Technology Brothers

What is Technology Brothers?

The most profitable podcast in the world.

John:

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we have some breaking news in the media free agency brothers. We got a blockbuster trade coming out of the journalistic trenches. Taylor Lorenz, yes, misinformation herself, is officially making the move from the Washington Posters to the San Francisco information. This is a huge pickup for them.

John:

Absolutely game changing. Jordy, what you got for me?

Jordi:

Let's talk about Lorenz's game. This is a multimedia star who has posted and reported across every single platform you can think of. Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, podcasting, Twitter, x, blue sky, Mastodon, threads, you name it. She's dominated it. She's not just covering culture, people.

Jordi:

She is shaping it.

John:

Of course, her her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head to head contact with none other than the the not with none other than Marc Andreessen. Let me do that again. Of course, her career hit a bit of turbulence after some head to head contact with none other than Marc Andreessen. That little dust up in the clubhouse caused her career trajectory to be slowed, hindered, impeded, delayed. There are other words for it, but you get the idea.

Jordi:

She hits free agency after parting ways with the New York Times. But instead of hanging up her cleats, she deletes all her tweets and goes back to the grind and gets immediately signed with none other than the Washington Posters. And let's not forget, she thrived there, continuing her gumshoe reporting, taking on billionaires, and making life miserable for anyone daring to build a network state.

John:

And talk about a dream gig working for one of the greatest technology brothers in history

Jordi:

An absolute dog.

John:

Jeff Bezos. She worked hard to make the richest man in the world even richer, one of the most noble things a technology journalist can do.

Jordi:

Absolutely.

John:

And, yes, people call her a champagne socialist. They call her a limousine liberal. But look, as someone who loves drinking champagne in the back of limousines, I feel like we're kindred spirits.

Jordi:

Look. This is a reporter who doesn't just show up. She gets in people's heads. She understands the game like no one else, whether it's hard hitting investigations or defining or defining Internet culture for the masses. Her articles have been must reads for years.

Jordi:

If you're building a network state, a new social app, or just trying to live your life in Silicon Valley, Taylor is coming for you and you better watch out. Phenomenal pickup by the San Francisco misinformation. They just landed an absolute franchise player. Can't wait to see the headline she's about to write. John, do you have any details on the contract?

John:

We don't at this time. I think it is just a contract. I don't think she's full time yet. Still testing out the water, settling in through the team. But very interesting, she hit me up a couple weeks ago.

John:

We chatted about the rise of the bro caster, and I chimed in as a male podcast expert expert on the record. Talked to her for about 30 minutes. It was a fantastic conversation, and she still got it. She's in the arena. She's making plays, and this article is fantastic.

John:

We're gonna break it down. But first, we're gonna go to a profile of Taylor Lorenz in none other than the information. They wrote about her. Now they're writing with her. It's almost Smart.

John:

Like, you can't write this storyline at home, folks. So let's go to Annie Goldsmith at the information who writes all rippers, no skippers, how Taylor Lorenz became part of the story. On May 18th, the Washington Post published a breaking news story about the Biden administration's newly created and promptly attacked disinformation government's board. The board was able to be led by researcher and author Nina Jankiewicz, who The Post reported had has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral. The post revealed that Jankiewicz was resigning from her barely 3 week old post, and the board, which had been charged with countering misinformation related to Homeland Security, was being disbanded.

John:

And this was a different this was a different arc in Taylor's career. She'd been on the tech beat and always she always got a lot of a lot of criticism because she was a a technology journalist, but she wrote a lot about social media. She wrote a lot about culture, and people were, oh, she should be in the style section. Completely disagree with that characteristic. I think that what she wrote about was extremely important to the technology world.

Jordi:

Now what I I mean discussed. Yeah. In many ways, she was the center of the entire creator economy trend, which was many ways, which was huge, but in many ways, she she contributed she she implanted so many ideas in venture capital's

John:

head A 100%.

Jordi:

That it it led to a sort of capital incineration where VCs invested 1,000,000,000 of dollars into the creator economy, and we haven't had much to show for it.

John:

And she was so pissed about VCs coining the the whole creator economy thing and really running with it with with as their own because she'd been reporting on it for years and was like, this is not me.

Jordi:

Well, that was that was

Jordi:

the that was actually the well, and that was somewhat of the the the thing I always found, you know, having my first, you know, real company, is a YouTube ad network that I started, while in college. And when I saw the creator economy trend happening in tech, I was like, this is kind of interesting because the entire movement was basically kicked off because somebody did an analysis Somebody did an analysis of the fastest growing small business categories in the US, and influencers were the fastest growing category. Yep. And so people were like, we need to give them sass. Right?

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

So they just dumped literally billions Yep. Into and the information, the San Francisco information was at the forefront of kind of covering that. They've had probably hundreds of articles at this point that have referenced the creator economy

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And tracking, like, deal volume and velocity, which has slowed down dramatically. And I think one of the issues where why that trend didn't necessarily play out is the trends that were driving the creator economy had really started at the creation of YouTube and some of these sort of foundational social media platforms

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

That had already been in the, like, very, like, scaled for a while. That said, I do think Taylor did a good job of making the creator economy about herself. Yep. And she's built a, you know, fantastic career on it.

John:

Yeah. There there was an interesting dynamic where the thesis of her book was that, look, you might see mister Beast or Logan Paul, like, kind of the shining stars of the creator economy now or Kai Sanad and her I show speed, all these bros, Rogan. But really if you go back in her telling of the history, it was the mommy bloggers who really were on the forefront of the creator economy, which I think is right and that's accurate, but it doesn't go back far enough in my opinion. Because if you go back even further, there's a group of bros that start the platforms, and that's guys like Chad Hurley at YouTube. Himself.

John:

And so there's this question of, like, her whole point was, like, VCs are just jumping onto this creator economy bandwagon right now. They're not authentic. And and, like, while that was true, if you go back to Sequoia writing the investment memo for YouTube in 2003 or something like that, like, clearly, they saw what the creator economy was going to become. And they actually made a very strong bet if you're a venture capitalist and you're looking for outsized returns. You don't necessarily wanna rip a check into someone with a Canon 5 d who's gonna go make vlogs and who knows if it's gonna hit.

John:

And if it does, it's gonna look like a lifestyle business most likely. You wanna be in the platforms, and that's why the VCs were correct to put money into Twitter. Yeah.

Jordi:

It's funny that in many ways, the creator economy investment trend was like the trend of capital incineration. But if you go back and you combine Shopify and YouTube into that And Instagram. Massive. It was an amazing category

John:

to invest in. Exactly. So you need to you need to really understand the definition of, like like, does creator economy include the platforms? Like, it should. Right?

John:

And so, obviously, there's a lot of beneficiaries there.

Jordi:

But And there's been there's been, you know, for for platforms like Substack that have gotten, you know, that have been at the center of controversy, they've continued to be a place where you can build a great creator business on. Right? So

John:

And so, she gets a lot of love for breaking this story. It was a huge story at the time. The scoop was for a news cycle, at least the talk of the town, just the latest in a series of stories that has made Lorenz the most scrutinized, recognized, and controversial journalist in the tech beat. She just keeps putting out bangers, says NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who I believe, like, runs the the onion now. Did you see this?

John:

I I I think I'm thinking of the right person. Her former editor at the Daily Beast, she's all rippers and no skippers, and that is true. She's on the power law. She is a phenomenal player, and everything that she touches

Jordi:

for school. She's a scoop machine because she lives and breathes the the the heavily online lifestyle that her Her book is

John:

extremely online.

Jordi:

She is extremely online. Every she she's living the same experience as many of the people that she covers. Yeah. So, obviously, she's gonna have better scoops and, you know, have a very unique lens on it all.

John:

Yeah. And it goes back to her early career. In the 3 months since she left the New York Times to join the post, Lorenz has been breaking has broken high impact stories about Facebook's smear campaign against TikTok, the woman behind the behind the right wing Libs of TikTok social media account, and the White House's Ukraine war briefings for TikTok stars. She's a scoop machine, said her post editor, David Malitz. It's so true.

John:

Her beat was initially dubbed Internet culture, though Lorenz now rejects that mon moniker. I hate that phrase. She said attention stemming from her belief that all culture is Internet culture. This is so true. She's dead on.

John:

Like, the Internet online is real life. Twitter is real life, and that's why she is she's she's really good. And she runs this, like she runs her own Instagram account, but then she also runs in a non insta Instagram account that's been banned so many times. It's now on, like, Taylor Lorenz alt number 7 17. Way.

Jordi:

Oh, yeah. I don't even know about it.

John:

Oh, it's really, really good.

Jordi:

I'm missing out.

John:

I forget what it's called, but it's really funny. And she posts great stuff. She, like, is very, very in tune with the culture, and she doesn't get enough credit from the tech elite in my opinion. A number of Lorenz's friends and colleagues use the same phrase to describe her extremely online. That's the title of her forthcoming book.

John:

There is no distinction between online and life and offline life. Couldn't agree more, Taylor.

Jordi:

Truth.

John:

You are dead on there. Now for the first time, Lorenz has found herself the subject of media attention in February when she announced she was leaving her job at the Times to become a columnist at the rival Post. Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and The Hill all covered her departure with Lorenz lobbying some lightweight grenades of the gray lady out her out of the on her way out the door. She told Vanity Fair that she kind of hit a ceiling at the times and hoped the paper would hopefully, you know, involve in evolve in their ways. Completely agree.

John:

I mean, she left shortly after the, dust up with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. They were they were in this clubhouse chat. Ben Horowitz used the r word, but he used it. He was quoting members of the Wall Street Bets community who used the r word to refer to themselves in endearing ways. And he was being positive, and they were being positive.

John:

So it was it was kind of a hall monitor situation. She took to Twitter immediately, posted about it. But most importantly, she got the name wrong. She attributed the quote to Marc Andreessen instead of Ben Horowitz. And shortly after, she was out at the New York Times.

John:

And I think huge mistake by the New York Times. Yep. Clearly, they just don't get the modernity. Cultural relevancy

Jordi:

Yep. Yep. For the Times.

John:

Yep. Exactly. But Which is why

Jordi:

it's such a big pickup for me.

John:

Bezos understood. Hey. If you're gonna be talking trash about, you know, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, get on my team. I love I love riffing with these guys.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so she goes over to the times, and she says, a few weeks ago, she found herself in mid in the midst of another journalism brouhaha after she referenced her personal brand in an insider interview. I will not make that mistake again, she told me. Pulitzer Prize winning Times reporter Maggie Maggie Haberman tweeted, is there something going on in the world other than the desire of some folks to get more attention? Ridiculous. Maggie, no one's gonna be talking about you in a couple of years.

John:

You need to be building a brand. Yep. Like, you're going to be irrelevant. Taylor is clearly a glimpse into the future here, and, the old guard just doesn't get it. And so it must be extremely frustrating for her for Taylor because, in any other community of tech people, everyone would be like, yes.

John:

Like, you are doing everything perfectly. And you can tell because the the the the tech folks are like, fuck. This is the one thing that works against us. Like, we don't care what Maggie Haberman says about us, but we do care what Taylor Lorenz says about us because she speaks our language and she's online.

Jordi:

Yeah. I you know, we we've we've talked about this before. We don't understand that the frustration with Taylor. She is a finally, a worthy competitor for the technology industry and a sparring partner. Right?

Jordi:

Somebody that you can bounce ideas off of and and have sort of this sort of somewhat charged but very meaningful debates on the most important topics of our time, like how much time you should spend scrolling.

John:

Yes. Yes. But it's kind of like getting in the gladiatorial pit with, like, a wild bear or tiger. Like Totally. It's gonna lead to a lot of glory, but you could get malt.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so you talk to her on the record. Could come out fine as we saw with this next piece that we're gonna cover, but you could get you could get destroyed, and your whole life could be, up in up in flames. And so there was a big controversy after she doxed the Libs of TikTok. The Daily Wire leased a Times Square billboard, which blared in all caps. Taylor Lorenz doxed Libs of TikTok.

John:

I wish I could get my my rivals to buy Times Square billboards about me. Man, what an impact. You know you got under someone's skin when they're buying billboards about you.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

It's fantastic. In Lorenz's view, it's not just the politically flammable stories that elicit such incendiary reactions, but the tenacity with which she reports them. I think you have to really nail them, she said. And when you really twist the knife in a good way, in an accountability story, people are going to freak out. Taylor Lorenz joined the Washington Post at a delicate moment for the newsroom.

