a lot of economic value. It's not going to be some chaotic, you know, apocalypse situation. Because if you think it's the apocalypse, you don't act like this. That that that's my take.
Speaker 1:It's like, yeah, this is not this is not the behavior of somebody who is like, what did Ilya see? You know? Oh, like, he saw like, that he glimpsed into the ASI and realized that, like, we were all going to be killed. It's like, no. That was a marketing stunt.
Speaker 1:That era is over, and now we are in the oil extraction and commoditization perspective. And, yeah, go get the money. It's great. Yeah. I encourage everyone to do this.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic. Yeah. Get the bag. I'd already been working in AI applications at Tesla, she told Fortune, but I was more interested in general intelligence. I wasn't sure it was gonna happen at that point, but I knew that even if we just got very close thing the things, we would build along the way would be incredible.
Speaker 1:I wanted to be part of that. Mirati has often spoken publicly about AI's power as a tool echoing sentiments expressed by Altman, a key champion of AI technology in a world that has grown skeptical about the company's technology. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to find the thing to do the thing that you want it to do? 100% true.
Speaker 1:Satya Nadella is in here talking about, pumping up Mirati because I think he would that point was saying, like, yeah, I'm kinda bullish on her. As a result, he wrote, Mira has helped build some of the most exciting AI technologies we've ever seen. Obviously, true. I mean, she's, like, clearly a goated product and AI manager. Like, there's no question about that.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, well, we will see where it goes from here.
Speaker 3:That Microsoft didn't invest in thinking machines.
Speaker 1:I don't actually know
Speaker 3:At the time at the time, it seemed like it seemed like Satya had more loyalty to OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then more recently, you can imagine Microsoft would make direct investments in potential competitors given that OpenAI OpenAI is working with, Oracle and and other companies that are now competitive again with Microsoft.
Speaker 1:It seems like Mira and Ilya left around the same time. Ilya is raising, what, a billion with 500 from Green Oaks coming in. And Mira, it says here I don't know how true this is. Can you look it up? It says secure significant venture funding over a hundred million dollars to support capital intensive large scale model training.
Speaker 1:So This is interesting
Speaker 3:because that's a
Speaker 1:small little bit compared to Ilia. But who knows? I mean, yeah, like, a billion dollar deal can come together in, like, two seconds in Silicon Valley these days.
Speaker 3:No. It's possible it's possible she's just throwing a bone to a handful of early partners, and then she's gonna do the one on 5,000,000,000, like, you know, in a in a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, like, the crazy thing is that, like
Speaker 3:but
Speaker 1:I don't I don't I don't think it might not be a bad deal. I mean, obviously, everyone's pointing to, like, the.com narrative. I mean, like, oh, there's gonna be one power law winner and all this is gonna but if it's commoditized, you know, maybe. Maybe you just gotta go drill the wells, get the GPUs, just buy a bunch of GPUs. I don't know.
Speaker 1:We'll see. Anyway, that that's the story of Mira. Is there anything else we should cover in here? It's pretty interesting. I mean, departed in 2014 and then founded immediately.
Speaker 1:I I I'm just so fascinated by the fact that, like, it's just model company after model company after model company and, like, just they all seem to believe the exact same thing, which is, like, these models are highly versatile. But
Speaker 3:they Yeah. The the interesting thing is believe that this
Speaker 1:will be a power law.
Speaker 3:Do you are you a DAU of more than one
Speaker 1:LLM? No. Yeah. Only chat GPTs on my home row. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then I use I have Gemini Pro Plus, like, that I can find when I find it, I can use it sometimes, but it's very hard to access. And I use that if it's, like, ingest a book because it has a million million token context window. So that one feature is something I use. Yeah. Perplexity every once in a while.
Speaker 1:Grok every once in a while. In x. I I do like Grok for image generation is fantastic because there's no guardrails. So it'll just generate, like, oh, you want a picture of Tom Cruise, you know, fighting Mickey Mouse? Like, no problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is, like, I think actually fine because it's very transformative and it's clearly satirical.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But all the other LLMs are terrified of it of of IP infringement. Yep. And I think, Disney and all the all the IP holders are like, yeah. Actually, we don't wanna get in, in a legal battle with Elon Musk, the the the president's first line.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The the other thing is that Elon will post through He will take he will he will post, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's it's every lawyer would advise Elon, please don't call Sam Altman a scam artist during the lawsuit because then Sam can go out and, like, sue for huge damages. He could say, you know, you prevented this $2,000,000,000 investment Yeah. Whatever. There's a million There's a million things, but but Elon being the world's richest man
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is willing to just take that risk. And so he would do that to a major corporation too. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, just he he said f you to, what? To, like, Disney and all the major to to Bob Iger just for stopping advertising.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not even, like, a suit.
Speaker 3:Just saying,
Speaker 1:like, hey. Look. X is getting a little wild for our brand. We're not gonna advertise there. And he was like, I have a message for you, and he flicked them off at that damn perimeter.
Speaker 3:F or f off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. F off. Right? Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad because sometimes, you know, the the the the four year old son asks for a picture of a of a of a Dreamworks character interacting with a Disney character. Yep. And you know what? I'm happy to abide.
Speaker 1:And you're gonna have to come after me Dreamworks and Disney because, you know, sometimes Mickey Mouse wants to hang out with Shrek.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 1:I think those two are did different IP worlds. But they shouldn't be, and I should be able to instantiate them. And I think it's very additive, and I and it's not a replacement for the real thing. It's clearly clearly additive. Anyway, speaking of intellectual property and, luxury goods, kind of, let's go on to the French billionaire working his Trump ties to spare his luxury empire.
Speaker 1:That's right. We're talking about LVMH and Bernard Arnault. Let's kick it off. Jordy, what you got?
Speaker 3:Yep. The day after president Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer, he received a call from a familiar French voice. It was Bernard Arnault, owner of the globe spanning luxury empire. Arnault wanted to check-in on the man he had known for decades. Trump was also in the middle of a fierce presidential campaign as well as several criminal proceedings.
Speaker 3:The phone call from Arnaud sent a clear signal. The luxury titan was sticking with Trump through thick and thin. With Trump now in office and warning of steep tariffs on European goods
Speaker 1:the tariffs.
Speaker 3:The question yeah. Of course. Yeah. The question is whether Arnaud can leverage his connection to keep his luxury conglomerate out of any trade wars. Trades would be a blow to Arnaud's empire whose largest market is The US, equal in size to all of Europe combined.
Speaker 3:Trump has called the European Union's trade surplus with The US a, quote, unquote, atrocities, but he also leans on personal relationships to guide his policy as every businessman in the world does. Yeah. The ties between the families are extensive, dating to when the two patriarchs were up and coming property developers in Manhattan. Oh. That's a whole other side of Arnaud's story.
Speaker 2:He he was, like,
Speaker 3:in the real estate development. We're all in the construction
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Industry back in France. Darnot's Second eldest son, Alexander, has become friends with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Ivanka Trump, also funny story. Yeah. I made a so back in 2021, we launched helpful VCs, which was that NFT project where we made 400, you know, crypto punk style, you know, NFTs.
Speaker 3:And we list we put them online, and we said, any VC that reposts this in the next four hours gets theirs for free. Otherwise, we're gonna auction it off. Yeah. So, of course, every investor, you know, NFTs were starting to become popular. They were like, I'm not letting my NFT get auctioned off to someone else.
Speaker 3:Everybody reposted it super viral. Alexander saw it, and then one of a mutual friend of ours hit me up, and he was like, hey. Could you, Alexander wants to make a a a a crypto punk style NFT for, his dad, Bernard. Could you make him on? I was like, sure.
Speaker 3:It costs, like, $50. I was like, here you go. So, anyways,
Speaker 1:Gabe story. I had no idea.
Speaker 3:Anyways, because Alexander had had was tapped into web three and had done some stuff with Tiffany's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They kinda, I think, approached in the right way where they dip their toes but didn't go.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You know, they weren't saying, like, g m, Wagmi, and stuff like that. So anyways
Speaker 1:I like Sequoia.
Speaker 3:This do
Speaker 1:you remember that? Since Sequoia rebranded as, like, the web three faucet main net thing
Speaker 3:for a week. And it
Speaker 1:was, like, at the actual top, and then the and then the SBF FTX thing happened. It was, like, okay. Back to back to the the basics.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Ivanka Trump is a friend of Arnaud's daughter, Delphine, and a devotee dev devotee of Dior, the brand Delphine oversees the CEO. So for those that don't know Yeah. Bernard has done a fantastic job of getting his all of his children, like, running different brands in the empire. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So she runs Dior. The Arnoux conglomerate even pays rent to the Trump Organization, which is a landlord for LVMH's Louis Vuitton store in Midtown.
Speaker 1:So does, LVMH do cosmetics? Because you were talking
Speaker 3:on the
Speaker 1:last show Yeah. That Melania should do a cosmetics line. Yep. If she doesn't have one already, she might. She did one.
Speaker 1:She did one. There we go. Yeah. That seems obvious.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'll I'll I'll continue here. During Trump's first term, Arnaud's decision to expand handbag production in The US and publicly promote the move with Trump help the luxury industry largely avoid an initial wave of tariffs that hit other European sectors. Why are you laughing?
Speaker 3:I just think it's it's the the funniest game of checkers Yeah. Where for now, it's like, I just I just really don't wanna get tariffs. Like, okay. Open up production in The US. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I texted to Trump, hey. Do you see what we did? Yeah. Yeah. Like, here's why you shouldn't, you know, slap, like, a 15% tariff.
Speaker 1:Trump left office before a second salvo of tariffs could take a take effect. Those levies with some dub, the LVMH tax, were designed to hit luxury goods in retaliation for a French digital tax affecting US tech giants. Yeah. Hey, Bernard. You gotta get it together over there.
Speaker 3:Get it Get your house in a row.
Speaker 1:The cookies. Let's cool it with the cookies. Yeah. The cookie banners.
Speaker 3:The cookie thing is just I made a joke about it when I was in France in late December, early January, and it just is so over the top.
Speaker 1:It's insane.
Speaker 3:It's just it just is
Speaker 1:He should be running. He should Bernard should actually do this because if think about it. You walk in the Louis Vuitton store, they're gonna be like, hey. Just so you know, like, you're in a store right now. Hey.
Speaker 1:There's a store. You might have an opportunity to buy something. Can you please, like, sign on this line that, like, you're looking at merchandise and you're in a store? And it's like, yeah. I know I'm in the store.
Speaker 1:I know I'm on a website. I know that cookies exist. Like, why am I clicking a button for this? Yeah. It's unnecessary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's the same thing that you would never see that in a luxury environment. And Europe seems hell bent on
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Making their
Speaker 3:entire imagine that that Arnaud and vulgar. Yeah. You have to imagine that Arnaud, is inspired to some degree by Elon and that if you have millions of dollars, you absolutely can influence the outcome of an election and make sure your guy Yeah. Is in. So, yeah, again, a lot of like, the obvious thing if you're trying to avoid tariffs is to show Trump, look.
Speaker 3:We're investing in America. You know, we're gonna, you know, develop, you know, production locally. This is an important, you know, sector. But but then the the the sort of more complicated way to do it is to say, like, I'm gonna fit fix French governance.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, like, I'm gonna get my guy in, and I'm gonna make sure we're not, like, launching these taxes on American, you know, digital Yeah. Goods and products.
Speaker 1:Wonder, like, LVMH tax. I guess it's still hang hanging over our nose. Business empire, it says here. Like, of all the things to tariff, that seems like the safest. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not just because, like, luxury goods aren't important, but literally because, like, they're not price sensitive in the same way. Like, they're not price elastic. And so, you know, if you tax cigarettes, people consume the exact same amount of cigarettes. Like Yeah. It's fine to tax cigarettes, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's the same thing for luxury goods. I would imagine that if if they if there's a tax on Louis Vuitton stuff, the price goes up, it becomes even more exclusive, they sell roughly the same, profits aren't majorly disrupted versus Yeah. If you're taxing, you know,
Speaker 3:cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap
Speaker 1:cheap cheap
Speaker 3:cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap
Speaker 1:cheap cheap cheap cheap
Speaker 3:cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap
Speaker 1:cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap a little bit. It
Speaker 3:So I was reading an article in the journal about about the Chinese, like, LVMH's opportunity in China right now. Yeah. And they have basically there's already luxury inflation that they set. Yep. The thing is that if if prices have to go up, Bernard wants to be the guy that's raising prices and capturing that additional thing.
Speaker 3:Yep. He doesn't wanna be raising prices because you have to account, you know, for this tariff, or you don't want the consumer to be absorbing more costs because of Yeah. Something that's not your margin. Right? So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, there's so many places where I would probably be pro tariff just to make the American local industry more competitive. Yep. You know, we talk about drones. We talk about, you know, DJI versus GoPro.
Speaker 1:We talk about, you know, all all sorts of hardware stuff, Unitree versus Boston Dynamics, all these different things that could could or the Tesla Optimus. But what and, like, you know, like, a a lot of these I was looking at, like, you know, Swiss watches versus American watches. Like, there's one guy who makes bespoke watches really in America. Like And you're on
Speaker 3:the list.
