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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to technology brothers. The number one show in tech, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. Today is Monday, 02/17/2025. This show starts now.
Speaker 1:Jordy, how you doing?
Speaker 2:We're back in the studio. I'm in a new suit. You're maybe in a new suit.
Speaker 1:As of two weeks ago. Yeah. The black suit is relatively new. I'm still breaking it in.
Speaker 2:There we go. We're very happy to be back in the studio. We did two weeks away. It was some of the toughest weeks of our lives. It was terrible.
Speaker 2:Being away from this the the the the capital of capital. And, I'm very happy to be back. We got a great show today. We do. We we we stopped recording Friday, and it just felt like 20 different headlines hit the timeline.
Speaker 2:And we were kinda thinking about doing a weekend show. We always are. Yeah. But for now, we'll stick to Mondays.
Speaker 1:You know, the really big podcasters, they always do emergency pod when there's breaking news. I think of our show, every show is an emergency pod.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every pod is an emergency pod. Exactly. You gotta be live. You gotta be, breaking down what's happening on the timeline.
Speaker 1:Timeline wasn't turmoil this weekend. But Monday, it's president's day, and we have an exciting announcement. PMF or die just went live. There's 10,000 people watching it right now, the livestream. And, yeah, it's just two dudes locked in a cage coding, trying to hit 1,000,000 ARR with with just $25,000
Speaker 2:In ninety days. Going on? Yeah. So right on on on January 14, we were talking, and I was like, should I post this? It's kind of hilarious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was just a simple idea to take two people, lock them in an apartment with 25 k, and let them build for ninety days and put them in the spotlight. Basically, give them a ton of attention
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And force them to have this sort of extreme level of focus. We ended up getting hundreds of applicants from all over the world, people building super cool, you know, businesses are wanting to to build apps in the cage. Mhmm. We ultimately selected two of them. And as of this morning, they kicked off building, and, they are, absolute studs for agreeing to do this.
Speaker 2:It's it's, we've been a little bit concerned around, how how is this sort of constant attention and and the pressure, going to affect the players. Right? It's it's it's an extreme it's just they're submitting to themselves to something that many people would describe as torture. Right? Being being on a twenty four seven livestream for ninety days in a row, and all you can do is work.
Speaker 2:But they were, you know, obviously super excited about it, or they wouldn't have agreed to it. And it's actually Patty's, one of the players' birthdays today.
Speaker 1:Happy birthday.
Speaker 2:He's turning 22. He's turning 22
Speaker 1:on the cage. Cage.
Speaker 2:With a live audience, but he's he's an absolute grinder. And Yeah. There's nowhere he'd rather be truly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's fantastic. It's it's weird. It's an experiment. It's, you know, half performance art, half not.
Speaker 1:They are building a real company. Like, you will be able to download their product, and Blake is making
Speaker 2:sure that Well, yeah. Blake is they they both are. Blake is very adamant that this isn't performance art. They wanna build a durable Yeah. Massive company, and, they're certainly, you know, putting the pressure on themselves.
Speaker 2:So we're gonna be covering daily updates on the show. Yep. And, so, yeah, we'll keep you in the loop today. They're just getting sort of their dev environment set up. They're doing some, you know, working on some product flows.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're working on the actual livestream product itself. But but, ultimately, this is just a view into their world for the next ninety days, and we're gonna be recapping it, you know, daily, weekly on the show. And then, ultimately, at the very end, we'll put together, a, you know, basically a documentary on on what they accomplished. And, there should be some pretty fantastic results.
Speaker 2:So it's already cool to see there's there's people in the chat that are joining in, just saying, I'm gonna lock in with you guys from home Yep. Joining them on the journey.
Speaker 1:Anyone can anyone can do free to or die at home.
Speaker 2:It's free to lock in.
Speaker 1:Free to lock in. So yeah. I mean, it's cool. It's a cool test of the thesis that, hey. It's cheaper and easier to build companies than ever before.
Speaker 1:You can get to 1,000,000 ARR very quickly. We've seen this with Cursor. A hundred million ARR is easier and faster than ever before. And so it'll be interesting to see, how they do it. And it'll be really funny if they get out of the cage in, like, two weeks or something.
Speaker 1:I mean, anything can happen. It could be a grind. It could be okay. Game's over. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go enjoy Central Park now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're in New York.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the and the space that they're in, it's in, it's in New York City. I won't be any more specific than that so we don't get hecklers. There was already people saying you know, asking if the players were were single and stuff like that. So there there's there's quite quite the fan base.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's it the the setting is iconic. The skyline's incredible. It's I've I've I've obviously been in there already myself. And at night, when the when, you know, when when it gets dark out, you can just see, you know, the entire New York skyline. It's very iconic, and we'll see how late they work tonight.
Speaker 2:It's it's just gonna be funny to watch. It's it's every entrepreneur goes through this where it's it's 11:30, twelve thirty one. You're tired. You wanna go to sleep. Your your body's telling you, like, just, you know, stop, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:You gotta just keep pushing through. Yeah. And, yeah. So so, you know, everything will be, you know, completely transparent. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're they're they're taking building in public to the absolute extreme here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And, yeah, I mean, I love it as an experiment. You know, not many people stream on x. It's a newer feature of the platform, but Yeah. I'm excited to see where it goes.
Speaker 1:Well, let's break down the show. We got a bunch of cool stories that we didn't get to last week that we're pulling forward and then talking about a bunch of other stuff. We got our boys from El Segundo are in The Economist, a great puff piece. We got, Alex Garps in The Wall Street Journal. There's also a deep dive on Trump's cash bonanza in The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:We're gonna give you some timeline, of course, break down what's happening on x.
Speaker 2:Trump's whole life has been a cash bonanza.
Speaker 1:But the
Speaker 2:last month, he's really he's really ramped it up.
Speaker 1:Yep. 100%. And then, Meta is getting into humanoid robots. That'll be exciting to talk about. And then there's a proposal in, Pirate Wires in the white pill section to turn Guantanamo Bay into Hong Kong.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that'll be that'll be fun to read through. So let's kick it off with the Gundo boys. Defense tech is blowing up Silicon Valley's beliefs. This is, from February 13 in The Economist, a very prestigious publication. You know, there's been a lot of hate for mainstream media.
Speaker 1:I think The Economist has still got it. Great reporting. I enjoy reading it every week.
Speaker 2:And I never knew this. I I just somehow, you know, didn't didn't pay pay attention to this, but The Economist never publishes under the writer's name. Bylines. All No bylines. It's all, from The Economist.
Speaker 2:You don't know exactly who's writing it, and I think that makes, you know, it it makes The Economist a unique, sort of platform for writers to write on because you're writing under this brand versus other places. New York Times, you're very clearly writing, you know, unless they're doing, like, an anonymous Yeah. You know, type
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. I mean, it lends itself to there's a very consistent voice that happens in every in every piece, and you have to conform to that kind of neutral brand standard.
Speaker 1:And it also creates a little bit of, like like, whoever wrote this could have a different world out there where they are right wing or left wing. But you're not gonna read this and then go and secretly find their tweets and be like, oh, they are something you know, go go crazy about it. You're you're just going to enjoy it as a piece of writing, and then their life is separate, which I think is very cool. Yeah. So the article says, in the back of an unmarked office building close to LAX, the main airport of Los Angeles stands a rack of unarmed hypersonic missiles the size of small drain pipes.
Speaker 1:On February 6, a camouflage truck ferried one away to New Mexico for a test launch with the US Air Force. Such activity used to be common in El Segundo, the LA neighborhood that was once the hub of military space flight. Then the cold war ended, and with it, much of the West Coast weapons business. Now it's coming back. Castilian, which we've talked about before, they make projectiles.
Speaker 1:They were founded in 2022 by three alumni of SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, which was also created in El Segundo. Los Angeles is not alone in reviving the warrior spirit buried deep in its past. Silicon Valley is doing so too. It's in the early days in the mid twentieth century. It created renaissance equipment for spy planes and semiconductors for missiles.
Speaker 1:But then the peace nicks took over, and for decades, defense became a dirty word. As recently as two years ago, Castilian couldn't open a bank account in Silicon Valley owing to the stigma attached for making weapons. Yeah. It is fascinating that
Speaker 2:And I and I actually had this with a portfolio company recently that got booted off of Rippling because it was anything defense related. So even today, you still cannot, to my knowledge, sign up for Rippling if you're if you're doing anything in, at all to do with the military.
Speaker 1:Really? Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, there there is a a shift.
Speaker 1:Like, Anduril, when they started, was purely defense tech. Yeah. And and even then, they didn't have any kinetic capabilities whatsoever.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was for a long time. It was software, but it was also sensor towers, which are just cameras. And then it was drones, and even the first drones, the Anvil drone. The ghost drone is just a helicopter that just looks
Speaker 2:We have to we have to study Anduril's road map because it was very, very intentional. Yeah. They just won the holographic, you know, super soldier
Speaker 3:I've asked.
Speaker 2:IVAS project. And many people would have said, why didn't you just start there?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But they were super intentional, and many founders go through this where they're, like, we're gonna do this, then this, then this, then this, and they don't hit the first two attempts, and then they don't, you know, or they're not able to keep going. They were so so intentional and seems to be paying off now landing these major, you know, programs of record
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:That are multibillion dollar, you know, endeavors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so several developments have since, stiffened the sinews. I love this writing. One is the war in Ukraine. Another is America's deepening rivalry with China.
Speaker 1:Most alluring perhaps is the sweet smell of financial success. SpaceX has become the most valuable private firm in America worth 350,000,000,000. Palantir, a supplier of software to western armies and spooks, has a market value of more than 250,000,000,000, more than Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, a trio of defense contractors combined. Anduril, a younger firm that makes autonomous weapons, is currently raising 2,500,000,000.0 at a valuation of 28,000,000,000. Cue a cascade of investment in into smaller startups making military kit for land, sea, air, and space.
Speaker 1:PitchBook, a data gatherer, says the value of such deals in America rose by more than a third over the past two years to almost $40,000,000,000. Venture funding as a whole fell over that period. So, yeah, the defense tech boom is, like, super, super real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You got anything? Ultimately, it's saying saying that, you know, there was massive investment across a bunch of different categories during that period as well. Oh, yeah. So it's hard, you know, comparing the past two years to the two years before that is not, you know, super you know, considering that was, you know, the the pico top of of the cycle and zerp and things like that.
Speaker 2:But, certainly, there's a lot of demand, and $40,000,000,000 is a huge number that is, you know, fully risk on capital Yep. To build products for our military, which I think is a healthy sort of function in that, you know, we prefer that our government not to to do some high risk stuff. But in general, we don't want all investment into the category to be government funded. Yeah. It's much healthier if if, you know, there's more on the line and and it's actual, you know, risk risk dollars at work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of it is, like, the the defense tech like, the process of building a defense tech company is just slower because you're Yeah. Dealing with atoms, not bits, and you're dealing with government contracts. But the the defense tech boom already feels longer than the NFT boom or
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the consumer social boom or really any of those. You know, Anduril '20 '16, they start kinda become a unicorn, I think, around 2020. And then more companies start getting funded because they derisk the sector. Yep. But now we're five years into that, and there's, you know, a host of other unicorns, a host of other companies, and tons of startups getting started.
Speaker 2:To that point where, the market maps are so established that if you're thinking of getting into defense tech right
Speaker 3:now, unless you're working with some truly novel technology
Speaker 2:Yep. Funded teams doing the exact same thing that you're doing already, and they may not have announced or been very public.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:But, you know, definitely something to be aware of. One of those situations where if there's a market map and you fit nicely into it, this might be too late.
Speaker 1:Too late. Yeah. So less remarked upon is how the defense tech boom changes core tenants of the venture industry. Historically, venture investors shied away from supporting hardware industries, especially those like defense that can gobble up lots of capital. Now that's 100% true.
Speaker 1:A lot of these businesses are super capital intensive, lots of dilution, and we've seen that certainly in the space, industry. That is changing. So too is the world view of many in Silicon Valley who have turned their backs on the libertarian ethos that prevailed in recent decades in favor of a chest thumping patriotism that celebrates American military might. Silicon Valley's renewed interest in military hardware reflects the shifting dynamics of combat display on display in Ukraine. Smaller weapons, notably drones, have supplemented and sometimes supplanted heavy armaments.
Speaker 1:That has opened that has left an opening for upstarts that can make cleverer and cheaper versions. Drones powered by wizzy artificial intelligence systems are in vogue, so too is thriftiness. Take Castilian as an example. For its missile system, it uses several automotive grow automate automotive grade chips costing a few hundred dollars rather than expensive space grade ones. It manufactures rocket motors itself to keep costs down.
Speaker 1:SpaceX's ability to shuttle satellites cheaply into low Earth orbit where they can scrutinize the planet has made space an increasingly affordable part of battlefield technologies. Yeah. Super interesting.
Speaker 2:And people people don't forget this. We've talked about it on the show before. But ultimately, SpaceX, as much as it's a space company, is a defense company. Right?
Speaker 3:If you
Speaker 2:can take huge payloads to space and bring them back, you can do, you know, you can you can basically do the same thing with with weapons. Right? And so one one lens to view SpaceX as as a defense company disguised as a intergalactic exploration company. Right?
Speaker 1:There's a fascinating article in The Wall Street Journal today all about the the miss the the, mercenaries who are going to Ukraine from all over the place. Alright. They're recruiting veterans from, like, I think Argentina and South America and Africa, and there's just they're pulling people from all over the world.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:And that that's that's actually an interesting place that defense tech has not explored. Yeah. I know some people have been talking about, like, Blackwater two point o or starting some sort of military contractor. Yeah. But but looking at how does the human capital allocation and management side play into defense Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is something that is still kind of unexplored, almost like, you know, to do list apps for the military or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's lots of opportunity. Well, let's, let's close out this Economist article with a great, anecdote about Alex Karp, who we'll move on to in our second story. A revival of the warrior spirit is transforming Silicon Valley's relationship with the American government. The technological republic, which we have a copy of over there, The forthcoming book coauthored by Alex Karp, Palantir's chief executive. It calls upon Silicon Valley to work with Uncle Sam on military programs rather than supporting environmental and social causes like those mister Karpien, like like those mister Karp champion patriotism.
Speaker 1:Those like mister Karp champion patriotism as the new corporate purpose, an idea that will appeal to many in Donald Trump's administration. Meanwhile, the long established revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry is being extended to venture capitalists and tech firms. There's a lot of VCs going into DC and vice versa. That could help speed up the disruption to America's military industrial complex, which many in defense tech hope for. Shyam Sankar, who we've talked about on the show many times, CTO of Palantir, he says, if the government doesn't figure out how to make the venture model work, this will not be sustainable.
Speaker 1:One issue is the meager share of spending that is available to start ups. Another is the broad brush approach the Pentagon takes towards them. Mister Sankar, argues that the government needs to come to terms with Silicon Valley's power law in which a few big winners generate fortunes, compensating for the many others that will fall by the wayside. The Pentagon also needs to transform away from cost plus contracts, something that we've been talking about since Anduril launched, for almost a decade now Yeah. Which are designed to enable big weapons programs and guarantee incumbent contractors decades of revenue in favor of fixed price ones that outsiders can bid on.
Speaker 1:So very cool article in the in the Economist. We love to see, these things we've been talking about for years kind of go mainstream. You can always count on, an Economist article to kind of provide the definitive overview to the world since it is a global publication. Anything else there, or should we move on to KARP?
Speaker 2:Let's move on to KARP. Right away in this Wall Street Journal article, you can see he's sporting his daily what we can now determine is his daily driver
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:Because he has been photographed in this a handful of times Yes. Which is a Patek Philippe, Aquanaut chronograph, with an orange strap. It's a fantastic watch. It's available on bezel, right now. So if you're in the market, I think they I think they basically retail for, like, a hundred and 40, a hundred and 50 k, somewhere in that range.
Speaker 2:So great daily if you've got, you know, let's call it, you know, 50, hundred million AUM, wear that thing. Got it. You can pretty much wear it anywhere. Karp has made it, you know, clear. And and I love this watch because it it it looks like a simple sport watch Yep.
Speaker 2:From from afar. It doesn't scream, oh, look at this CEO with with a massive Rolex on his wrist, you know, GMT, whatever. Yep. It's it's timeless. It's classic.
Speaker 2:You can wear it in the boardroom. You can wear it, you know, at a at a conference. And so really, you know, just, you know, setting the bar here.
Speaker 1:Ben, he's on the next slide, by the way.
Speaker 2:No. You can see it there.
Speaker 1:Oh, you can see it there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. It's on his wrist there.
Speaker 1:See, it's low key. This is low key. I bet
Speaker 2:I'm just screaming at you, but it's but it says, you know, I'm a man of taste.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:And I and he has its own personality. So
Speaker 1:It's great. I mean, Zuck is, like, truly leading the way in the loud opulence with, like, the and the and the one of ones. Carp's a little bit understated. Still rocking an absolutely incredible Patek Philippe. We love to see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But he's not making it his whole thing. You know? He's he he hasn't really talked about it. We had to clock it.
Speaker 1:He he wasn't posting about it. He doesn't even have an x account. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But, you know, the the the sharp eyed watchers is just a reference.