John:

Like the Times, the Post was

Jordi:

working to formalize a policy surrounding its reporter's use of social media. The paper had been rocked by a discrimination lawsuit

John:

filed last July by reporter Felicia Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor who was suspended in January 2020 by former post editor, Marty Baron. The suspension came after Somnaz tweeted about rape allegations against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. Though the paper is now under the leadership of its first female executive editor, Sally Busby, the episode was still fresh in the minds of some staffers when Taylor Lorenz joined in March. Enter Taylor Lorenz into this powder keg situation. Here is somebody who is Where she thrives?

John:

Voice on Twitter in a way that no one else has been empowered to do. And so the feeling from the top brass is mutual. There's a lot of excitement in the room about working with her. Part of what it means in to practice journalism today is there are going to be staffers that have really large followings, and this is true. This is the modern era, and so you have to be online.

Jordi:

In many ways, in our corner of the Internet, Lorenz is gonna be bigger than any publication that she Yeah. Works with. Yeah. Absolutely. She actually genuinely has more reach

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Than The Post Yep. Within our section of the Internet.

John:

She is the one technology journalist who truly lives rent free in the minds of the tech elite Yep. In a very meaningful way. And that you can't put a price on that. It it it can't be quantified in, like, distribution numbers or or Yeah. Or circulation numbers.

John:

Though, Taylor Lorenz is now the poster child for being very online, growing up in old Greenwich, Connecticut, she remained fairly unplugged. In the late nineties, I felt like the Internet was for nerds, and I wanted to be cool, so I didn't really spend a lot of time online aside from AIM, she told me. In 1998, I just didn't get the hype at all. She declined to answer additional questions about her family life, upbringing, or even her exact age itself, the subject of wild speculation on the right. Yeah.

John:

People are obsessed with her age. It's very funny. On her Wikipedia page, it says that she was born between 1984 and 1988 or something like that.

Jordi:

That's that's that's that's her gift is being able to swing through. Is she Gen z one story? Is she millennial another? Is she a boomer another?

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

She really can sort of bend with whatever the subject that she's writing about and really feel as though it's coming from the source. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. But that bit, it just keeps on giving. Like, just just this week, it went viral again because, someone was talking about her age and she replied, like, look, I'm 50. And it's, like, obviously, she's not 50, but no one gets the joke. And so everyone's, like, she she's actually 50.

John:

And they're, like, you know, start dunking on that and, like,

Jordi:

it just She's got a real she's got a real sense of humor. Right?

John:

She's got a real sense of humor.

Jordi:

She knows how to get the people riled up.

John:

Exactly.

Jordi:

She does it intentionally, strategically. Yep. She did this. You remember when when she went out and said, you know, I need to have my, you know, apartment, she heats her apartment to, like, 80 degrees. Degrees.

Jordi:

Sort of

John:

like her

Jordi:

baseline temperature. And and that sparked a lot of speculation that maybe she was, you know, a lizard person or something like that and needed to be in sort of a warm environment because of that.

John:

The war on air conditioning, she's been waging it for years. But, yeah, I mean, what what a career. In 2017, Lorenz came face to face with the dangers of her new job when she was assaulted at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, getting punched in the face while delivering a livestream report. I peer pressured the Daily Beast into hiring me for little literally nothing. I took a 70% pay cut.

John:

I sold every belonging I had and moved in with a bunch of

Jordi:

rumors. Conviction.

John:

Heights. Conviction.

Jordi:

Conviction.

John:

Grinding. And, yeah. What what a crazy thing. I remember she was at that livestream. That was so crazy.

John:

What a crazy time. She was an instant hit of the Daily Beast. She was like a rocket ship. She was a pioneer in what was then a criminally undercover industry. Lorenz stayed at the Daily Beast for a few months before getting recruited away.

John:

Within 6 months, I had 4 job offers from all these other outlets. I took the Atlantic where I was there for a year and a half and then the New York Times was aggressively recruiting me. Yeah. I mean, this is what happens to star players. They get recruited.

John:

Yeah. And, now now she's fully in the free agency. She's writing. She's a, a fantastic sub stack. I I subscribe to her newsletter.

John:

She's always unearthing stories that I would not have found otherwise. She's not learning about, like, the mainstream tech news, but it's very

Jordi:

important if you're,

John:

if you're a tech if you're a tech person.

Jordi:

She's done this perfect creator dance, which is benefiting from these legacy media brands in order to establish herself while still sort of building up her own audience so that she can maintain this sort of, you know, this sort of, like, fuck you attitude of I don't need you, you need me. Right? Yep. Given that that she could, in theory, be completely independent at any point and and probably make just as much money doing that than she could at any, one of these publications.

John:

Yep. Yep. But it's obviously come with major setbacks. She's been doxxed multiple times. She's been swatted multiple times with police forces wrongly called to her home and that of her parents.

John:

She's philosophical about what her parents faced. She calls them generic suburban white people who can comfortably reason with law enforcement when 15 police show up at the door, but she worries about other reporters who are victims of such harassment. Think if they're in in a different neighborhood or of a different background or of a different race, those are the stakes other journalists are trying to cover. The abuse has been so constant. It's become almost routine.

John:

It's the same. Doxxed on Kiwi Farms and 4 chan, read a thread about your family and friends, and get swatted. You get swatted. They leak your phone number. I feel like I'm on the merry-go-round for the 20th time.

John:

I feel like there's there's gotta be some way to to harden her her security because, she's gotta keep posting, but, swatting people's just playing dirty, folks.

Jordi:

Don't do it.

John:

It's it it that that's not the point. The the whole thing is, like, you have to understand what's going on in the tech press versus the tech community is, like, it's it's WWE. It's wrestling. Like, what happens on the court is left Yeah. Is left in the ring, and and and, you know, you can't be the fan that thinks it's real.

John:

Yeah. That's just embarrassing.

Jordi:

But here's here's the thing. The the pressure on her and the scrutiny Yeah.

Jordi:

Has made

Jordi:

her a better journalist. Right? And she admits that she says she's keenly aware of any mistakes that she makes no matter how trivial will be trotted out in front of a national audience. Yep. I can't get a correction ever.

Jordi:

Like, I would be dead. I can't fuck up ever. Any tiny thing is gonna be blown out of proportion to the margin for error because of that attention is just very high. Yep. That's that mamba mentality, right, where she's she understands in the spotlight she's gonna perform.

Jordi:

Right? And it's pushing her to be a better journalist.

John:

Yep. And and this came back to, to to hurt her recently when she was at a, press briefing for Joe Biden. I believe she called him a war criminal, on her close friend's feed on Instagram. 1 of her close friends, turns out not that much of a close friend, leaked it. Screenshot it, leaked it.

John:

And there was massive blowback. But you know what? Free speech. I thought we were the the party of free speech. We're supposed to be supporting people saying unhinged things about our enemies.

Jordi:

That said so, but recently, she's sort of come around to feeling like deplatforming is actually wrong in many ways. She said on a recent podcast that, you know, while she historically was in favor of silencing the manosphere. So if you had male opinions, she wanted to generally sort of shut you up, deplatform you. What she's sort of found in her research is that that tends to have blowback that comes with it where if you end up in this game of whack a mole where you deplatform somebody, they pop up on another platform, and she's been very critical of the right leaning, platforms that have been in favor of free speech.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And spoken out very strongly against many of those platforms, but at the same time, recognizing that the there there are so many potential platforms to to post on today that deplatforming is is potentially,

John:

you know, very ineffective. Birth of Parler and Gab and Truth Social and, you know, all these different platforms.

Jordi:

I I think that the natural next move for her is potentially like a board level role at Truth Social. Because, like, where where does she really go from here? She's been at The Atlantic, The Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Information. She's been around, you know, she's been at every top newsroom Yep. In the country.

Jordi:

The own the natural next step is to join the board of something like Truth Social and help you know, Truth Social, while they have a fantastic valuation, they only did about a1000000 in revenue Yep. Last year. So if if Taylor went on there and said she was rolling out a private feed and subscription, she could probably 2, 3 x their revenue overnight.

John:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

And it it mean it goes back

John:

to the concept of, like, the horseshoe theory. Right? Like, she's been clocked as, like, left wing. But as we've seen with her calling Biden a war criminal, she's not riding with Biden. She's not in the Democratic establishment.

John:

She's further left that. She's very skeptical of the government because of how they handled COVID. A lot of people on the right are skeptical of the government because they handled co because of how they handled COVID. And so you could see her following around going to national Bolshevism or far right extremism, and and just kind of come into the other side at a certain point. We've seen this

Jordi:

a lot. I like to I I like it when she runs into the fire. Right? So with with her going to the information, it's it's literally saying, hey. All my, you know, all her top enemies are avid, you know, readers of the information.

Jordi:

These sort of texts

John:

lead mouth of the wolf.

Jordi:

She's going and running at them Yep. And, you know, screaming at them Yep. Chasing them around the Internet.

John:

But the next thing that goes into The Daily Wire.

Jordi:

The Daily Wire or or True Social. Right? Yep. Or True Social. Going into the fire, she's not afraid to do that.

Jordi:

But there's one her.

John:

There's one journalist who will not be working with her in the future, and that's Nate Silver. They got a little spat on x. Taylor wrote, hi, Nate. I don't disclose any personal details like my birth date, home address, family info, etcetera, because my family members are harassed and swatted at their homes. Thanks to reactionary people like you misrepresenting my work and inciting outrage.

John:

Why are you so obsessed with my age? It's a good point. Good point. Who cares if she's writing bangers? I don't care if it's a 13 year old in Czechoslovakia.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

I will retweet it. Yeah. But Nate replies and says, Taylor, normal people publish their date of birth. Mine is 1 1378. I know you're probably older than the image.

John:

You want to cultivate online, but you just own it. Not much you can really do to make yourself younger. And Nate had to delete it. He said deleting this because it's mean. I don't think highly of this person, but I also don't know this person.

Jordi:

I was a little unclear what he meant by deleting it by screenshotting it. Posting it. 5,000 likes. So I was a bit confused on that, but I I think it's important. So we don't we don't talk about this.

John:

This is a growth hack. We need to post some really incendiary stuff, then delete it, and then post it. I'll be like, I'm deleting I just so you know, I'm deleting, the this picture of my watch collection and my rare car collection because it's in it's gauche. It's in bad taste. Yeah.

John:

I I apologize, and please don't repost and like this.

Jordi:

Yeah. And I and I I think it's important to say, so we don't talk about politics or social issues on this podcast. Yes. I feel like I have to, you know Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Remind people of that. Yeah. But I do think it's important for us as a technology and a business podcast to stand up against this journalist on journalist violence.

John:

Exactly. Exactly.

Jordi:

Technology Technology Brothers, you know, we have our differences at times, but overall, we have this sort of shared common mission to advance the world, through enterprise SaaS and rockets and everything in between. Journalists have the same sort of desire to find and share the truth, and I don't wanna see Nate Silver and Taylor Lorenz fighting. Yeah. I wanna see them uniting. I wanna see them going over to True Social, going over to Blue Sky together Yep.

Jordi:

Being everywhere at once, posting more and, you know, constantly in pursuit of the truth and not letting personal differences or getting into arguments about birthdays. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this goes back to when when Elon bought ask x, Taylor was, banned for a little bit for some reason. It was a very dark time. I I want her on the platform.

John:

I want her in the ring. I want the surprise. Still she posts with comments off now. Yeah. She she's back on, but we need to get her her account fully back up and supported.

John:

We need all of her crew on to really create some tension on the timeline. This was, like, the beauty of Twitter was, like, if you were posting about capitalism or technology, could go either way. You could

Jordi:

get done. You could

John:

get dunked on.

Jordi:

Now when you get dunked on. When you go out

John:

and post Now there's no there's no stakes.

Jordi:

Capitalism good. You're good.

John:

Oh, yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Old old news.

Jordi:

Thumbs up.

John:

There's no stakes. And so stakes and drama, that's what makes for entertainment, and so we need more of that. So we need to support Taylor Lorenz on the

Jordi:

timeline. And and, honestly, if if Taylor was taking x seriously, I'm I I'm assuming she'd be pulling in at least 50, 60 k a month.

John:

I would hope so.

Jordi:

Just off of the the ad sharing Yeah. Revenue.