Speaker 1:You should you should actually make sure you're on here.
Speaker 3:You should make sure you're on the list because it's gonna be, like, a decade.
Speaker 1:RGW or RGM. I think RGM, out in Pennsylvania. And then there's Hamilton, which is, like, a great and historical organization, but they're not at the same level as the Swiss guys. So it's like, if you tax that, it's like, Patek, Vacheron, and, and Audemars Piguet are still like, they're only games in town at that level. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm and I'm wondering, like, if all of a sudden Louis Vuitton is more expensive, what is more competitive in America?
Speaker 3:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do we just start rebuilding? Maybe it'd be an opportunity for an American, new luxury line to pop up.
Speaker 3:The thing about luxury though is it takes a hundred years to actually build a luxury brand.
Speaker 1:Where whereas whereas if an American entrepreneur came out today and was like, I have a drone that's just as good as a DJI, not even better, just the same, same price, we're price competitive, and and I would buy that one, obviously. But right now, it's like, okay. If I need a drone Yeah. Like, it has to work. I have to go with DJI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because the opportune the other the other one is one from America that doesn't work and and, cost twice as much. Anyway, let's move on. The the the article mentions China. LVMH is counting on strong US demand to power its growth in the coming years after sales in China, the second biggest market, plunged around 20% last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you were telling me something about that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, so It tracked with
Speaker 1:the iPhone sales perfectly.
Speaker 3:Right? So many luxury product companies had been dependent on China for the vast majority of their growth over the past decade, and that just, like, slammed basically to a halt. It's contracting now. That has to do with, like, economic issues in China. Also, the Chinese consumer kind of, like, finding their way, and they're being actual consumer brands in China that are starting to be compelling
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To people locally. But, but, yeah, there there's Caring Group who whose sales were down, like, 30% or something like that. So In China? In China.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's interesting. I'd love to know how LVMH is doing over the past year to ten years, if you could look that up on public. But there's some interesting inter information here. LVMH operates 14 factories in The United States already and is planning to pump more money into Tiffany, the iconic American jeweler it acquired in 2021.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So in 2024, carrying sales in Asia Pacific, including China, declined 30% due to weakened demand. And so there's there's this kind of caught people off guard to some degree because there's a bunch of stores that are already, like, badged Yeah. Like, have the branding of, whatever, you know, sort of luxury brand is going in there and just nobody's moving in. Or or they're open and, like, people just aren't coming through.
Speaker 3:So really tough, you know, scenario right there. Apple's having the same issues. Their sales are down, almost double digits, as of last year in China. And, again, part of the reason for that is that the iPhone in China is more of a luxury product Yeah. Than it is a utility.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we talked about this yesterday off the show, but, Apple has huge advantages in The US. They have their modes, which is, like, messaging, payments, the developer ecosystem. They don't have that in China because of WeChat and these and these sort of super apps. And so somebody can just trade for a cheaper phone and get, like, 90 per 99% of the utility Yeah.
Speaker 3:That they would get from an iPhone.
Speaker 1:Whereas if you go off iPhone right now, it's like you're losing your iPhone storage, you're using all your group chats, you're losing your account.
Speaker 3:Bunch of apps. Like, you're not you're
Speaker 1:gonna won't won't work anymore. Yeah. It is very you're very locked in. So this is fun. He he went to the inauguration ceremony and sat next to Bezos and Musk who he's been, like, going up and down with as the richest man.
Speaker 1:He recently was knocked off, and Elon is the richest one now. But he was flanked by his wife and two of his five children. Who would refuse an invitation from the president of The United States to attend their inauguration? Arnault told reporters. Besides, I've had a long standing relationship with him.
Speaker 1:Like, we're best buds. I love him, which is probably true. This article is based on interviews. Arnault first crossed paths with Trump when the Frenchman was living in New York in the early nineteen eighties. Arnud had left France after the election election of Francois Mitterrand.
Speaker 1:The first socialist president of France's modern republic led to higher taxes in the national nationalization of swaths of the French economy. He literally did the meme. If Trump's elected, I'm going to Canada. If if Kamala's elected, I'm going to France. And and he did that.
Speaker 1:He was like, there's a socialist here. I'm bouncing. I'm going to New York. Yeah. And it it must have paid off for him because he said, he didn't own a single luxury brand at the time.
Speaker 1:Instead, like Trump, he aspired to become a real estate mogul. He opened offices at Rockefeller Center while Trump Tower was being erected on 50 Sixth And Fifth. Arnault met Trump for the first time at a charity dinner at the Plaza Hotel in the early eighties, years before Trump acquired the storied hotel. Trump was the embodiment of a distinctly American form of luxury, one that splashed brand names in bold based font on everything from buildings to jets. Loud opulence.
Speaker 1:Loud opulence. Really
Speaker 3:the really the creator.
Speaker 1:Arnault's most high profile investments were on the Florida coast. US real estate, however, was difficult terrain for the Frenchman who struggled with an unfamiliar market. When Mitterrand's cash strapped government made a u-turn toward a more business friendly policies, Arnaud returned to That's
Speaker 3:so He's just like so dirty. You're only you're only business friendly when you're cash strapped. No. You wanna
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the teal thing is, like, is, like, even the socialists would say, you gotta let the capitalists make some money before you can redistribute it. Yeah. So, like, it doesn't make sense to do socialism in a 2% GDP growth economy. You need to get to 10% GDP growth. And that's, like, where the all the AGI socialists come from is they say, hey.
Speaker 1:Look. Yeah. Like, UBI sounds crazy now, but when we're growing GDP 10%, there's gonna be so much money flowing around. It'll be easier to pay for for UBI. Everything will be paid off.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you know, these guys are futurists. When Arnault resurfaced in New York in the late nineteen eighties, it was the purveyor of a different kind of luxury. Arnault had purchased Christian Dior, and he was fighting for control of LVMH. He had garnered a reputation as France's sharp Alou dealmaker back in France, drawing comparisons to Trump himself. Arnault and Trump shook hands at a party at the Metropolitan Club in 1989.
Speaker 1:Arnault had helped sponsor a black tie event for the French luxury industry at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan. They shared a table according to video of the event, and Arnault is seated next to a bejeweled Ivana Trump. As Trump beams as he arrives at the table to shake hands, Arnaud continued snapping up fashion and luxury brands, including American ones like Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan Donna Karan. The front the real front lines of the expansion, however, was The US real estate market. It was like a game of Monopoly.
Speaker 1:Arnault's brands needed to occupy prime locations in America's most exclusive shopping corridors. Talking about Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, just around the corner of Trump Tower, Bulgari, etcetera. And so he goes on an absolute tear
Speaker 3:because Yeah. And if you if you haven't already, go listen to the acquired episode of, LVMH because the story is just yeah, the found I I honestly have listened to both, so I'm probably have overlapping narratives. But, but, yeah, both of those episodes are fantastic, and and they give you, just just learning about our now just an absolute he didn't certainly didn't lock into, being, at one point, the world's richest man.
Speaker 1:Well, let's close out with this, like, how the taxes are actually shaping up to see, you know, what the prediction is for how LVMH bears going forward in the Trump two point o administration. In 2019, the Trump administration imposed tariffs of seven on seven point five billion worth of European goods in retaliation for EU subsidies to Airbus. The duties targeted aircraft, cheese, and alcohol, like wine and scotch. Bad news for the French diet. The French The French is fair.
Speaker 1:Paradox.
Speaker 3:Justin Mares.
Speaker 1:Luxury items like champagne and handbag and handbags were spared. Thank god. Dom Perrin.
Speaker 3:People scratching their heads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, at $2.53 50 a bottle, you know, you put tariffs on that. We're we're gonna be making January 6 look like a picnic.
Speaker 3:A baby shower.
Speaker 1:A baby shower. Yeah. The day before the tariffs were enforced are now and, Alexandra, boarded Air Force one with Trump en route to Johnson County, Texas to inaugurate the new Louis Vuitton workshop in Texas. LTV notice how they
Speaker 3:say workshop. They don't say factory Yeah. Because a lot of it is actually still done by hand. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. LV Mason invested $50,000,000 in the facility with plans to hire a thousand employees within five years. The bags produced here in in including the never full, new, new, and metis, I'm not familiar with these bags, bear the label made in The USA. When a French reporter asked Trump why he was slapping levies on wine and cheese while ignoring champagne and leather goods, Trump said he had been discussing the issue with Arnaud. I can't tax him because he moved to The United States.
Speaker 1:He was very smart. He was way ahead, Trump said. That's a good point. I mean, it's the dealmaker guy. Like, it seems like corrupt, but at the same time, it's like the whole point is what does America get out of this trade deal?
Speaker 1:And there are a number of things. There are money from tariffs or jobs and domestic manufacturing. And so, you know, Trump says, like, hey. I threatened him. He played ball, and so I have to
Speaker 3:I can't text?
Speaker 1:Have to back down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like like, that's the point.
Speaker 1:It is it is also tricky because, like, yeah, champagne, how are you gonna move that? Like, you can't move that to Texas, I don't think. Yeah. But, Trump's presence at the unveiling caused consternation at Louis Vuitton's offices in Paris. Nicolas, Gasqueira, Louis Vuitton's artistic director for women's collections wrote on Instagram, standing against any political action, I am a fashion designer refusing this association.
Speaker 1:It's, like, kind of a reasonable thing to say.
Speaker 3:He's not Yeah.
Speaker 1:That crazy. But yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of people that work at LVMH that are not down with, the MAGA bros, and so they're gonna have a rough time. Pulling Trump aside, are no confided plans to make a major investment in The United States. He didn't say what, but days later, LVMH made went public with a bid for Tiffany's.
Speaker 1:The roughly $616,200,000,000.0 deal was the biggest acquisition of Arnaud's career. And with Tiffany's flagship store, LVMH,
Speaker 3:and now it's just real flagship American luxury brand. Yep. There's not really Yep. Any can you think of any that
Speaker 1:actually Cartier and it's not an American brand. Yeah. Yep. And so I don't know who owns Cartier, but, you
Speaker 3:know LVMH. Wait. Really? Yeah. You're kidding.
Speaker 1:No. They own both? That's the most monopolistic thing. Like, yeah, like, where where is
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so Cartier is owned by Richemont, but Bernard owns a big stake in Richemont.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Wow. So it's indirect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where's Lina Khan on this? She's probably buying luxury watches, and she's like, you know what? Let them
Speaker 3:Oh, sorry. Scare economies. So, actually, I take it back.
Speaker 1:Okay. Break it down.
Speaker 3:I was spreading I was just spreading, misinformation. The size of our nose stake when he when it when it when he acquired it was undisclosed. Earnard holds it, in his words, as as an investment.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The thing is is Arnaud has a history. If you listen to the founder's podcast episode, he will just start. He'll he'll wanna buy a company's or he just starts buying the stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 3:So this is what he does.
Speaker 1:He's he's based on his version of public. Just, like, ripping little checks here. Dollar cost averaging in.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. He's dollar cost averaging in and and, and and it it's totally possible, like, he just doesn't even want to own all of Richemont. But, anyways, he sees it as an investment, not, he's never said, oh, I'm gonna try to take this over. So he
Speaker 1:doesn't have a controlling stake, but he does have a stake. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:No matter whether you go Cartier crash or Tiffany Patek
Speaker 3:But it's interesting because
Speaker 1:all money wines in the same place.
Speaker 3:Richemont also owns Van Cleef
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which you know that are now it it's such a hot, you know, brand, especially right in this moment. Men and women are wearing it. You know that, you know that he he wants
Speaker 1:He wants vodka. He wants
Speaker 3:it, but then they also own, like, IWC
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Piaget. Yeah. Like, maybe he doesn't want those.
Speaker 1:Piaget is great. Yeah. IWC, I'm not a big fan of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, good pilot watches. Yeah. You can't hate them. So let's see.
Speaker 3:LDM funny thing being a public company and just having somebody text you that says, hey, don't wanna ruin your day, but Bernard Arnault just bought, you know, bought 6% of the company, and we're hearing he's making other bids.
Speaker 1:It it is it is very, very funny. Anyway, so now that LVMH was Trump's tenant, and Arnault needed to extend his conglomerate's stay into the brick building. Once the Tiffany flagship store reopened, Arnault wanted to temporarily move Louis Vuitton's flagship into the brick building, while its permanent store underwent a a sweeping renovation. Arnaud dispatched Alexandra to, New York to become the number two executive at Tiffany on 01/06/2021, the same day that Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Just coincidence.
Speaker 1:By the time he left office, Trump was widely considered a pariah among the business elites. Alexander Arnault was the exception. The young executive and his wife died with Trump in 2023 at Mar A Lago.
Speaker 3:So for any of our listeners Yep. That are under five years old, it's hard to even our our kids listen to this Yeah. From time to time. It goes on in the house. Yeah.
Speaker 3:People don't you know, these five year olds don't realize that that Trump was a pariah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 3:Just in in 2021, every like, he would probably call somebody like Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Bezos would just, like, not pick up.
Speaker 1:I never need to
Speaker 3:I never
Speaker 1:need to think of him ever again.
Speaker 3:Like, hey. Sorry. Removed from politics. Yeah. It was just fully removed.