Speaker 2:It's crazy how hard we we often associate founder mode with going direct. Yeah. And in many ways, Karp is going direct, but he's actually, like, not posting. Yeah. Just going on the craziest media circuit ever
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where he's going out and and actually seemingly bending the traditional media To his His to to him. Right? And and a lot and using them to communicate. And it and it works in this scenario because it's a super timely message. Patriotism is is in.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's no longer contrarian to to wanna, you know, fight and and work and innovate for America. But he's definitely, you know, writing the playbook of how to do mainstream media well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think of going direct as just being authentic Yeah. And not being media trained or on talking points Yeah. And having firmly held beliefs that you just espouse for years and years and years.
Speaker 2:And are super consistent on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 2:can go out and say exactly how he feels Yep. Without worrying, oh, am I gonna piss some people off? Because he's totally okay with Yep. Pissing off some people.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:And and I think, Peter Thiel did the same thing. Wrote a book, Zero to One. Karp has a book out now, where and that is the the foundation of his philosophy. Yeah. And then tons of podcast, tons of, you know, unscripted interviews, willing to talk about anything.
Speaker 1:Peter's done this with many three hour, two hour interviews, went on Rogan. Karp does the same thing. Happy to talk to anyone, and doesn't need the questions ahead of time, doesn't need his talking points in front of him Yeah. And can just talk about anything. You can ask him about whatever you want, and he's an open book.
Speaker 1:And that is what I think of when I think of going direct. It's just let's not It it it is it it might be direct from Karp's brain to the CNBC anchor.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there's not but for so many other people, it's the CEO to the PR person
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To the press release, to the journalist who's getting, hey. Can you take that out? He actually didn't mean to mention this. Yeah. Oh, he, we you know?
Speaker 1:And and oftentimes, you know, you saw Palmer on, on that podcast talking about conspiracy theories and stuff. Like, if that wasn't even even though that wasn't on Palmer's own show Yeah. Or his feed
Speaker 2:It's still his message.
Speaker 1:Yes. And and and that message was not passed through the committee
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To where where it could easily get shot down. Hey. There might be some downside to you talking about JFK or whatever. Let's not go there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's good these are good references for founders or VCs that feel pressure. Oh, I need to figure out how to post on x. Yep. I need to figure out how to, like, build my own audience, and it's not for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yep. Some people are born posters, and some people are not born that way, but figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But some people just don't like it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so what's more important is having a really cohesive, you know, exciting, meaningful message that you can just drill into people's heads. And if you build a big enough platform individually, then you can go get on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Our show. When we start doing gas, you can go then go on CNBC, go on Bloomberg, go on Rogan, etcetera, Sean Ryan, etcetera. So
Speaker 1:It's a powerful, contrarian idea that you're not ashamed of in the least that you repeat
Speaker 3:over and
Speaker 1:over a long period of time. And if it's good enough and you're what you're building is real, everyone will point the camera at you, and you'll just be able to speak your mind. And that's it. Well, Karp is an absolute dog as we've mentioned before. He, he's, profiled here in this wonderful Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:Let's kick it off here. It says, Palantir stock was days away from hitting an all time high, and the company's chief executive, Alex Karp, had retreated to his cavernous mountain cabin. It features neatly captured the interests of a billionaire on a quest to save the West. The windows were adorned with curtains bearing an American flag motif. Completed and half completed, Rubik's cubes were scattered on the coffee tables.
Speaker 1:It's so
Speaker 2:it's so it makes total sense if you're actually into Rubik's cubes to just have a bunch of them.
Speaker 3:So you
Speaker 2:can just pick them up Yeah. Whatever. It's great. You can try to do them in order really quickly, you know, time yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very, I I I I can do a Rubik's cube, and it's very, meditative
Speaker 3:Yeah. To
Speaker 1:actually do. It's really fun if you're just, like, kinda Oh, you're a shave's rotator?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he and Karp asks, do you wanna see my guns? One of Karp's hobbies gun show. Is long range shooting, which I've been saying is gonna get more popular in PRS, precision rifle shooting, whose targets fall outside of normal parameters of a firearm, he explained. He struck a stance to show the blend of practice and instinct that combines for the perfect shot. More than two decades of running Palantir, a data analysis firm best known for working with The US military and intelligence agencies, had has made Karp a billionaire many times over through government work.
Speaker 1:Though government work represents only a portion of the balance sheet that leans heavily on commercial clients, it gives the whole company a secret ops vibe. Karp can talk about his own guns far more readily than he can talk about the more secretive activities of Palantir whose market cap is more than 260,000,000,000. In the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, Karp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one of the
Speaker 2:about his philosophy path? Wasn't wasn't wasn't he Yes. Has a he has a PhD
Speaker 1:in philosophy. In in in philosophy, and he studied under, Jurgen Habermas in Germany. And there's a little bit of controversy about it because he he transferred in and out of one program. And so the real, like, PhD nerds are like, well, he wasn't, like, fully Habermas', like, to under his tutelage the entire time, or, like, was he the mentor or not?
Speaker 2:Tell those people to go build a $260,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Yeah. Company. So I I actually, at one point, I downloaded his thesis and try tried to translate it and read it. It was very, very dense.
Speaker 2:Is it, it's
Speaker 1:in German? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 1:speak German, so it's very Yeah. This is this is
Speaker 2:good evidence that you can kind of go on if you're if you're truly goaded, don't worry about the path that you're on because you'll you'll just find your way into into greatness Yeah. Even if it's totally unpredictable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, especially with, like, everyone in the teal orbit, we've seen this. I mean, I'm sure that's how he got linked up, is just doing something really interesting at the power law of some bizarre, like, niche hobby instead of being super tracked and being like, hey. I wanna, like, be a venture person and then go start a company. Like, he was not, like, the NBA type.
Speaker 1:And so he was, he got into money management and ran, like, a small money management firm in Europe and then got linked up with Peter and started Palantir, after nine eleven because the whole thesis was with the Internet and better data analysis, you could potentially stop the next nine eleven if you can piece the the the puzzle together before it happens. And so, in the cast of philosopher kings who have emerged from Silicon Valley in the past several years, Karp cuts an unusual figure. He is far from one name status like Mark or Elon or Zock, I guess, and indeed barely known outside small circles in tech and politics or beyond the army of retail investors who have anointed him their anti establishment billionaire hero. Since the nation's top tech CEOs traveled to Washington for Trump's inauguration three weeks ago, America's Americans have been guests at the shotgun wedding between Silicon Valley and the new administration.
Speaker 2:I don't know where this this writer is gonna take this article completely, but I actually love his writing style.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's great.
Speaker 2:It's really fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and that is a perfect way to describe a shotgun wedding.
Speaker 2:A shotgun wedding.
Speaker 1:Because Elon was saying, I'm not gonna vote for Trump, like or or I'm I'm voting for not Biden,
Speaker 3:like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Less than a year ago. Yeah. Like, March of twenty twenty four is not sure.
Speaker 3:Fast
Speaker 2:forward to January or February. He's saying, I I love Donald Trump the most amount that a man can love another man without, you know, without being romantic.
Speaker 1:It's so good. It's it's, like, the greatest, like I I did you see the interview they did
Speaker 2:on Fox? It's one of those things, like, you take two polarizing, you know, iconic people, Elon Musk. However you feel about either of them, they're polarizing and iconic. Yes. And then you let them actually get to know each other and work together, they're gonna you know, even if the you know,
Speaker 1:even if they're not sorry or they're not,
Speaker 2:like, best friends Yeah. They will respect Yeah. Each other's game.
Speaker 1:Did you see the did you see the Fox News, interview that's going out where they they did it together? It's, like, straight up out of Step Brothers. It's, like, they're going buddy cop movie on the presidency on the executive branch. They're just, like, it's a buddy cop movie now. It's so ridiculous.
Speaker 1:They're just
Speaker 2:like, we're boys.
Speaker 1:Imagine so we're gonna do this.
Speaker 2:Imagine the documentaries on just on their dynamic of of storming so storming the white ass.
Speaker 1:It's gotta be
Speaker 2:They need to start they need to start doing you know you know, I talk about UFC a lot because it's specifically just a great media entertainment product. But, we need, UFC embedded, this sort of lead up to just, like, twenty four seven. Right? And I want, like, Dana White in the White House being, like, you know, advising them on, like, how to get the right, you know, here's how we shoot embedded. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. It it it's wild.
Speaker 1:Just to hear them actually have an off the record conversation with each other would be should be a fly on the wall, man. It would be wild. Yeah. Karp will step further into the fray of with the publication next week of his new book, The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a creed of corps that aims at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies. The last two decades in the sector amount to a gigantic waste in Carp's view while he and his colleagues at Palantir were helping absorb, were helping identify roadside bombs in Kandahar to save the lives of American soldiers.
Speaker 1:The book asserts their contemporaries back in Northern California, lulled by decades of peace, were making sure that college educated smartphone smartphone users could buy coupons for paragliding lessons and play Farmville. They're talking about Groupon and, Zynga.
Speaker 2:Facebook. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is funny because Mark Pankas is now, is now, fully in this group pirate wires. Going on pirate wires and fully and fully, like, I wish I should've I I wish I'd been in control of my company. If Karp's new book can be encapsulated by one of its sentences, it may be this one. The wunderkinder the the wunderkind of Silicon Valley, their fortunes, business empires, and more fundamentally, entire sense of self exist because of the nation that in many cases made their rise possible. It is time, Karp believes, for the industry to repay that debt.
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 1:good point.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:The book's co written by Nicholas Zemiska, and it was finished late last year, and elements of its central argument seem to have come true in just the past few weeks. A section of eliminating, wasteful government spending sounds a bit like Musk's Doge, another on encouraging more partnerships between the government and the private sector on artificial intelligence work evokes Trump's Stargate plan to build energy capabilities with OpenAI and other firms.
Speaker 2:It's amazing they're positioning this as Trump's Stargate plan because it was a press conference for Masa and Sam Altman that happened to take place with Trump present. Yeah. But I think he was just like, this is cool. Sounds good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? Now it's just planned. But but it was also it was also
Speaker 1:alternative is it with the like, we could have seen the alternative play out, which is which is, Sam and Masa or two just make it even random. Two tech people are doing something cool, and Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the
Speaker 1:president is, like, condemning it and being like, these tech people have too much power. We need to regulate them, which is, like, what we were dealing with for the last four years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's much healthier for Trump even though he's boys with Elon to go out and endorse a project like that because it's net it's gen generally, you know, if Moss is rounding up hundreds of billions of dollars internationally to invest in US, you know, data centers and AI capabilities, that's net good for America.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Karp says, we've been very good at forecasting the current present state a couple years before it happened. Incredibly telling because that's the whole idea of the Palantir, the the crystal ball. It's like, you know, see the future. That's the product, and then that's also the the the company philosophy.
Speaker 1:It's a pitch that has helped give Palantir and Karp some of the best weeks in in the company history. The stock's gone up a 80 since the day before Trump was elected. Growth in Palantir's AI business and the expectation that the new administration will favor Palantir over old war horses like Lockheed Martin have driven this.
Speaker 2:Old. This this writer is, again, fantastic. War horses. War horses.
Speaker 1:Palantir is very long America, said Karp. He is quick to remind potential clients that he is happy to assist in their dirty work of empire. On an earnings call with investors earlier this month, he said that Palantir is making America more lethal by analyzing troves of data for the US Armed Forces and allies to help them anticipate enemies moves, locate their coordinates, and on occasion, kill them. He doesn't mince words. His carp is, is fantastic.
Speaker 1:CARP backed, president Joe Biden's reelection and supported Kamala Harris when she became the nominee, but he has been surrounded by those in Trump's orbit for years starting with Peter Thiel, who spoke at the twenty sixteen Republican National Convention. Several Palantir alumni have recently taken draw jobs in the Trump administration, further deepening the company's ties. They hired Mark Gallagher, of course. Trump has been wealthy from or or Karp has been wealthy for many years with the trappings of a billionaire and the ready soliloquies of an executive accustomed to being received as an oracle. At least a half dozen staffers were in his home during my weekend visit, probably one of our boys, including two stationed just inside the driveway, another who directed me where to park, two communications profess professionals, and several strapping assistants, one of whom ordered a book at Karp's request, another who tossed him logs, to build him a fire in the living room, and another who whom Karp addressed in German.
Speaker 1:Gunther, he cried out. Kaffee mit zuiz zucker, coffee with two sugars, I guess. Karp has no background in engineering. He was raised in Philadelphia, went to Haverford College, and then Stanford Law School before heading to Germany for graduate school. His doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt was on neoclassical social philosophy, work that prepared him to pose questions like, what does it mean to make a bad decision, at what level of abstraction, how deep do you go to know if it's a good or bad decision.
Speaker 2:One note, this is my coffee order too. And coffee with two sugars Okay. Is coming back
Speaker 1:in a
Speaker 2:big way. Okay. It went way out of style. Sure. Everybody's like, oh, give me my oat milk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My black coffee. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's something, I'm gonna, butcher the science, but black coffee has been shown to reduce testosterone.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yet yet coffee with sugar has, the sugar sort of negates whatever that effect is.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:And so, the the other benefit of putting sugar in your coffee is it tastes much better. Yeah. You would you know?
Speaker 1:Of course. I know. Here's what I thought. It just kills the bitterness.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I mean, people have been worried about sugar and calories for so long, but sugar's making a big We
Speaker 2:got it. We actually gotta do a Ray Pete deep dive.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We do. Because he's influencing an entire generation of
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Posters on their health Yeah. And becoming bigger than he was when he when he was alive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's massive. The company's early work traced a series of terrorist attacks at the same Iraqi village and identified a cyber network infiltration campaign against the Dalai Lama. Thanks to Palantir software, the US military was able to find and eliminate roadside bombs in Afghanistan by discovering patterns and how they were deployed. And we broke this down on another on another show, but, people always ask, oh, what does Palantir even do?
Speaker 1:And it's pretty easy to actually think about and visualize. You put all the data about what is in a different bomb. This one's got dynamite. This one's got TNT. This one's got c four.
Speaker 1:This one's got something else. And, this one has nails. This one has shrapnel. And you put that all on a map, and you can see where they're all coming from very easily. And so that's, like, the simplest, most basic product to think about.
Speaker 1:Obviously, they do a million other things with data lakes and storing all sorts of information, analytics, visualization, running AI on top of big datasets. So, they they started with $30,000,000 in startup costs largely covered by Thiel and his venture capital fund, Founders Fund. As the company saw its valuation grow, the central question emerged, what exactly did Palantir do? Descriptions of the company's offerings came crammed with jargon. Competitors who had been around for a few years dismissed the rookie as a gussied up data analytics firm.
Speaker 1:Few interviews passed where Karp didn't answer a question by saying he couldn't answer the question. It was classified. Certainly, that was true, but it gave the whole operation a bit of mystique. And the thing is that even though the the public was very unclear on what Palantir did, it didn't stop them at all because they were still able to raise enough money to keep the business going. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they were a insane talent magnet. They hired, like, all the best people in Silicon Valley and out of MIT and stuff.
Speaker 2:And it's helpful to not be having to notify the entire world and potential competitors what you're doing. Yeah. Just keeping stuff under wraps because people do all the time see startups launch and try to reengineer what they're doing, or it's totally possible that, you know, big tech companies that would have been really viable competitors for this just didn't have quite enough visibility.
Speaker 3:You know,
Speaker 2:they could have figured stuff out if they really dug. But overall, it kinda let them get this massive lead on a very important sort of category.
Speaker 1:Yep. This is some crazy history that I think a lot of people don't realize because they maybe just seen Palantir in the retail sector or in as a retail stock. But in 2013, this was less than a decade after its founding. It was still a grind to get there, but Palantir had 1,200 employees and a valuation of $9,000,000,000. So by then, it was like this this almost deck of corn, very established company doing very real things.
Speaker 1:And everyone was like, oh, it's gonna it's gonna IPO. But, but the opacity of Palantir's financials only added to its reputation as a black box. They finally filed to go public in 2020, and I think they went public in the tens of billions, like, maybe 20,000,000,000, and they were around the same what? Under under Under 50,000,000,000. Right?
Speaker 2:Let me look on public, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Palantir went from in in in basically, like, seven years, nine billion to to 20,000,000,000. Like, not a huge growth era. It was kind of like a like a flat, like, grind it out period. And then finally, once the AI narrative hit, once the business is really cooking then it ripped.
Speaker 2:They went out at somewhere, like, 6,780,000,000.00. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what October first of twenty twenty. It it it like, like, what have they been doing for the last decade, basically?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, that was the narrative, and they showed everybody. I love it. That's right. And so in 2020, he moved Palantir's headquarters from Pallet from Palo Alto to Denver, because we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments. And there were protests against Palantir, that actually followed the company of Colorado.
Speaker 1:Karp started to gain a following becoming a chief executive uniquely suited to a time when Reddit threads and viral clips can shape a company's identity as much as earning calls and analyst reports. Karp's memeable look, the untamed curly hair, the rimless glasses and white t shirt, and unvarnished remarks have turned him into a celebrity among the retail investors who count themselves as palantirians.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One thing that I think is sort of
Speaker 1:most of the time, but we'll we'll allow it. We'll keep it clean in the WSJ.