John:

I would hope so. So go and, go and subscribe to the information. Subscribe to her podcast power user pod on

Jordi:

AWS is a sponsor. Sponsor. We'd wanna just say, do we we like to do sponsor acknowledgement.

John:

She's still working with Bezos. That's great.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. I was worried that they had a rift after believing the post, but it's good to see that Bezos is still supporting her.

Jordi:

I think it's good to do sponsor acknowledgements. Thank you to AWS for sponsoring. Peller. I think it's an amazing way to get in front of, you know, the next generation of of engineers and entrepreneurs that are gonna be building on top of AWS.

John:

I agree. I agree. So let's go to the rise of the bro casters. This is the article that Taylor called me about, and I spoke to her on the record. She writes, about a year ago, Shawn Kelly, then 26, decided to launch yet another business.

John:

Previously, he'd fooled around running a small drop shipping company as as a Rutgers University undergrad. Later, he sold face masks and other personal protective equipment during the pandemic's early days. Clearly, very hustle, very entrepreneurial oriented guy. Neither enterprise had really gone anywhere. So after years of binging the Joe Rogan experience, he settled on his next venture, his own podcast.

John:

He built his show Digital Social Hour as in-depth conversations with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers, attracting guests like Brian Johnson, Tulsi Gabbard. He uploaded you to he uploaded episodes relentlessly, both audio and YouTube videos, and amassed a dedicated male following. In swift order, he shot to number 1 in Apple Podcasts self self improvement category. Congrats. Probably lots of Dom Perignon along the way.

John:

Yep. And he's accumulated 11,000,000 Instagram followers and more than 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube. He's leaned hard into video and employs up to 8 freelance video editors at a time, 6 for his longer stuff, and 2 for short social media friendly clips. What's interesting is that she then later clocks his revenue or his profit.

Jordi:

She she went and she said she talked to industry, experts about it. Why would she just not ask for a picture of his watch or car collection?

John:

That would be good.

Jordi:

A much easier way to clock his revenue.

John:

He won't comment on his annual revenue, but based on conversations with industry experts, it could plausibly be around a half $1,000,000. I feel like that's really low. Low. Super low. Low.

Jordi:

For Kelly, if that's what you're doing if that's what you're doing, talk to us.

Jordi:

Yeah. We'll we'll get

John:

you set up with some real real profit. You may maybe he's not doing enough ads.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But, I mean, 11,000,000 Instagram followers, 1,000,000 subscribers, like

Jordi:

You gotta be able to pull in a lot more than

John:

half of that. Rule of thumb, generally I mean, this isn't even for business content or long form, but the rule of thumb is usually a dollar per subscriber on YouTube is, like, reasonable reasonable monetization. So you look at MrBeast, over a 100,000,000 subscribers. His business does over a $100,000,000. You look at a lot of the finance channels that have a couple million views, a couple million subscribers, a couple million bucks in revenue.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And then, of course, there's cost below the line. But, he, Taylor is, opining on the end of an era. The era of journalistic podcasts like Serial and Slow Burn is fading away, and even the schlocky true crime and horror standbys like My Favorite Murder and Last Podcast on the left no longer hold as much cultural sway and brand power as they did a few years ago. Instead, the new podcast stars are young men like Kelly. They're part of the manosphere that's been talked about a lot in politics lately ever since Donald Trump made their shows key campaign stops.

Jordi:

Yes. And and Taylor's last podcast episode was with your your friend, a researcher Joshua Sidarella. Joshua, who is an expert on the manosphere. Yep. And it was a great episode where Josh Joshua basically mansplained the manosphere to Taylor and the audience.

Jordi:

So it was, very insightful for me, considering, you know, I've I've I've listened to some of these podcasts before, but I'd never heard the Manosphere described so perfectly.

John:

Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. It's all this question. There's been a big question in the media about, like, should should the Democrats build a a Democrat version of Joe Rogan? And there's a bunch of reasons why that may or may not work.

John:

They kind of if you look at the top technology or the top podcast, there are already plenty of left wing shows with huge reaches. The Harris campaign just didn't do them. Like Yeah. There's The Daily Show. There's the Ezra Klein Show, the NYT Daily.

John:

There's Last Podcast on the left, and, there's that one with those comedians called, I'm blanking on it, but it's it it it it's also really Smartless is really big. And then there's the one with the Obama writer, called, Pod Save America. So there's just, like, so many like, the views are clearly there. It's not like, you know, oh, there's a 100,000,000 Americans who just aren't listening to podcasts. They're just listening to different podcasts.

John:

They just weren't prioritized.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

So I kind of rejected the whole premise when I was talking to her. But there is an interesting question about why, why male podcasts have become so big, how this happened. My thesis for her was that a big part of it is that Apple has less algorithmic control over what people look at and listen to in the podcast player, so they are much less likely to deplatform people. They did deplatform InfoWars, but they never deplatformed the Daily Wire in the same way that YouTube can just adjust the algorithm to promote a little bit less because there, Kevin Roos did this whole deep dive on I think it was called Rabbit Hole. He did a whole podcast and series about, young men who go on YouTube and look for, you know, self improvement content, essentially.

John:

Yeah. And then they wind up in a conservative rabbit hole of content that gets more and more right wing as they go down it. And the recommendation algorithm was it wasn't tuned to deal with politics at all. It was completely neutral about it. It was, like, if you if you search for a video about a, you know, 911 turbo s, well, you're gonna you're gonna see a video about a more niche Porsche, and you're gonna see a an ST video and then a GT 3 RS and then some retro Porsche because it knows Porsche.

Jordi:

On cars and bids buying

John:

Exactly. Exactly. So so it's kind of like a funnel for anything.

Jordi:

And, of

John:

course, it worked the same way for conservative content and liberal content too.

Jordi:

Yeah. And she and and this this piece calls it out, but YouTube is I I do think it's starting to change, but it forever it because YouTube originated with a lot of gaming content Yeah. That was, like, over I think it was, like, over 50% of all content uploaded to YouTube for a while. I mean, it may still be that way, was just gaming content.

John:

There's a lot of men.

Jordi:

Attracted a lot of men. And then, that has still snowballed where I see this have, you know, running a a YouTube ad network. You know, I

Jordi:

don't run it. I haven't run it in years, but starting one in college, it was

Jordi:

always it used to be run it. I haven't run it in years, but starting one in college, it was always it used to be a real challenge

Jordi:

to, help a female oriented consumer brand actually

Jordi:

scale up on YouTube because there just wasn't that many channels. Yep. That's changed a lot Yep. As YouTube has become but I think I think one of the the I don't think this is, like, specifically called out, but some something that people miss with YouTube is there is, it has complete so much of YouTube content today is watched on TVs. Yep.

Jordi:

Right? And so what that means is that the influence that TV used to hold Mhmm. Is now held by the the the male podcast experts. Right? The Huberman's, Alex Yep.

Jordi:

Friedman's, etcetera. Have deals where

John:

they can still post the full show on YouTube. This is the thing with the the Harris going on call her daddy and Trump going on Rogan. Rogan is now a couple years out from his Spotify deal. He's allowed to post the full episode on YouTube as well as on Spotify. Yeah.

John:

Call Her Daddy is still in that tweener phase where they have to, gate it. And so what went out on YouTube from Call Her Daddy was just a clip. It wasn't the full thing, and it was a lot shorter. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into the dynamics there. They had a good quote from Sameer Chowdhury.

John:

Do you know this guy? Most of the colonists show.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

It's a great it's a great show. They break down, the they break down everything in the YouTube world, and they really break down, like, the business of YouTube. Yeah. Really great interviews with Mr. Beast and a lot of other folks.

John:

Samir says, YouTube is a largely male audience and male loneliness is a factor. You have a lot of young men looking for community and friendship, and they've been able to find that through podcasting.

Jordi:

Yeah. We've talked about the cure cure to male loneliness being just calling up your ramp, you know, sales rep. Yeah.

John:

Your SDR.

Jordi:

Your SDR over at ramp. They'll talk to you for hours.

John:

Or going on.

Jordi:

Yeah. Going on. Taking expert network calls. Exactly. But I resonate with this when I discovered podcasts while I was a young man.

Jordi:

I was 18. And it felt like having a mentor in my pocket. Yep. Where I could listen to hundreds of hours of people that had gone and done the things that I wanted to do. And I learned the language of the industries that I was interested.

Jordi:

I learned different health practices that, you know, many of which I different health practices that, you know, many of which I still do today. So it podcasts have served as basically an older brother to me that I didn't have in terms of teaching me about the world, and it's influenced many of my beliefs.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Right? Yeah. My question here is, he says, YouTube is a largely male audience. And so I wonder how what the actual gender breakdown is. Is it 6040?

John:

Is it 7030? And then and then if you zoom out

Jordi:

Can you look that up?

John:

And then if you zoom out, I wonder if if is it that women are just listening to less content or consuming less content, or are they on is Instagram more female? Is TikTok more female? Or are are are is YouTube and podcasting really just skews male? Like like, are AirPods sold more to men than women? Like, I wonder about that or just, like, headphones, like, listening to things, the thing that is upstream of the individual platform.

John:

Because I I would believe that there are some platforms that lean male, some platforms that lean female, but I would be very surprised if we learned that just content consumption is a male phenomenon.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's interesting. So as of now, this site is reporting that only 54% of YouTube users, 18 and above are male.

John:

That sounds right to me. That sounds right to me because but but it is in different niches, obviously. If you look at, like, the business niche or the manosphere, obviously, that's gonna skew male. But there are gonna be plenty of sub niches that skew female. 5050.

John:

Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so and so I I I kind of I kind of disagree with that characterization of YouTube,

Jordi:

and I don't think the data

John:

backs that up. But it is but it is interesting that that just the the accessible product on on social media, in on new media, was accessible to the conservatives this time around where next year or or in in conservatives this time around where next year or or in in 2024, I guess, 2028, we could be looking at, oh, it's the TikTok election or the Instagram reels election, and the Democrats are crushing because they have much more viral potential on there. And it's a little bit of a more like, for JD, he seems to do really well in a 3 hour show, same with Trump. But maybe the Democrats, whoever they put up next, whether it's Buttigieg or AOC, they'll do well better on a streaming platform, or they'll do better on a short form platform. And so I'm I'm I'm wondering if this if this holds forever or if this will be, if this will be, you know, disrupted.

John:

And so let's go to my quote in here. The other commonality, many of these podcasters eventually fill the poll towards political coverage, which is something I've talked about, which has been an an even wider appeal than topics like artificial intelligence and crypto. John Coogan, an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, and host of the podcast Technology Brothers, said he experienced this pressure firsthand when trying to grow his YouTube channel, which is now has nearly a half a 1000000 subscribers. You want your business to grow. You have employees, he said.

John:

But as you grow, you need the numbers to go up. The algorithm is addictive. You realize that there are only a 100000 people interested in tech or AI. At a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural.

John:

We've seen this with, all in going political and everyone getting really up in a tizzy about that, but it makes sense. They're growing their business then and what they're doing is impactful to the tech community. I was just talking to somebody at the gym

Jordi:

about this. Take take away their their desire to go political. They enjoy the culture war.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Right? Like, those guys like duking it out on the timeline with the Taylor Lorenzes of the world. Yeah. And they just enjoy it. It's like a sport to them.

John:

And it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger. Like, when J. Cal's posting, like, we're the number one podcast, he's not even talking about, like, the number one podcast in technology anymore. Yeah. Like, he will have episodes.

John:

Like, the all in show will have episodes. They're, like, the number 1 podcast in all the categories.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And it's because it appeals to everyone. Yeah. If they were just sticking to deep dives on, oh, what AI agent is the best or what startup got funded? Like, they're not gonna they're not gonna go broad. And and they wanna go bigger and bigger and bigger, and this is very natural, and it creates an opening for new shows to come in.

John:

This is what happened with Lex Fridman. He used to be the artificial intelligence podcast. It was all AI researchers, then eventually broadened out, started having political people on, started having, you know, Jocko Willink on and Rogan and all sorts of different people on health stuff. And that created the opportunity for and now DoorDash is doing Tony Blair, and eventually, DoorDash will broaden out to all sorts of different topics that he's interested in. He won't just be the AI researcher show, and then there'll be a new DoorDash, and that's great.

John:

And it's this virtuous cycle that should not be it it shouldn't be criticized. It's just it's a positive thing.