Speaker 3:And so the inauguration this time was just hilarious and that everybody came to kiss the ring.
Speaker 1:And all these yeah. Imagine we we talked about this with the, you know, decision to deplatform Trump. It's like everyone in that group chat was like, yeah. There's definitely never going to be any negative repercussions from this. And then four years later, they're like
Speaker 3:And then even even, a
Speaker 1:year later infinite leverage over us.
Speaker 3:And then a year or two later, there's this really viral post that's continued to go viral with somebody saying, it's crazy that we just deplatformed Trump, and there was just, like, literally no consequences. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's just like, oh, we just
Speaker 3:lose the election in a landslide. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I forget who that is. But, yeah, it's it's great. I can't tell if they were joking. I think they might have been joking when they posted that. But
Speaker 3:Who knows?
Speaker 1:But it is hilarious because, obviously, there were very serious consequences, but not for the LVMH organization and the Arnaud family because, Alexander is a young man on the move. Trump wrote in a social media post at the time, we were celebrating the deal we made. Alexander Arnault, actress Gal Gadot, and Tiffany CEO Anthony Ledru cut the ribbon at the reopening of Tiffany's flagship store in 2023. Louis Vuitton's Fifth Avenue store transferred to the brick building, turning it into a department store sized temple of commerce. Temple of commerce.
Speaker 1:We love temples of commerce. Giant sculptures of a giraffe and ostrich were added to the facade of the building. Very cool. And so after Trump won the election, Arnaud moved Alexander to Moe Hennessy, LVMH's drinks division, which generates much of its revenue as in The US, which generates a lot of its revenue in The US. Alexander took over as the unit's number two official matter say he's being groomed to eventually take the top job at Moet Hennessy.
Speaker 1:The drinks business faces more difficult straits than the conglomerates leather goods and fashion divisions. Drinks have much thinner profit margins, making it harder for them to absorb any additional levies. So we gotta keep buying Dom. Yep. That's really important.
Speaker 1:We're gonna save this company here on the consumer side.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And there's a lot of talk around who's who's, Arnaud's favorite boy Sure. Or child. Right? And so the way that the way that he's sort of moving Alexander around the empire, sort of training him up Yeah.
Speaker 3:Presumably, like, he seems like the leading candidate for becoming the top dog.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:Again, we're not It's exciting. Don't quite know yet.
Speaker 1:And so you can't shift as we mentioned, you can't shift champagne and cognac cognac production to The US. I think legally, like, France has rules that link appellations of wine and liquor to specific regions of the country. And so it's only champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France. It's like the Yeah. It's like a legal term.
Speaker 1:For now, LVMH executives have been carefully mapping its exports across every customs code category, tracking their exact locations in the shipping process. So the company can quickly determine its exposure to, the moment any tariffs take effect. And they're gearing up for more investments in Tiffany. LVMH is spending 10 times more on Tiffany stores than its previous owners and more than twice as much on marketing. Wow.
Speaker 1:That's a huge investment. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. Maybe a Tiffany store in every in every, every city in America.
Speaker 1:Whatever people say, the Tiffany the Tiffany CEO Anthony Ledru says, this is shaping up to be a very pro business president. So they're coming out marking their claims
Speaker 3:Never hurts
Speaker 1:to be
Speaker 3:pro business.
Speaker 1:Pro business. Should we do, should we do some some jet battling? The airplanes have been crashing. It's been very devastating, very sad. Fortunately, no one was killed on the last plane crash, but it did flip over entirely, and the wings broke off, which is not good.
Speaker 1:Seems like pilot air. They came in too fast.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Do you wanna talk a little bit about you don't need to name the individual, but but a pilot that we know was kind of breaking down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll just read the texts. This is hilarious. So we're talking about the, the the crash, and, my buddy who flies planes says, he thinks it's gonna be very stupid for the next five years. Have you seen the video that have you seen the clear video of the crash?
Speaker 1:The guy just landed way too hard. Literally nothing wrong with the plane. The weather looks totally fine. Just way too high of a descent rate, which is crazy since you have way higher air pressure when it's cold, clear day. And Toronto is basically at sea level.
Speaker 1:Like, bro, these are basically the ideal conditions to land a jet other than the snow on the ground, but that seems like that wasn't a factor. Yeah. Because as soon as they come in, before they even touch the snow, the wheels just break off the plane. And so clearly, they came in way too hard. And and he closes by saying, like, if you told me what, you need to land a jet, what would your favorite conditions be to choose?
Speaker 1:I'd basically choose these exact weather conditions, cold, clear day at sea level. And so, yeah. What a what a mess. Very, very silly.
Speaker 3:But, anyway, so this this story kind of ties into the, to the last one in some ways because Europe had been subsidizing Airbus. And so this is just this great battle of commercial, you know, airplane manufacturers that's playing out.
Speaker 1:And it seems like it seems like it's worked for them or something. Something's going right at Airbus because the Airbus
Speaker 3:Well, is it just that so many things were going wrong at Boeing? Yeah. Because it's possible if they were just not even executing that well, but just, like, prioritizing safety Yeah. Yeah. Durability of the planes Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and, pilot training.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe the safetiest European Rigorous hiring. Just works, I guess. Or maybe they're not getting brain drained. You know? Like, Airbus might be the hottest ticket in in Europe, whereas in in in America, you know, a lot of the great Boeing people probably went to work at SpaceX, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the European company started delivering the new aircraft, the a three twenty one XLR late last year against a backdrop of manufacturing upheaval and financial strain at its American rival. So far, the XLR has racked up more than 500 orders, many from airlines looking to replace older Boeing planes. And can you pull up on public, like just give me the size of the prize, like market cap for Boeing, what's happening with the stock over the last couple years, market cap for, Airbus, just to give me some ideas.
Speaker 3:Pull out I'll I'll send some screenshots to To
Speaker 1:Ben.
Speaker 3:To share?
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm gonna keep reading, and then you kinda do some deep dive in. The jet success is one of the starkest signs yet of the diverging fortunes of the two companies with Boeing's troubles leading to gaps in its product lineup that are now being exploited by Airbus. It is also a warning of a bigger threat looming. While Boeing is strapped for cash, Airbus is increasingly investing an entirely new generation of aircraft that could shape the duopoly for decades to come.
Speaker 1:Very interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one one thing right away with with Boeing, sort of a narrative violation, but they're somehow up a lev they're they're up 11% in the past twelve months, which you just based on all the headlines. You would expect that. You just wouldn't expect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They've had, like, a very rocky you know, they went they they they got, you know, badly, they badly you know, their their stock suffered, obviously, with with, you know, COVID and everything like that. And then it's basically And
Speaker 1:then the seven thirty
Speaker 3:seven percent. Actually never actually fully recovered. So they're still Yeah. They're still down.
Speaker 1:From peak.
Speaker 3:They're down 27% over the last five years. So Okay. Pretty meaningful
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Dip. On the other hand, you have, you know, Airbus, which on the, you know, five years up 30%. So they're almost inverted in that sense.
Speaker 1:So air American Airlines and United Airlines have chosen the Airbus's XLR to replace their Boeing fifth seven fifty seven fleets.
Speaker 3:And, again, as a consumer, if I'm looking at two flights, I don't really have that much loyalty to airlines, to be honest. I just kind of, like, try to book Yeah. The best flight. The but I do kinda pay attention if there's two flights that are exactly, you know, pretty much exactly the same. Airbus.
Speaker 3:I just go for the Airbus.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:And so it's totally possible that that these airlines are saying, consumers don't wanna be flying on Boeing. We need to adjust our fleet
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To fit their
Speaker 1:It's crazy because, like yeah. Well, I mean, you go one level deeper in the stack and, like, you know, no one cares that it's like, oh, this is a Rolls Royce engine or, like, this is a Yeah. TransDigm seat buckle. But most people don't know who makes what planes when they get on a Delta flight or an American Airlines flight. But it's you know something's going you know something's going bad when people start caring about who what who what the plane manufacturer is.
Speaker 1:But it has been a mess, and there's been a lot of negative, press. Even though just on the safety statistics, like, Boeing is still very, very safe. But it just the the Yeah. The the vibes feel off.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:The new model, the latest in its a three twenty family of aircraft has another advantage. It doesn't have much competition. Boeing discontinued the seven fifty seven in '20 in 02/2004 and shelved plans to build a new aircraft that would have competed directly with the XLR in 2020. The US company's main rival aircraft, the seven thirty seven MAX 10, is years behind schedule awaiting silence from the FAA.
Speaker 3:If if all but a handful of people are let go from the FAA, it's possible that
Speaker 1:That never gets approved.
Speaker 3:Give it no. They'd give it a rubber stamp because they're like, hey. We really don't have time to, you know, deal with this.
Speaker 1:It hasn't been all gloom for Boeing. The company in December announced a landmark order for up to 200 max 10 jets from Turkey's Pegasus, a care a carrier that predominantly operates Airbus jets. So they are flipping some people. America Airlines also doubled down on its commitment to max 10 with 85 new orders last March. And Airbus isn't without its own problems.
Speaker 1:Supply chain issues have limited the company's plans to turbocharge production and meet booming demand in the wake of the pandemic. This month, Airbus said it was delaying a long touted hydrogen powered jet. No idea they're even working on that. Anyway, in the five years since 2019, Airbus has spent some 12,900,000,000.0 on r and d. Boeing's plane making business has spent 8,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 3:This is such an example of, like, going back this month, Airbus said it was delaying a long touted hydrogen jet hydrogen powered jet. You didn't even know this was happening. Yeah. Clearly, you know, the the reason that, you know, if you could go back and invest in Tesla years ago, the the the bull case would be like, this is a big company Mhmm. Very focused on innovation that's gonna continue to try to reinvent itself.
Speaker 3:And these airline you know, these aircraft manufacturers, commercial aircraft manufacturers don't seem like the reason they trade it, like, two x revenue is because they have no real, like, they're not really showing, hey. We're committed to innovation. We wanna we wanna build the next platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, anyways, it's just it's just interesting to think about.
Speaker 1:At a large late stage company, people's incentives aren't their lifetimes. They're like, I'm here for a couple years or I'm here for a decade. I'm I'm building my career, but I'm later in my career. Maybe I'm gonna retire in ten years. Maybe I'm gonna retire in twenty years.
Speaker 1:Elon's thinking like, I'm going to run SpaceX in a thousand years, and I'm gonna be the president and king of Mars. And so, you know, whether or not it's true, he's certainly thinking long term. And that leads to a very different style of decision making than the guy who's just like, okay. To really get my retirement package or to get my bonus or to get my promotion, I gotta put out a press release about some fake thing and get some McKinsey consultants to say it's real.
Speaker 3:Powered jet. No. We're delaying it, but
Speaker 1:And then pump pump the stock a little bit and then pull back from the last second and say, it was actually never really a thing. It was just a a what's the term? It was just a art project. It was just performance art.
Speaker 3:Performance art.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What if they what if they come out and say that in the next press release? Oh, that hydrogen jet? That was just a bit of performance art.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a side project.
Speaker 3:This is why Boom Aero could end up being you know, their recap could end up being, like, the best investment ever is because if they can pull it off, then these big either Boeing or Airbus will have to come in and buy it, or they'll just sell directly
Speaker 1:Yes. To their own. And for everyone who's saying, oh, Blake's probably, like, the CEO of Boom is, like, is super diluted now. Like, you know, it's gonna be rough for him. If he really starts crushing and, like, delivering delivering in a serious, serious way Yeah.
Speaker 1:He can reincorporate in Texas and do the Elon thing and be like, I want 25 percent of this company, and I'll and I'll and and you'll give it to me if I hit, you know, a hundred billion market cap.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And all the shareholders will be like, absolutely. Because it makes perfect economic sense just like it did with Tesla.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, if you're if you're a founder and you're diluted, you're kinda dull but not out.
Speaker 3:You have Paul.
Speaker 1:Don't give up because you can always get back in the game. Yeah. This is a new thing. Yeah. Wasn't the case for a long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Paul, you can imagine Paul Graham being a big part of that round, presumably, and the other investors. I'm sure they were thinking we need to make sure that Blake is incentivized to triple down Totally. You know, when many people would have given up already.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But I obviously, the investors need, like, financial downside protection and, like, they need to own what they own. Yeah. But at a certain point, it just becomes about the share price.
Speaker 1:And, you know, it can be accretive to issue the CEO or the founder CEO a ton more equity Yeah. In the sense that, like, yes, you will be diluted as a shareholder, but if the price goes up and you make money Yeah. Everyone's happy. Anyway, Airbus has been working on lightweight airframes, fuel efficient engines, and even folding wings. That sounds real.
Speaker 1:That's that definitely sounds like something that's gonna happen soon.
Speaker 3:We're gonna have folding Android phones or we already have them. The natural evolution is folding wings.
Speaker 1:The folding wings are definitely coming. It's right around the corner, 2030. Everyone says if you're ever in business and you and somebody asks you like, oh, when's that crazy thing gonna happen? Just be like, we're a few thousand days away. You know?