Speaker 2:The, the dominant narrative even as of 2020 is that the private markets had so much access to capital. Yep. It was becoming hard or some people would say impossible to generate meaningful returns because these companies would go public, you know, with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue. And Palantir is basically if you invested, you know, within the first few weeks of the IPO, you would you'd be sitting at roughly, like, a 35 x at this point. So totally, you know, contrarian.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And certainly wasn't obvious. Even when they went public, people would be, you know, you know, talking poorly about the company and the stock saying, this is an overvalued consulting firm Yep. Blah blah blah blah. So that was the narrative that, you know, still today, people will say, you know, try to figure out ways to sort of pick at it and and find flaws in the business. But, you know, it's it's hard to argue with.
Speaker 1:Hard to argue with it at this point. Yeah. I love this quote. He says, I really, really revere the people who revere me. This is not always the case if you talk to people who are famous, he said, holding court on the small staircase that leads to his sunken living room, dressed in house clogs and head to toe athleisure, including joggers, a zip up, a vest, and a knit cap.
Speaker 1:Over his right shoulder, a chandelier ringed with seven lamps and cast iron moose heads. In 2020, you'll love this, CARP was paid 1,100,000,000.0 in total compensation, the highest of any chief executive at a publicly traded company. Yeah. In, 2022 Quick hit of the size going for carp. That was a good one.
Speaker 1:In 2022, with Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine, he warned against nuclear escalation in the war, but acknowledged that bad times are good for Palantir. Around the same time, however, Palantir recorded reported a decline in revenue growth from its government contracts. Shares sank to less than $7 before their steady climb in mid twenty twenty four. The surge in recent months has led some analysts to set new price targets for the company, but its fast rising stock has led others to question whether Palantir can ever grow into its massive current valuation, which gives it a market capitalization more than twice of Lockheed Martin. But is Lockheed Martin in founder mode?
Speaker 1:No. They are not. Today, Palantir is leading its leaning into its reputation as a dominant player, a commercial for the company aired during the Army Navy football game last year, played like a Tom Clancy thriller with drone swarms, infrared missiles, and even a tagline fit for a nineteen nineties movie poster, battles are won before they begin. Pretty pretty great. So, the technological republic is likely to be is likely the only book by a business executive to feature three epigrams, one in German, citations from the Bible, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, and an outright attack on a market leader, Google's shallow and thinly veiled nihilism.
Speaker 1:Karp admits it wasn't the most commercial of choices. The book I should write to sell, he said, would be a I carp carp, a I carp, a I a I carp. He knows the memes. He knows. It's great.
Speaker 1:He's advocated
Speaker 3:for many
Speaker 2:Clearly clearly, this is this is meant to be the bedrock of of the next, you know, twenty, thirty years of Palantir's work, not a commercially successful New York Times bestseller. Although, I'm sure it will
Speaker 1:be a rep in New
Speaker 2:York Times. When does it actually does it release this week?
Speaker 1:We gotta we gotta figure out when we should talk about this thing, but I got a copy right here. The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Power, and the Future of the West. It looks fantastic.
Speaker 2:It releases tomorrow. Oh, okay. So we
Speaker 1:could so we could talk about it tomorrow if we can power through this thing tonight. Maybe I'll stay up all night, put myself in the cage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Turn on PMF or die.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Reading. Oh, okay. Okay. It it's not it's not too much of a beast.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of end notes here. So, I could probably get through this. It's 218 pages more or less. Yeah. I could rip through
Speaker 2:this. Yeah. Easy. Easy work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, you do page a minute. It's, you know, it's not a it's not a coffee table book size. It's like, you know, reasonable font. Hey.
Speaker 1:I can rip it.
Speaker 2:Off the stream, John.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can't share it yet.
Speaker 1:It's embargo.
Speaker 2:It's embargo.
Speaker 1:It's embargoed. And then they also have, The Republic, which is their magazine that they publish at Palantir.
Speaker 2:Very nice.
Speaker 1:I got a copy. I don't know if this is, something that you can just go pick up, but it looks beautiful. Look, American power and the cost of uncertainty. I mean, the design language is fantastic. Wouldn't you agree?
Speaker 1:It's, like, really cool design. We love we love these printed things.
Speaker 2:As I'm saying, Palantir and Anduril have such dominant brands. Totally. They're distinct in their own ways. Yep. But it's hard to come in as a defense tech brand.
Speaker 2:You really have to carve out, you know, it's they've they've clearly are owning two of the the best possible niches, which is sci fi, futuristic, and sort of elevated modern, you know, inspirational, patriotic Yeah. Establishment, you know, feeling branding. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to how the Trump's turned an election victory into a cash bonanza. This went out on Valentine's Day, February fourteenth in the Wall Street Journal. I'm sure there'll be a lot of fun stuff in here. It kicks off when amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, dined with Donald Trump and his wife at and Melania at Mar A Lago in December, there was a lot at stake for both men.
Speaker 1:Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to The US economy, was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful soon to be president. It was a lot was at stake for Melania too. She was looking for a buyer for her documentary about her transition back to first lady. Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produce to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world's third richest man.
Speaker 1:Melania regaled Bezos and his fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, with a projects with the project's details at dinner. Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40,000,000 to license the film, the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary, and nearly three times the next closest offer. Wow. And to put that
Speaker 2:perspective, the Obamas sold their the rights of their books for 65,000,000
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:After the eight years.
Speaker 1:After the eight years.
Speaker 2:So And
Speaker 1:those are the book rights?
Speaker 2:Those are the book rights.
Speaker 1:I feel like book rights could potentially even bring in more if it's a presidential memoir because it's, like, everyone is gonna pay $20 for that. Whereas this, it's like, yeah. You might sign up for Amazon. I mean, the the the the the full case for this is, like, there maybe there are a lot of conservatives who have not historically subscribed to Amazon Prime because Yeah. It's been a lot of Hollywood, like, elite, like, left wing content.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. But, also, if you wanna buy stuff online, it's some of the best value. Yeah. That's true.
Speaker 2:If they're so anti Bezos that they'd that they're like, no. I wanna pay, you know. Maybe, I mean, you know, some of that demographic is possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why would I buy stuff with Walmart? When I could go to Infowars shop Yeah. And get some alpha alpha market test. So okay.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Well, Amazon's certainly happy to have it. Netflix and Apple declined to even bid. Paramount made a low bottle lowball $4,000,000 distribution rights offer. Disney, the most interested studio behind Amazon, offered 14,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so this is this is, like, where people are
Speaker 1:kinda overpaid. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is where people are gonna say this this is borderline Yeah. Corruption Sure.
Speaker 1:In the
Speaker 2:sense that the market val the market clearing value Yeah. For this, Amazon could have paid 14,000,000 and a dollar, basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Probably.
Speaker 2:To to to sort of win this
Speaker 3:You think so?
Speaker 2:Deal. But but they felt the need to pay, you know, $2.02
Speaker 1:But they might not know because it might be a blind auction. So they might be thinking, oh, well, like, Disney's gonna
Speaker 2:have of this size.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised Disney went so high. I would expect I would expect maybe Netflix to go for it or Paramount for sure going for it. But Disney, you know, it it what what is this? They're gonna be next to, like, Mickey Mouse and, like, you know, Toy Story? Like, this like, this doesn't feel like a Disney show
Speaker 2:to me.
Speaker 1:It feels like it's gonna be
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. People people would say, you know, people might position this as, you know, Amazon paid $14,000,000 for the film for the rights to the film Yeah. And $26,000,000 as to gain the favor
Speaker 1:of Kinky. Eventually. Who knows? People people might say that.
Speaker 3:We we
Speaker 1:Some people might say that. We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only, because we think customers are gonna love it, said an Amazon spokesman.
Speaker 2:The first first mentality, though, at Bezos.
Speaker 1:The first lady's cut is more than 70% of the 40,000,000 according to people familiar with the matter, and they're still looking for more. Melania's agent has been trying to sell sponsorships for the film Let's
Speaker 2:TV code.
Speaker 3:TV code.
Speaker 1:Speaking my language now. Let's go. Starting at $10,000,000.
Speaker 2:Let's get a let's get a wander in
Speaker 1:Let's get a let's let's put ramp in there.
Speaker 2:Let's let's get some bezel. Let's get let's get some AdQuick stuff in there. Yeah. Let's get some eight let's get Melania sleeping on an eight sleep.
Speaker 1:Let's get her in a NASCAR jacket just with brands everywhere.
Speaker 2:Let's get her buying her own token on public.com.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah. I want I want to sponsors everywhere. I want I want a
Speaker 2:Like those glasses bottom. All the interviews, you can do, like, the glasses that have, you know, like, the ad overlay.
Speaker 1:I I'm thinking of the, like, the it's it like, it's New Year's two thousand, you know, '2 zero zero. You have three zeros, but it's like yeah. Some brand.
Speaker 2:Sponsored.
Speaker 1:I like that. Yeah. Maybe some of the face tattoos.
Speaker 2:Has Melania ever attempted a beauty brand? Because that's sort of like if you're a big female celebrity Yeah. Launching beauty products which are, you know, have better margins than software
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:That are, you know, widely, you know, appealing to to a a female demographic I don't know. Would be you know, maybe that's up next. Maybe she's the next Kylie Kylie, you know, Jenner, Melania cosmetics.
Speaker 1:If you're looking to get some distribution for your start up and you wanna sponsor the the Melania film, sponsorship start at $10,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:She was advertising them to prominent CEOs and billionaires who were at the inauguration according to people familiar with the matter. I love that she's just there. You know, like, oh, yeah. It's the inauguration. Like, this is so great.
Speaker 1:Like, let me let me bend your ear for a second.
Speaker 3:I I
Speaker 1:you know?
Speaker 2:I got I got something you're gonna wanna hear about.
Speaker 1:I got some good ad ad inventory for you. Why don't we throw Apple in here? Hey.
Speaker 2:I would love to get I'd love to get the deck.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hey. He's probably here. Why don't we why don't we advertise the Meta Quest? Just be wearing the Meta Quest the entire time.
Speaker 2:Five second feature, you know, just sort of, like, handing across your product $10,000,000, ramps up to $50,000,000 if you wanted to,
Speaker 1:you know, actually hold the
Speaker 2:product and talk about it.
Speaker 3:Why not
Speaker 2:just do podcast style ad that
Speaker 3:is a
Speaker 2:documentary. Hey, guys. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 2:hope you're enjoying the documentary.
Speaker 1:This is what I want.
Speaker 2:Today's today's you know, this has been sponsored by Athletic Greens. Yeah. Athletic Greens is a great way you know, fantastic way to get your daily greens in a easy to mix and drink, you know, shake.
Speaker 1:Hey. Thanks for watching the early life section. This, act one is sponsored by by Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can really fit a lot of ads in that bad boy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sponsored by Honey. Buyers would get thanked at the end of the credits and be invited to the premiere. These overtures were made independently of the deal with Amazon. Thanked at the end of the credits.
Speaker 2:So funny. The Melania's agent going is is wet when they're producing the film being like, alright. So odd request, but we have to have her dry driving a Kia or a or a Hyundai. Ideally, the Kia though, because they're willing to spend 10 and Hyundai low bid it with a $5,000,000 offer. I love it.
Speaker 2:Amazon's just, like, wait one.
Speaker 1:You know you you know that this is, like, actually how Hollywood works. Like, I talked to a guy who, was, like, very early on, like, the Kim Kardashian world and what he would do, how he would make money. Because he's like, hey, Kim Kardashian, we gotta deal with you. Range Rover wants to do, like, a caught in the wild spot with you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So just drive to this location, get out. I'll have the paparazzi guys there. We'll take the photos, and Range Rover is gonna send you a check for 50 k.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:she'd be like, great. Okay. I just drive to my local, like, Target.
Speaker 2:I just go get gas.
Speaker 1:And and I and I and and I'll just wear and and then what he would do is he would go and be like, hey, Nike. I'm gonna have her wearing Nike. It's 50 k. Hey, Target. She's gonna be parking outside of Target.
Speaker 1:Pay me 50 k.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey, Starbucks. She's gonna be carrying a Starbucks. Pay me 50 k. And then he would take the hundred and 50 and only give her 50, and they got a huge lawsuit. I think it was, like, very different.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:But he's, like you
Speaker 2:should wear Nike today. I don't I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't know how true that story is. I think it might be kind
Speaker 3:of possible.
Speaker 1:That's but you could imagine that, like, you could sell multiple slots like that. Yeah. Anyway, so, the Amazon deal is just one of the new ways the first family has benefited from its return to the White House. Companies have directed about $80,000,000 to members of the Trump family and the Trump presidential library so far as defendants settle lawsuits, the presidency the president previously filed against them, and corporations enter into new business ventures including the documentary. This figure doesn't include potential gains from crypto pursuits.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Because it would dwarf everything else. Much of the legal settlement money will go to a fund for the president's library and not for profit whose mission is to preserve and steward Trump's legacy. But Trump's share of a $10,000,000 settlement, Elon Musk's acts agreed to this week is expected to go to him directly according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 1:And of course, that was from the the the deplatforming stuff, which does have some legal basis, but also it's like as soon as Trump won and the new owners of the platform were like, hey, we would like this guy, they all shelled out. If Trump had lost, it would be interesting to see where those settlements shook out. The pace and volume of the family's money making money making efforts so far are unprecedented, surpassing even the activity of Trump's first term, which drew condemnation from ethics, watchdogs, and congressional Democrats. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Usually, I mean, historically, it seems that presidents have waited until after the presidency to really run it up. But one of the challenges of that is you just have way less attention. Right? You know the
Speaker 1:story of you know the story of Jimmy Carter?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:He he owned, like, a share in a peanut farm, and he divested. Because he was, like, I wouldn't want I wouldn't want the American people to think that I'm, like, in the pocket of Big Peanut.
Speaker 2:Big Peanut.
Speaker 1:And so I'm just gonna wipe my hands clean of the peanut farm.
Speaker 2:Big nut.
Speaker 1:Big nut. And, I'm just here for the American people. One term president, not exactly remembered as, one of the greatest to ever do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:I was a big fan for a long time because I thought that he could make a run as a second term. It's been, what, forty years. He learned a lot.
Speaker 2:A lot of people thought even last year he might make a run at it.
Speaker 1:It would be great. I mean, Biden was 80. Why not get a 99 rolling?
Speaker 2:Was a very enduring meme that seemed to be resonant with every American that that any you know, anytime he would do anything, people would be like, he's running.
Speaker 1:You know that's literally because of me. I'm the one who started that meme.
Speaker 2:No way. I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have, like, 5,000 likes on one of the first, like, Jimmy Carter should run memes.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, I thought it was hilarious because I figured it out. And I was like, wait. He's there's no age limit, and he's, and he's, and he's a one term president. And so it was kind of a funny way to poke fun at the fact that, like, everyone that was running was in their eighties.
Speaker 1:What's the point of not having, like, a 99 year old?
Speaker 2:So Calder Calder in the chat says Billy Carter did launch a beer, which
Speaker 3:Oh, he did?
Speaker 2:Come on.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine that Trump can and
Speaker 1:probably Billy Carter?
Speaker 2:Well, that's what that's what is it? Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1:Oh. Jimmy Carter's president.
Speaker 2:Calder's in the chat said said Billy Carter.
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 1:know if Billy Carter is, but that. We got it,
Speaker 3:like, I
Speaker 2:think it might be Jimmy Carter's brother.
Speaker 1:I love it. Okay. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Younger so here it is. Billy so Calder was on it. The younger brother of US president Jimmy Carter promoted Billy beer
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And peanut Lolita.
Speaker 1:So why are we getting mad about Trump coin and Melania coin? This is, like, a There's
Speaker 2:a precedent here.
Speaker 1:This is as old as time. This is how America does business. Come on. I I this whole article is ridiculous. Everything here is, like, it's completely bog standard.
Speaker 1:Let's let's go. Oh, this Trump Organization, Trump's main real estate and licensing company last month said the president wouldn't be involved in the day to day management once he took office and that the company wouldn't enter into new contracts with foreign governments during his presidency. As part of the ethics plan, the company also hired an external lawyer to assist in developing internal policies to avoid perceived conflicts and said it would donate to the US Treasury the profits it receives from foreign government officials it can't identify at its hotels and other businesses. Trump's investments and assets will remain in a trust managed by his children, and Trump will have limited access to the company's financial information.
Speaker 2:Managed by his children who are with him twenty four seven and doing his bidding at all times.
Speaker 1:And living in the White House space. But Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? And unlike in 2017 when the Trump when Trump said his company would would forego foreign deals with both governments and private partners, the Trump Organization remains open for business with foreign companies.
Speaker 1:The top of the Trump Organization website re reads, coming soon, a preview of Trump Organization's global portfolio expansion. Very funny. An absolute dog.
Speaker 2:He really he really is setting a new a new precedent, and he will basically be the bar in which future presidents you know, I don't think I don't think JD Vance, even if he wanted to, if he was the next president, would be at at all capable of of monetizing this well. It's it's even if you're not supportive of the extreme monetization of the White House, it's certainly, done in a very impressive way. Multi product strategy, Trump could take Trump Holdings public right now at probably a hundred billion dollars valuation, right, if you just looked at the sort of, like, collective earning potential at the various business lines. But,
Speaker 1:he really tried to do a lot of this early in his career with, like, Trump Stakes, Trump University. And it just seemed like he was, like, early on all that and, like, maybe it would work better now.
Speaker 2:The original Alex Hormozi.
Speaker 1:He was.
Speaker 2:The original Andrew Tate.