Jordi:

The only thing I wanna see out of Taylor is if she wants to really fight back against the manosphere, she's gotta get bigger. She's gotta monetize more. I want her you know, there's this talk within the tech world of what's gonna be the first $1,000,000,000 one person company

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Could easily be Taylor Lorenz. The Taylor Lorenz Media Super Corp Inc. Yep. That could be the world's first. Yeah.

Jordi:

And that would be I would love to see her as a bean air. I'd love to see her gen you know, potentially gunning for that first, you know, podcast to IPO. Right?

Jordi:

She's gonna

John:

have to go back. Outcomer for that.

Jordi:

Yeah. Total SPAC candidate if she would really start to focus on monetization. So my biggest criticism of Taylor is focus on monetization if you really wanna

Jordi:

yeah.

Jordi:

If you wanna understand the creator economy more more promoted posts, I like that she's working with AWS and and encouraging young technologists to build on AWS through that partnership, but ramp it up. Right?

John:

Yep. Ramp it

Jordi:

up. Yep. I

John:

like it.

Jordi:

More ads and, we're you know, I feel like we're lucky to have her as a as a sparring partner. You know, the pressure makes her a better journalist. Yep. And,

John:

and so if you're listening to this, you're a founder, you're in technology, give it on the record interview to Taylor. Most of the time, it'll come out great like this, but every once in a while, you'll slip up, admit that you read one unqualified reservations post, and she'll destroy your entire life. But that's the way it goes, folks.

Jordi:

A game.

John:

That's the game.

Jordi:

And it's a good game.

John:

Yeah. So she's actually retooling her podcast right now. We saw this. She's she's shifting from a interview show, to a dual host, conversational show. Yeah.

John:

And so, hopefully, that leads to breakout success. I'm whenever I see somebody with an interview show, I'm always, you know, cautiously optimistic that they'll play the game correctly. Like like, if she wants to be this technology political show, like, she should have gotten Kamala Harris on the show. Yeah. And it's, like, what was her plan to get to that size, to that that scale?

John:

And you can't I mean, I love Josh, but, he is very much a micro Internet celebrity. He's small, and so he's not gonna bring a huge audience

Jordi:

to that. And it's also a question of of Taylor Lorenz is such an alpha. Could she and and Kamala, who's also an alpha, even exist in the same room together with the alpha?

John:

Figure out a way. I mean, Rogan Rogan figured it out with Trump. Yeah. Like,

Jordi:

they they they got in the

John:

room with creating some great content together. And so I I think that's that's the big problem with with the the the Democrat version of Rogan is that no one is really grinding out, like, okay. How do I make sure that I have to be the stop? It almost felt like Collier Gabbie was, like, locked into it and was like, okay. I guess we'll do this, but this wasn't our plan.

John:

Whereas if you're really trying to build the Rogan of the left, like, you gotta be getting all these people on. Yep. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks for listening to that deep dive. These people are jumping.

John:

Put her in the truth zone because it was a truthful article.

Jordi:

She

John:

The information. Everyone who's calling it the misinformation is misinformed. It's not the misinformation. Stop calling it the misinformation. It's the information.

John:

It's not the misinformation.

Jordi:

San Francisco information.

John:

It's the San Francisco information, so go easy on them. They're great. And they just they just picked up an all time player, so we love them. Hey. Yeah.

John:

Oh, before? Before, yeah, we

Jordi:

gotta do We have a fantastic Oh, this is great. Post by Tyler. He

John:

post by Tyler.

Jordi:

He says that inspired by Friday's episode of Technology Brothers, I created a marketplace for sales reps to rent dotedu email addresses from female college students to increase their response rate to cold emails. If you're a sales rep or sales leader looking to crush your q four goals, try leveraging a dotedu email today. Check it out at edumart.ioor@theedumart. And he's created this fantastic marketplace

John:

where he can go on.

Jordi:

If you are selling enterprise SaaS, go on there, get a dotedu, email address from a, you know, female college student.

John:

If you're in college, go on there and

Jordi:

and get some positive income. Rent out your e d

John:

u address.

Jordi:

Probably massively against the terms, but so is Airbnb in many ways. Yeah. Early days.

John:

Move fast and break things. This is all inspired by more. Inspired by

Jordi:

Morgan Barrett, who said, with a girl's name and a dot e d u email address, I have almost a 100% response rate to cold emails. True banger here, 1 and a half 1000000 views, almost 4,000 likes oh, sorry. 40,000 likes. Almost 4,000 bookmarks, and people really, resonated with this.

John:

And this is why we got a call out Tyler because 40,000 people like this. Only one guy actually went and built it. And so the next time you see some crazy banger and you think, oh, somebody already built it. There's probably 10 there's probably 10 y c companies that are doing this already. They aren't.

John:

Just go and build it and send it to us.

Jordi:

Oregon covered it on 19th. We talked about it, at the end of last week.

John:

Fantastic execution.

Jordi:

Built it over the weekend and shipped it this morning.

John:

Does he deserve brother of the week?

Jordi:

I think this is I think this has to be the brother of

Jordi:

the week.

John:

This is brother of the week.

Jordi:

This is brother of the week. Congratulations to Tyler. Congratulations, Tyler.

John:

You are the technology brother of the week. This is exactly what we look for in the technology brothers, building

Jordi:

Shipping.

John:

Shipping, shitposting.

Jordi:

Even running after controversy, there's gonna be a lot people

John:

on the call list

Jordi:

that are against this. There's gonna be a lot of people in general that say this is, you know, misleading or or whatever. But as long as you're selling a product that people need and want, I I think that it's fair game. Yep. You know, and, And

John:

he's good at promoting it. He got

Jordi:

us talking about it. And it'll be good for the it'll be good for the shareholders too.

John:

Business Insider. You gotta get them to write about it. Call up Taylor Lorenz. Tell her what you're doing. Maybe she hates it.

John:

Maybe she writes a hit piece. It's gonna be good for you.

Jordi:

Thank you

Jordi:

to Tyler.

John:

Thank you to Tyler. Congratulations on your brother of the week. Andrew D'Souza says the startup industrial complex created by Paul Graham and y Combinator is rotting the creativity and ambition of a generation of founders with a paint by numbers approach to entrepreneurship. Founders, go off script, have an original idea, stop building for a niche, build for humanity. And this is so funny because I saw someone subtweeting this, and it was just like someone complaining about YC.

John:

And then it was just Paul Paul Graham, Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe. Like Zapier. Zapier.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's a good rebuttal.

John:

It's like, well, yeah, of course, we're not focused on the off script companies in this batch. The ones that people are focused on right now are the AI wrappers that are, like, running the right playbook.

Jordi:

Yeah. But Coinbase was contrarian.

Jordi:

Wasn't it?

Jordi:

You could get a Bitcoin for just,

John:

like summer 12.

Jordi:

You got

Jordi:

you when you were in the batch, you could get a Bitcoin just for signing up.

John:

Yes. One Bitcoin was the sign up reward for Coinbase. And then for years, no, everyone was like, oh, yeah. Coinbase, like that weird company. Like, oh, okay.

John:

I guess they raised some money. Like, they were slow to raise money. It took them a while. There were much hotter companies coming out of YC. And also, they were they were not flagged as, like, a top startup.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. And I I would say, the YC framework and basically religion around company building that they've created objectively for most entrepreneurs is like a fantastic set of guardrails. Just like run it, you know, build, have the best possible chances of building a business. When I look back at the companies that I've built, you know, if I if I'm taking sort of a rearview look, I'm like, I wish I was sort of following more of y c's dogma around certain things.

Jordi:

And the other thing is, yes, y c is a great place to go if you're if you don't have some super inspiring idea or vision and you just wanna build some software Yep. And have, like, a good framework to do that.

John:

Maybe join another

Jordi:

But you can still they're still happy to take these weird outlier ideas. Ideas. There's just not gonna be

John:

a nicotine pouch. They funded a nicotine pouch company in 2018.

Jordi:

And they're not gonna

John:

ZYN didn't even exist. Yeah.

Jordi:

And you're not gonna have a 100 visionary companies in every batch.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

That's okay because there's gonna be some You only need to do visionary, you know, plays that end up pivoting into

John:

Also, like like, there is a massive piece dividend of this startup industrial complex. Like, you look at the ramp guys. They took their first company through YC, Paribus, wound up selling it, and then they wound up doing an even bigger company ramp after. And when I think of their creativity and ambition, like, it's not rot. It's not rotten.

John:

Not not by any stretch of the imagination. And and them setting them up with the YC framework to build, execute, sell that business, like, it made them who they are today. And so, you know, it's like there there are so many ways to be successful and we're, you know, very thankful to to YC. So a big wag of the finger to Andrew D'Souza. We disagree, but let us know what you think in the comments.

John:

Christina Farhat says, your honor, it was my AI agent. And Veronica says, this will be a real argument. Real. Yeah. Where does the

Jordi:

liability fall? We're already seeing this a

John:

little bit with, with If you go on agent dot ai and you the professional network for AI agents Yep.

Jordi:

And you, you know, hire some digital employee that just goes absolutely rogue.

John:

Well, this is already happening with, those those customer support agents where you can basically get the customer support agent to, like, give you a full refund or something for if you, like, game it out properly.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. And then the company has something, oh, that was not our policy. Like, it hallucinated.

Jordi:

Like Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Who who's responsible for that? The LLM, the company that created the wrap

Jordi:

up with the game. On that side. Yeah. The customer They're smart enough to convince your

John:

Yeah. But what happens when it's a $100,000,000 deal

Jordi:

Yeah. Or

John:

something that's going to court and Yeah. Someone is gonna say it's my AI agent, and so that liability should fall not on the company, but on the the the the company that made the AI agent or the LLM. It's gonna be a mess. Yeah. But fortunately, full of The lawyers the lawyers will

Jordi:

win in the end. They were using

John:

AI agents and

Jordi:

To to fight the cases.

John:

Yeah. We hallucinated. We plead guilty.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

We didn't mean to.

Jordi:

No. There's there's gonna be value in being a human at the end that says, like, you know, just taking responsibility for the

John:

Yeah. I mean, human in

Jordi:

the loop for

John:

a very long time, obviously, because of the responsibility.

Jordi:

Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post, from our friends over at Fiorentino label. Fiorentino label, bespoke suiting designed in America and handcrafted in Italy. So Fiorentino label, is run by John Fiorentino. His family made his money, made their money in hospitality.

Jordi:

John has been running Furrentino label fantastic suits and tuxedos. And, there's many heads of states and, you know, very, the tech elite that wear these suits. We can't, you know, discuss specifics because it's very private. But, anyways, fantastic suits. I wore 1 at Heretic Con.

Jordi:

I got a lot of compliments on it. Yep. And, we've had a number of our listeners actually go to Ferrante even a label after hearing about them here on the show and get suited up. So, we ask everybody, anybody that's recording a podcast.

John:

Yep. Especially if you're a capital allocator.

Jordi:

If you're a capital allocator, would it kill you to put on a suit? Yep. Answer is usually no, so you should put one on. You are a capital allocator or an executive, not an HVAC repairman. So dress like it.

Jordi:

Dress accordingly.

John:

Alexa z says, wow. I'm definitely bullish on this app at get hype get get hype h q. And in the settings slash account, it says, call the founder.

Jordi:

I think this is great.

Jordi:

I think

John:

this is amazing.

Jordi:

Yeah. I think I think this is actually, like, the kind of thing that YC basically recommends,

John:

which is just make yeah.

Jordi:

Just make yourself extremely available to users.

John:

And once your phone is breaking, then get the second line of defense. But don't be like, oh, I'm starting this brand new company. We don't have product market fit. We have 3 customers, and I need some sort of, like, you know, like, a whole guest here. You know?

John:

And so a bunch of people and a bunch of stuff. It's like, no. Just let people help you. Some of the greatest, tech support I get from early stage companies always from founders.

Jordi:

Yeah. And the best the best founder mode, g o's, they see somebody post on x, like, hey. I'm having this issue,

John:

and then they're gonna right there. Boom.

Jordi:

Yep. Stripe's, yeah, still still does this.

John:

Yeah. It's great.

Jordi:

Let's

John:

go to Guillermo Roche over at Vercel. He says the American dream for real, and it's McDonald's is hiring a web developer to use Next. Js.