Speaker 1:They're basically saying that they're basically saying the same thing. Yeah. Twenty thirty, for sure. It's definitely gonna happen. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If it
Speaker 1:slips to 2040, it's no big deal. No one's gonna be mad at you. No one's gonna remember what you said in 2025 and 2030. Yeah. Five years later.
Speaker 1:So it's a lifetime. Anyway, folding wings. That'll be yeah. Maybe they should just flap them. Make let's make birds.
Speaker 1:Giant albatross birds.
Speaker 3:The wings flap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come on.
Speaker 3:The wings flap.
Speaker 1:We spend more time arguing
Speaker 3:with the a thopter. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. From, From Dune. From Dune. That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Boeing isn't in a financial position yet to launch a new aircraft, so they're kinda getting stuck, and Boeing could get in a situation where their old plane sucks and the new plane, they can't afford to launch it. And so, lots of risk around Boeing, but the stock is up. It was oversold, and, clearly, people are, you know, optimistic that something will happen here. But, let's let's figure it out.
Speaker 3:It's not great when they're saying we've got a little we've gotta spend a little bit more time more focus on getting ready, getting the business back to generating cash Yeah. So that we have the cash to support new airplane development. That's just not good. Like, how is the how how is the stock trading up on on just that narrative?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Hey. We're not making money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're a hundred and $40,000,000,000 company. Nobody trusts our airplanes anymore.
Speaker 1:Boeing CEOs. They're falling out
Speaker 3:of the sky.
Speaker 1:This is like Yeah.
Speaker 3:We we definitely gotta focus on getting ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think what's going on here is that, profit is equal to revenue minus costs, and we need revenue to go up while costs go down so we increase profit. And everyone's like
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so just to give everybody context, I I have the full, public page pulled up here. On 66,000,000,000 in TTM revenue, they they've lost about $9,000,000,000. So Rough. Not looking Anyway great.
Speaker 1:Good luck to them. Hopefully, they can go pick up some startups, do some acquisitions
Speaker 3:It would actually be
Speaker 1:let those founders run the company. That's what I wanna see.
Speaker 3:Yeah. At a certain point, you just you want any great American company. Yeah. Because Boeing and the fullness of time is a great American company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That said, it clearly needs somebody like Elon. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wish Everyone always said that's the
Speaker 3:bull case for for Elon just having a bunch of children
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is that one of if we need more Elons
Speaker 1:Now I I think we can get other people. I would say the the wild card move, they should Boeing how much how much cash do they have on their balance sheet? Like, a billion dollars? They should just go
Speaker 3:buy I hope they have more than that. They're losing almost a billion a month.
Speaker 1:They're burning a billion a month. Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, people are like, oh, these AI people are raising too much money. We Boeing's out there burning a billion a month. If Boeing's burning a billion a month, and you're only burning 50 k a month.
Speaker 3:They've got Boeing has 26,000,000,000 on their budget.
Speaker 1:Take five of that. Go buy Boom. Blake Scholl, get in the CEO seat. You're running Boeing now.
Speaker 3:Better planes.
Speaker 1:You gotta make better planes.
Speaker 3:Make them flap.
Speaker 1:Make them flap. No. No. Don't make them flap. Make them real.
Speaker 1:Make them good. Stop with the flapping.
Speaker 3:I I want the, like, ornithopter.
Speaker 1:Ornithopter mode. Ornithopter mode. Yeah. I I I like this plan. I think we can turn this around.
Speaker 1:This is why we should have an activist hedge fund. So we can come in, start putting pressure. Maybe we gotta give Bill Ackman. Send Bill Ackman a post. Hey.
Speaker 1:We're taking Boeing private. We're buying. Boom. We're putting Blake Scholl in the in the Boeing CEO seat. Crazier things have happened in the business world.
Speaker 1:You heard it here first if it happens. What do you look at?
Speaker 3:I just realized there there's that Apple launch
Speaker 1:event. Now?
Speaker 3:Nikhil in the chat says, did we cover it yet? We have not covered it yet.
Speaker 1:Ben, if you wanna print off an article or pull up some slides for us, do that. But while we're preparing for that next segment, Jordy, I'd love for you to take me through Nick Carter, and his, and his post on, meme coins being unquestionably over.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Here's, you know, a lot of people over the last week have been, saying our meme meme coin is dead. There was a time that felt like, NFTs were just inevitable, and they were gonna take over the whole economy. And, I mean, it
Speaker 1:just feels like meme coins are, like, the least dead they've ever been in history Okay. From my perspective because the president just launched one. And so I feel like we're still, like, yes. Maybe you can call top if you're really, really sharp like Nick is. But in general, I think for, like, normies, they're just like, woah.
Speaker 1:Like, these meme coins are, like, serious.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so, well, he actually gets into this. There's some really good interesting so so the the the narrative within crypto right now are that meme coins are dead. Yeah. They're they're seen in these sort of, extractive zero sum games.
Speaker 3:Right? Balaji came out and was, like PVP. PVP. These are PVP projects. There's no value creation.
Speaker 3:It's just value sort of transfer between people that are, you know, early and people that are later. Right? And, like, people that's bought and sold at the right time Yeah. People that bought and sold at the wrong time.
Speaker 1:And and and we've taken this stance. We have said that launching a crypto coin is or meme coin is low class and vulgar. What would your mother say? Yeah. We've said that, you know, we we we we have we have generally been fairly harsh on the on the on the crypto community.
Speaker 3:And so and so the last, and it's and it's interesting because, you know, even today, a company that I backed at Pre Seed just announced a huge their second round Cool. From entries in crypto, called Universal Assets. So, like, there's a bunch of good stuff happening in crypto, but it does feel like meme coins had sort of the the obvious top was the president launching a meme coin Yep. And then kind of where do you go from there? And so there's been a bunch of drama with the Libra coin
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:From the Javier Milano. Javier who, like, just kind of promoted it, but wasn't necessarily a part of it. Yeah. Sort of reflected poorly on him. And then now this week, it's been interesting.
Speaker 3:Dave Portnoy has just, like, gone heavy into meme coins, just launching a bunch of coins and and sort of getting on these sort of live, chats on on x and just, like, him, you know, looking, like, classic disheveled, you know, yelling at sort of cartoon, profile picture, you know, people. But let's get into this post, and we'll cover some of these other issues.
Speaker 1:So funny that Trump has to pay short term capital gains on Trump coin.
Speaker 3:Wow. That's right. Because he was just selling into
Speaker 1:because they sold him, like, two days. Like, it's like it's like the shortest. It's just ordinary income. Yeah. 50%.
Speaker 3:So Nick Carter says, meme coins are unquestionably over. Obviously, they won't fully disappear, but the trade is gone. Reason being the entire premise of meme coins that was that there were fair launch opportunities where John Retail had just as good of a shot at making money as the funds and VCs. So for a while, it was these sort of ICOs that were sort of public, but they also had some sort of more institutional capital. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then you had, these heavily sort of VC backed projects like Solana, for example, like, raised a bunch of venture capital before they ever were sort of widely available or distributed. Yeah. And so, you know, after going through this era of, like, VC coins that are getting by the time they go public, basically, on the chain, they're, you know, trading at these crazy valuation meme coins you could get in at $10,000 market cap. And then if it goes to a million, like, you know, you've got a, you know, ridiculous return. So anyways, this was the entire substance of the claim made by the meme coin boosters.
Speaker 3:The coins had no purpose beyond their launch mechanic. They weren't sold as a product in their own right, but rather as an alternative to high fully diluted value VC backed coins. Those have their own problems, of course, but their issues did not make meme coins any more worthwhile, and the meme coin trade was entirely based on a claim that was ultimately exposed as a lie that the casino was at least fair. It was evident that this wouldn't last, and once meme coins became a big sector, semi professional entities would emerge to cut prelaunch deals, trade on insider info, snipe launches, meaning, like, just buying something super early that you know is gonna be big. The quoted tweet dives into those details.
Speaker 3:For all of Hayden's sins, and Hayden is the guy that did the Melania token, and then he did the Libra token. Yep. He's done more to expose the corrupt meme coin sector than anyone else, and he should be commended for that at least. So he basically did a bunch of stuff that people are like, what are you doing? Yeah.
Speaker 3:This is terrible. And then he went and talked for hours on On coffee. Portnoy with Coffeezilla. And so the Melee coin was the most obvious example of this. Opening at a billion and and going up to 4,000,000,000 in minutes, clear proof that people were playing a rigged game.
Speaker 3:So presumably, Hayden sold, you know, basically sold a bunch of the token before launch. Basically saying that as soon as we launch this, it's gonna be worth a billion dollars. Yeah. You're gonna be able to sell into that and it'll go up to, you know, a multiple of that. Nick says, but it's just the latest in a series of unfair and botched launches.
Speaker 3:The casino didn't take a slight edge. It was more like ninety ten in favor of the house. Right? So where to now? Like, just to make it very clear, if it was ninety ten odds in Vegas, people would stop going because there just wouldn't be the story.
Speaker 3:It just would be way less entertaining. And so Nick's entire thesis is if you're ninety ten in favor of the house Yep. People will just stop playing the game.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:So he goes, so where to now? Meme coins are cooked. There will still be launches and probably some winners, but the meta is done. Crypto historically has always been about these metas. Right?
Speaker 3:It was DeFi summer, then it was, like, the NFT room, then it was The three three. And Yeah. And so retail will still be farmed here and there, the little little pay pigs as some people. It's really As many as many are not extremely online and unaware of how extractive the sector is, but the countless coterie of scandals in meme coin land will turn off the smarter investors and eventually the mass market. So his position here is that, there's a there the people that are on x right now and and on Discord and Telegram and all these platforms, they know that, like, meme coins are cooked Yep.
Speaker 3:And they're now becoming way more wary Yeah. Of, like, some of these bigger projects. In many ways, like, Trump like, if you just bought Trump in the first twenty minutes of when he announced it, you did really, really, really well.
Speaker 1:And it's crazy because I I feel like, like, in the retail sector, like, in in, like, in, like, Wall Street, like, there is a thesis for, like, okay. The US government can give you a corporate bond or a a government bond. Then you hit three three to 5% or something. And then a a large corporation like Apple just makes money, makes money, makes money, and you buy a share of that, and they give you a little bit of the money. And so it's very, like, logical.
Speaker 1:There's very clear value creation there. And then and then, yes, you do get the crazier stuff where it's like day trading very rarely works out because it's so financialized and so professionalized that it's like, yeah, you're going up against fucking Jane Street. Like Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:Pardon my language, but, and then but then on the flip side, you have people like Warren Buffett who espouse just, like, general buy and hold strategies that that do tend to work out for retail in for most people, and it and it does kind of work. And with with the crypto stuff, I guess something, like, similar does exist with just, like, stack stats and buy Bitcoin versus, like, trade meme coins. But when I see the meme coins, like, I can write the algorithm in my head, which is, like, set up a bunch of servers that are scraping Trump's Twitter and watch for any crypto launches. If there's a crypto launch, immediately go buy that. Right?
Speaker 1:Thank you. Immediately go buy that. Like, that and and and you could do that for Melania. You could do that for Baron. You could do that for
Speaker 3:And there's people that actually have set up for all
Speaker 1:these people.
Speaker 3:Snipers that Nick is talking about. It's actually they're looking at the chain and
Speaker 1:seeing and saying, okay. The person that did Melania is working on a new thing. It's probably big, so let's buy some of that immediately.
Speaker 3:Or, hey, this thing just got created and a hundred thousand dollars flowed into it. Buy it with size.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so all that seems super easy to to make algorithmic. And so I don't know why as a retail investor you would ever wanna play in that unless you truly had inside information.
Speaker 3:So anyway, so Nick says meme coins are cooked. Second point, conventional l 1 l 2, DeFi token launches will continue. But I'm noticing funds and founders shying away from high pre launch valuations mindful that end buyers are wary of these high f d v low float game. And so what high f d v low float means that this is basically the Trump Trump coin. Right?
Speaker 3:So there's like this crazy sort of fully diluted value in in that if you released every token onto the market that would like, if you if you if there's a billion tokens, you know, and this is the price, this would be the market cap. But then, what they end up doing is they're only there's only a number, like, 20% of that actually circulating. So So it helps support the price.
Speaker 1:I mean but I mean, that happens when a company goes public. Sure. And the reason you hire an investment bank is because they're trying to do price discovery Yeah. In roadshows with large investors. So they go to State Street, they go to Fidelity, and they say, hey.
Speaker 1:The company is doing here's the DCF. Here's the huge model. We think this is where it should trade. What do you guys think? Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's do an auction. Let's auction off this block and then get it, and then unlock more of the shares. Like, this has been a solved problem, and somehow crypto reinvented it. But the problem is is that, like, the whole point of an IPO is, like, typically to raise money. So you you're raising money.
Speaker 1:You're offering the public. And then and then the reason why you want an accurate price is because if the price too is the price is too high, yeah, your cost of capital is lower. You raise more money, but then your stock tanks and everyone's like, your company sucks. On the flip side Yeah. If you price too low, your stock pops, but you're like, hey, we only got a hundred million dollars in our IPO, and we gave up 10% of the company.
Speaker 1:Like, what happened? And that's why Bill Gurley is always upset about that. Yeah. But the problem with Bitcoin is that, like, you don't need the money for anything. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, is there a point for this?