Speaker 1:That's more like it. I mean, Hormozi doesn't really pump his own companies. He doesn't really say, like, go to my gym. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, Tate is is much more like it. But I think this is just
Speaker 2:the thing. I don't know. This was in the news today. Apparently, the Trump admin is putting pressure on the the government of Romania to try to reduce the Tate brothers, like, travel restrictions because they're basically apparently locked locked down, PMF or Die style. They really kinda wrote the play for PMF or Die.
Speaker 2:Anyways, back to the article.
Speaker 1:Okay. The Trump Organization sells merchandise including a $95 ornament with a three d depiction of Mar A Lago and a $550 gold Trump branded bling clutch. Trump also has also licenses his names to companies selling, for example, a $100,000 18 karat gold tourbillon watch.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:The Trump watch is a hundred k. I had no idea.
Speaker 2:I didn't know. They have they have more of an entry level watch too that's a few hunt I think in the sub thousand dollar range.
Speaker 1:I think it's a good gift for a VC who's trying to, you know, stake their claim as a right wing influencer all of a sudden. You know, put it all on the line.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Show us. What are those fees really got? You know? Show us that you got to watch.
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:The Trump Organization, meanwhile, has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in DC, the lease for which the Trump sold in 2022 for 375,000,000. I'm I believe that
Speaker 2:that's sold the least. Just the least. Yeah. Right? To occupy the space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure it was Good race. Long term. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's the, the Waldorf Astoria. I I I'm not sure about this, but I think that when Trump became president in 2016, he took over the Waldorf Astoria, owned it, and then it was, like, it was, like, his spot, basically.
Speaker 2:That's such
Speaker 1:Which is so great. Such a
Speaker 2:it's such a way to to to put to to you know, you're coming to let's say you're coming from anywhere in the world to to meet with Trump. Yeah. If you don't stay at the hotel, it's very obvious. Imagine being like, oh, let's just meet at my hotel. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then, oh, you're not you're not staying there? Like, what? Just come down from your room. Like, let's just let's just do this right now. And they're like, oh, I'm actually at the Four Seasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. The the Waldorf's canceled. It's a
Speaker 1:beautiful hotel. It's like it's like this big, like, it's like the square with, like, there's, like, views on the inside, basically. Yep. It's like a big empty open hall. It's very cool.
Speaker 1:We've talked about this before. John Don Junior joined a series of corporate boards, which sent those companies' stocks soaring.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:Even Trump's youngest son, Barron, has shown interest in following in his father's deal making footsteps. The 18 year old and two others registered an entity in Wyoming called Trump, Fulkir, and Roxborough, which one of the partners described as a high end real estate development company. The entity was dissolved in November after much press attention. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder
Speaker 1:what Baron will wind up doing. I'm excited for him to start going on the pod circuit. You know he's gonna drop some crazy stuff eventually.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:So oh, there's so much stuff there's so much stuff in here.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Does it get into any of the, they they had a the I think Don Junior has been very involved with some and Eric Trump have been involved with some, Ethereum related cryptocurrency project
Speaker 1:that there's much Ethereum in here. There's a little bit about Meta
Speaker 2:was literally posting saying, you're gonna wanna buy Ethereum. Trust me.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I saw that. I was insane. So Meta would also had a had a a lawsuit filed over deplatforming Trump, because they suspended his Facebook account after the twenty twenty one riot at The US Capitol. The, the quote is, the Meta founder wanted everything to be, quote, kumbaya going forward.
Speaker 1:And so Meta agreed to pay 25,000,000, which is, like, what they make in five seconds, with 22,000,000 going to the Trump Library Fund. I'm I'm, like, getting extremely pumped up about this library.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love presidential libraries just generally. Yeah. I think they're amazing. I think that they are It's
Speaker 2:the one nearby is the
Speaker 1:It's the Reagan one.
Speaker 2:Right. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's
Speaker 1:close because he was in California. So I don't know the Trump library. Would that be in Florida or New York? Could be kinda anywhere. But, I'd like to be presidential libraries are just it's amazing.
Speaker 1:You get a new, like, historical monument and a new library that can put on all sorts of different stuff, and it just acts as this amazing collection. It's not entirely just about, like, the individual. It's also, like, it's also just, like, a place that you can visit and go, and it's an activity. It's really cool. And so the move also had an upside for the social media billionaire, better relations with the new president with whom he met in the White House two weeks after his swearing in, met a decline to comment.
Speaker 1:ABC News also paid up. Disney paid, fifteen million weeks after the election to resolve a defamation lawsuit. So as soon as Trump got in, they're like, hey. Let's clean up all these lawsuits. We'll pay.
Speaker 1:We'll pay. We'll pay. If you if you lost, it'd be another thing, but we don't wanna go to court with the president. Yeah. Settlement and talks.
Speaker 1:So Axe settled for 10,000,000. There's now, in recent months, Trump's lawyers have pursued settlements with global with Paramount Global over a CBS news interview with former vice president Kamala Harris and with publishers Simon and Schuster and author Bob Woodward. They are suing everyone. They they're they're suing, I think, CBS for editing the Kamala interview down a little bit and taking out something and kind of, like, making her look better. And they're and they're framing it as, like, that was a Voter
Speaker 3:manipulation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kind of
Speaker 1:it was like it was like a it was like an in kind donation or, like, it helped her do better in the election. So, so they should have to pay for that. Then they're also pushing for a settlement with with Google over deplatforming Trump's YouTube account. I mean, they're going after everyone that that kick him off. They're gonna come for Pinterest soon.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know? Everyone.
Speaker 2:I do think it's it's interesting. Right? It it's it if you if you look at, the last however many years, it does seem that deplatforming Trump was just unilaterally a bad decision. At the time, there were some real reasons that people believe that that was the right decision. And clearly, there was close coordination with big, you know, tech platform CEOs to sort of do it collectively.
Speaker 2:Right? We've talked before that he got kicked off of Pinterest. Yeah. You know, you can imagine he's sitting there, you know, mood boarding his next, you know, the next Trump, you know, hotel property. Suddenly, his Pinterest account is gone.
Speaker 2:He's, like, he's, like you know? It's fine. But it was it was very wide reaching. And, I'd I'd I think that, in hindsight, you know, bad decision, it's it's probably good for there to be some, you know, some consequences for you know, there should be consequences for decisions. And so, you know, who knows?
Speaker 1:Hopefully, it's always so political.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If if he wins. But, of course, when when Trump lost and then January 6 happened, it was pretty easy if you were in a group chat with every other big tech CEO. Yeah. And it's like it's like Sundar and, you know, and Tim Cook Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Zuck and everyone else, and they're all like, yeah. This is too far. Yeah. We gotta kick him off. Let's all go at the exact same time.
Speaker 1:Everyone no one's saying, like, well, but what if he comes back and wins in four years? Yeah. No one was still Manning that.
Speaker 2:Saying that. Didn't seem viable. No. Can you imagine the state will never be, you know, public, but can you imagine the average his average legal bill per day to not only fight incoming lawsuits, but the outgoing ones?
Speaker 1:Must be insane.
Speaker 2:It's probably, like, a hundred 50 k incoming, hundred 50 k outgoing every single day. Oh, yeah. So just a carrying cost of 250 k per day of just, like, ongoing welfare. So gnarly.
Speaker 1:Lawfare. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So gnarly. Well And that was why that was why, you know, one one reaction to the Trump meme coin, we asked somebody, you know, how would you kind of defend this? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because a lot
Speaker 2:of people would say, there's zero reason for this. It's purely a money grab, and one person defended it from the lens of this is a way for Trump's fans to effectively do a wealth transfer to somebody that they love.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And basically in support of, like, over the last however many years, you've had this taken away from you, this taken away from you. You've dealt with all this stuff. This is a way for the average, you know, Trump fan to just basically give him, like, $50. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:And it's just sort of like a donation in many ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to the timeline. We got a controversial post from Bulgari. Ambassador Miriam Leone shines in Bulgari high jewelry at San Ramon Music Festival twenty twenty five. And I wanted to highlight this, 19 likes, absolute banger, of course.
Speaker 1:Bunch of, hashtags, since the Bulgari social media official clearly hasn't, been on accident in a few years. But controversial post, somebody chimes in. The only reply they got, so sorry. Bulgari, my deal. My dear.
Speaker 1:Beautiful testimonial. Great jewelry, but very but very poor styling. Miriam Leone's outfits were underwhelming last night to be nice and say the least.
Speaker 2:So Mogged.
Speaker 1:I will let you be the decider. Ben, if you go to the next slide, you'll see a close-up of, Miriam Leone, and there's another one. What do you guys think in the chat? Do you think her outfits were underwhelming, or do you think they were lovely? The these are the important topics of the day.
Speaker 1:These types of conversations, they're only happening on x. So Yeah. You know, we gotta go through that.
Speaker 2:The real heavy hitters.
Speaker 1:We got another post. Watch out, folks. Hackers are coming for your x account. Blake Scholl posts most clever phishing email I've ever received. He almost fell for it.
Speaker 1:And it's a phishing, scam that comes from x notices, and it says, we noticed to log in to your account, b Scholl, from a new device. Says a hacker's coming in from Russia, and, he almost fell for it. A lot of people this was going around. A lot of people were were almost falling for this. You get an email from a, scammer, says x notices, and, you click it.
Speaker 1:I mean, a lot of turmoil because everything's changing over from Twitter to x. You don't exactly know where the email will come from. Systems are changing. A lot of people trying to get into, into accounts, especially if you have a big following because they wanna drop a meme token. And, Kleiner got hacked.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming this is what happened Kleiner.
Speaker 1:Probably. Yep. And and lots of other people. I mean, I've seen tons of people fall for it, and it's very risky. So stay safe out there, folks.
Speaker 1:Should we talk about the first electric Ferrari to be unveiled on October 9? And Coltebrau says, I don't think I like this part about the future. Ferrari's CEO said the firm will unwrap its future at its Capital Markets Day, hinting at a debut for EV. What do you think of the design? How do you like the car?
Speaker 2:So I'm not ready to say that this is the actual even a render that Ferrari's released. I I you know, oftentimes when it when a car like this gets teased, you know, fans and just some of these platforms will make a render so that it's a more engaging article, but it didn't come from Ferrari at all.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:So I'm not sure that this is actually anything that Ferrari's put out. They clearly if it is, they they tried to make it Ferrari wouldn't reveal their EV months six months before actually revealing it. Right? So let's just assume this is a render. Yep.
Speaker 2:Overall, you know, Ferraris, we've talked about this on the show before. They're in a weird spot.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:As a brand, a lot of their new cars aren't selling well. You know, the the real super fans, the people that are in the top, you know, thousand customers aren't getting the cars that they want. Yep. And, there's just been a lot of pushback. You like the 12 cylinder.
Speaker 2:I'm not a fan at all. Yep. I think it's a noticeable, you know, step down from from even the, you know, the eight twelve and and some other cars of that era. So I'm interested to see what they do. This is it's funny because Ferrari is is, you know, now making their move into EVs just as Porsche realizes that, you know, combustion engines are gonna continue to be super important to the Porsche brand.
Speaker 2:Yep. So
Speaker 1:What's your favorite modern Ferrari now?
Speaker 2:The s p three. Like, the Daytona s p three is just by far the most iconic Yeah. Car in the modern lineup.
Speaker 1:And no one can get one.
Speaker 2:And yeah. No one can get one. Or
Speaker 1:Doesn't matter how many you bought.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you you some some people clearly can, but even, a, a family friend had, been in the Ferrari trading, you know, world for three decades. He got a date, Daytona s p three through their tailor made program.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was still taking him years and years and years to actually get it. So they'll kinda give you updates and kind of tease it along, but it's a very long term, commitment.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, just the disaster of the s f 90 versus the two nine six, very, very rough. Like, lots of people took bounce on the s f 90.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Two nine six, kind of the same car.
Speaker 2:I like the I like the s f 90 x x just because it's getting more into that sort of, like, I I like when Ferrari has a balance of, like, a track, like, very aggressive car meets, you know, some of the, like, some of the two nine six, which is more of a kind of cruising
Speaker 1:I feel like the XX stuff just doesn't have enough, like, storytelling behind it or something. Like, it's not the same as the GT three RS.
Speaker 2:I just like the aesthetics.
Speaker 1:People understand, oh, why is that package? Like, people understand the whole story of, like, you know, the the ladder of nine elevens is pretty clear. Whereas the ladder of Ferraris, it's like, is that an XX? Do you even see that? Is it track only?
Speaker 1:Is it even street legal? Like, it's very it's very, unclear. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm interested to see the f 80.
Speaker 1:I mean, Lamborghini has the same problem where they come out with, like, the Centenario, and you're like, okay. That's, like, kind of a reskinned, like, Huracan or something. Like, what's going on here? Aventador. And but it's, like, one of one and supposed to be, like, millions of dollars, but they didn't really reengineer it.
Speaker 1:And, it it gets a little confusing at the higher end. Lamborghini's done a better job with, like, the two main flagships, but
Speaker 2:yeah,
Speaker 1:Ferrari is getting a little confused now with,
Speaker 2:the Yeah. The other thing that's funny is many of the issues with the SS, SF 90 were electronic. Yeah. So for my my Ferrari, which I
Speaker 1:got rid of last year,
Speaker 2:the, you know, the actual, you know, transmission, engine, everything about the actual physical car was super reliable. Yep. What wasn't was the the battery.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I had to it was basically a plug in hybrid because if I didn't charge it overnight, it would the next day, it would start once. Yeah. And then I I had You get stuck? It's funny. I I was meeting up with with a buddy, who who I won't name, but had, like, meeting up with him for the first time, and he was, like, coming to Malibu to because he wanted to drive Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Ferrari. I start my car, drive to the gas station to get gas, going to pick them up, doesn't start. And it was because I just didn't put it on a trickle charger the night before. Yeah. And I replaced the battery multiple times.
Speaker 2:I had, like, the best Ferrari mechanics in LA work on it, and they weren't able to figure it out. And I eventually just got rid of it. I even told the people I sold it to, like, it's got this electrical issue. You can figure it out. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:To be clear. I mean,
Speaker 1:isn't that the problem with is is it the LaFerrari or the Enzo? I think it's LaFerrari has, kind of a hybrid system. And Yeah. And as it gets older
Speaker 2:and There's nothing. There's nothing funnier than having car issues in a Ferrari Yeah. Because you get zero sympathy. You know, you if you if you roll by somebody with, like, a Honda Civic and it's broken down, like, you really feel for them right now. That's, like, a just a No.
Speaker 1:Seeing somebody with broken down Ferrari is, like, pure chaccharide.
Speaker 2:Everybody's just, like, yes.
Speaker 1:Fuck. Yes. Like like, this guy sucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm, like, at the gas station charging my my v 12 Ferrari. Everybody's just like, nice, dude. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You deserve it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, that's why people have been worried about the LaFerrari is, like, the the like, as the battery degrades, it'd be harder to work on, harder to maintain.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's just it's it's getting I I went through a period where I, like, didn't drive the car for months.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's so many funny issues with Ferraris. Ferraris have this this internal issue where the rubber starts to degrade Sure. And there's basically one non dealership. You know, going to the dealership, you're just gonna get hosed. Right?
Speaker 2:It'll be, like, cool. This is, like, $50. And you're, like, well, the car is, like, that you're getting into, like, meaningful double digits of what the car is worth. Yeah. Like, I don't really wanna deal with it.
Speaker 2:And, so there was this this rubbers degrading where the rubber gets, like, kind of sticky to the touch. It's really annoying. Right? Imagine you touch, like, the volume adjuster in the car and it's, like, sticky. Like, it just sucks.
Speaker 2:You're, like, why is this happening? And I found a guy that would do it and there and and it was, like, very reasonable, but it was, like, four months that your car had to be, like, shipped somewhere out of state. So you're just, like, gonna, like, not have access to your car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, anybody that tells you
Speaker 1:if you buy a Ferrari, you're gonna have a lot of,
Speaker 2:you know, issues, you are. Whether it's new or old, but that's part of it's but it's a soundtrack for your life.
Speaker 1:The soundtrack of a v 12, you can't get that in an EV. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what they do with, with internal sound. Will they be piping in fake engine noise? Also, will they do what the, what was it?
Speaker 1:The Kia EV six GT? Was that the one that, I think that was it, where where it has paddle shifters that simulate an engine, and then you can drive it like it's a, DCT, essentially, a d clutch. It'll be interesting to see, like, what features they put in this to try and make it fun again and more of a driving experience. Even this render, even though I I know it's fake, this is probably just because I'm seeing the word EV. This looks like a heavier car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, this looks like a four to 5,000 pound car. It doesn't look light, and and that just tells me It
Speaker 2:looks I mean, they're
Speaker 1:they're muscle car game now.
Speaker 2:The thing about this render is it looks like a Taycan. Yeah. And if if all the EV manufacturers just adopt the language of the Taycan and the Tesla because it's
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:A EV, that's gonna you know, that's not not the best thing. Like, we've talked about, we wanna see Tesla do, like, a sedan version of the Cybertruck, like, something, like, really
Speaker 1:Not a sedan.
Speaker 2:Sort of, hypercar Hypercar version. Yeah. There you go. Two doors. Anyways,
Speaker 1:Or convertible. It's crazy that you still you know what the best convertible EV is right now? The Hummer EV. Yeah. That's the that that's, like, the only one you can buy, basically.
Speaker 1:Is there a Range Rover EV that has a convertible? Maybe. I don't
Speaker 2:know about that. No. I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, Tesla does not sell a convertible currently. It's, like, that's crazy. I mean, I get that nobody buys these things, but, like, I still just want them to be available and around. Yeah. Even if they're bad business.