Jordi:

So I think, historically, this would have been a great opportunity for crypto investors after the bull cycle ends. You know, go, you know, maybe you're not going to just put the fries in the bag. You could get a, you know, next year development role.

John:

This is such a banger. 12 ks.

Jordi:

But this is. Yeah. This is a fantastic job. I can't. What's more American than working for the Golden Arches?

John:

Yeah. It's remote, and it pays a 130 to a 180 k. Not gonna be a not gonna be a angel investor with that salary, but, you know, get this job, ask for a raise.

Jordi:

Hey. With your bonus, you might be able to get up into that 200 k range and get accredited and see who goes super long on all your absolute boys.

John:

Exactly. Employees can work remotely. So yeah. And McDonald's is back. It's having a moment.

John:

It's very popular. So, you know, go work at McDonald's if you are a Next. Js developer. Josh Wolf says, the new Lux quarterly letter to LPs. Our theme, tech venture global markets told in 4 parables of 4 brothers.

John:

I like this. 1, Prometheus, 2, Menoetius, 3, Prometheus, and 4, Atlas. And they have these, like, gigachad, cartoons of these bros.

Jordi:

I like somebody else, like, quote, tweeted this or just tweeted. Yeah. And they were like, what? Every time the Luxe, they put out their quarterly letter, I just put it into Claude and say, like, rewrite this in a way that I can understand. And then it just pops it out.

John:

Just take out the parables and

Jordi:

No.

John:

But I The actual this is this

Jordi:

is one of those, like the fact that they're taking this information. Like, think about how much, like, great how many great takes were locked up in, like, LP updates for the last, like, literally decades. Yep. And now this is you know, we're very against building in public on this podcast.

John:

Their alpha, though?

Jordi:

I

Jordi:

think they're leaking last quarter's alpha.

John:

Yeah. I guess it's, it's marketing at the end of the day. But I I do like that that there's a there's a twist here in the writing language to use these parables. I think that that's

Jordi:

that's just makes it way more interesting.

John:

It's just more interesting, more stimulating than I mean, it's very anti Paul Graham who wants to just write plainly directly. But I think there's something about creating a little bit of a barrier to get into the the the the LP letter and enjoy it. And then you're also learning something about Atlas or Prometheus. And maybe you don't know that much about them, so you're also getting educated. Maybe you wind up pulling up the Wiki, reading a book, learning a little bit more.

John:

It's a good No. And I and I

Jordi:

any anytime I'm talking with a friend with a fund who's saying like, oh, I know I need to do content, but I don't know what to do. It's like find your brand of content for Josh. It

Jordi:

is it

Jordi:

is, hey, I'm going to write this sort of esoteric, broad ideas about markets and technology and, like, put it out there. There's a lot of big ideas, and it's up to you to kinda

John:

start with your screenshot essays. Screenshot essays. Start as, like, Slack conversations or something like that.

Jordi:

Andreesen, the big big idea that they're branding something that's already happening and just, like, owning

John:

great at coinages. Yeah. Coogan's Law.

Jordi:

Yeah. And Founders Fund is shitposting.

John:

Viral viral videos and vibe reels, I guess, and shitposting. And apparently breaking, stories about Polymarket and and their competitors. Bennett Siegel says flavor of the month, technical teams raising seed capital to buy business and transform it with AI. Sounds like a nightmare scenario for the founders, the company being bought, and the VCs funding it.

Jordi:

Yeah. So this is, you know, referencing all the new teams that have come out and doing these, like, AI oriented roll ups saying, hey. I'm gonna buy a bunch of accounting firms and automate everything. Yep. And it's hard enough to just buy a business and make it grow.

Jordi:

Yep. It's comparably, if you're trying to buy a business, make it grow and completely change how the service is delivered and not lose all of your customers and alienate, like, the existing teams and clients and and everything like that. Like, it just sounds like one of those things. Like, I think people when they think about, what attracts Silicon Valley got very obsessed with roll ups and just general m and a because they're like, wait, I could go work at Meta and, like, you know, have to work 10 years to eventually get to the point where I'm making $1,000,000 a year. I could just buy a business that does $1,000,000 of EBITDA and, like, you know, use some conservative amount of leverage and, you know, eventually, I just own this great asset.

Jordi:

But everything is just much, much, much harder than it than it seems. And roll ups are obviously that. It's like not only are you competing with other groups that are participating in roll ups so that the price of assets end up going up and spiking and being very competitive. You're competing against other owner operators that are just coming onto the scene and they're like, I don't need it.

John:

Yeah. We saw that with Brazil.

Jordi:

Yeah. I don't need

John:

to roll up all the Amazon brands.

Jordi:

Yeah. And they're poorly. In their situation, they're beholden to the to the platform. And as Amazon fees went up, they just didn't really have a business anymore. But, but yeah.

John:

What about examples where buying a business at seed stage made sense? I know didn't Warby Parker buy no. It was Harry's. They bought a razor factory. I don't know if that was fantastic, but, it was certainly differentiated at the time.

John:

I know some there's been some companies that have bought banking licenses Yeah. Where it's been some sort of asset that that they needed and they couldn't get any other way.

Jordi:

Yeah. The Plaid founder did that.

John:

But it's rare to go and buy an existing business and transform it because usually you could just start from scratch greenfield. Yep. Interesting.

Jordi:

But, yeah, there's a bunch of people attacking the whole services economy, which is 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars saying like, hey, if we can go just provide the service of AI, we can turn this from like a relatively low margin services business to a high margin software business. And I just think it's going to be much harder. There's a company I invested in Nick Abhazid, who is at, main Product Hunt Main Street and, then Ramp. He's now building Rivet, which is like a ground up attempt to, leverage basically AI for accounting.

John:

Is he buying CPA firms?

Jordi:

He's taking the opposite approach. He's just building from scratch. He's saying, like, you know, there's I don't know what you're buying if if potentially all the customers leave in the 1st year.

John:

Yeah. Be tricky. I don't know. Not easy. There usually needs to be some sort of I think there there was another generation of companies.

John:

Will Menitis is really obsessed with this. The, the the there were companies that would buy, like, dental, practices and then flip the capex to opex by essentially, like, renting the medical equipment to the and that was, like, really, really, alluring to, like, the CFOs of these, of these, like, you know, hospital networks or something because they don't have this big capex expense anymore. And I think they grew pretty quickly, but then I don't think it really panned out in the way that people hoped. Yeah. There'd be dragons for sure.

John:

Yeah. Dangerous. Let's go to Connor McDonald. He's been on the show before. Here's my take on AppLovin, and he stars out l o so that they can't search for it.

John:

So reaching an older audience with disposable income with high quality ad space for the very first time is often good. That's not rocket science and worth trying, especially with ad credit. But long term, sustainable results are still very much TBD. What do you think about this? Have you used Applovin?

Jordi:

So Applovin is an ad network that's focused on mobile games. Yep. And so they're audience big. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

Right. Tons of, you know, very scaled ad network. And any time you're a consumer brand that you're able to get in front of a totally new audience, you can usually drive some pretty interesting results. 1, because CPMs just are going to be a lot less than meta because meta is like the premier place to advertise, right? You can be the most hyper targeted and so CPMs are just higher.

Jordi:

But but yeah, there's been a lot of talk about AppLovin. I think AppLovin, like it was able to create this mania within like the X like, marketing community of saying, hey. If you're spending, like, 20 k a day on meta, we'll bring you over to AppLovin. Yeah. And people have been seeing some great results.

Jordi:

But, yeah, I I was able to get, you know, just by being friends with with Connor and doing some work with with Ridge and Sean in the past, I was able to get a front row seat into, like, viewing of, like, how they test into new ad networks. And they've always meta has always been the backbone of their business, and they've they've focused on meta excellency. I think it what Connor's alluding to is it's a trap to think, oh, I'm just gonna find this new ad network and, like, suddenly my business is gonna be fantastic. Temporary. It's like, no.

Jordi:

If you're not making meta work well, you're not AppLovin is not just gonna, like, solve all your issues.

John:

Like, it's

Jordi:

a it's a marketing, like, excellence. It's a skill issue, basically. So you're not just gonna, like, suddenly transform your business by going over to a new network.

John:

That makes sense. Let's go to the p god. He says, anyone have a $105,000,000 for me to borrow? And he screenshots the buyout LBO opportunity for the Arapahoe Basin ski area. Last year.

John:

A subsidiary of Dream Unlimited was acquired by Alterra Mountain via its financial sponsors, Triton Funds and KSL Capital Partners through an estimated 106 $105,000,000 LBO on November 19, 2024. So this is not available. He's, like, joking clearly because the deal already happened. But I do know a a Benair who bought a a a a mountain, like a ski resort. And, I think he enjoys that.

Jordi:

The summit series? No. No. No. That was different.

Jordi:

They also bought it.

John:

But, yeah,

Jordi:

I just like to encourage more listeners to just go buy ski resorts. Yep. You know, all of the great mountains for the most part have been getting acquired by these big Yep. Conglomerates. Yep.

Jordi:

And I'd like to see more independently operated ski resorts. Yep. We're working on an event with with Bryce over at Indy to do a Technology Brothers, gathering Yep. In Park City.

John:

Stay tuned for that.

Jordi:

Stay tuned for that. But, but, yeah, just if if you're thinking about it, the answer is yes. Just go buy a ski resort. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. It is tricky. It depends on the capex that's that's already gone into the ski resort. Like, the one that I know, doesn't actually have chair lifts, but it it's so it's for, like, a more prestigious type of skier. They do cat skiing.

John:

Are you familiar with this?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. It was like heli skiing. Cat skiing, you ride on a big, like, caterpillar

Jordi:

On a cat.

John:

Truck, basically, on a cat. You bring all your ski gear. They just drive you up to the top of the mountain, and then you ski down in completely fresh powder, which is pure powder.

Jordi:

It's amazing.

John:

And for the real real ski heads, powder is where it's at.

Jordi:

My, my great grandfather ran the gondola at Mammoth for, like, 40 years. Oh, yeah. Basically, like, post World War 2.

John:

He was like, happened

Jordi:

to be, like, best friends with with, Dave McCoy, the founder.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

And because of that, my uncle used to massively take advantage of the relationship to the mountain. So he would just go off off terrain

Jordi:

Oh, yeah.

John:

Of course.

Jordi:

And, like, duck under the rope. And then he'd have this is, like, pre cell phone, but he'd be, like, radioing, like, hey. Like, I ended up going over the other side.

Jordi:

Could you

Jordi:

send a cat? And they had some crazy

John:

That's hilarious.

Jordi:

Crazy stories. But it's the fact that, like, anybody who is building these ski resorts in the sixties

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Is so insane. Thinking about the machinery and the amount of risk and, like, the, like, amount of human life that's at risk on a mountain at any any any given point if the machinery malfunctions or you're not smart about avalanche control. Yep. Like, it's it's one of the craziest environments to build a business. We could probably do a whole deep

Jordi:

dive on.

John:

Some of the some of the ski resorts have howitzers where for avalanche control, there's a few versions. 1 is just you have the ski patrol go up there with sticks of dynamite, and they just throw the dynamite. Yeah. It just shocks all of the avalanche potential down, and it just creates an avalanche. But then, at some ski resorts, they have they have howitzers where they just literally fire a cannon into the mountain, and it just causes all

Jordi:

that avalanche

John:

to come down.

Jordi:

I love nothing like being at a at a at a at a

John:

ski resort. You have to have boys firing these firing No.

Jordi:

And you're in that. You're in the hot tub after skiing after a long day, and you get to hear the cannon going off, you know, showing that, you know, there's gonna the next day is gonna be it's like signaling that the next day is gonna be fantastic.

John:

Yeah. Bluebird. Do we have a promoted post?

Jordi:

We certainly do. We always do. This one is from Aman Resorts. The architecture of Amonkila is a celebration of Bali's natural beauty cascading down the hillside to the sea. Stone buildings, walkways, and pools are woven among the palms, framing views of the ocean and the resplendent greenery.

Jordi:

So this this this property is fantastic. I haven't been yet. I've been to Bali a couple of times on surf trips, but was before my Amman arc. I want to go here. Amman is kind of where, sorry, Bali is where Aman really got started.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

You know, their first property, I don't even believe they they were able to get a, commercial loan to do it. They had to just, like, personally acquire this property, turned into the, you know, what what is today, the greatest, hotel brand in the world, in my opinion, at this specific moment in time, if you're, you know, evaluating it for reach and quality of experience. So go check out the Aman Quila.