Speaker 3:Like, you know, hate this guy Hayden
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:With, Libri coin managed to generate a hundred million dollars. And what what Dave Portnoy was pressing him on is, like, whose money is it? Like, where did that come from?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so you'd be sort of waffling on that.
Speaker 1:Like like, a good example would be, like, you know, like, Uber goes public. They raise money. Yeah. Now they're public. They can issue debt easier.
Speaker 1:They get lower cost of capital. And so what is Uber? They're profitable now, but if they need to raise more money, they have access to the public capital markets. And then they can do things like try and build a self driving car or Yeah. Hire a bunch of engineers to make their app better.
Speaker 1:Like, there's obvious things. But, like, with a meme coin, like, where the money doesn't go towards anything, like, the project is done as soon as it's as soon as it's shipped. Right? Yeah. There's no there there's no so the price discovery doesn't even matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just it's just a wealth transfer.
Speaker 3:I I don't maybe maybe the price The price is on the ever function. No. Like, I mean, that's that's Nick's broader point Yeah. Is that the coin's purpose was the launch mechanic.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then the product is the price. So when the price is
Speaker 1:good Yeah.
Speaker 3:People love the product. They're like, I love this product. And then when the price is not so good, then they they they start to take some issue with it. And it's interesting. So what Nick is saying is, like, you know, these rounds are happening in the private market.
Speaker 3:So I've done, I've made probably five ish investments in sort of digital asset related, startups. I was lucky to be in this company that that launched today. Yeah. We have a Universal asset. We'll we'll cover it in a bit.
Speaker 3:I was, like, in the seed round of Farcaster, which is a billion dollar, you know, protocol now. But over the last year, I've been pitched these rounds that are that are this is our pre token launch round. Mhmm. The round is happening at $700,000,000. Here's the comps.
Speaker 3:We think we're gonna be able to go out at 2,000,000,000. It's like an easy, you know, multiple on your money. Like, that's how these things are being pitched. This is sort of pre IPO round. You only have to hold You're only a liquid for a year, and then you get this, like, quick, you know, potentially pop.
Speaker 3:So Nick says next, he says crowdfunding platforms like Echo will thrive. So Echo is like angel less esque platform for the crypto world. They do, effectively SPVs. They have accreditation, KYC, all the stuff that's important for companies that their their narrative is, like, let's help these, private crypto rounds that are pre token, be more community oriented. So enable, you know, 200 people to invest in something that in a perfect world, Andreessen would be like, we're taking that entire round.
Speaker 3:But people started to, you know, think poorly about these VC coins. Another interesting point, this is this is a really interesting one. So he says flight to quality. Part of the reason meme coins were were attractive was because they promised nothing and were thus cons considered exempt from securities law.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the thing with money a token. Right? Like, it's not like she said, hey. I'm issuing a token, and we're gonna build a protocol that will allow you to, like, get exclusive access.
Speaker 3:You're not gonna earn from it.
Speaker 1:There's not there's nothing. It's not a financial product. It's just a it's a meme. Yeah. And that's actually what they they they don't even call it a token or a coin.
Speaker 1:They call it, melaniameme.com is now live or it's a meme.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Nick says we have a progressive SEC that is already crafting rules to allow for compliant issuance of tokens and presumably an equity light disclosure regime for issuers. This means that we don't have to bother with fake decentralization, which is these protocols that are like, oh, we're set up in The Maldives, and then we have, like, our, you know, NGO over here in Africa. It's like That's basically when
Speaker 1:USAID is getting it on this one.
Speaker 3:But anyways, so the idea here is that these tokens that couldn't have fees associated with them because that would position them as, like, blatantly a security. They'll they'll be able to actually return capital to users in an interesting way and actually start to function more like equity.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Because a lot of people would say, like, oh, this token has to be worth money because it's connected in some way to this company, and they're worth a billion dollars. And the reality is is, like, they're totally disconnected. Right?
Speaker 1:The whole point of why you buy stock or preferred stock in a corporation is that it gives you a legal right to the stream of cash flows. Yeah. Like, that's
Speaker 3:that's fine.
Speaker 1:It's like, if you own, you know, 1% of Berkshire Hathaway, you get 1% of the profits in that they dividend out. And now there's a lot of other structures that can happen. The money can flow around a lot of different ways. The board can vote to reinvest those assets. But in general, you have a claim on the financial assets, both on the balance sheet and in the and and in the cash flow statement.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Nick ends on a positive note. He says there's no reason to be upset. A sense of gloom and cynicism pervades crypto right now because meme coins in a sense were considered the last fair terrain where anyone could make money. This illusion has been shattered.
Speaker 3:He basically is saying the trade of the next few years is just to be, like, where is their actual sort of like on chain cash flows happening and just buy those tokens. Yeah. Right? Because then this fee switch can be turned on. Yep.
Speaker 3:And you can actually earn, you know, cash flows based on your ownership of said token. So basically, like, this could be the end of crypto and meme coins are mainstream now. There's gonna be less of the I just bought this token and now I'm worth $10,000,000 type of thing, and more so it'll bring a level of if you you can you're gonna be able to make money on chain. Yep. But you're gonna be more like a day trader who's either getting super lucky, taking a lot of risk, or being highly methodical Yep.
Speaker 3:And taking the sort of long term value driven approach to investing. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:there's gonna be the top call.
Speaker 3:There's gonna be I think, like, the next meta is gonna be crypto value investing where you're kind of looking at these protocols and saying, okay, where is their income being generated on chain? Yep. And how can I, you know, basically own that and compound on it? And I'm sure a lot of people do very well, but it just looks more like traditional stock or bond investing Yep. Or alternative asset investing than Well,
Speaker 1:let's close out with this growing Daniel post, and watch out. There's some bombshells in there. You got a sensor. He's got a little bit of
Speaker 3:Daniel says, I think crypto permanently damaged tech in weird ways. Just a huge influx of very uninteresting, greedy Our words. Our words. And when crypto went bust, they rolled into AI, and now every AI founder I meet except for a handful seems like total dimwits. F crypto, man.
Speaker 3:10 k likes, so 10
Speaker 1:k now.
Speaker 3:View hidden replies for insane crypto bot trash.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Absolute s word technology built by s companies for s community. It is funny that the that the like, the if you post a lot on x, you're gonna have even if you have nothing to do with crypto, you're gonna have, you know, hundreds of messages a week from people being like, hey, boss. I've got a meme coin.
Speaker 1:I have a I have a bot that replies to every single one of my posts with some sort of, like, chat GPT spin off, but it always tries to steer the conversation towards some Solana thing that I haven't seen. And so most of the time, it just gets muted. And I I don't follow it, so I don't see the notifications. But every time I actually click, I'm like, oh, that's weird. There's someone, like, tracking me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What would your mother say? Lots of messiness. Go build something real. Do you wanna go through Gauthier?
Speaker 1:Do you do you wanna do that? Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's talk about a, a
Speaker 1:Let's do a size
Speaker 3:gong. Gauthier's A group of yeah. Let's hit the size gong. Gauthier's phenomenal poster. That's a good hit.
Speaker 3:And, anyways, so, so, anyways, Gauthier, I I ended up backing this team in 2021. So, basically, had to have been close to, or maybe 2020 even, but, like, close to
Speaker 1:decade.
Speaker 3:Close to four probably four plus years ago.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And they have just iterated and made pivots. They were starting and building an on chain index. Mhmm. And one of the, I think, generalized issues they had was they couldn't really launch hard launch in The US. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You had they had to, like, make it available. Mhmm. And a lot of crypto wealth is still in The US even though our regulatory environment wasn't friendly. So they ended up kind of evolving the business into what it is today, which they're announcing. And, so anyways, I'll I'll read it out.
Speaker 3:So, uni universal dot x y z, universal fundamentally improves how assets move and trade on chain. You can now trade spot assets like, SWI, I think it is, s u I, Doge, and XRP directly on your preferred chain without bridges or centralized exchanges. The problem is simple. Crypto is fragmented, so many chains, so many assets. If you're trading on base but want exposure to something like sold, Doge, or XRP, you have to bridge or find your way back to a centralized exchange.
Speaker 3:This creates unnecessary friction for your users and severely limits which which assets developers can use. Universal solves this with you assets wrap tokens that are backed one to one by verifiable reserves held in Coinbase prime. Each US that can be natively minted and redeemed on chain across any supported chain. Since going live, US assets has already seen over 850,000,000 in trading volume. So that's crazy.
Speaker 3:They seem like very, pacing towards a billion dollars, you know, very quickly.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Traders, this can mean you can finally trade 80 plus new assets without leaving your preferred chain. No bridges, no centralized exchanges, no fragmented liquidity, and you can put your assets to work in DeFi. This is really cool. A lot of investors have experienced this before. Sometimes you don't really know what your portfolio company is doing.
Speaker 3:I certainly, didn't fully understand the new the new, development, but, you know, they've evolved and and clearly iterated and and are building something awesome now. So congratulations to Gauthier and the rest of the team. They have just, I commented, incredible showing of grit across a crazy few years because there were so many moments where Yeah. Where I'm sure their loved ones were basically saying, alright, guys. Hang up the hat.
Speaker 3:Like If you're
Speaker 1:in web three, pivot to AI. Yeah. You gave us a lot of pressure.
Speaker 3:Like, you gave us a good run, but, like, it's over kinda thing. You know? Yeah. So That's great for them. Very cool.
Speaker 3:Exciting.
Speaker 1:We got more funding news. Saronic raised a $600,000,000 series c, from Andreessen caffeinated eight b c general catalyst, Elad Gil. Little bit spicy on the timeline since, Delian called Elad out for Elad Gill. His whole thing is like the index companies. He wants to buy the one company in the space that's the power law winner.
Speaker 1:Elad's obviously a a a investor in Anduril. Andreessen's an investor in Anduril as well. And now they're investing in another defense tech company, but, you know, we'll see. Maybe there's room for two power law winners in this space. But, congratulations to everyone over at Ceramic.
Speaker 1:And $600,000,000, I mean, that's a lot of money. You know? Boom. Going for that.
Speaker 3:Boom. Boom. Boom.
Speaker 1:So congrats to everyone over It's ironic. Let's
Speaker 3:I just love to see solo GPs leading gig arounds. Always. It's just it's just the best.
Speaker 1:Always. I love to see them. And it is cool. I mean, Alad's point was that, yeah, like, shipbuilding capacity is way under way under we need more shipbuilding, and and that's what Ceramic's focused on. Let's move on to, the humane AI pin is winding down.
Speaker 1:Did you see this? HP is acquiring the team IP and software for a hundred and $16,000,000. We've been talking about this make printers great again. We have a Brother printer. It's pretty good, but it could be a lot better.
Speaker 3:Of course, we have the printers the brand is actually called Brother. It's not just your nickname for it.
Speaker 1:We don't just have one printer. We actually have three printers. We have some very nice printers. We have we're big into printers.
Speaker 3:Her name is Brother USA,
Speaker 1:by the way, so if
Speaker 3:you want.
Speaker 1:And so this, yeah. Shout out to Brother and, shout out to HP, Hewlett Packard. Let's see. I think it's funny that HP is known for, like, printers now because they used to be, like, the premier maker of computers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I actually know someone who's, like, a descendant of Bill Packard. And,
Speaker 3:it's Oh, Bill.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, I mean, HP has a incredible founding story. There was a, oh, who was it? Some some guy, who fought in World War two or worked at World War two in MIT's radio lab, created a radio system to detect bombing runs to defeat the Germans, goes out to, Silicon Valley, teaches at Stanford, and, two of his students are, Bill Hewlett and, David Packard. And he's like, you guys should start a company.
Speaker 1:And they started HP. It's just like Wildmont. Massive, massive company. But, they have acquired, Humane. Humane had raised, maybe, like, $200,000,000.
Speaker 1:They launched that AI pin that was kind of a a problem in a solution in search of a problem. Didn't really get a lot of traction. Got It
Speaker 3:was more it was more felt like a experimental cool art project.
Speaker 1:It was also weird because it was, like, AI was clearly tacked on at the last possible second. Yeah. Because originally, it was, like, they're Apple folks, and they left Apple, and they're, like, we're making the next Apple device. But every decision that they made with this pin was hyper aware of Apple's monopolies, and that created a very a very, like, compromised experience. So it could it could receive text messages, but they knew that they couldn't integrate with the iPhone because so they're So
Speaker 3:wasn't it a different number?
Speaker 1:Yes. You had to get a different phone number. So Yeah. Hey, Jordy. Send me a text message, and don't forget to save the other number for my humane AI PIN in case you want text me while I'm wearing the pin.
Speaker 1:Like, it clearly makes no sense from a u UX perspective or UI perspective. But Yeah. It makes sense if you're thinking, like, 25 steps ahead and you're saying, well, if we do integrate with Apple over Bluetooth, they will have complete control over us, and we will never be able to defeat them. And so clearly, they were thinking, let's not make just, like, a cool consumer hardware company, because there are plenty of those. Let's try and disrupt Apple, and so we have to rethink everything from first person as just a mess.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And there was there was you could look at the so clearly, very talented builders, designers, like, had a big vision. Yeah. I love I love that in general, we're the ecosystem is broadly supportive of people taking these big swings on projects that are ambitious and maybe prone to fail. Right?