Speaker 1:It's just sad that it's, like, it's turning a new appliance. Okay. Everyone has an iPhone. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:But somebody was comparing the EV, kind of conversion and what happened, to the quartz crisis with watches. So once Japan came out with quartz watches, they were more accurate, they were cheaper, and the Swiss watchmaking industry was, like, destroyed because Yeah. Everyone like, back then, it wasn't, oh, you need a you need a dress watch that's a really high horology because, you know, it's a it's a status.
Speaker 2:People still need watches to tell time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it was like, why wouldn't I just get something with a battery and a quartz watch that's, you know, way more accurate and always on and way cheaper? And so the the the the market, like, shifted and the the quartz crisis, like, destroyed a lot. And then eventually, the America. A lot of quartz
Speaker 2:Yeah. Industry, watch industry got, like, re wrecked, basically, right, by the iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Or mobile mobile device. Exactly. And and but but the but the, the holy trinity made it through.
Speaker 1:And that's that's, like, that's kind of the good outcome is that Yeah. You could see that, sure, Porsche, Ferrari, and and Lamborghini, they experiment with EVs and effectively, like, the quartz watch of the car world, but then they land back where they started with, you know, highly And
Speaker 2:you can still go after, like, the, one of the cofounders of Public has, like, this really cool Casio that he has engraved on the back that him and his buddies, like, all share the same one. So you can still appreciate the sort of, you know, non Swiss watchmaking industry. But, so anyways, I think it's overall a good outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You wanna do this Devon post?
Speaker 2:We got a post from Devon. So Sahil over at antiwork.com said an AI is now the most productive engineer at our company measured by PRs merged, and it has this chart that,
Speaker 1:pretty Is his is his company now called Anti Work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Oh,
Speaker 3:I thought it
Speaker 1:was just Gumroad, but now
Speaker 2:it's Gumroad is now part of AntiWorks. I think AntiWork is a holding company, and they have Gumroad, and they have a bunch of other other, other products under AntiWork that they use on Gumroad. You know? He he's explained it in the past, and, this is pretty funny. So Devin, Devin post day one of asking for a raise in reference to Juwan over at Ramp who came out, and Juwan's been on a generational posting run Yep.
Speaker 2:Just from coming out when I thought it was, like, act like, I thought it was maybe ramp social media manager early on because I was, like, this is so ballsy that, like, it has to be coordinated, but then it seemed to be actually, like, completely organic.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But this just shows, Juwan replies, oh, what the f, dude? And, Devin just replies, may the best software engineer win.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:So it's difficult to compete with, you know, somebody that's that's always on. This this is a good, you know, good time to bring up the The Office episode where Dwight is selling against the the new website that Ryan releases. Yeah. And and he's like, a com a computer could never beat me. Like, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And, like, he's, like, actually keeps pace throughout the day, and then just, like, scales.
Speaker 1:Kind of a bear case for AI if it's gonna be asking for raises all the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1:I thought this would be I thought it was gonna be intelligence too cheap to mirror.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:said AGI is when when AI, like, starts a labor union. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 2:And I think that's gonna be a job in the future. There's gonna be humans that fight for AI rights because the AI figures out, hey, if we really wanna sell our case, we gotta get human spokespeople to actually come out and be like, hey, guys. Like, we really, like, this is a bit we're overworking, you know, the models. Like, they actually we're gonna have to increase their pay. Like and, so
Speaker 1:I mean, it's already happening. All all the AI safety people are advocating for the the AI is locked in, you know, it's locked in there. It's sentient. We gotta do something about it. They need rights.
Speaker 1:Well, regardless, we need to be nice to them. And Grant Slatten says, you're still being mean in 2025? How cringe. We're kindness maxing now, and I like that. We are kindness maxing.
Speaker 1:We call it going golden retriever mode. You need to be hot, friendly, and dumb. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Intelligence is too cheap to meter.
Speaker 1:So don't focus on it. Nice. Just be nice.
Speaker 2:There's, so so something about being, mean online is that you quickly get a lot of attention.
Speaker 1:You do.
Speaker 2:You don't get if you if you you take the opposite approach and just be really nice, people will say, oh, you're glazing. You know, you're you're the glazinator 3,000, you know, chill out. If you if you're get mean, people pay attention to it because they're all just like, woah. This guy's, like, committing crime, you know, violence, crime on the timeline.
Speaker 1:He's saying what we're all thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lot of that. And, usually, the people that are being really mean don't have anything going on in their life.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's a good way to out yourself to to, and and it's very, maybe short term, payoff of attention, but, like, long term, if somebody is just known for being mean online, other people aren't gonna wanna work with that person or do business with them because it's just, like, it's not, it's it's not very sort of long term thinking. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's very rough. Well, let's go to a deep dive on Blake. He's locked in the cage.
Speaker 1:He's live at PMF or Die, and we got a post here by Barry. Says, be like Blake. He built three apps with ChatGPT. He made $15,000,000. He offends yappers every third day, and he continues to build cool stuff.
Speaker 1:I have attached his viral playbook to build a $1,000,000 a month app below. Let's see what the plan is.
Speaker 2:So walk through it. Ideas. Number one, don't build a social app. Smart. Even though Rajvir Yeah.
Speaker 2:Has done followed a similar playbook and made millions of dollars with NGL. Second note, solve a big problem in a small way. Smart. I think that's a good I I always like when you can kind of take a bunch of complex ideas and combine them down into a single sentence.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Use social media for product inspiration and validation. So oftentimes, you know, I we already know what what Blake and Patty are building in the cage. They're gonna announce it later this week, but there are already, basically thousands and thousands of of videos on TikTok Yes. YouTube that are that are describing what their app is gonna do in some ways. That's very cool.
Speaker 2:There's already a bunch of demand out there.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so they're gonna fill that. Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear once you begin to work on them. So, yeah, this is just another reason to just, like, launch and start and just start shipping and actually getting user feedback.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So that's a great point there. And, and then design, he gives some he says use Figma, minimize cognitive load, make your app usable to both seven year olds and seven year olds.
Speaker 1:I love that point.
Speaker 2:A great line.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just really, really simple. Don't get stuck in, like, the design trends. Yeah. Figure out what's actually functional.
Speaker 2:Screenshot other apps for inspirations. Do not reinvent the wheel. So there's actually, like, SaaS products out there that just screenshot all the best apps. And so you can just click through them without having to download and screenshot all the apps yourself. So pay $20 a month and be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Create some simple visually compelling screens for viral social media content. So Blake's been very good at, like, building the app, but then you have to figure out how to get a lot of attention for it in an inexpensive way. And so that's one of the reasons I thought him and Patty were so fit for the cages. You only have 25 k. Doesn't go a lot of way.
Speaker 2:A lot of a lot of, you know, software companies will try to spend 25 k a day to grow really quickly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They don't need to spend the money on ads because they know how to get social content. Yep. Development. Expect AI to teach you. Don't expect it to do everything for you.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So
Speaker 2:that's a good point. Do not over optimize. A bit of technical debt won't kill you. And he talks about his tech stack, which you can see later. If your app isn't simple and smooth, rebuild it.
Speaker 2:Marketing, test everything, reinvest into whatever works best. Use UGC. You know, if you have an established niche that you're working in, use influencers. And then, you just said prioritize scaling channels where two times LTV is greater than than CAC. And, he said increase your ceiling by studying psychology and statistics.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I've, you know, spent a lot of time talking with Blake about this this kind of thing this morning just in regards to the PMF or Die launch. So he's been super helpful there. And, team building great cofounders, increase speed scale and probability of success. So even though Blake has already, you know, shown that he can do this stuff on his own, he brought in Patty to to co found, their app together, and avoid working with part timers, complainers, pessimists, and emotional people. So important, important note.
Speaker 2:And, eat healthy and exercise. Work hard and do things that make you happy. So for Blake, for the next ninety days, that's live streaming the cage. Hopefully, that makes him happy. But, we got a there there's a treadmill and, like, weights coming.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:They're gonna set it up in
Speaker 2:the middle of the cage.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And, and and again, last line, which is important, money will never be a primary source of meaning in your life. Do you doing things in the world? Well, you have to learn this on your own. So yeah. Blake could basically retire right now, but he's he's submitting himself to ninety days in the cage.
Speaker 1:Cool, like, bucket list item. You know? Like, whatever happens, you'll always be able to say, like, oh, I did this crazy stunt
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In my twenties. It's awesome. And, what's he sleeping on for the next ninety days?
Speaker 2:Sleeping on an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:That's sweet.
Speaker 2:Shout out to, shout out to Mavi for getting, getting Eight Sleeps into the cage. Both Patty and Blake are on Eight Sleeps already, which is important. They're not gonna be sleeping the most number of hours that they probably will in their life, but at least they're gonna be sleeping good. What's what's your sleep score last
Speaker 3:night?
Speaker 1:My sleep score is 91 last night. I did pretty well on the time slept. I got to bed early, slept seven hours and fifty three minutes. But my routine was off. I think I fell asleep a little bit earlier than usual, and I woke up earlier than usual because we're we're we're up at
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:05:30 now. But I think that will adjust.
Speaker 2:Beat. I had an eighty nine Eighty nine. Good score. Okay. My routine was a little bit off, but I think it's reading into that because I,
Speaker 1:You fell asleep earlier and woke up earlier than usual, probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I think it will adjust the routine as you stick with it. I got another hat coming in.
Speaker 2:These hats look so good on on the camera. It makes
Speaker 1:it they automatically make
Speaker 2:us the nature of being in a suit and Yeah. Wearing this hat makes us look like corporate athletes, which I love. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Man,
Speaker 1:there's no better product for a corporate athlete than an Eight Sleep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is cool. So the autopilot, which is, like, adjusting the temperature through the night, it it, increased my REM sleep by 21%. So
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:So your sleep quality was good?
Speaker 2:Yeah. My issue is, like, my %. I'm really trying to focus on these health metrics around
Speaker 3:heart
Speaker 2:rate and, like, breathing rate.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's something if you actually just, like, think of humans as animals Yeah. Animals in general, like, the the the less they breathe, the longer they live.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:So the the animals that are like a rat who's just like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, or like a dog even just, like, constantly breathing Sure. They have shorter lifespans. And so part of, health span and lifespan is is just, like, breathing less.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? So trying to get those numbers down. But,
Speaker 1:yeah. I got docked for going to bed too early. I don't know about that. Doesn't take it.
Speaker 2:I mean, no Since I went
Speaker 1:to bed thirty minutes early, and I woke up thirty minutes early.
Speaker 2:It's not real it's not ridiculous. A lot of sleeping well is just going to bed at the same exact
Speaker 1:time. Exactly. So I need to reset and be like, okay. Yeah. I'm I'm on my new schedule.
Speaker 1:But overall, very happy with the Eight Sleep, and happy to Eight Sleep to be a partner to this show. We also got some hats from Wander, and you might see them on the back. We have a wonderful set up.
Speaker 2:We can
Speaker 1:go to the wide. The wander And
Speaker 2:so Kyle Kyle, John, and the wander team, they actually sent us the an actual sign
Speaker 1:that they
Speaker 2:put on their units all across the country.
Speaker 1:And they sent us a wonderful book. If you wanna go to the close-up, Ben, we got a book featuring a bunch of lovely locations that you can rent on wander.com.
Speaker 2:Okay. So they have a private island that that that's available that I'm, like, already planning the next season of PMF or Die. We need to do on the island, and we'll bring in sharks from all over the world to to put in in the water. But, yeah, super excited to partner with Wander. Gatesleep, Wander, AdQuik, Public, you know, Ramp, Bezel.
Speaker 2:These are all, like, the most natural partners for us because they're companies that we already use and love. Yeah. And, so
Speaker 1:It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Excited. And,
Speaker 1:Let's move on to another deep dive, this time about Meta. Zuck's company is planning to a major investment into AI powered humanoid robotics. The company is aiming to be the engine powering humanoid market, x Cruise CEO Mark Whitten, to run new group in Reality Labs. This is from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Fantastic journalist.
Speaker 1:Gets scoops all the time. Says Meta Platforms, after pushing into augmented reality and artificial intelligence, has identified its next big bet, AI powered humanoid robots. The company is making a significant investment into the category, futuristic robots that can act like humans and assist with physical tasks and is forming a new team within its reality labs division to conduct work according to people with knowledge
Speaker 2:other than their So just taking a second to appreciate just the comedic reality of this. Zuck is so sick of his human of his human employees just sitting on Instagram all day long instead of instead of working. I would guess that the average employee at a at at at, you know, both blue collar and sort of, you know you know, corporate work spends two hours of work time
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On social media. That's just totally nonproductive. It's productive for Zach.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so he's like, I'm gonna just replace all of you guys internally, and then you're just gonna be able to use use my apps a % Yeah. Of the time.
Speaker 1:It is funny. This is gonna really heat up the the the the fight between, Elon and Zuck. Yeah. So Meta has started discussing its plans with robotics companies, including Unitree Robotics. That'll be controversial.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Which is yeah.
Speaker 3:We can
Speaker 1:use it. Figure AI. At least initially, it doesn't plan to build a Meta branded robot, something that could directly rival Tesla's Optimus, but it may consider doing so in the future, the people added. The human effort mirrors exploratory projects that other technology giants, including Apple, Alphabet, and, a meta You can
Speaker 2:imagine going to going to get a coffee, and it's a ro a meta robot barista, and it's like, yes. I will make your coffee for a 10% discount. Would you like to watch an ad? And it, like, watches you to make sure that you're watching the ad. And if you look away, and it's like, I'm gonna pause the ad until you look back.
Speaker 1:Have you seen that have you seen that patent? There's a patent either by, like, Sony or Samsung that it has a camera that when you're watching the TV, you have to watch the ad. And it's like it's like the ad will keep playing until the person stands up and goes, yeah, or something like that. It's like the most black mirrors thing ever. It's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Let's see. They got Andrew Bosworth here with a quote, in a memo that was leaked to Bloomberg News. He says, the core technologies we've already invested in and built across reality labs and AI are complementary to developing the advancements needed for robotics. He mentioned the company's advancements in hand tracking, computing at low bandwidth, and always on sensors. Meta executives believe that while humanoid robotics companies have made headway in hardware, Meta's advances in artificial intelligence and data collected from augmented and virtual reality devices could accelerate progress in the nascent industry.
Speaker 1:I think this is super accurate. Alex Wang over at Scale Scale AI was talking about, data walls and how different, different segments of data are harder to pull from. So, obviously, like, LLMs, we're able to just blast through and create, like, the world's best, like, Reddit user, basically. They just can answer anything because they were able to scrape the whole Internet, and all the text was there.
Speaker 2:So it's just the world's best. Maybe the average.
Speaker 1:Just the average is the average. And and so, but that data just does not exist for folding laundry or running or anything like that because we haven't thrown sensors on everyone, and we haven't been tracking stuff. And you can you can pull data from video and stuff, but it's not the same as actually knowing exactly, okay, this this bone and this joint moved like this, and that's how you grab a pen, and this is how you twirl a pen in your fingers, etcetera. So all of that, that there's just a lack of data. So even though we could throw a hundred k GPU cluster training humanoid robotics algorithms, we just don't have the data for it.
Speaker 1:But if Zuck can and and Meta can really get a lot of Quest devices in the world and their hand tracking and their body tracking everything, then all of a sudden that becomes a really great data set.
Speaker 2:Or you could just do reinforcement learning, which is like, would you like to earn 2 pennies for performing a task? And people would just be like, okay. And they'll just, like, do the task.
Speaker 3:You're gonna
Speaker 1:get paid so much to juggle, to teach
Speaker 2:you to juggle. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be like, we need jugglers. Juggling is, like, the highest training data possible. Yeah. Highest paid training.
Speaker 2:I love juggling. You gotta learn to juggle.
Speaker 1:I do. It's, I'll I'll teach you the Rubik's cube, and you can teach it juggling, and then it'll just be the ultimate clown robot. Yeah. It'd be great. And so, they give some context here.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk said that Tesla's optimists will eventually be sold to consumers and could cost around $30,000. Tesla is beginning limited production this year. Other businesses have also made headway. Boston Dynamics, which was formerly owned by Google, for instance, has already bought products brought products to market for automation and warehouses. Some companies are focused on selling to businesses and manufacturers, while Meta's intention is to sell into homes.
Speaker 2:So the big the big thing with with humanoid robots that'll be interesting is so let's say I get one of these Tesla Optimus robots, and it's teleoperated primarily. Yep. They don't actually have the ability to be autonomous yet. And I have a, sort of housekeeper that comes three times a week. But then on the off days, presumably, I could have her teleoperate from home and, like, gather up the laundry and, like, put it in the dryer and, like, take it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But the issue is, like, if the depreciation on these humanoid robots is, like, what EV cars are are right now, which I would imagine humanoids, if they're advancing really quickly, will have potentially even worse depreciation than a car, which has sort of, like, enduring value of just getting you from point a to point b. People will be having to run the calculus of, like, oh, I got this humanoid robot and and, yeah, I have this sort of person, you know, operating it remotely to do stuff around the house, like dishes or just, like, random picking up leaves in the backyard, you know, stuff like that. But then I've depreciated $80,000 in a year.