John:

I highly recommend booking a trip to Aman and, book it far in the future. Book it, get online, look a year out, book something that you can look forward to for a full year. So then you're just kind of planning and thinking, oh, this is almost gonna I'm almost gonna forget about this. Yeah. And then it's just gonna sneak up on me.

Jordi:

And then, and then I'm not even gonna

John:

think about the expense because I paid for it a year ago. Exactly. That's the way to do it.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Plan plan next

Jordi:

to where headspace right now. Yeah. In about a month, I'll be at an amount property. Yep.

John:

But you got to book the next one. So you

Jordi:

have to look forward to it. Always.

John:

Exactly. So you're you're never like, oh, wow. Like, when am I gonna get around to getting back there? No. It's like you already got booked.

John:

Exactly. You always wanna have 1 or 2 bookings, like just rolling.

Jordi:

Perpetual.

John:

Let's go to Jim's sail bike right. He quote tweets us and says, Technology Brothers is the best personification of the vibe shift. Their ex their aesthetic and approach to discussion are the antithesis of Brooks' bourgeois bohemian archetype that so accurately described elite culture for the past 20 or so years. Very insightful. Very insightful post.

John:

That is exactly what we were going for with this, and I do think we want to push back against the bourgeois bohemian trend that's been really popular in tech, unfortunately, and celebrate the capitalist bourgeoisie. Yep. The not the limousine liberals and not the champagne socialists, but the capitalists who enjoy drinking champagne in the back of a limousine.

Jordi:

Yep. And sparring with Taylor Lorenz.

John:

Exactly. And so thanks for writing in, Jim. I'm glad you you really hit the nail on the head with this. And, good to have you first time on the show, but I'm sure you'll be back soon.

Jordi:

Absolutely. Thank you, Jim.

John:

Thank you. Let's go to dirt man. Dirt man says, dirt man b sack says, Elon should buy MSNBC and just have tech bros pod reading bangers from the timeline 247 streaming into boomers living rooms across the country. We gotta put the CNBC banner on this one.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Elon says the most entertaining outcome, especially if ironic, is the most likely, and everyone's joking about Elon buying MSNBC. And I think we could crush on MSNBC.

Jordi:

I I agree. And and, honestly, we should stop right there because there's stuff in the works Yep. That we, you know, can't necessarily Yep. Talk about.

John:

But I think we have the production value. We have the banter. We have the content. Give us a slot, Elon. Pick it up.

John:

I love sparring

Jordi:

with Boomers. Normally, I spar with Boomers in my HOA board meetings, but I I'd like to do it on the airways. Right?

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

I'd like it to be more like a megaphone approach.

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Like, sort of they can't talk back, but you're just sort

John:

of I mean, if Twitter is real life, imagine how much more it will be real life if we're broadcasting it into the MSNBC. Yeah. And, I mean, talk about making your family proud. All of your distant relatives will be, oh, I saw you on MSNBC. I love your new show.

Jordi:

And think about what we could do for the broader economy if we were able to encourage all the boomers to lever up. True. Go long risk assets. Yeah. A lot of them at this point are are sort of they talk down to Gen z and the millennials saying, you're you're too risk on.

Jordi:

Yeah. And, you know, you're all you care about is is, you know, the next crypto coin.

John:

Yeah. Also, you watch you watch MSNBC, and they do a little segment, and then they take an ad break. The ads aren't integrated properly, and there aren't nearly as many of them. And on that note, let's go to a promoted post.

Jordi:

Promoted post from Tiffany and Co. Celebrate meaningful beginnings this holiday with tea by Tiffany, an homage to an iconic motif from 1975. These designs feature handset paved diamonds for extraordinary shine. Discover more at tiffany.com/gifts /shop/holiday. Hashtag Tiffany and Co, hashtag a Tiffany holiday.

Jordi:

Anyways, this looks like an absolute absolutely fantastic Gift. Gift. Fantastic. And,

John:

highly recommend everyone in the audience.

Jordi:

Our audience is very.

John:

Put your AirPods in. Go to Tiffany right now.

Jordi:

Now our audience is very oriented around crushing their q four revenue goals. But, Christmas is, as of today, a month away. Yep. Get those gifts in now. Go to your local Tiffany's and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

John:

Thank you. Let's go to Beth Jesus. He says real and posts a a, a photo of his phone and Vittorio's phone next to themselves next to each other. They met up in real life, and he was very black pill because Vittorio uses light mode on x instead of dark mode. And I like this.

John:

I I think this is so funny. Like, showing someone your x account profile thing is very much like it's like, you know, in old, you know how knights you know where we got the salute from? So we got the salute. You you would salute someone with your hand because you were raising your, your knight's helmet. Like, the the the shield here, you would raise this to show my eyes and and show that I'm I'm Yeah.

John:

Yeah. I'm not a I'm

Jordi:

not a threat. The brother in me sees the brother in me.

John:

It's the same thing as why why do we shake hands? We shake hands to show that I don't have a weapon in my hand in my right hand. And so this is, like, showing a little bit of vulnerability. I'm showing you inside my life, inside my x account.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And and it's almost like 2 of the greatest posters meeting

Jordi:

Proof of post.

John:

And showing each other, you know, a little bit how the sausage is made. And it's fascinating seeing the difference in numbers. I mean, they follow almost exactly the same amount of people, almost 2,000. Smart. Bev has a 140 k followers.

John:

Fantastic. Vittorio, a little bit smaller, 40 k.

Jordi:

But Vittorio is on an incredible trajectory right now. I mean, he's really

Jordi:

Ascended.

John:

Like, ascended. Ascended. But what's interesting here, Beth has a 136 subscribers. It's decent amount. I think they're all on $5 a month.

John:

That's, like, not bad, making almost a $1,000 there. Vittorio, only 7 subscriptions. But this is what I found funny. Beth has subscribed to 4 people. Vittorio is subscribed to 47 people.

John:

Wow. So Vittorio is shelling out, like, what, almost $300 a month towards his absolute boys.

Jordi:

Yeah. Respect. That's amazing.

John:

Respect.

Jordi:

Amazing. It really is a sign of respect.

John:

This is the creator economy. Yeah. Yeah. He gets the check from x, the the creator payout. I'm sure it's I'm sure it's, heavy as a stone.

John:

Recycling it. And then he puts it right in with his other boys. And so I'm gonna go check out who he subscribes to if that's public. But, great to see 2 posters meeting IRL. Love to see it.

Jordi:

Recreating the timeline in real life.

John:

Yeah. That conversation, you could probably, just steal tons and tons of bangers from that.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

Let's go to Din. He says, the Harry Stebbings effect. I believe he just went on the show. Says, 200 plus applicants, every tier one investor in my DMs, €4,000,000 of potential revenue in my DMs. Okay.

John:

That's a little weird. What are 3,000 LinkedIn requests. Wow. And 300 Twitter followers. That's actual tangible value added to this one.

John:

Is I don't know. A $400,000,000 fun, baby.

Jordi:

There you go. Size gong. Size gong.

Jordi:

Boom.

Jordi:

I I don't know if he was on the show or Harry just tweeted. Harry tweeted

John:

First time. Oh oh oh, you think he just tweeted?

Jordi:

Tweeted, and he said that that Buena, this this guy's company, is adding a million of ARR every 12 days.

John:

Really?

Jordi:

And he just just, like, just threw it

John:

out there. He didn't even have him on the show.

Jordi:

I don't know. Wow. I only listen to Founders Podcast and this podcast.

John:

Well, congrats to Dan. Fantastic growth. Good luck with the next phase. Convert all of that.

Jordi:

Good luck. You're gonna need to go to agent dot ai Yeah. To get a agent to help you process his LinkedIn request. Find the alpha. Lot.

Jordi:

That's a lot.

John:

But good luck out there.

Jordi:

Good luck.

John:

Do we have a promoted post?

Jordi:

Promoted post from Blackstone. Think investing equals the stock market. Think again. There's an ocean of opportunity in hashtag private equity. If you're a hashtag financial adviser curious about tapping PE for your clients, check out hashtag Blackstone University.

Jordi:

Then they threw a Bitly link up here. So, they've dropped a whole, they've dropped a whole course for financial advisors to learn about private equity. If you're a financial advisor and you don't know about private equity, it's an awesome asset class. Some fantastic returns. You can you can go really risk on with some great managers and, you know, Blackstone hit it hard.

John:

Where better to learn it than Blackstone?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Yeah. We love Blackstone here.

Jordi:

They they created, a popular, festival.

John:

No. That's BlackRock.

Jordi:

Oh. Blackstone. Different organization. Right. BlackRock created the BlackRock City.

Jordi:

Blackstone, just a fantastic asset manager.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

And, love their use use of aggressive use of hashtags here. You know, they clearly know their way around this platform. Yes. Leveraging all the features.

John:

Yes. So thank you. To Blackstone. Let's go to the Wall Street Journal, and we gotta we we gotta put this in the truth zone. This is a rough article.

John:

I read it over the weekend, and I was pounding my fist on the table. I was so mad. They said the ultimate trading for flex, a Snoopy Swatch, or a Casio calculator

Jordi:

Right.

John:

Why lots of money men still favor novelty watches. The anti status watch, why men in finance love cheap cheesy watches. Terrible trend. I hope it ends immediately.

Jordi:

Yeah. Bad luck.

John:

They do give a shout out to some strongholds in the finance community that have stuck with the classics, the Audemars Piguet, the, the Richard Mills, the Pateks. But they Yeah.

Jordi:

If you wanna go fun and funky,

Jordi:

go on.

John:

Yeah. And this is this is the Bobo. This is this is the this is the bohemian bourgeoisie that we are fighting against here.

Jordi:

Yeah. So

John:

if you see someone Point

Jordi:

your war.

John:

With a Casio calculator, a Snoopy Swatch on the trading floor, tell them put that watch down.

Jordi:

Pick a new career.

John:

Pick a new career, buddy. Take a hike.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I was very upset about this. Enough.

Jordi:

Yeah. Shout out to the journals at, this

John:

is the ultimate hit piece on finance. This is trying to collapse our our global economy.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. Because if enough people find out about this, then

Jordi:

then the

Jordi:

How will they trust their

John:

Their their their their asset manager. I agree. Yeah. And and this is what could really make the common person hate Wall Street

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

If they find out that they're wearing just trash Ironic. Ironic watches.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But if you see someone with a with a with a gold Cartier Santos, you have to respect that. Totally. So, this is this is just a very depressing trend. So, it starts here, folks. If you see someone with some ironic, watch, tell them clean up their act, put on something classic, put on something timeless, head to bezel.

Jordi:

You are a capital allocator and asset manager, not an HVAC technician.

John:

I couldn't have said it better myself. So thanks everyone for helping fight the good fight. Let's Let's go to Guy. He's been on the show before. Says, by the way, just FYI, this emoji, prayer hands, is not praying.

John:

It's high fiving, LOL.

Jordi:

Did did you know that?

John:

I saw

Jordi:

that, and I was because it's

John:

Yeah. It it it it's it's it's the prayer hands emoji. It's the 2 hands together. It can be praying or high fiving, but I I guess you

Jordi:

went into the unit code. Use

Jordi:

it on the On the high five?

Jordi:

Well, I I'm gonna start using it now, but I just use that a lot because I I, you know, pray for bubbles and and, and other things.

John:

I think it's whatever you want it to be. I mean, people have long changed the definition or the or the connotation of emojis, the peach emoji, the butt, and, the gun emoji has been through multiple cycles. I think that it all depends on the context. And if you see someone using this in a context where it clearly means prayer hands, it's prayer hands.

Jordi:

And Yeah. And emojis are

John:

Clearly, they're high fiving.

Jordi:

Emojis are tools for communication. And, you know, we shape our tools. And from there, our tools shape us. So we need to constantly be reevaluating our use of emojis and, rethinking them, redesigning them. You

Jordi:

know, stick to the

Jordi:

classics when you them, redesigning them, you know, stick to the classics when you can, but don't be afraid to mix some new Yeah. Hitters in.

John:

Do we have another promoted post, or should we do this first? Air environment says AV has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bluehalo. Together, we'll create a more diversified global leader in all domain defense technologies capable of addressing the full spectrum of modern defense. Huge deal in the public markets. Air environment has acquired Bluehalo, and we wanted to cover it on the show because it's one of the most fascinating examples we've seen in risk recent history of nominative determinism.