Speaker 3:We want 10 of these to fail. Yeah. We don't want them to all to fail, but it's fine if 10 fail and one works. Right? That's like I want but I
Speaker 1:want more, friend.com stuff
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where it's like, you give a kid a couple million bucks, and he goes and he tries to launch it in twelve months. Yeah. Not these guys were burning $200,000,000 for, like, a decade. Yeah. And I care more about the time, honestly, than the money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's
Speaker 1:just so long. I wasn't exactly ten years, but it was
Speaker 3:too long. Time. My main point with humane is you could objectively analyze the humane pin Yeah. And determine that it was never gonna be a hit consumer product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can And
Speaker 3:the issue is that the team had so much time and money invested into it. Yep. They had to, like, go put on clown makeup and, like, go out and be, like, look, like, this is the next big thing, and you could just consumers are too smart. Yeah. They're like, wait.
Speaker 3:It's a second number, and Yeah. And it doesn't fully replace my phone, but it's sort of additive, so I still need my phone.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:But what like, how am I gonna actually use this? This doesn't really make any sense.
Speaker 1:It was innovation theater. It was it it they were larping
Speaker 3:as Apple. They were larping as Apple.
Speaker 1:They literally dressed up like Steve Jobs, did an Apple style keynote, and said all the words that Apple says Yeah. Except that's not what makes Apple successful. Yeah. What makes Apple successful is that they had first mover advantage to, like, a revolutionary platform, the iPhone, and then they locked everyone in. So it doesn't matter if they've just bumped the camera specs two megapixels, you're gonna buy it anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and that's just a different it's just a different business. It's like a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Apple powerful.
Speaker 3:It was validating for for me because at times you're like, am I crazy? Why are the we won't name these investors. Yeah. But but you're like, why are these people putting in so much money? And and you could say, oh, it's just a team bet.
Speaker 3:You know, they they they have some, like, real innovative technology here, and maybe that's worth something. But it's the same thing that my my reaction to Quibi, which also you know, the thing about these companies that that have raised a bunch of money or super high profile, they tend to actually fail fairly fast in the sense that Quibi shut down, was it months after starting?
Speaker 1:Yep. They
Speaker 3:were like and Quibi's fundamental flaw was they were like, everybody's watching these short form vertical videos. We should shoot highly produced short form vertical Yep. Video, cinematic movies, and TV shows, not realizing that you're competing with every single person with a cell phone Yep. You can make more entertaining, more topical.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And and you're competing Quibi is not competing with Netflix. They're competing with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, x. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's what friend.com understands. Anyone can fine tune an LLM. Anyone can go to Llama and Yep. Make the LLM sound weird. And so he's been making a bunch of weird decisions that add up to something that seems differentiated
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And is not just gonna show up, in your in your Siri anytime soon.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Speaking of Quibi, Blake Robbins, if we go forward probably 20 posts, he says random thoughts. Turns out Quibi could have worked if it had just focused on soap operas. Real short is doing $40,000,000 per month for vertical video. I don't know anything about real short, but people are saying this is a, narrative violation. One guy says too bad their output is pure slop, but it's working, which is really, really interesting.
Speaker 3:They're doing 40,000,000 a month?
Speaker 1:40,000,000 a month. Real short. Never heard of it, but someone figured out and cracked it. And, yeah, I mean, it's the same story with Quibi and Humane, two
Speaker 3:But okay. But these stories are, like, total slop. So their new release, they have Take Me Hades, I'm Dying. When her sister gets back blackmailed by a ruthless sex club owner, Dakota James is desperate, blah blah blah. Divorce Me One Last Time.
Speaker 3:Haley Bildner, a successful NYC CEO Engaged to a billionaire politician, is shocked to learn, the air this is another one. The heiress and their Wow. The heiress and her possessive bodyguard. So So it's just like it's basically romance novels turned into these, like Yep. Seemingly, like, low
Speaker 1:Yeah. But so, I mean, this is a weird thing where where they were willing to do this thing. What is the counter positioning here against Quibi? Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is the founder of Quibi, would not touch this for ethical reasons, for aesthetic reasons. I can't even He missed out on a $40,000,000 a month opportunity.
Speaker 3:This is, like, basically pornography Yep. For in the same way that romance novels are. This this show is called Pregnant by My Tough Daddy CEO, which I don't even wanna
Speaker 1:say. Bleep
Speaker 3:all of that. Yeah. So there is these.
Speaker 1:This is this is not family friendly content. Is it AI generated, or
Speaker 3:is it actually Technically, we don't know what the story is about. It could be
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't like it. The vibes are off.
Speaker 3:Terrible vibes. Terrible vibes.
Speaker 1:Terrible vibes. Blake So
Speaker 3:now we know why they're doing
Speaker 1:$40,000,000 a month. What did it cost them? Well, there's a good question. What do the founders of Real Short's mothers think about them?
Speaker 3:Because What's we should reply and say, Blake, where should we start in the catalog? Yeah. But that's interesting. So the the thing is is, like, these these sort of, like, low class and vulgar novels sell really well.
Speaker 1:It's the same as character AI.
Speaker 3:Sort of TikTok Yeah. Book clubs Yeah. And stuff like that. People like this stuff. So slop sells.
Speaker 1:Anyway, promoted post. We got a promoted post from Porsche, the nine eleven ST. This limited run vehicle is up for auction with the entire winning bid supporting the Red Cross response to disasters through The United States. Now that's great because the Red Cross, we've been talking about this, might go through a for profit transformation, which would be huge. The auction is live now through February 20 in partnership with RM Sotheby's sealed.
Speaker 1:So, obviously, a lot of the viewers of this are gonna be at Sotheby's probably this weekend. And so, take a look at this nine eleven ST. If you're not familiar, the ST, of course, is a manual analog. Essentially, you know, this is a Carrera GT level performance vehicle with, true driver engagement. Beautiful vehicle.
Speaker 1:Highly recommend picking this up if you're looking for a daily, something to show off, something to have to make your commute a little bit more exciting. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 3:Great just sort of commuter. Underrated commuter.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so the Carrera t is out now. Little bit cheaper. I think a hundred and 60, hundred and 80.
Speaker 3:No. No. No. No. It's way less.
Speaker 3:I mean, after you could probably get it up there with options, but you can get a Carrera t for probably one.
Speaker 1:They raised the price though. Like, the only one the
Speaker 3:new? Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the newest one with the hybrid powertrain, is, is up at, like, $1.50 now.
Speaker 3:The '20 '20 '5 t has a starting price of $1.35. So, yeah, with options, you could probably get it to, like, $1.70.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But the ST was much more limited, much more expensive. And I think it's because the s, it has the turbo s powertrain, especially, or the GTS.
Speaker 3:It's basically a touring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 3:mean, a g g three touring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. G g three touring powertrain, but manual and much more engagement. So highly recommended.
Speaker 1:Anyway, big news from Anduril Industries. They are doing a hiring stunt. They posted, don't work at Anduril. And we have a post here from Chris, Bakke. He says, the new social media intern at Anduril is about to single handedly land them a $500,000,000 defense contract.
Speaker 1:There's a couple posts here from Anduril. They say, got a tech job. They get a tech job, they said. It'll be easy, they said. I've been soldering for eight hours straight.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. I'd love to go help with the dive XL project. Flying from LA to Sydney and back in a weekend sounds great. Matt Grimm just said I should do the Murph with him in two weeks, and he believes in me. I've never done a pull up in my life.
Speaker 1:Whoever was working on IVAS before me was really into sword art online. And the and the ultimate banger that got eight k, I think it's going up more, says,
Speaker 3:pole intern, John?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whoever ghost wrote these, generational ghostwriter, really. Like Yeah. Genius, you know, I can't say enough about them.
Speaker 3:Really dog.
Speaker 1:Absolutely dog of ghostwriting on the timeline. Might
Speaker 3:be might be in there.
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 3:Might be
Speaker 1:in there with the Palmer just told me he wants a working prototype of the big robot from Pacific Rim by Friday. Eight k likes on that. And, lots of good responses. Somebody says, is drill working for Palmer lucky now? Jason Levin says, Anduril is posting now.
Speaker 1:This round is about to be huge. And they even gave a shout out to our sponsor, Ramp. They say, hey, Ramp. Why does my corporate card have unlimited spending on American muscle car rentals? I like that one.
Speaker 1:I had one with that. And Ramp quote tweets it and says, looking into this for personal reasons. And, of course, the Ramp army comes out. Juwon says, I think we should change it to unlimited muscle car purchase. And Ramp says, as long as No.
Speaker 3:You know, actually Productivity. Heard a good story. So I have a family friend who operated a massive HVAC company in New York for decades. Yep. And he would he's told me just some crazy stories from that.
Speaker 3:Because imagine you're working basically on the buildings and office and retail space of, like, all the most powerful firms in the world. Sure. And so, anyways, wild stories. But he said that, he would get his executives. They would all get a company car Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And he would advise people gen they could get whatever they wanted, like, within a certain budget range, but he would advise them, you know, generally, like, get a truck or, you know, something that Sure. And he said that the most issues he ever had was, an exec that got, like, a a a nicer BMW Sure. Because every customer started going back to him being, like, why is your exec, like like, I'm clear like, I'm not paying like, whatever I'm paying you right now, I'm gonna pay you, like, you know, 20% less because, clearly, you have way too so enough margin in here that your executives are, like, driving sports cars Yeah. Exactly. To meetings.
Speaker 3:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think the Anduril guys, if you're if you're working at Anduril and you're traveling, gotta get a Mustang. Show up in the GT three fifty r, the GT 500, the dark horse maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Yeah. What else would be there? Maybe Camaro, maybe something with a helicopter. Corvette.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Z r one.
Speaker 3:The z a new Z r one. The new
Speaker 1:Z r one. People are not gonna be like, this is a muscle car. This guy they're they're gonna ask you to renegotiate the contract at that point. Yeah. But, but maybe, maybe something with a Hellcat in there.
Speaker 1:A demon Dodge demon pulls up.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Zero to 61.7 or something off the factory line.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 1:You love you love a track ready, American made factory muscle car. But very cool. Love to see Anduril, doing some fun posting. They posted a video, which I think we can pull up then. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you have that? Let let let's throw that on the stream and and and break it down. Jordy, what do you think about Anduril's recruiting video titled, don't work at Anduril, highlighting all the drawbacks of going to work at a defense tech company.
Speaker 3:Is that from an icon?
Speaker 1:We'll watch. Yeah. Let's watch.
Speaker 2:I've been at Anduril for, what, three months now? It's not the typical tech job I was expecting. My My last nine to five was more like an eleven to three. I was working remote. Here, you come into the office every day, and they have you doing actual work.
Speaker 2:Where are the nap pods? And everyone's going on about the mission. It's like they're literally obsessed with America, but I'm pretty sure this coffee is Italian. The founder guy, the one who's always in the Hawaiian shirts. Is he, like, always around?
Speaker 2:Subtrading tunnels are bunkers. It's about using the entire crust of the earth as a three-dimensional battle space. A new warfighting system.
Speaker 3:It's really hard to make it
Speaker 2:in the current ebike industry because dive LD is so hard.
Speaker 1:It is the smallest VFX shot.
Speaker 3:We make. It dives to a
Speaker 2:depth of 6,000 meters totally off, honestly. It's a bottom of that. Any part of the
Speaker 1:Easy shot. I didn't
Speaker 3:even notice
Speaker 1:that at
Speaker 3:the very least.
Speaker 1:Easy shot, but very cool. Like, little little touch.
Speaker 2:It's not exactly business class. I thought I'd be on my laptop at the hotel pool.
Speaker 3:That's how I'm just surrounded by all these robots.
Speaker 1:Lots of product demos.
Speaker 2:They actually expect us to test our products in the field. I'm more of an indoor guy myself. Sometimes I wonder, how did I get here? I'd rather just be sitting at my desk.
Speaker 1:That's a good BMX shot too. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:Can you This is so well done.
Speaker 1:It's so well done. I mean, it's like
Speaker 3:Is the is the whole don't, like, blank? Is that that's been done in a campaign? Work
Speaker 2:in Android. Probably. It's just built different.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 3:It's funny that they mixed in the the Zoomer brain rot terms. Yeah. Yeah. I felt different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, clearly, you know, targeted at, like, you know, the the younger engineers who are who I mean, the the classic Anduril pitch was, like, why are the best software engineers writing ad optimization code? Like, come build something important. And I think that hits it really well. Pretty fun.
Speaker 3:I love I mean, fantastic campaign. I was engaged the whole way. Yeah. It felt like they could have done the same campaign in thirty seconds, but they just extended it out. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They probably cut it in a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 1:I was kinda nervous. Like, I think, like, it has, like, the the patina of, like, Super Bowl ad almost where it's, like, something you could see almost before a, like, a movie. It's like a it's like a one minute, like, cinematic, like, experience. But, I think it works because Andrew has so much, like, credibility. I think that that style of ad probably is a little too much if you're, you know, a seed stage startup that's, like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like,
Speaker 3:you're like, you're a 120
Speaker 1:tax that stuff.