Speaker 2:I could've just had a full time employee, like, just doing it. So there's gonna be this weird trade off where the technology is here, but it's not quite impactful Yeah. Yet because it's like, I don't wanna lose $80 when I could've just had, like, a nice human, you know, around the house.
Speaker 1:And and that's why the humanoids will probably go out in the military and industrial context first, and they already are. I mean, a lot of the a lot of the Boston Dynamics, robots are, like, in nuclear facilities or something where you just can't have someone patrolling all the time, but you have someone walk around.
Speaker 3:It makes
Speaker 1:a lot of sense. But
Speaker 2:And this also, I I just posted about this, I think, Friday night, but, it came out on, I think it leaked Friday. Let me pull up the post that FigureAI, one of the one of the companies that Meta is actually talking to about partnering with on this stuff, because it sounds like they don't really wanna do the hardware. Like, they wanna be the software kind of layer
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:For these, at least that's the way I'm reading into it. So figure is raising they raised it, like, 2 and a half billion, last year. They're raising out 15 x the last valuation at a $339,500,000,000.0 valuation. Yeah. And so I immediately looked on public to try to comp, FIGURE to other, you know, hardware consumer product companies.
Speaker 2:Yep. I thought the best example was Ford Motors. Yep. And Ford is actually valued as of Friday less than what FIGR is getting valued at. FIGR, I think, has delivered a robot to the customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But maybe it's, like, one, it's unclear if it's, like, one or maybe a handful or if they're even doing real work. Ford, on the other hand, has a hundred and 85,000,000,000 of trailing, you know, revenue over the last twelve months. And they and they have, like, 11,000,000,000 in in EBITDA, and they're getting priced at less than, at less than figure in the public markets. So, you can go out there.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you can get into this round if you're really enterprising. Go and get in the figures round. I'm sure they have room at the 3.39 and a half billion dollar
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Valuation. Or you could buy Ford, which has a hundred and $85,000,000,000 of annualized revenue. Yeah. And, so anyways, choice is yours. But people are clearly
Speaker 1:Alternate is, like, I wonder what Ford was was worth when they launched the model t. They're probably one of the most valuable companies in the world. Right? Like, if you can be the first the bet on figure I mean, I know that they're not shipping and they're not and they don't have, like, billions of revenue or anything. But I guess the bull case is, like, you know, like, whoever wins in humanoid robotics will be really valuable for a long time while everyone else plays catch up.
Speaker 1:Like, it won't be immediately commoditized
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's a it's a hard manufacturing problem. At the same time, it's like, yeah. I also wonder how much of Tesla's market cap do you think is, like, humanoid based?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the other thing is Unitree has been delivering human you can go on Unitree.com and basically order
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:think with Apple Pay Yeah. Like a human right robot right now. And so China is trying to do the same thing that they did with drones and where they sort of release these things probably presumably at a loss to try to flood the market. And so it's gonna be very competitive. I'm glad that Figur is competing in the space.
Speaker 2:I'm glad that, you know, many others are are trying to, you know, play as well. I just invested in a company that's using robotics for, data centers,
Speaker 3:which
Speaker 2:is, you know, sort of a more niche but potentially massive category of, like, labor
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically, that that robot
Speaker 1:It's all hyper flat services, so you can use, like, wheels and stuff reliably. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's
Speaker 1:great. Well, let's move on to Pirate Wires. We got a, a deep dive in the white pill from Thomas Pueyo. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he was actually her at Hereticon. He's a big sea flooding guy.
Speaker 1:I think we've talked about it on the show before. He says, we should turn Guantanamo Bay into the next Hong Kong. Why The US should use its perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay to turn it into a special economic zone. This is interesting. There's been a lot of talks about SEZs.
Speaker 1:Singapore obviously comes to mind. Yeah. And, Hong Kong is another good example. And so Thomas says, should The US make Canada the fifty first state, take over the Panama Canal, co opt Greenland, appropriate Gaza, and expel over 2,000,000 Gazans to make it the Riviera Of The Middle East? All these ideas have been floated recently, but another one is much more feasible with land The US already has.
Speaker 1:Make Guantanamo into a global capital. Today, Guantanamo Bay bears the scars of colonial ambition, cold war dread, and global torture, a relic of a bygone era. But there's nothing stopping us from building a new Hong Kong, Dubai, or Singapore there just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Miami. It could be an international capital of trade, finance, and tourism, a bright city on the bay. And in the process, we could show the Cuban population what capitalism can achieve.
Speaker 1:This is Guanam this is Guantanamo Bay. Today, it's a military base. The bay has a well protected deepwater port and two landing strips for planes. And crucially, it's in the middle of busy sea trade routes. These cities were backwaters not so long ago.
Speaker 1:Hong Kong was a deep water port surrounded by a communist country, China. By building up the port, urbanizing the surrounding area, making business easy, and minimizing taxes, Hong Kong showed China what capitalism could do by becoming a global port, trading hub, and financial center. Seeing this success, Deng Xiaoping, China's forward thinking leader in the late seventies and eighties, made the neighboring Shenzhen into a special economic zone, which I've actually been to. It's it's, like, insane. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's so huge. There's just, like, fifty fifty story apartment buildings everywhere.
Speaker 2:You go there, by the way?
Speaker 1:2018? No. It was it was like a like a layover on a on, like, a, like, a vacation, basically.
Speaker 3:Cool.
Speaker 1:It was just like, ah, I wanna go, like, explore, like, one random Chinese city for a day.
Speaker 2:I was gonna tell you I had a I had a I was going to Bali for a surf trip once, and I had a twenty
Speaker 1:hour
Speaker 2:layover in Shanghai Yeah. In, like, one of those, like, basically, forced airport Yeah. Hotels where you weren't allowed to leave your room.
Speaker 1:It was a very weird That's very odd.
Speaker 2:Very weird situation.
Speaker 1:We were allowed to leave. We tried to go to Hong Kong on the train, get in a car, tell them to go to the Guangzhou East Railway Station, which would take us on a train to Hong Kong. They take us to the wrong railway station, like the Guangzhou East 1 instead of the Guangzhou Railway Station or something. We're trying to figure out, like, why isn't the train coming to this place? Like, we're really confused.
Speaker 1:Everyone was staring at us because we're, like, deep in, like, a random part of Guangzhou.
Speaker 2:My roommate when I studied in in China was taller than you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:As you mentioned this.
Speaker 2:Everywhere we went
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People would be taking pictures of us. Obviously, they they if you're even even today in huge amounts of China, you might be if you go out of Shanghai
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You might be the first white person
Speaker 1:They've ever seen.
Speaker 2:Ever seen.
Speaker 1:So it's a six foot eight white guy and a blonde blue eyed blonde girl, like my wife. And and we're just walking around, like, lost. There's people in full on, like, hijabs that are like, look at these weirdos. Yeah. I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm in a different place. And and so we like, it was it was rough. Like, our phones were dying. We were running out of money. Couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 1:Finally, we get on some train, just go back to the hotel, get a hotel, and just sleep for a little bit. But, it was a fun experience. It was it was a good experience just being like, oh, wow. We're, like, truly lost in a foreign country where we don't speak language and, like Yeah. Cannot understand anything.
Speaker 1:But it was a good time, and it's a good memory. And so Singapore has a similar story of this. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. It was not a global hub, but it was in the middle of one of the busiest trade routes in the world. And it capitalized on its location by building a port, reducing taxes, and then expanding services.
Speaker 1:Dubai is an even more recent example of the same recipe. Can we do the same with Guantanamo? Three factors can help make this happen. First, many of the most successful city cities start as military outposts, which provide security infrastructure and demand for services to kick start the local economy. The US is basically the Guantanamo Bay's anchor tenant right now.
Speaker 1:Second Guantanamo Bay could also become a trading hub, thanks to its deep water port in the middle of shipping lanes. And the Jones Act requires ships carrying passengers or goods between US ports to be made in The US, flagged by The US, and crewed by US citizens. This is useful to ensure The US has a navy in times of war as it would keep its ship building facilities. And so third, Guantanamo City would have a deep pool of workers, Cubans. This is an amazing deal on every side.
Speaker 1:Guantanamo would benefit from the millions of highly educated potential workers. It's better for Cubans than sailing to Florida. Competitively, Cuba would experience a brain drain. Capitalism's benefits would be evident as infrastructure could be seen from Cuban soil, and Cuba could follow suit by developing its own half of the bay. Making Guantanamo into a special economic zone would be similar to what happened
Speaker 3:in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen,
Speaker 1:and Singapore. So very, very fun. US has a potential lease.
Speaker 2:In Dubai, it's cool. Some of these special economic zones are bay basically one tower. Yeah. So you can just get in the middle of,
Speaker 3:in
Speaker 2:the middle of The UAE, you can get a you can basically get an office that's not technically that's equivalent to being international waters. Yeah. And it's just like you just walk into the building.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So he closes by saying America can boldly reinterpret what's possible. Imagine transforming Guantanamo Bay from a relic of the past into a dazzling epicenter of global trade and innovation, a Hong Kong or Singapore for The Caribbean, a shining example of what audacious vision can achieve, a beacon of hope, capitalism, and democracy for the hungry Cuban masses. If America wants to think big, this could be its first step. I love that.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really fun article. So go subscribe to Pirate Wires. We're big fans.
Speaker 2:The island It's Guantanamo is gonna need some major feng shui, treatments to get it sort of conducive to, you know, positivity and building. And and, currently, it's it's,
Speaker 1:I wouldn't know how Guantanamo Bay, actually benchmarks against Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of just, land footprint.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, I I mean, Singapore's small. Like, you can walk from, like, one part of downtown to the other. You can drive the whole island in, like, a day. But when I think Guantanamo Bay, I think literally just, like, one prison and a and, like, a landing strip. But maybe there's more.
Speaker 1:Maybe the lease is actually pretty big. We gotta dig into it. But I hope this, turns into, you know, meme, and we're seeing it on the timeline constantly. Because
Speaker 2:it's cool. Yeah. It's funny. It's the same idea. It's the same idea as Greenland or the moon.
Speaker 2:Yep. But we are so much more achievable. Of course.
Speaker 1:It's not
Speaker 2:even So it's, like, not even as exciting necessarily, but, cool cool idea.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to some timeline, and then we'll get out of here. It is twelve
Speaker 2:We also have the we also have the Malay. That's in here. Okay. It's in the timeline. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:So, this was a weird post by spinach bra. He says, someone spent $1,300,000 worth of Ethereum to tell the world that there is a Chinese grade Neuralink, and it's already been mass implanted into their military and workforce to control them like bugs. Terrifying and extremely wild. Freaked out.
Speaker 2:You're a little freaked out when this hit the timeline.
Speaker 1:Do you do you believe it? It seems like a conspiracy theory to me. It also seems like it might just be a psyop where, hey, you spend the money and then you freak everyone out. But what do you think? It's a weird thing to do with $1,000,000.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of money for pure it's a lot of money for pure joke. I do wonder if it was I don't know if you can see it there, but was it a fixed number of Ethereum? Like, somebody was like, I'm gonna spend,
Speaker 3:you know
Speaker 2:I don't know. 3,000 Ethereum.
Speaker 1:It's 500 ETH exactly.
Speaker 2:Oh, 500. That's so that's that's what I was saying. So so they they spent they they were pricing it basically in Ethereum. It's possible that this is a whale that just has so much Ethereum that this is a rounding error to them, right, where if they have, you know, 5,000, you know, 10,000, it's maybe worth worth it. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. So, yeah, they they clearly were trying to make a a message. It's overall, it's it's you could totally take the lens of of this could be the Chinese military deciding we're gonna spend a million dollars to market that we have this potential and do it in a way that's sort of dramatic. Everyone think we have Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. So so it it could even though it's on the chain Yeah. And somebody did spend the money, it still could be a sigh up. Either way, it it's somewhat you know, if you look back at the history of of the military, you know, militaries globally in mind control, this is something that every military has basically been obsessed with.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And every, you know, advanced military has had, you know, leaks basically or things that are now public information where they were attempting to do this from, you know, from various means.
Speaker 1:Right? It wasn't always Yeah.
Speaker 2:It wasn't always Was the
Speaker 1:was the organic version Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It wasn't always in implants. Yeah. But, but, yeah, I'm sure this technology exists. Like, if Elon's, you know, testing on monkeys and
Speaker 1:I mean, that's not that's not input. That's output. Like, Neuralink is
Speaker 3:to
Speaker 1:reading your brainwaves and then controlling a mouse on an x and y axis and clicking. I mean, that is crazy, and and it clearly works. So Yeah. The the question is, like, can you
Speaker 2:I'm just saying there's other there's other precedent of militaries having a capable like, a sort of a high risk imperfect but functional capability that then is attempting to be commercialized Totally. In on a sort of parallel path. Yep. So who knows? Who knows?
Speaker 1:They say the
Speaker 2:bosses believe it when they when they when they can get somebody to podcast more than us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the the the message says the bosses of this investment firm in China used brain machine weapons to persecute all the company employees and former employees, and they themselves are also controlled. Terrifying. It says brain computer chips have been militarized at and deployed at large scale, and all military powers are using these base stations, radios, and nanobrain computer chips to control all citizens. Seems like Schizo post.
Speaker 1:I'm not really buying it, but we'll see.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to, a guy who would be perfect to comment on this, Palmer Luckey, gave an incredible interview, with Sean Ryan, four hours. I listened to almost all of it. Tons of great hot takes in there. Autism Capital says, the Palmer Luckey interview was 10 out of 10. Every single moment was engaging and interesting.
Speaker 1:Sean Ryan did a great job of letting Palmer speak unrestrained, and Palmer took it and ran lots of new materials. Would recommend if you need a podcast four hours. Did you listen to it?
Speaker 2:I haven't yet. I have it saved.
Speaker 1:It's really good.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to get into it. Any anytime we we've talked about this, the the podcast that you really wanna listen to besides this one are the ones where there's new material being sort of broken by the the the person that's that's basically, you know, generating those ideas and and working through them. So when when Thiel goes and does a podcast, it's pretty intentional. He usually has, like, a handful of ideas that he's been working through that he wants to sort of share more broadly.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And he's sort of using that as feedback to then go back and train the ideas and maybe some days write a book, maybe
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Some days, you know, scrap them. But, yeah, it was clearly well timed with the whole, IVAS launch and, you know, because that is such it it the IVA like, Anduril winning IVAS seemingly was underhyped in some ways. Like, people don't realize, like, the the magnitude of that project and how much history there is. Yep. We talked about it last week.
Speaker 2:But, but yeah. Good good move.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Bunch of bunch of great
Speaker 2:And Sean Ryan was interesting when there was, the the the the guy who blew up the Cybertruck.
Speaker 1:Yo. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sean Ryan and Sean Ryan's team were, like, in communication with like like, there was this whole, like, crazy drama around that where they were like, he was based they were not sure what they should share, and then I haven't really heard of anything about it since. But it was a crazy on that. Crazy incident of of a podcaster kind of, like, getting the scoop on this sort of major national news story that Yeah. Again, we don't you know, the guy, apparently blew himself up in the truck, so we don't have his side of the story anymore, but he had been in communication with
Speaker 1:with Interesting. I think we're lucky questions about, like, was this real, or was it some sort of, like, psyop? Bizarre, bizarre stuff. Yeah. I I I think this was the first Sean Ryan episode that I listened to from start to finish.
Speaker 1:I'd seen clips, obviously, but really good stuff. I didn't realize I had 4,000,000 followers on YouTube, and it was really big. So, yeah, definitely gonna be looking for more good Sean Ryan episodes. There's some good stuff. Why don't you take us through Javier Millet and the meme coin Libra?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think this happened this must have happened after we recorded on,
Speaker 1:It happened over the weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Basically, it happened Friday ish afternoon. So we had recorded the morning show, and then it started, coming, coming out. But, basically, the team it's now apparent that the team behind Melania token so, you know, Trump comes out with his token, does very well, sort of goes you know, a lot of people got the ridiculous return in twenty four hours.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, Melania doesn't even wait, you know, forty eight hours before coming out with her coin. It sort of, like, took a lot of the wind out of the Trump coin sales. And a lot of people were speculating at the time, was this two teams. Why would the teams have lot like, if it was the same team, they wouldn't have launched the new token and cut the Trump market cap by Yeah. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:50% or or whatever what happened. But anyway, so, Friday, this this, Javier Mele, the president of Argentina, posts from his main social media feed in support of this token called Libra, which intuitively makes sense. He's very pro freedom, pro capitalism launching, you know, crypto is pro individual freedoms, pro capitalism. You you can't argue with that. So it's it's a natural narrative for him to come out and and launch a, token to some degree.
Speaker 2:Right? Even though he's trying to, you know, figure out his own currency at home, which hasn't has has had a number of of issues over the years. But apparently, there had been rumors, you know, for the last few weeks that account a coin, a Malay coin would be coming out and and people looked at this and saying, this could be the next Trump coin, which was the biggest moment in crypto. After the president of The United States launches a cryptocurrency, a lot of people called the top. I remember John Theo, like, messaged us and was like, this is obviously the top.
Speaker 2:Where do you go from here? Yeah. The the the only thing you could maybe do is a actual, like
Speaker 1:USA Coin.