John:

The CEO of Bluehalo, his name, Jonathan Moneymaker. And, of course, he made the money. He made the money, baby.

Jordi:

Don't bet against Jonathan Moneymaker. That's all I would say.

John:

Never. Never. And so fantastic outcome for all the investors. I think this was a private equity roll up. They built a bun they put together a bunch of small companies and wound up selling it to Air Environment, and congrats to them.

John:

We don't know the full terms of the deal here, but it feels like a size gong moment to me.

Jordi:

Congrats to Jonathan Moneymaker, and we would like to back whatever he does next.

John:

Yes. 100%.

Jordi:

Quick promoted post from Zegna. We are only a month out from, Christmas, and there are many other holidays coming up, but we wanted to celebrate a Zegna holiday from our home to yours. Wrap your loved ones in timeless. Oh, Owasi Cashmere.

Jordi:

Oh, yeah. I see. Cashmere.

Jordi:

Cashmere scarves that will be cherished for years to come. We're committed to certifying our cashmere fibers as a 100% traceable from 2024. I don't know if this is, as is an ESG thing. I'm I prefer their commitment to quality over traceability, but I certainly appreciate the traceability as well. Thank you to Zegna

John:

for making speaks to the this idea that, like, you know, you're going to be in fancy holiday parties. Maybe you're going on some ski trips. Ski season's coming up, and you wanna look good. You don't wanna be Yep. Stumbling around in athleisure or looking like you just, got off a bus in Sand Hill.

John:

Yep. You want to be dressed to the nines, and so Zegna is a great way to go get a nice jacket or a nice coat.

Jordi:

And my jacket got here. You don't see enough technology brothers wearing scarves broadly.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

It's a

Jordi:

great it's a great accent piece. It's a great way to to kind of

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Communicate what you stand for. Yeah.

John:

It's clearly a step up from Patagonia.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

And so we highly recommend you go check them out and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Let's go to April Zucchi. She says, I can't stop thinking about this Nietzsche quote. The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others in effort. Their delight is in self mastery.

John:

In them, asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege. It is to them a recreation to play with the burdens that would crush all others. Couldn't agree more.

Jordi:

Yeah. When you're in that zone, you have to find what your why is. And that why can be anything for us. It's, you know, doing it for the money, being willing to push through when, you know, when you're in in this case, we're an hour 4 of podcasting. Yep.

Jordi:

And, you know, do you have that that that weakness inside of you that Jock Jocko would kind of referencing, quit, turn off turn off the mics, walk out of the room, take the suit off, and then being willing to just, like, push through and continuing to create content is is, you know, you have to have that

John:

that long. Better.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

John:

Dylan Field, he's been on the show before. He says, if this were where if this is where we're starting, I'm worried what the actual top signals will be this cycle. How it started versus how it's going. How it started is Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin white paper, and how it's going is dollar sign dog cage, and there's a live streamer doing some extremely depressing things that we're not even really gonna talk about. Yeah.

Jordi:

We don't wanna talk about it, but, hopefully, pumped up fun gets their act together and ends this, live streaming feature.

John:

Sometimes moderation is good.

Jordi:

Content moderation.

John:

That's good. Good to hear it's over. Hopefully, no more.

Jordi:

And, yeah, I think that there's a lot of alpha right now just tweeting top every single day. Yep. Because eventually, you're gonna be right.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And

Jordi:

you'll be able to go delete all the other ones and go back and quote tweet the top and say, like, look. I called it. Yeah. Called the local top. Yeah.

Jordi:

And there's, you could raise, you know, a $1,000,000,000 fund off of calling the top. Yeah.

John:

So There is something about, like like, the good meme coins and the ones that last are fun. Like, Doge is about this dog. It's very funny, and Elon's run with it. And it's become and it's, like, even popular today because it was always filled with, like, some sort of comedy or funness, and the dark stuff

Jordi:

never Even Solana with, like, the GM culture.

John:

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It was always, like, inspiring to some degree even even when it was frothy.

John:

Yeah. So stay positive out there, folks.

Jordi:

No revenge. Hate hate meme coins.

John:

Bruno says, regarding the hot topic of Stablecoins, if you strip out USDT, which is primarily used for trading and laundering, transaction volume since 2022 is flat and supply is meaningfully down with no merchant adoption. Not really getting the hype, but let's see how this plays out. Interesting.

Jordi:

Yeah. The merchant adoption stuff's interesting. I mean, I I I do think you have to imagine that, you know, strong, like, infrastructure platforms like, Bridge and especially the amount of investment that I imagine Stripe will put behind bridge going forward, like merchant adoption will go up.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Coinbase, you know, recently, you know, last week ran that ad, you know, showing a guy buying a, you know, selling a car

Jordi:

or a

Jordi:

truck with stable coins. And I think that that stuff is going to really, you

John:

know, meaningfully catch on. Also, big assumption here that 99% of USDT is trading and laundering. Like, that just might not be true.

Jordi:

Certainly a lot

John:

of how

Jordi:

would you know a lot

Jordi:

of it is is trading. Sure. The laundering stuff, who knows? It seems, much harder to

John:

But even trading is is valuable in the sense that, like, you could say a lot of the US dollar is is tied up in trading activity.

Jordi:

Right? Yeah.

John:

Like, how much is on Citadel's balance sheet right now? A lot. Does that make it, like, less real? I don't know. Yeah.

John:

I don't think so. So I don't know. I'm still I'm still positive on on,

Jordi:

Yeah. At the end of the day, the technology is very meaningful of being able to send money 247 in a trustless way.

John:

Yeah. That's awesome. Exactly. Let's go to Praying for Accents. He's been on the show before.

John:

He says, designers, DALL E 2. I stole your pictures and used them to generate art. And the designers say, no. This is illegal. And the programmers are talking to chat gpt, and chat gpt says, I scanned your GitHub account and stole your code.

John:

And the chat programmers say, cool. Did you get it to work?

Jordi:

This is this is an interesting, interesting reaction. It does seem like,

Jordi:

really designed.

Jordi:

It was more like the community. I haven't like the Yeah. It it was the peep it was the it was the designers that the creatives that weren't monetizing. Yeah. The create the non monetizing creators that are that are struggling artists like, having them figured out in a commercial application.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

OpenAI monetizing their work

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Sort of indirectly

Jordi:

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

Really piss him off. The designers that I know that have built great careers are all excited about AI touring.

John:

The artists like Beeple, you know, he uses cinema 4 d. I'm sure he's able to use generative AI either in the post processing or in the texture generation. But he's coined this own style that even if it could be copied, he has the proof of work.

Jordi:

Yeah. But I do feel like I do feel like the Gen AI stuff did take a little bit of wind out of his sails Sure. Because Beeple was going through the painstaking effort to make these absurd images. Yep. Now anybody can make the same absurd image.

John:

But I haven't seen anyone replace him.

Jordi:

No. I'm not saying he's been replaced. I'm just saying more, like, it's less jarring. It's it doesn't have the same effect for me to see a Just

John:

see, like, Elon riding a bull

Jordi:

or whatever. Anybody can yeah. Yeah. Because he can generate that now.

Jordi:

I guess.

John:

I guess. I think he still has some sort of, like, interesting carved

Jordi:

He still has a

John:

It it it's gonna be the same thing where, you know, Beeple's artwork people always said this about, like, the Mark Rothko. Oh, my kid could make that or or some artist where it's just, like, paint splatter. Yeah. And and you'd you'd say, yeah. My kid could make that, but the point was that you didn't.

John:

Yeah. And then the point was, well, if even if your kid did, everyone would just be like, well, that's a Mark Rothko rip off.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And now it's like, yeah, your kid could prompt that, but it would just feel like a Beeple rip Yeah. In my opinion. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, he's already made generational wealth, so I don't even know if he needs to make any more anymore.

Jordi:

Yep. Post economic.

John:

Let's go to Delhi, and he's been on the show before. He says, so Waymo is changing to a Chinese auto manufacturer. Yeah. F that. My autonomous ride about to accidentally drive off a cliff.

Jordi:

Okay. So Waymo

John:

has been running on Too many Winnie the Pooh jokes. Hard pass.

Jordi:

So so so I really don't get it. So this is funny timing because Waymo is, like, the only time you see a jaguar today

John:

is just Waymo. Jaguar.

Jordi:

And Jaguar is just, like, floundering

John:

Floundering.

Jordi:

The the Ray Dong

John:

something or whatever.

Jordi:

The president over there is just, like, floundering Totally. Cars nobody cares about.

John:

But, like, clearly, they have manufacturing lines that produce reasonable cars.

Jordi:

Jaguar had stopped making cars, probably, presumably except for Waymo. Yeah. And why did that deal not happen?

John:

It's crazy.

Jordi:

It's honestly it makes me even shorter, Jaguar Yeah. Feeling that It's rough. Waymo was already running on their, basically, infrastructure and decided not to move forward with that. Yeah. But very, very bad.

Jordi:

I don't want I don't want, It's

John:

so funny he throws in another win.

Jordi:

I don't want I don't want the CCP to control, our drones are, you know, one of our biggest social media platforms, and now our autonomous cars

John:

Very rough.

Jordi:

Don't want that to happen. So, Delian, why don't you, you know Buy Jaguar? Put a $1,000,000,000 into a Jaguar buyout and, you know, reshore it

John:

to Something I mean, we already have the answer. It's Tesla. Right? Like, Tesla is is the American competitor to everything that, Waymo will be doing, and, it will become a culture issue. I I I I tweeted this post of, like, look at the way the Waymo car looks and then look at the aesthetics of the Tesla self driving car and, like, both political sides, like, hate the opposite one.

John:

Yeah. And and it's weird to think that something as utilitarian as as just getting a ride from one place to another can become like a political statement, but it it has. People, like like, many Democrats would say, like, I will not buy a a Cybertruck because of the statement that it makes.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

And the same thing for a Republican driving a Prius, which is the same thing. I'm gonna be rolling coal in a Raptor r. Let's go to Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. He says, how do you not own a suit for the office Christmas party?

John:

You're an l six, and it's a photo of wife Jack. Have you been following the wife Jack thing?

Jordi:

I think these are great. The first time I see them, I'm like, oh.

John:

At first, I thought it was, like, kind of negative, but I realized that it was actually very positive and very pro natalist campaign. And there's been a little self policing within the wife Jack community around, like, don't make it negative. Don't make it overbearing. It's it's like the wife is saying these things because she loves you, not because she's, like, actually upset with you.

Jordi:

Positive spin.

John:

And so, yes. Also, if you're an l six, get a suit. If you're an intern, get a suit. Yeah. Everyone needs a suit.

John:

It's ridiculous.

Jordi:

It's ridiculous.

John:

Get a suit. Call your tailor.

Jordi:

Call Fiorentina labeled.

John:

Call Fiorentina. Daniel, he's been on the show earlier, and he's been on the show many times, former brother of the week. He says, the walls close in as you age. The path of for responsible change to oneself grows more narrow. You have commitments in your work, a career that makes sense given your current mental arrangements.

John:

You have a spouse and a child who won't count on you to exist in a certain way, who count on you to exist in a certain way. Very doomerish post.

Jordi:

This is

Jordi:

kind

John:

of the opposite of the other post that we I

Jordi:

don't know.

John:

That we said that was like, you can just change your career at 45. Remember?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. You can. But the thing is is your life very quickly adapts to your identity. True.

Jordi:

True. So if you wanna change who you are and what you do, once you have a wife and children Yeah. Yeah. And I even noticed this of, like, I've I've I've appreciated, like, having a kid in school now and being like, okay, I can't just move across the country.

John:

Of course.

Jordi:

So that makes me, like, more oriented around

Jordi:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Investing in my local Podcasting

Jordi:

or whatever.

Jordi:

Podcasting podcasting locally. Yeah. But, yeah, I just thought that that was relevant because I think if you're if you, you know, aren't married or don't have kids yet, like, you need to be taking on, like, at least 5 times as much risk as you are right now because the the more that other people are dependent on you in many ways, the less risk you can take on.

John:

Yeah. It's great. This is a great one by Zane. He's a little skeptical, but we're gonna debate this. He says, some idiot took regular old sour candy and put it in a bag with some generic branding and sold it for a $100,000,000, and you're still waiting for someone at HR to approve your PTO on Thursday so you can spend a couple days with your family.