Speaker 3:That is I I have no idea if they I I I'm assuming they work with an external agency.
Speaker 1:An internal team.
Speaker 3:Okay. So, yeah, the the cool thing is, like, an agency would be, like, that's, like, a $300,000 campaign because it's Yeah. Days and days of shooting, and you have, like, all the product shots
Speaker 1:in the
Speaker 3:field and then the stuff with Palmer. So doing it in house is very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think they can take that don't work at Anduril campaign and scale it out and do you're talking with the AdQuick team. Right? Like, do do a billboard on the one on one that says don't work in Anduril, and it has some crazy submarine.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And people are gonna go
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:And it's just about, like, breaking that expectation of, like, everyone's saying work at my company. We're saying don't work. And, yeah, it's a joke. Obviously, you get it. And then there are and they are recruiting, but it's just something that sticks out a little bit in the feed.
Speaker 1:And even the first just don't work at Anduril post got memed and went viral because it was like, wait. Why are they saying that? Like, that's weird. The counter People, like, fell for it.
Speaker 3:Counter positioning is so key.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's funny. Speaking so counter positioning, everybody says join us on our mission. Anduril taking the opposite approach. Don't work at Anduril.
Speaker 1:If you don't yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, if you if this doesn't sound exciting to you.
Speaker 1:If you care about nap pods, like, you're not gonna have fun here. Just self select out. Yeah. And then by definition, there's
Speaker 3:just a call. Positioning example. So, Allen control system, which we've talked about on the show before, everybody was going for these sort of Lord of the Rings names.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And they were like, we're gonna go the exact opposite. We wanna sound like we're decades old. Like, Allen Control System. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's, like, just kinda random. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like an old legacy company.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:But then when Steve was on CNBC
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Or some other, mainstream media channel, I think, like, a week ago, it looks very legit because it's, like, Steve from Allen Control Systems. Exactly. Like, oh, what's this? You know, it doesn't sound like a startup. So counter positioning matters a lot.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Even even with us, like, we love YC. We, like, would love to, you know, figure out, you know, some stuff to do with them over time. But, with PMF or Dies, like, the exact counter positioning against Totally. Against y c just from the lens of, like, instead of make something people want, like, make something that makes money.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. And and it's not it's not like taking a shot at y c. It's more just like like, hey. There's there's a million, like like, Techstars is trying to be, like, exactly copycat y c, and there's a bunch of different companies that are Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or organizations that have just been trying to, like, clone. It's, like, actually, it's more fun. It's more valuable. It's more interesting if you try and differentiate. And that's what Anduril's doing next to the Googles of the world, which have been pushing for, hey.
Speaker 1:The nap pods are great. And, hey, the the work life balance is fantastic. They're they're saying the opposite. And it's and and that is like the the spice of basically any great marketing campaign in my in my opinion is just, finding the white space and then kinda going and exploiting it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's, let's move on to AdQuic since you mentioned them. This is a little shout out. Their head of analytics, Ty Tinker. Great name.
Speaker 3:T t.
Speaker 1:Head of analytics and he just tinkers with analytics all day. Great nominative determinism. I love it. Amazing. Why don't you try tinkering with your analytics once you, run an ad quick billboard?
Speaker 1:But he was on the SAS Backwards podcast, and you can listen to the full episode here. And I think that'd be a great opportunity if you're trying to think about out of home. You go listen to this podcast and you see. I mean, the big question with out of home is always the analytics. Like, how do I track any of this?
Speaker 1:It makes no sense. It's like it it it's like, is it just brand? Do I just have to do it on vibes? Well, Ty Tinker, the head of analytics over at Adweek, has all the answers. So go check that out
Speaker 3:if you're interested. I was saying I asked Chris, the CEO of AdQuik earlier, how would you approach an annual out of home campaign specifically around recruiting? Because there's some of these key areas where they could just, like, really scale up their recruiting efforts. And he said, we can layer any first party or third party behavioral data onto the map in AdQuick to find the best out of home ad placements to hit engineering job seekers.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 3:So it's not just about a lot of out of home is, like, we just wanna be out in the world and, like, be big and, like, you know, get people's attention, but there's a science behind it and, like, AdQuik integrates all that. So it's not like you're calling up the owner of a billboard just saying, like, yeah, I'll take your billboard for thirty days. It's, like, let's actually figure out the highest ROI, most relevant places to be, and then spending in those places.
Speaker 1:So Yep.
Speaker 3:They, anyways, very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to VR. Something Andrew is working on. So if you wanna work on VR, you could go work on the IVAS program, which, I think is very interesting. I was I was digging in a little bit more. $22,000,000,000, contract for IVAS transferred over.
Speaker 1:It only went live in 2021. So I think that there might be, like, $10,000,000,000 left on that contract, but then also it might get rebid and other people might bid for it. But at the same time, it's like dollar amount wasn't two.
Speaker 3:The dollar amount wasn't released from what I saw in terms of what Andrew was actually capturing. Exactly. But Andrew's pitch would have been even if they're bidding for it cold. Yeah. We're gonna be able to do this for
Speaker 1:a quarter of the cost. Exactly. And so that means that, hey. If Microsoft was gonna make $10,000,000,000, but it was gonna cost them 9,000,000,000 to deliver that and capture that ACV, then all of a sudden, they're like, hey. This this this contract only has a billion dollars of value to us.
Speaker 1:We We will sell it to you. And I have no idea if they if they paid anything or what they paid. But Yeah. These contracts can change hands. So it'll be interesting to see how that how that plays out.
Speaker 1:But I can't imagine a better place just from I mean, obviously, I'm, like, not objective at all here. But just try to be objective, like like, you do you're doing VR for defense. Name a better person than Palmer. Like like, I'm I'm super conflicted here, but, like, let's be honest. Like, what other company are you giving it to?
Speaker 1:Like, there's nowhere else.
Speaker 3:So anyway This is, our main advice for people is get conflict. Conflicted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get conflicted. Get on the cap table. Get on the cap table and and then start chilling, pumping your own bags. Let's go to Tim Urban now, because he is a daily active user of the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:He says, I'm possibly the only person on earth who uses Apple Vision Pro twenty plus hours a week. As a writer, it's just such a massive upgrade, to go from a 32 inch monitor to, sitting on a mountain top totally immersed looking at a 50 foot screen. There's just one problem. The idiotic way Apple designed their headset. All the weight sits on your face.
Speaker 1:This is uncomfortable and was on the way to making me look 80 years old. So he had a friend who three d printed a headset that, that leads the headset to sit millimeters off of his face. It doesn't even touch his face. And so he says, Apple, please talk to Jonathan and get your stuff together. VR, even with a big heavy headset, does not have to be uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:It's all in the design. And I love this. I, I loved the Apple Vision Pro, but I agree. It was super it was super heavy, and they need to fix that. And it seems like,
Speaker 3:Timmons got
Speaker 1:got a solution.
Speaker 3:The what they nailed design wise was what people expected a VR headset to look like. Yeah. But they but there were just so many like, again, that's not something that Steve would have let out the door. Users were like, oh, it's heavy on my head. It would have been Pepsi challenge
Speaker 1:balance. Product. Are you familiar with Pepsi challenge? No. So Pepsi challenge was this campaign run by Pepsi in, I think, the late nineties, early '2 thousands.
Speaker 1:And basically what they did was they had blind taste tests with people, like man on the street stuff. Yeah. So they'd film a bunch of people come in and say, taste Pepsi, taste Coke. And they'd give you a little, like, thimble full, like, like, two ounces of each. People would taste the Pepsi, and and they wouldn't know which one went.
Speaker 1:And overwhelmingly, they would select Pepsi. And what was going on was that Pepsi was sweeter. And so over a one ounce taste, you would be like, yeah, I want the Pepsi because that one tasted sweeter. But when you gave people the whole can, they were split much more fifty fifty. Yep.
Speaker 1:And sometimes even leaned coke because they were like, I don't really want that much sweetness. And so Pep, I call I call the, the Apple Vision Pro like a Pepsi challenge headset or Pepsi challenge product because, it was an incredible experience for ten minutes. And that was the experience that most people had. They went in, they put it on, and they were like, okay. I'm good.
Speaker 1:Or you give it to your friend or you blow your grandma's mind with it, that type of thing. But beyond that, it didn't became it didn't become a daily active product for many people. And Apple is in the business of daily active use. You gotta be using your AirPods every day, your phone every day, your laptop every day. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, they're they're they they they can't
Speaker 3:afford to sell. Valuable consumer electronic product if you're not getting daily use. Yeah. That's why Sonos struggles because you can't set it up and then you just put it in a box and, you know.
Speaker 1:Yep. Well, speaking of products that I use every single day, we gotta talk about Eight Sleep. And I wanna show this ad that they ran with none other than Charles LeClaire. Charles LeClaire. Charles LeClaire.
Speaker 1:Charles LeClaire. The f one, driver. He partnered with Eight Sleep. He says the secret is out. We are, Eight Sleep says we are officially teaming up with Charlotte Claire who trusts Eight Sleep to power his performance on and off the track.
Speaker 1:And this ad is incredible. We are gonna recreate this 100%. I love how this was shot. It's super high energy. Ben, can we pull it up and play the full Eight Sleep?
Speaker 1:Charles LeClaire, add
Speaker 3:our Marcy. Trey in the chat goes, Sharl, s h a r l. Sharl.
Speaker 1:It's Good.
Speaker 2:Good. People see the races, the speed, the moments on the podium. But what they don't see is what truly drives performance. For me, it is the work of the track, the preparation, the focus, the recovery.
Speaker 1:Sick ass.
Speaker 2:Sleep is the foundation. Whether it's long hours of travel or intense back to back races, staying sharp and recovered is what makes the difference.
Speaker 1:It's so sad. Sleep or night sleep. So quick. You can tell if the production was, like, a one day or maybe two
Speaker 3:Beautiful transition out of the sort of tech online x bubble
Speaker 1:%.
Speaker 3:Into one of the biggest global superstars in
Speaker 1:the world. A %. And and it also still has that, like, high paced, frenetic, social media vibrials, like, piecing to it, which I love. It's not like, oh, they went to some agency, and the agency said, oh, this is how you do an ad with f one. It's gotta be, you know, this really long winded thing.
Speaker 1:It's like, no. Really fun to watch, bunch of really cinematic shots. Yep. You can imagine. I can see the I can visualize the lens that they're using, how the camera is moving.
Speaker 1:That's just like handheld really quick, you know, high high faith Yep. Like fast paced editing. And I love it, and I can't wait to recreate that with us because he says champions sleep on Eight Sleep, and we like to say that podcasters sleep on Eight Sleep. And so you should be sleeping on Eight Sleep. Everyone should be sleeping on Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:So go and get an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 3:And we have a code too.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 3:TBPN.
Speaker 1:T B P N. Go check it out. Oh, we got some hiring news from none other than Josh Efraim. He says, today, I'm joining Cooley LLP as special counsel in San Francisco to support and advise founders that are forging a new tech frontier. Building on the frontier is hard.
Speaker 1:Think sectors like crypto, AI, hard tech, biotech. This is in part because the legal landscape can be complex and dynamic, making it hard to navigate navigate. He was a paradigm before, an absolute dog. He saw many founders struggle to find the right team of lawyers to help them navigate the challenges their businesses face. Working with crypto founders and investors on these challenges has made me uniquely equipped to help others navigate legal complexity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, crypto deals are next level in terms of legal complexity. It is not just the simple safe note and some, Stripe Atlas stuff most of the time. And so, Cooley is a leading law firm, supporting companies in crypto, AI, biotech, and hard tech. This involves a full suite of experts in areas like securities and commodities, regulation, governance, finance, hard and soft intellectual property, money transmission, and commercial transactions, just to name a few.
Speaker 1:It's a privilege to have the opportunity to join my good friend and former Paradigm colleague, Rodrigo Sierra. And the team at Cooley works seamlessly together to support founders on the frontier of crypto and beyond, and I'm ready to get to work. I wouldn't have seen this opportunity or been equipped to address it without the support of the team at Paradigm. The team at Paradigm has set the standard of how to build on the frontier of crypto, and their leadership on the legal and policy front is the best in crypto. So congrats to Josh.
Speaker 1:Good luck on your new career as special counsel at Cooley. And, hey, if you're looking for a startup lawyer, this guy knows how to post. So
Speaker 3:Not many. Not much. None of the startup lawyers I know are great posters. So
Speaker 1:But this one love to see it. It. This was great. Full breakdown. He's on x.
Speaker 1:You can go reply to this post. You can go tweet at him and say, hey.
Speaker 3:DM him. He's not gonna
Speaker 1:be able
Speaker 3:to give you legal advice in the DMs, but you can sign an engagement letter, and, I'm sure he'd be able to help you out then.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to Vanta. Savraj Singh says, trust Vanta. Wow. Thank you for this generous gift.
Speaker 1:This is a gift from your friends at Vanta, and it's a couple of, Valentine's Day candies. Yeah. It does look like drugs, but they are in the compliance business. So I imagine it's not drugs.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And people are kind of like, Lowell, that's so generous of them. And And it's kind
Speaker 3:of small gift. Idea that it's it's the world's smallest gift, but it's it's kind of a cute idea to just be like like, what what what was the actual I'm I'm trying to remember Valentine's Day. The Valentine's Day thing, you get these little
Speaker 1:like expect from your SOC two compliance, Like, you know, platform.