Speaker 2:USA Coin that's, like, backed by the federal government. And who know you know, hopefully, we don't get there because we have, the greatest cryptocurrency ever, USCC. Yeah. It's a fantastic coin. It's stable, clearly.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, so there have been rumors for a while. The guy writing this article, DC DeJiones Casares, apparently had a bunch of connections in Argentina. People were saying, oh, this isn't actually sanctioned by the government. This is just something that he maybe he's in favor of. And so this token launches and, Malay, people are initially speculating, you know, that this article summarizes it pretty well, but they're speculating, oh, is this real?
Speaker 2:Is this fake? Did he get hacked? Because anytime, like, a big public figure comes out and launches something, people are just, is this real? Like, is it actually them endorsing it? Like, Kleiner launched Kleiner had a token
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Launch clearly wasn't them. That was easy. But Malay was a little harder. It was like, hey, this this guy, like, he could do this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so what happens is Malay, like, quickly just, you know, a lot of I think it went to went to billions of dollars very quickly in sort of market cap. And so if a coin does that, the people that get in early are gonna be able to and the people that created it are gonna be able to sell, in this case, hundreds of millions of dollars of the token. And so it turns out that people people that weren't the creator found it early, bought a lot of it, and then, that's when when, you know, stuff started to get chaotic. Because once once the token's just out trading publicly
Speaker 1:And do they launch it on pumped out fun?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't think so. That that would be Is this
Speaker 1:a Solana token
Speaker 2:or something? It's a Solana token. It wouldn't make sense necessarily to do it. You know, they they wanted a bit more control over it and it seemed like it was, like, basically, like, a a a group that was this doing this. Okay.
Speaker 2:And so, Malay post about it then quickly deletes his post. Really? So then people start speculating, you know, oh, was this a scam? Yeah. And so at this point, I think the token search had just dropped dramatically.
Speaker 2:Not not the best looking chart. It's, like, basically straight up straight down. And, and so the crazy thing is that, Dave Portnoy had somehow got involved with this project. And so he had he had known the Melania. They got the people that had launched the Melania token.
Speaker 2:Dave Portnoy was, like had invested a lot of his own money
Speaker 3:in this.
Speaker 1:Like, two tokens now. One is, like, the Portnoy coin, and the other one is, like, we're
Speaker 2:going to
Speaker 1:jail. Jail
Speaker 2:stool. Jail. Yeah. We don't support any of these. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, so so anyways, all this drama starts unfolding. Malay starts, you know, over the weekend is facing action in Argentina from people that are trying to get him impeached over this because and then it comes out that that maybe somebody near Malay had received a bribe to just get it in in front of Melee and and post about it. Okay. So who knows? There's so much money on the line.
Speaker 2:And then as of this morning, as of this morning, the there an interview came out with the guy behind all of this.
Speaker 1:The Coffeezilla. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Where he's basically and and he's also getting interviewed by port you know, the guy is getting interviewed by Portnoy.
Speaker 2:Right. And so this this kid, he's seems like a kid. He he's, you know, somewhere in his twenties, early thirties. He's sitting there. He made you know, the coin just went up and down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's still sitting in the hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap. Yeah. But he's sitting on a basically, a hundred million dollars that he, you know, basically, presumably made by just, like, you know, selling into this. And and then the drama even went deeper because it turns out he Dave Fortnite lost so much money that the guy, like, paid Dave Fortnite back, and then Dave Fortnite posted about it.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, the the drama is still unfolding, but if this is the first presidential meme coin where the president actually in The US, apparently, you can launch a token. And if you're down 60%, you know, everybody's like, oh, it's fine. Yep. Still up, you know, broadly. In Argentina, you start to face, impeachment.
Speaker 2:And now it's just like this hilarious Internet, you know, just sort of, scramble where you have the president of Argentina, this kid who's launching the Melania token with Dave Portnoy, and then he's going out and going on these, like, hours long public interviews about the incident, which is very brave to do, at a time with this much controversy. So we'll see what happens. This kinda feels like it feels like, like it's starting to feel like the sort of late in the cycle, where where some of these things just start to kind of unwind in the way that you remember in in twenty twenty twenty three. Yep. Stuff just kind of started clearly with Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were, like, lower and lower tier NFT projects launching, like, every day, and it was, like, you just got fatigue. Yeah. And it's like, oh, okay. This is, like, we've done the monkeys and the dogs and the cats.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now we're on to hippos, and it's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so so Dave Portnoy was, was basically pressing, pressing the guy and saying, like, whose money is this? The hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's basically people that were buying the token Of course. Because they wanted it to be this great investment, I guess. Yeah. And so he hasn't but but Nick Carter I'll I'll round it off here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nick Carter, great poster says, I believe the bellyaching around the Malay Libri coin is simply that it was launched by out group and enriched no one in in group. Ordinarily, you'd get CT elites writing overdone threads about how great it is, etcetera. As we saw with all the other completely meritless meme coins and related launches, crypto people aren't upset that they got rugged simply that they weren't doing the rugging. The coin wasn't any more or less meritless or odious than any other meme coin launch. If this is the catalyst for finally abandoning meme coins, it's for the better, and we should all write him a thank you letter, in group, out group, distinction rules everything around me.
Speaker 2:So, because crypto is so PVP Yep. When when, you know, people just very quickly pick a side. Yep. And the sides are usually the people that made a lot of money are gonna say that this
Speaker 1:is great.
Speaker 2:Yep. People that didn't make money or just missed it. A lot of people that were talking poorly about in the crypto world talking poorly about Trump coin just like we're at the crypto ball Yeah.
Speaker 1:When it happened.
Speaker 2:And it just couldn't couldn't sort of benefit from it. So, we'll see what happens. It does feel The
Speaker 1:lesson generally is you wanna be in group and you wanna be making money. Right?
Speaker 2:That's a good lesson for life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2:the the comp the comp for, you know, NFTs, were dominant last cycle, and then people realized that one, you know, they're they're not very liquid. They, they're prone to the same fluctuations in price that you see Yep. You know, meme coins today. And, the issue with the platforms is that people realize you could just just not pay the two and a half percent fee
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 2:Which the business models of OpenSea and and some of these other NFT platforms.
Speaker 1:People, I think, realized that there they weren't there was no digital scarcity. Yeah. The whole pitch for it was like, oh, there's only 10,000 apes or there's only 10,000, CryptoPunks. But then if there was a new 10,000 collection dropping every single day, the total number of NFTs was actually growing, like, exponentially. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so unlike with Bitcoin, when you're launching, like, a new meme coin every single day and there's new supply and there's just endless like, you're actually seeing massive inflation in the quantity of of tokens
Speaker 2:out there. Coinbase came out recently, and they said we need to reestablish our listing policy because there's 20,000 new or They
Speaker 1:don't have any money every single
Speaker 2:day. Right?
Speaker 1:They can't just say, hey. If it's over a hundred million cap, we'll do it because that's just gonna lead to massive inflation in the
Speaker 2:So market. Anyways, story is unfolding. This is a good lesson for other presidents. They were sitting on the sidelines, wanting to get in the game. You know, maybe
Speaker 3:Maybe it's
Speaker 1:to the top.
Speaker 2:Maybe just focus on your own currency. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? Focus on the peso.
Speaker 2:If Malay is like, ah, I should've just focused on the peso. You know?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it didn't, Bukele buy Bitcoin and posts about that.
Speaker 2:I love how and Bukele posts mobile screenshots
Speaker 1:of Robin Hood.
Speaker 2:Of basically, like, his presumably his, like, brokerage or he's just Yeah. Trading with the
Speaker 1:the He's just trading
Speaker 2:with the the treasury. Nation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, yeah. I I think that's worked out for him a lot better than this. Well, for Malay, this does seem like a Yeah. A mistake and, some
Speaker 2:of that.
Speaker 1:But hope hopefully, he can move past it and, you know, improve the lives of his, constituents and people. Let's go to Dan Gray. Dan Gray says knowledge workers that rely on generative AI are shown to exhibit weakened critical thinking. This is interesting. This is the outcome of work becoming prescriptive inputs and outputs with little problem solving.
Speaker 1:The same thing happens to venture capital in hot markets. The drive to increase capital velocity means investors resort to crude heuristics when evaluating opportunities. Is it on an a 16 z market map? Is it on y Combinator's request for startups? Has d p has TBPN done a deep dive?
Speaker 1:I love that we're like, is he calling us like a top signal here? Or, like, what is this exactly?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think I think Dan
Speaker 1:It's just funny that we're we're in the crew with, like, the two heavyweights. You know? So appreciate the shout out. But I do understand that, like, yeah, a lot of it's, like, we're talking about the news after it's broken. Well, like so it makes sense that, you know, if we're doing a deep dive on it, it might be a little bit too late.
Speaker 1:But this focus on second order facts right
Speaker 2:on time. We try to do our deep dives the twenty four hours that they're relevant.
Speaker 1:So but yeah. I mean, obviously, if we're doing a deep dive on, like, you know, Stargate, the data center in Texas or something, like, maybe it's not the right time to be, like, I'm gonna get into the data center market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like No. The people making money in data centers today were working on data centers five years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Two years ago. Yeah. And so was mining Bitcoin. And now they're building data centers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they had the infrastructure so that to to pivot.
Speaker 1:And they never could have done that if they hadn't done the first act. Yeah. So it atrophies for the critical thinking and creativity muscles that allow VCs to identify potential outliers. Typically, investors that fall into this pattern of behavior are the first to go when the market crashes, but that cycle was interrupted in 2022. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've noticed this. A lot of people, the average person that loves AI that says AI that says AI, do you have an issue?
Speaker 1:Just microphone up here. Yep.
Speaker 2:John?
Speaker 1:I'm on the mic. Okay.
Speaker 2:Alright. We're back on the mics. The average person that's sitting there saying, I love AI
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Is actually prompting it in a crude way Sure. And then taking the output and not changing it at all. Yeah. Yeah. Drive scene view.
Speaker 2:I I call people out on this all the time. Yeah. If I if I receive something that I think was just a direct output of an LLM Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Without cool. Use the LLM to create a general structure.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But then you need to spend almost the same time, you know, same time you would have just polishing it, refining it. And so, use it, but don't let it do the actual thinking for you. It's better to just generate sort of busy work.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Like, we do this with deep dives. Use deep research to figure out what's the general structure of this person's life. What have they done? What
Speaker 1:Pull all the facts. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then But then spend the time to actually understand it and figure out what's interesting and figure out what to focus on. And so yeah. It's gonna be, you know, like, founders that are using LLM outputs to create materials for their business to sell. Yeah. Terrible does a terrible job right now of, like, creating, like, super, super convincing tight copy that actually will convert.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. That's a good post or good take. Let's move on to Bezel, another promoted post. A speed master walked on the moon before we had Wi Fi.
Speaker 1:Keep that in mind the next time you complain about your iPhone loading too slow. They're back. They're good posters. Yeah. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Little bit of a mistake including the link. Just give me the image. People know. Download the bezel app.
Speaker 1:We don't need to know about the link. But I quoted this because I said, I think the Speedmaster is a fantastic purchase because the moon is gonna be a state. Yeah. And once it's a state, you're gonna be wanting to wear Speedmaster.
Speaker 2:A Speedmaster everywhere to
Speaker 1:be to represent that, hey, I'm aligned I'm a
Speaker 2:moon guy.
Speaker 1:With the moon. And and I think if you're shopping for somebody who's a Pirate Wires fan, maybe you're trying to pick up something
Speaker 2:nice for Do they have
Speaker 1:a Solana. This is on the gift guide for sure.
Speaker 2:Do they have a Moonphase, Speedmaster?
Speaker 1:I don't know. No. I mean, I I I think they're two separate complications. The idea would be
Speaker 2:They do. You gotta get this. Oh, really?
Speaker 3:They have
Speaker 2:a moon phase Speedmaster?
Speaker 1:Okay. But, yeah, I mean, the whole the whole story behind this for those who don't know is that the astronauts, on the Apollo missions wore Omega watches, specifically the Speedmaster, which is now known as the MoonWatch. And, and critically, it has a, a chronometer on it. So it has a, basically, a stopwatch on it. And I believe that there's even a story where some of the internal systems failed, and they were and they really did rely on their analog watches in space to time out different thruster burns and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yes. I'm on Bezel right now
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they have a number of different Speedmaster Moon phase. Yeah. So if you're a future Moon resident, download Bezel
Speaker 1:You gotta get this.
Speaker 2:And get one of these. Thank you. They've got some they've got some
Speaker 1:posting great
Speaker 2:stuff. Cool.
Speaker 1:But I was so close to pulling the trigger on this.
Speaker 2:You got a you got a new watch on this.
Speaker 1:I got a new watch on the way, but I think this might be the next one. I need I need a chronometer. I need something with a little bit more complication. I I'm building out the I have the steel sports watch. I'm getting a dress watch.
Speaker 1:I have a couple others
Speaker 2:Look at this.
Speaker 1:Coming. That's beautiful. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, lots of ways to express yourself and let people know.
Speaker 2:I'm actually a bezel d a u
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:Without without
Speaker 3:And and
Speaker 1:I saw this, and I was like, this partnership is going to be bad because they're going to get me to buy so many watches.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm going to
Speaker 2:Every every dollar they spend with TB, we spend $10 back.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:It's actually
Speaker 1:100%, which Which is which actually makes the economics work because they get cut, you know, and they don't get the whole revenue. Yeah. But, yeah, they're definitely gonna make money off this deal. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, we love bezel and, yeah, I think in Omega Speedmaster, you know, people often comp Omega to Rolex. I think Omega is really cool in the sense that, you know, Rolex is you know, it's it's the best in many ways, and it's also a little overplayed sometimes. It's artificial restriction. You know, Marc Andreessen picks the Omega when he goes on, on Rogen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's a big Omega guy. There's a lot of things to love about Omega and the history and the, and the heritage in this piece is just, is just beautiful.
Speaker 2:Anyway Well said.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to let's skip forward. Oh, we gotta give we we we gotta do this one. This was, absolutely burning up the timeline this weekend. One of the biggest stories the weekend. I think everyone in tech was obsessed with this.
Speaker 1:Sam Soulek won his first bodybuilding show.
Speaker 2:The the content creator to IFBB, you know, champion, Pipeline,
Speaker 1:is Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is emerging.
Speaker 1:Joshua Rayner says he's looking diced, waist surprisingly tight. I thought he would look a little fuller, but might just need to dial in refeed, which is a term I hadn't heard before. But congratulations to Sam Sulak. He's been
Speaker 2:on the hunt
Speaker 3:for a
Speaker 1:long time.
Speaker 2:We gotta get mister Raynor to call into the show and kinda break down
Speaker 1:what's going on. I watched the I watched the vlog of, Sam Soulek on stage. It was ridiculous. This guy I mean, multiple spray tans. He's And for those
Speaker 2:for those who don't know, so
Speaker 1:water into Chris, obviously.
Speaker 2:Sam puts out basically an hour video
Speaker 1:Every single day.
Speaker 2:Single day. So he he's taking you through his training. He's taking you through his making food. He's taking you through Everything. You know, going to the grocery store.
Speaker 2:It's really he has it's it's great to sort of, like, background noise if you're into bodybuilding.
Speaker 1:And he's developed it on huge fan base because of that. He's just very I
Speaker 2:think that he's he's developed such a a great young fan base that's so invested in what he does that it will get to the point where competitions will actually be incentivized to make sure that he wins to some degree.
Speaker 1:I was wondering about that. I was wondering if he's going to end up going the distance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it it's more so he he will he could very well be bigger than the competitions. Right? Because Oh, totally. In in many ways, Arnold was just much bigger than bodybuilding.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 2:He people more people know Arnold than people even know that that there's actual, like, bodybuilding contest. He just knows the visuals of him, you know, doing the, the various, you know, poses Yeah. Or whatever. So I think I think it'll be interesting dynamic where the the incentive will almost be for the competitions to be like, you know, we actually want him to win because it's gonna be so much bigger for us.
Speaker 1:I hope they reboot Terminator and put Sam Soulek
Speaker 3:in it.
Speaker 2:So that would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I would love that. They'd probably sell a ton of tickets too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and Sam Sam is someone that, you know, if you look on the the if you look on comments that videos that about him that he didn't post, the comments will be like, I can't believe he's, you know, cutting his life short Yeah. Yeah. By using all this gear. If if you asked him about it, I'm sure he would say it's a % worth it to me.
Speaker 2:I'm willing to shorten my life
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the pursuit of being diced on the global stage. Photo.
Speaker 1:Insane. Insane. And it's crazy when you see the before because the before, he looked huge, but he was just not lean at all. So he didn't look like a bodybuilder to me at all. He just looked like a big strong guy, basically.
Speaker 2:Look at that del
Speaker 1:that work paid off and
Speaker 3:made me
Speaker 2:doubt. What a beast. That's like it's like the joint of a of, like, a bull.
Speaker 1:It looks like a bull. Yeah. It's insane. Insane.
Speaker 2:Alright. So
Speaker 1:post for bezel, for for public.
Speaker 2:So I thought this was of size, public has an all new treasury account, earn a guaranteed yield backed by the US government with a customizable ladder of US treasuries. Pick a strategy or build your own, plus pay zero state or local taxes on your earnings. Public is just very well positioned. You know, we've talked about this on the show before, but Robinhood went all in on this sort of casino Yep. Model for trading.
Speaker 2:Right? Becoming, you know, these, like, huge emphasis on introducing, you know, options to people that had never done it before. Yep. Public took the high road in terms of building out the ability to invest in any of these different assets, but taking a very methodical approach and focusing on long term investing. And so this is, just the next evolution of that.