Speaker 3:For compliance, not, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're they're not gonna take you to f one on on box at f one on on
Speaker 3:I mean, they probably will do that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe maybe if you're a big client. But yeah. I mean, it's nice that they and I think this is underrated that, hey, come up with something cute and fun and send it to every single customer you have, especially if you have high LTV. You know, every Vanta customer is probably making them thousands of dollars.
Speaker 1:So you can afford to send a couple bucks to every single person, send a package, send a t shirt to every single one of your customers if you're in a b to b organization. Sure. If you're a consumer and, you know, your customer makes you $10, you can't send them very much free stuff. But, better than just an email, better than a, you know, I don't know, just like a discount code. I Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting. Kind of, you know, didn't go viral for the wrong reasons. Didn't go did did did wasn't actually a fiasco for that. So I think it's
Speaker 3:just kinda cute.
Speaker 1:It's cute. I like a
Speaker 3:little gift.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's funny that they have this cute little llama, as a mascot. And yeah. I like Vanta. I'm down.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm into it. Speaking of other good vibes. Rahul, zero interest rates, posts pictures of evenings at Julius. And he posts this at 10PM. And it's just, guys being dudes hanging out in the office.
Speaker 1:I love it. And Raul's really gone on to step back from posting and memeing and trolling and just, you know, wind up building a business. EV. EV. EV.
Speaker 1:EV focused on focused on grinding. So we love to see that.
Speaker 3:Well, every time you post, Rahul, if it's PG, we'll cover it here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And you can always go back into the product manager archive and see some absolute bangers. Product build account.
Speaker 3:So here's the hack to find the so good. The top the top bangers. You just go in a, go in a a new tab in Chrome that's Yeah. That you're not logged in and just put x.com slash their username.
Speaker 1:Won't work for him because he's locked. His old account's locked.
Speaker 3:His old account is locked. Yeah. Alright. Well, he still got bangers
Speaker 1:on the new account. Archived. But some of the greatest posts of that era came from him. Yep. He was he was a fantastic poster.
Speaker 1:And still still got it, but, you know, much more focused on business these days. But we love you, Raul, and good luck on, the next feature you're pushing or the next higher you're making or whatever you're doing next. Selah Selah underscore who's been on the show before says, how the f am I supposed to consistently down 200 grams of protein every single day without structuring my entire life around this?
Speaker 3:I put this in because I feel like you have really good advice for this. You're always having some little protein Yep. Snack. We ate burritos right before this as we typically do.
Speaker 1:Yep. I mean, the easiest way is to,
Speaker 3:Look, Blake, I have the PMF or dye stream up here. Blake is just housing, what looks like raw milk. So that's one way. Just just just don't drink water and just drink raw milk instead.
Speaker 1:I can't I can't pull up the old data. But, yeah. I mean, you need to eat, buckets of chicken and, I mean, one easy way to get this is, a a single, David protein bar has 28 grams of protein, and it's something like a 10 calories. It's like uncannily crazy macros. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:Eat 10 of those a day. Boom. Done. But, yeah. You you gotta go, you gotta figure out where to get the the massive amounts of protein.
Speaker 1:You know, six eggs in the in the morning.
Speaker 3:We we talked about this.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start
Speaker 3:slunking eggs on the show. John's never slunked before. I'm a slunk enthusiast. We gotta get it's it's also eggs have become such a status symbol, such a, you know, a safe harbor for wealth recently.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, I think just having, like, a 36 pack carton here that we're just slunking.
Speaker 1:I mean, Gabe right here, he says, pretty easy. You have 16 a we have sixteen waking hours. You need to eat 12 and a half grams per hour. That's only two eggs. Set a recurring reminder on your phone.
Speaker 1:At the beginning of the hour, eat your two eggs. You can cook the 32 eggs the night before. Belt it in a regular size cooler, which you carry with you. Wow. 8,000 likes on that.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize this was such a banger. 64,000 likes on this post. Wow. Selah. Killing it, dude.
Speaker 1:Good job. Very, very fun post. And, yeah. You gotta get your protein up. You gotta get one gram of protein per pound of body weight at least.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, a lot of steak, a lot of chicken, a lot of broccoli, and, a lot of eggs, I guess. Simple. Let's stay with Sala because there's another good post here. Some ideas for huge value add quote tweets in case anyone needs them. You wanna read some of these?
Speaker 1:They're pretty funny.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if you are if you've ever ever had a post go really viral, you're basically gonna get people that that are quote tweeting it and adding their own little spin on it. So these are typically some some ways that, you know, if you're quote tweeting something, throw these in. Fascinating, big if true, hundred emoji, interesting, wow, rocket ship, target, Worrying. Question mark ex exclamation point.
Speaker 3:Be sure to use these a lot. People will really appreciate the value you add. Kind of
Speaker 1:a Elon subtweet, but I genuinely think this this is
Speaker 3:a positive it's value add. Your phone's gonna
Speaker 1:be out of jail. Yeah. It's curatorial because Elon knows there's a lot of followers. Obviously, he has a huge boost in the algorithm. And so what he's doing is saying, I want everyone on x to see this post, and I'm just going to quote tweet it so that it goes in.
Speaker 1:Because, by the way, retweets don't really work anymore. They just don't go out. So instead, you need to quote tweet with something like this. And so, I I think this is a great strategy for growing your account. Just become a curator.
Speaker 1:Everything you see, quote tweet it, throw it in the throw it in the timeline. I think you're gonna wind up seeing a lot of growth, honestly. And that's just the meta, and you gotta play the game on the field, unfortunately or fortunately. You know? Don't complain it.
Speaker 1:Don't hate the player. Hate the game or vice versa. What is it? No. Don't hate the game.
Speaker 1:Hate the player. I don't know. Anyway You don't
Speaker 3:know at this point.
Speaker 1:Speaking of, Bezel sponsors, I don't know. There's no transition here, but we love Bezel, and Bezel has been killing it on X. I'm so excited about this. We've been talking to them. They're obviously a partner on t VPN, and we're very happy I have a watch coming on Bezel.
Speaker 1:Jordy's watch, he bought on Bezel, and we recommend everyone install the bezel app and, pick something up. And they do these amazing deep dives here on individual watches that are available for sale on bezel. And this one today is about the discontinued Patek Philippe Nautilus. It could finance your house or or at least a very, very nice vacation. Here's what makes it special.
Speaker 1:It's complicated. And to be
Speaker 3:clear, this is like a this is a hundred thousand dollar watch. Yep. So, yeah, it's it's very pot you know? It's a lot of money. Couple weeks
Speaker 1:at a watch.
Speaker 3:Couple weeks at a Mon is is, you know, basically equivalent. So they just get get an idea of the value here.
Speaker 1:Beyond the standard timekeeping functions you'd expect from a 6 figure watch, the reference number is 57121ADash001, boasts a date, moon phase, and power reserve complications. Will you use them every day? Probably not, but bragging rights don't come for the asking. Just like the most sought after executions of the Gerald Genta designed icon, this outgoing Nautilus features stainless steel construction. If a standard Nautilus challenges convention in steel, a complicated Nautilus turns the wow factor up to 11.
Speaker 1:At the heart of the show stopper, Patek Philippe's micro rotor equipped caliber two forty PS IRM CLU. Translation for the non watch pilled, a comically drool worthy self winding mechanical movement of the highest quality, the stuff of Swiss dreams. Production of this reference has officially ended, meaning the ante just got upped on its collectibility factor. If you're still waiting by the phone for your AD to call, you might be waiting for a while. I like it.
Speaker 1:So, go follow Bezel and download the app and start, curating a little a little wish list because, you know, the, that secondary sale might hit any day now. And, or you might hit some sort of thousand bagger and need to upgrade your daily driver.
Speaker 3:Real quick.
Speaker 1:So, get on Bezzle. There's a bunch of options at every price point, and we can't recommend them highly enough. I've it's been a wonderful experience. They have a little, like, Domino's pizza tracker when you buy something. Shows the person, mailed it into them for authentication, then they mail it to you.
Speaker 1:It's all very seamless. You can pay with wires.
Speaker 3:Which is so key because normally, if you're buying a watch, you know, from some random dealer, you send all this money and then you're just like, fingers crossed. Yep. Fingers crossed. It's coming. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it actually goes into escrow properly. And, and you can even, so they they have auctions as well.
Speaker 3:Rates. And those
Speaker 1:are extremely tempting because you see these watches and you're, like, that's, like, half off.
Speaker 3:Of course. Like, he's so, by the way Yeah. Justin Mears, former brother of the week just messaged me and said or messaged us. Just getting something. Said talking to a hoodied man, at bezel about buying a hundred thousand dollar watch.
Speaker 3:Thanks for the intro. So he's talking with Ryan right now. So the good thing is, like, watches are considered purchase. You can go on bezel, browse, buy stuff, but they actually will just let they'll talk to you Yep. Which we recommend because it's like you're basically buying, you know, potentially something that's car priced, you know, what as it, like, a for your car.
Speaker 3:So having somebody you can talk to is great. And, anyways, so funny that
Speaker 1:that's happening to my what he winds up with. That that's fantastic news. That's that's great news. And then let's, let's do Joe Weisenthal, the stalwart over at, Odd Lots podcast on Bloomberg. He says, imagining Twitter right before the asteroid hits.
Speaker 1:Have you been following this asteroid news at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm gonna go out on a limb is is NASA's, like, we are getting dozed. It's coming. Yeah.
Speaker 3:How do we protect ourselves against that every single day? Just say there's a 1% greater chance. Eventually, it's gonna be, like, 99% chance we need NASA to save us, like, fund them. So I think this is a survival tactic. I think it's too conveniently timed.
Speaker 3:And why are you getting why are you you why are you a % off week over week on the probability of something hitting Interesting. Hitting in 2030? Yeah. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:They also just picked twenty thirty out of the hat. Oh.
Speaker 1:Is it twenty thirty? I don't know. Is it twenty twenty five or something?
Speaker 3:No. I think it's NASA
Speaker 1:says little bit. Twenty thirty two. Yeah. NASA says there's now a 3.1 chance of an asteroid an an asteroid will hit Earth in 2032 up from two point six percent yesterday. This is the highest risk assessment an asteroid has ever received, surpassing two point four percent in 02/2004.
Speaker 1:And Guru, Guju Viper says, can we bet on this Polymarket? And Polymarket says, yes. Of course. And, Joe Weisenthal says, imagining Twitter right before the asteroid hits, a furious debate about whether prediction markets did a better job than the formal modelers and the and the degree to which the former could exist without the latter, of course, referencing the, the election. And so I I thought that was just a very, very funny post because, of course, people would be debating about that and betting on it right up until the end.
Speaker 1:But I think we're safe. NASA actually has the bull case is that they've done asteroid deflection before. And so, this this model does not take into account that they might just send a rocket and, like, blow it up, basically. Yeah. Which would be a good outcome.
Speaker 1:And fortunately, we have, what, seven years to figure it out. That seems very doable. That seems very doable. We might we might have, you know, thousands of of starships up there by then. Who knows?
Speaker 1:You could you could start a new company today for asteroid defense. And and Big opportunity. And and and
Speaker 3:If you wanna
Speaker 1:be a hero
Speaker 3:if you wanna be a hero, main character every fifteen years Yep. Start an asteroid defense company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:We'll back it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be great. And so we got another post from Wander. Their designer has been on a tear, and this was interesting because I I haven't list I've never actually listed a, a property on Wander. But if you have a a vacation home that you want to rent onto Wander to other people, their booking website is just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1:They have a whole management platform, and the management platform is crazy. It's integrated with all sorts of, iCal URLs and smart home things so you can generate new access codes for the garage door so that when someone comes in, they have a bespoke code that only works for that amount of time. And so they've done a lot of work to help, property owners.
Speaker 3:Of the yeah. One of the greatest trades one of the greatest trades you could do right now is say, there's a ton of competition for nice homes on Airbnb because there's this huge range.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And if I if I go and partner with a wander, I'm gonna get a much better guest experience that I don't have to manage at all
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And, less competition because wander at the moment, they don't have the same amount of density. They might have five homes in a specific market. Yep. So you're sort of, and they're working with the Technology Brothers to drive the demand side too. So we're here to drive supply and demand.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But And I liked this picture if you're looking for inspiration for where to stay, if you wanna be a guest at a wander, the next photo is just this, this crazy modern box house with a beautiful pool and a really wide open, door great for entertaining. I thought that'd be a fun place to stay. So, so go surf on Wander. Tell him the technology brother sent you. And, that's pretty much our show for today.
Speaker 1:Our producer, Ben, is a little under the weather, so wish him well. Thanks for being a trooper, Ben. We really appreciate you helping run the show today. Hope you're healing up soon. And, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Speaker 3:you want. Go lock in.
Speaker 1:Go lock in.
Speaker 3:It's time. It's enough entertainment and news for the day. Yeah. Time to lock in.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching, everyone. Thanks for having a great day. See you tomorrow.