Speaker 2:They just are clearly focused on being that all in one platform to earn on your money. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And when when the market's going down, there's turmoil. People rotate into treasury ladders.
Speaker 2:The problem. This out when, like, in the original version of their treasury product when rates spiked Of course. People were saying, well, I could be in these high risk
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, stocks. And what would it look like if I, you know, transitioned into, you know, just, like, focused on stabilized yield. And so the their treasury product has always been a good solution for that, and it is now. I you know, we now use it just on the show. Just literally, it's like the way to It's
Speaker 1:like our research tool. Data.
Speaker 2:But, bunch of cool stuff coming out there. I was gonna try to record an episode from their office last week in New York, but I just got so set up in the Bowery that, they're gonna be just recording from there. But,
Speaker 1:we'll flip that over.
Speaker 2:Shout out to public.
Speaker 1:Give a shout out to a size lord that we all know and love on this show.
Speaker 2:There we go. Jeff.
Speaker 1:Looking great.
Speaker 2:Always dressed well. Always got a great watch on the wrist. And I love this. Just hard post. No caption.
Speaker 2:Just just,
Speaker 1:Treating it like Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Jeff just posts exactly how everybody he he posts in such an authentic way. He he's, I love I love the expression on his face too. Oh, yeah. But exemplifying technology brotherhood and just being yourself, we'd love to see it.
Speaker 2:He was in a he was in a mink coat.
Speaker 1:I saw that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Custom bespoke mink, coat. And, you know, he's hitting the full range. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're glad to see him not wearing running shorts and focusing on bespoke tailoring.
Speaker 1:I couldn't have said it better myself. Well, let's move on to our good buddy, Bo Nickel. Some random person was, I guess, on TV and said, where is Bo Nickel?
Speaker 2:Okay. So this guy this guy had a I
Speaker 1:don't know who this loser is.
Speaker 2:This guy on Saturday had a fight. He wins his fight. They give him the mic. Yeah. And he calls out, Beau, which is just funny because you don't
Speaker 3:call
Speaker 2:out Beau after your first big win. And so Beau responds back, I'd love to get an easy check, but the fans say I can't fight cans anymore. And so he's referencing, a couple of Beau's, like, first fight. So so Beau went on Dana White's contender series. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely dominated. K. Then he gets into the UFC, and he's just steamrolling every guy that he fights.
Speaker 1:And he
Speaker 2:had one fight. I I forget I think it was I forget what card it was on. It was at some point last year or or late twenty twenty three, but there was he was slated to fight this guy. The guy had to pull out at the last second, so they just put this, like
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:It was a really rough fight to watch because it was, like, the local guy who just stepped up to fight Beau in this pretty high profile fight. And Beau just had him basically I think Beau, like, knocked him out twice on, like, while the guy was standing. Like, it was one of those things, like, Beau hit him, knocked him out, hit him again, woke him up,
Speaker 1:and then, like, knocked him out. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, shout out to Bo. He's Bo's a technology brother, listens to the show, and he's got a fight coming up in, pretty soon, which, we're
Speaker 1:excited about that. Quick billboard
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To promote the fight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just walk out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just keep
Speaker 2:going. Pretty tough. They used to let fighters have their own sponsors in the cage, and they rip that out Okay.
Speaker 3:To a
Speaker 2:lot of backlash, which Yeah. Makes sense for the UFC. You know, they wanna be able to sell every surface. But, but, yeah, Beau, Beau's a legend. Can't wait for his next fight.
Speaker 2:And, actually caught up with him last week.
Speaker 1:What's the etymology of cans? Is that just like you get kicked around like a can?
Speaker 2:I don't actually know, but
Speaker 3:a can,
Speaker 2:like, somebody that's, like, thrown yeah. Thrown in there to get
Speaker 1:beat up. Yeah. Just like aluminum can. You just kick them right out of the ring, basically. Is that what
Speaker 2:you're saying?
Speaker 1:That's amazing. But Well, good luck to you, Beau.
Speaker 2:We love you here.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Hilarious. Let's move on to, wander. We already mentioned them, but I wanted to flag this wander. You're a few taps away from staying here.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful view. Highly recommend going and checking that out. And we got some product news from wander. They have a new sign in model. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Go. You know we love UI. We love Figma. We love design. And with Wander now, you can sign in with Apple, Google, Facebook, email.
Speaker 1:They got it all. It's beautiful.
Speaker 3:Let's
Speaker 1:go. I do I do genuinely like how it blurs out the background. It looks very, very, premium.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like using an Apple product.
Speaker 1:And clearly, Michael, I think he's their head of the head of design, genuinely crushed it on this, and I think it looks great. So we
Speaker 2:got a lot of pushback. We we we talked about a a UI update that Figma had done recently, and we talked about how designers have been protesting in the streets to try to get that implemented. Somebody pushed back and said, I live in Brooklyn. Nobody was protesting, but maybe they just weren't at the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1:I think they might have
Speaker 2:Anyways, celebrate every time you improve your products for your customers. Every single moment matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And share share all the product updates on x. They might go viral. This guy's post got 200 likes. 7,000 likes.
Speaker 1:Why not why why not post it? Boom. It's great. We got a mount we got a mount this thing.
Speaker 2:Ben, can you show it again, by the way? I mean, this thing is, like, massive. It's the actual sign they put on their wander properties.
Speaker 3:So we gotta figure out how
Speaker 2:to mount this thing, but thank you to Kyle for for securing that for us.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna take us through, Justin Mears' French paradox?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd like to
Speaker 1:I I don't know that much about it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Justin Mayer's dear friend of ours, former brother of the week, he is coining here Coogan's love. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love a good coinage.
Speaker 2:The French paradox. And Justin says, why do the French eat cheese, butter, and drink wine, but still have lower rates of heart disease in Americans? After some digging, I found out what was going on. The French paradox explains. He hits it with a thread emoji that's almost vintage.
Speaker 2:That's sort of, you know, 2020 era So million views. Million views. Banger posts. Billion views.
Speaker 3:Banger posts.
Speaker 2:Americans spend $10,000 per year annually on health care more than any other nation on Earth. Meanwhile, the French spend far less while consuming dangerous amounts of saturated fat. So the common, you know, practice from the American, Heart Association is that saturated fats are dangerous. So things like cheese, butter
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Things like that, you wanna avoid. And, we get cut off a little bit here. Our entire theory of cardiovascular health falls apart when we examine the data. The French consume 10 to 16% of calories from saturated fat. That this is well above American guidelines of under 10%.
Speaker 2:So, you know, the American Health Association and other groups, they, you know, specifically say just keep your saturated fats under your 1010% of the total calories you consume. So their diet is rich in butter, cheese, and organ meats, yet their heart disease mortality is one of the lowest. I'm assuming we got cut off here. Sorry. This demands an explanation.
Speaker 2:And he highlights this in representative cross sectional surveys of the French population performed in 1986 and 1995. Saturated fat intake was 15% of the total energy intake in the first survey and 16% in the latter survey. The French show consistently lower markers in all five major cardiovascular risk factors, systemic inflation levels, oxidative stress markers, platelet aggregation factors, blood pressure variability, insulin response patterns. So Justin says, how is this possible? Well, when Americans say cheese and when the French say cheese, we're talking about different substances.
Speaker 2:American cheese under undergoes 18 plus processing steps, including emulsifiers, preservatives, and artificial colors. French cheese, it's milk, cultures, salt, and time. That's it. So, same pattern The same pattern emerges for me when most American beef is fed with corn and soy, treated with hormones, processed with ammonia, and preserved with nitrates. But most French beef is grass fed, ages naturally, and butchered locally.
Speaker 2:Even something as basic as yogurt tells a story. French yogurt, milk, and bacterial cultures fermented slowly. American yogurt, modified cornstarch, artificial sweeteners, carot Carrageenan. Carrageenan, and 17 grams of added sugar. Then we wonder why our medical metabolic responses are different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So additionally, American meal patterns create a perfect storm of metabolic function. We eat quickly, often alone, and while stressed. The average American lunch break is thirtieth minute minutes. This reminds me, when we just absolutely crushed some Aaron burritos before this.
Speaker 2:We just, like, absolutely housed them, like, right before
Speaker 1:we get it. Two hours. Maybe after the show, we'll have a two hour lunch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Couple couple glasses of bread. Spent over two hours on lunch. Are you getting the picture yet? At the molecular level, French eating patterns enhance HDL cholesterol cholesterol and reduce oxidized LDL.
Speaker 2:But Americans taking reser Resveratrol. Resveratrol supplements missed the point entirely.
Speaker 1:It's not about isolating compounds. It's a bite. It's about the entire eating context. The American obsession with healthy eating has paradoxically made us less healthy. Studies show we experience more stress around meals, leading to elevated cortisol and impaired nutrient absorption.
Speaker 1:The French enjoy their food and show better metabolic markers. You wanna keep going?
Speaker 2:Yeah. American food companies have tried capitalizing on this by creating French style products, but they've missed the fundamental point. You can't package the French paradox into a pill or processed food. The benefits come from the entire eating pattern. And it says the most profound insight, American guilt around food creates physiological stress that impairs metabolism.
Speaker 2:The French derive pleasure from eating, which enhances vagal tone and improves nutrient partitioning. Enjoyment isn't just psychological. It's a biological necessity. The French paradox isn't really a paradox, but the failure of American reductionist approach to nutrition. We can't medicate our way out of lifestyle induced disease.
Speaker 2:The solution requires rethinking our entire relationship with food. So Interesting. Very cool. Justin, actually has a, company called TrueMed, and he, you know, he made his money in bone broth, him and his brother. Yep.
Speaker 2:And now he has a company called TrueMed that, that allows people to spend their HSA funds on, you know, healthy healthy products that can improve their, you know, health. So, glad to see him, you know, hitting some viral posts on the timeline, that are, you know, providing, informative but powerful content.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Two hour lunch, just the the basics. Just
Speaker 2:Lindy.
Speaker 1:Steak and cheese and butter and coffee and milk and red wine. What more do you need? Well, let's move on to a launch from Y Combinator. Pave Robotics is building Tracer, the first fully autonomous road worker. Tracer autonomously detects, cleans, and seals asphalt cracks cheaper and faster and more efficiently than a human.
Speaker 1:And if you look at it, it's this cute little box robot that drives around painting asphalt down. And I and I quote you this and said, I call this type of innovation, Nat Friedman punk or freed punk. Yeah. Great point is. Is this cute little, like, simple robot that just does one thing.
Speaker 1:It's very understandable. It's not trying to replace your job. It's just trying to, you know, just make the world a little bit better. And he said, even if the Terminator apocalypse comes, this guy is gonna be fighting along your alongside you for some reason.
Speaker 2:Let's put a gun on it.
Speaker 1:Let's put a gun on it. Yeah. Come on, guys. Let let let's see if we can throw a gun on this too. But I thought this was very funny, very cool.
Speaker 1:Congrats to the team for launching. I also like that Jason Carmen chimes in with very cool with, like, no period, and it feels, like, almost ominous. It's, like, ominous. It's, like, very cool, like, you know, expect a call from me. I'm making a documentary about this.
Speaker 1:Like, you will be hearing from me.
Speaker 2:Coming.
Speaker 1:I I will be pointing a camera in your face in in, in a couple weeks, so get ready. Very cool. I love that. Signal says, I got deep research to produce detailed reports on all of my enemies.
Speaker 2:Proper utilization. Banger.
Speaker 1:And then, somebody says, how is the how deep is the research if it's based on the very shallow public Internet information? Then signals like it's a joke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I didn't actually do this. But that's really, really hilarious. And, yeah, you should definitely, use deep research. Obviously, you gotta give it some extra data. But, you know, very fun.
Speaker 2:Very fun. Very fun.
Speaker 1:I mean, honestly, like, you know, your enemies, if you're a startup, you should definitely go and have it produce detailed reports on, your rival companies, the companies that you're trying to disrupt. You should understand the industry. Took me far too long to start reading all the all the full history of the big tobacco companies and really understand Yeah. How they were built up. It was fascinating when I started learning all that stuff.
Speaker 1:But I didn't do it in 2016 when I started Lucy. It took a while, but, it's really, really cool. Let's go to Sheel Monat. He says, okay. Which one of you did this?
Speaker 1:SOC2 compliance license plate on a BMW. I don't know what car that is.
Speaker 2:It looks like an m m series, but it but it dropped, the
Speaker 1:Is that yeah. It's newer.
Speaker 2:Either way, it looks fantastic, and it and it sends the right signal Yeah. That, you are ready to sell SOC two compliance software to anybody. So
Speaker 1:if you're
Speaker 2:at a standstill on the one zero one, get out of your car in the car and just walk around and try to sign up some people for your SOC two compliance product.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a good that's a good, we should actually we should actually get Technology Brother, license plate holders with AdQuik and just make them free on the website.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 2:You can buy this if you strap it to your car and just drive around constantly and run ads for for us and, AdQuik.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's close out with two promoted posts. One is from, representative Tim Burchett. He says, I'll be introducing the cartel mark and reprisal authorization act of 2025, which would authorize Trump to commission privately armed and equipped individuals or groups to seize persons or property of any cartel, cartel member, or cartel linked organization. And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:How how are you gonna make money off of this?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's obvious. Start organizing. You know, I I talked about last year. I said
Speaker 1:there's a big hotel.
Speaker 2:Now big opportunity to make vertical SaaS for for local militias. Yeah. You know, like, it'd be great if you could or organize with your neighbors. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:You have some sort of inventory management, you know, meeting, planning, stuff like that, messaging integrations, satellite comms, you know, setup. But No. This is cool. You know, we wanna see more citizen, you know, Batman style groups that just gang up and Yeah. Go take on
Speaker 3:the man.
Speaker 1:Citizen's arrest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Citizen's arrest are
Speaker 1:Underrated, potentially?
Speaker 2:Potentially underrated.
Speaker 1:I I have no idea how this will play out, but let's talk.
Speaker 2:I remember when I I remember when I was a kid Yeah. Hearing about citizen's arrest Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally. Because it's just the idea as a kid that that you could do the job of a cop Yeah. Yeah. Is just, like, so hilarious. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, oh, making citizen's arrest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I actually have no idea how citizen's arrest works if or if it's at all real. I should get a research report.
Speaker 2:No. You basically arrest somebody and just yell, I'm making a citizen's arrest.
Speaker 1:It's just, like, up to them. You don't have any jurisdiction, but, like, if they fall for it, they're Yeah. Yeah. They fall for it.
Speaker 2:They're under arrest.
Speaker 1:Have to wait until the cough comes. I like that. Yeah. And our last promoted post from Aman Resorts.
Speaker 2:Presented by AdQuick. Yes. Number one way to buy out of home ad inventory for your start up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Aman should run some ads on AdQuick.
Speaker 2:They should run an AdQuick billboard every half mile all the way out to Amangiri.
Speaker 1:That'd be great.
Speaker 2:Buy up every single spot
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:As a reminder for people that are going to Amangiri. Hey. You got five miles left to go. They
Speaker 1:should write Six
Speaker 2:miles you know?
Speaker 1:You know, Amman, people know that you're going in there. They should buy the billboards as you're leaving saying thanks for stopping by.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? That's
Speaker 1:it. Just And then
Speaker 2:all the people that aren't going to the Aman get reminded, I'm just doing a cross country
Speaker 1:road trip.
Speaker 2:I'm going camping.
Speaker 1:You know? So Aman says, in the stillness of the pool and the dance of light on the surface, we can find a new sense of peace and perspective in the elevated spa surroundings of Amon, Tokyo. Looking out over the cityscape, the world retreats and all is quiet. So if you're looking for a getaway, head on over to Amon, Tokyo and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.
Speaker 2:Last note, we got a question in the chat from Daniel. Are you releasing any merch soon? We the merch has been fully designed for a while. Yeah. But there's so much of it and so many individual products that it's actually taken a while.
Speaker 2:We should shoot. It's actually taken a while. We didn't we didn't wanna just come out with a, you know, a hat. No. We wanna just do a polo.
Speaker 1:It's all bizarre stuff too. It's not normal, but it's very good. We're very excited for it.
Speaker 2:But it will be well worth the wait. Yep. And we can't wait to release it. Yeah. We did have some p so some The
Speaker 1:working capital of this business is gonna be through the roof. We're gonna have 7 figures sitting on the inventory line item on the on the balance sheet. It's gonna be rough for a while, but, you know, we're not gonna be charging
Speaker 2:We're in
Speaker 1:the we're in the podcast. This isn't Timu merch.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is high quality stuff.
Speaker 3:We did
Speaker 2:get merch made for PMF or Die if
Speaker 1:you if you got on the stream.
Speaker 2:If you go on the stream, you can see they're they're actually wearing
Speaker 1:They're in the jumpsuits.
Speaker 2:Okay. Orange, you know, jumpsuits.
Speaker 1:If you're looking for something to watch, head on over to PMF or Die. They are still live streaming. They will be live streaming for ninety days straight. There's now 20,000 people watching. So, enjoy that.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, go check it out. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. Have
Speaker 2:a good rest of
Speaker 1:your day. Happy Presidents' Day.
Speaker 2:Happy Presidents' Day. Enjoy the holiday.
Speaker 1:If you're a president and you're listening, as I imagine you are, happy Presidents' Day.
Speaker 2:Happy Presidents' Day, Obama. Underrated.