John:

Denied. And he's co tuning a CPG wire article that says, the Hershey company is acquiring Sour Strips, a fast growing sour candy brand for an undisclosed sum. So I don't know where he got the 100,000,000, but maybe he dug into it. Sour Strips was founded by Internet personality Max Chuning in 2019. And Max Chuning was like a huge YouTuber, all in the fitness space.

John:

I mean, great nominated determinism there, like chewing to the max. He's chewing the sour candy. He always likes sour candy. And so he he started

Jordi:

this brand.

John:

But the fascinating thing is that, yeah, the name is just sour strips. That's the that's the name of the category. That's a descriptor. Yeah. I don't think you can, trademark that.

John:

And so someone else could start a sour strips company. Maybe you couldn't use the exact same logo and stuff, but you could make it pretty close because sour strips is is not trademarkable. But he still grew it really well, and he started advertising it on his podcast, advertising it on his YouTube channel, and then used that to get into retail, I'm sure, and eventually grew it to, I think, a $100,000,000 of revenue, something like that. And Yeah. Fantastic outcome for Max.

John:

Love his podcast. Love him Yeah.

Jordi:

It is so funny because if you if I think back to being a child and going to a candy store or a place that sold candy, there was always a, like, sour strips kind of bucket or dispenser type thing that were just called sour strips.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, if if there was truly no other brands in that category and he's just like, I'm gonna take this and, like, brand it and really focus on selling it well and marketing it and growing it, then, yeah, he deserves the 9 figure

John:

There's also a big there's also a big piece here where if you go through if you're starting a CPG company and you walk through the aisles, you can see that some are incredibly competitive. Some sections of the grocery store are, like, it's half Unilever, half Hershey, and you're just screwed because they both have major competitors there. They're gonna outspend you and they'll never acquire you. And then some categories are completely run by, you know, 200 year old companies. I know a guy who started a, a popcorn spray company that he got to, like, $1,000,000 in revenue very quickly.

John:

And Like, you make popcorn and then season it with spray

Jordi:

spray spray.

John:

Yeah. You season it on top of it. Graffiti. And and it and it gives it, like, the movie theater popcorn smell, and there's a bunch of scents.

Jordi:

The Pfizer the extra Pfizer.

John:

I I asked him about that, and he and he even had a bunch of claims that it it, like, wasn't bad, but it it does feel weird. But, but what he realized was that the main competitor in that in that entire section of the store was just Orville Redenbacher, and it's a very big company. They're not really innovating. They're not gonna fast follow. And so it was very easy to get in there.

John:

And it might have been the same thing with sour strips where Hershey didn't have any play in that category. Yeah. So he basically built the product.

Jordi:

Because everybody, oftentimes, the best ideas are just, like, obvious but overlooked.

John:

Yeah. Let's go to Greg Yang at XAI. First time on the show. He says, if you haven't had more than one career, have you truly lived? I like

Jordi:

that. Yeah. You had your career and and Wall Street.

John:

Wall Street.

Jordi:

Short career.

John:

Yeah. I like this. I think, this is a very millennial millennial post, like jumping from job to job, being a founder, being an investor, being a content creator, moving back and forth between things.

Jordi:

But I feel like it's widely accepted now. The millennials are the 1st generation where it was it it almost, Yeah. It was just normal to be like, I'm gonna do this one thing. I might get decent at it, and then I'm gonna jump over here and do this other thing. I'm gonna do this, that, and kind of like snake your way through life.

Jordi:

I I think it's generally good. I I have a lot of, you know, people that I went to college with that have only done one thing out of school, like real estate, like investing. And then they get to, like, you know, 28, 29, 30, and they're like, well, I guess I could still do other stuff, but then they feel still kind of trapped. And I try to talk to them and be like, no. You can literally do whatever you want.

Jordi:

Yeah. You can completely reinvent your career, jump into a different industry or category, or go from an investing role into an operating role or vice versa.

John:

There is an interesting thing that PG often says that, like, the best founders have, like they're experts in, like, 2 or 3 different disciplines or maybe if there's a cofounding team, they're they have, like, 5 or 6 disciplines mastered between them. And maybe you get that from working in different careers and then you can put them together. Like, you've worked in finance, but then you've also worked in consumer packaged goods, and so you're able to operate your business very effectively. It's yeah. Yeah.

John:

It it makes sense.

Jordi:

Maybe I don't know what Greg did before this, but maybe he was, you know, at a, a woke language model. And now he's like, I'm reinventing myself by being at a base language model.

John:

Yeah. At XAI.

Jordi:

But, but, yeah, reinvent yourself.

John:

Yeah. I like it. Klaus, Inspector Investments says, average US bank, we regret overcharging customers. We are hiring additional staff to investigate, and we should have it settled by 2027. Average Japanese bank.

John:

Pledge. Anyone employed by this bank who has stolen money or caused others to steal from the bank will pay for it with his or her own property and then commit suicide.

Jordi:

Very on brand for Japan.

John:

I can't believe there's still a samurai

Jordi:

do over there. That's so crazy. A samurai.

John:

I was watching a show, called, like, samurai or something on Netflix, and, and, like, the show got boring because it was, like, every episode, someone's committing seppuku. It was just constant. It was like, oh, okay. Like, oh, guy stubbed his toe. Gonna commit seppuku.

John:

But I guess that's really what they

Jordi:

do there. I think the the the the meaning the takeaway from this is that financiers are the modern samurais. Right? And you need to act with honor.

John:

You do.

Jordi:

And if you betray your own honor

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

Then there's only one route. Yep. You know? Yeah.

John:

I mean, if you Go to the KMS website. Ever catch us doing an episode without any ads, hold us accountable. Yep. Demand that we commit seppuku Yep. Because that would be a violation of our sacred bond with the listener

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

To advertise. And, people are going turbo long, that company. Oh, here's a good one. People are saying that Ben Hylik is the next Ligma, 0 interest rates, and it's Ben Hilach. I think we mispronounced his name.

Jordi:

That's a that's a thing that we do.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Or at least

John:

Yeah. We do it

Jordi:

at the do.

John:

We we we do have

Jordi:

good crack. So

John:

so And so he he printed out a a transcript of our of our podcast, and, we say, I don't know the guy, but I think he's got a cool startup, great designer, great taste, fantastic. This is a future Rahul Ligma bit. This is fantastic. He really is the next Ligma.

Jordi:

He really is the next Ligma. So stay tuned

John:

for the next Ligma. I mean, he

Jordi:

had some, he had another post that was great. I don't think we covered it. But but as the bit was going on, he posted, he was like, hi, everyone. In our defense, when we did the Jaguar rebrand, we really thought Kamala was gonna be, elected, and that got picked up too. And it got a bunch of

John:

I told a friend that, like, jokingly, and he, like, didn't get the joke and was like, wait. Really? Like, they thought they she was gonna win.

Jordi:

I was like, no, dude. I guess, I'm

Jordi:

went jaguar run turbo long. Turbo long Harris.

John:

Anyways Legitimately, like, they did go turbo long, like like, the the the the the the rise of wokeness, which probably has was steadily literally happening from, what, 2010 to 2020, even beyond. 2022 was probably the peak. Then Elon buys x and then the culture starts shifting. And if you were long wokeness, like, your company did very well throughout that entire phase. You got ESG customers.

John:

You got DEI investors. You got all sorts of benefits, and that only stopped that that gravy train only stopped, like, last year.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so if you kicked off a rebrand for your company like, Jaguar didn't make cars this year. They, like, took the entire year off.

Jordi:

Rough. Roughly.

John:

And so the whole plan for, like, the rebrand, the reset, going full electric, this is, like, years in the making. And, like, I'm sure they did, like, some multiyear McKinsey project and, like, had all these different things. Like, it was a big deal for them. They didn't just, like, do the

Jordi:

silverware.

Jordi:

Of McKinsey. We love management consulting and we love McKinsey, but it it kinda reeks of of, of McKinsey.

Jordi:

Well, you get in what you put out here.

Jordi:

VP gone rogue.

John:

It's garbage in, garbage out with McKinsey. If you show up with a good plan, they're gonna deliver some good plans for you, but Yeah. The inspiration has to come from the founding.

Jordi:

Take some responsibility.

John:

Siri says VC went from being a relationships business to a sales job. When did the dynamic shift? I have a I have a idea of exactly when the dynamic shift, but what what do you think?

Jordi:

Go. Go.

John:

So so I think the dynamic shifted after post.com around 2010 when the industry realized that b to b SaaS was not going to be a winner take all market. Yeah. And you could underwrite 2 and 20 against $10,000,000,000 outcomes reliably.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so if if the market

Jordi:

had Well, the $10,000,000,000 outcome thing was was new. That was more of,

John:

like Exactly.

Jordi:

That was the Decacorn thing was, like

John:

It wasn't it wasn't real in

Jordi:

20 in in, in the dotcom boom.

John:

Yeah. All those VCs got rugged, and they didn't do that well, and a lot of them went out of business. But in in 2 2008, 2009 coming out of the financial crisis

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It started to be clear that while there were major major power law winners in social media Yeah. And you couldn't just build a whole fund around social media investing because if you missed Facebook, you were done. But you could build a fund around b to b SaaS, like base hits that were essentially decacorns. And and if you can build a business to $10,000,000,000 in under 10 years, you can easily charge 2 in 20 and beat the market. And as long as you can beat the market, you can charge those high fees.

John:

And as long as you can heart charge those high fees, you look like a venture capital firm as opposed to if if if you're underwriting to 10 years and it's a $100,000,000 outcome, you just won't look like a VC. Like, you just won't have the management fees. You won't have the returns. Like, it just it'll look like a bank.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And and and if you're building a business where your target is a $100,000,000, you know, high CapEx, less r and d, you just go to the bank Yeah. Or you fund it off your credit card or cash flow. There's a bunch of different ways to build these businesses, and there are different pockets of financial capital out there for different business strategies. Kind of everything became looked like VC, including, like, consumer and d to c and all these things. And a lot of those didn't pan out.

John:

Yeah. Creator economy is a good example. But it was it was when it was when it was it was clear that it wasn't going to be Salesforce or Oracle building every vertical SaaS tool that Yeah. At that point, it became, okay. Any fund could hit the next Databricks or the next Driptland or the next Gusto or deal.

John:

Like, there's so much opportunity to to exit with Yeah. A $1,000,000,000 return of fund. And as soon as you can say, hey. We're gonna own 10% of this Decacorn, and we're gonna return a $1,000,000,000 fund. Yeah.

John:

It's game on. And that's when it became and that's when it became, a sales job because you scale up and you need to be in every firm that that's gonna be a Decacorn, and you need to write checks in. And, also, the IPO window shipped it out. During the dotcom boom, companies were going public at 300 mil. And then Free.

Jordi:

Yeah. So

John:

it so it was a sales job, but it became the sales that was being done with the stuff you saw in Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah. It was the Wall Street guys cold calling, hey. I got a stock for you. Yeah.

John:

This company just went public. The ticker is, you know, whatever, m p3.com. You should get in right now, and it mooned in retail. That shifted when the company started staying private longer.

Jordi:

Yep. Yeah. Well said. I mean, I think, any VC that doesn't understand I'm, like, short any VC that doesn't understand that they're in the likability game. Because if you're not one of the holy trinity or a top five firm

Jordi:

Yep.

Jordi:

You have this sort of adverse selection problem where all the best founders want to work with a select group of firms. Yep. They go out and they're gonna meet a lot of investors, but they want to work with Founders Fund. They want to work with Sequoia. And so if you're not one of those funds, then you need to realize, like, you better the the founder must genuinely feel something about the partner who wants to do that deal.

Jordi:

Otherwise, why are you gonna have any right to win that deal? Yep. Even get a slice of

John:

it. Yep.

Jordi:

Right? And so

John:

It is still a relationships business for the power law VCs. The next generation of power law winners in venture capital are doing the relationship business.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And that's the Lockheed Grooms, the Nat Friedman's, these new generation of capital allocators that are doing very well versus the droves of Stanford grads who are just associates at large firms that are just churning through cold calls. They're in the sales role because they are not out on the extreme end of performance, and they're not and and they're deriving their their growth from fees, not carry.

Jordi:

Totally.

John:

So it's it's all a rational move because the the funds have gotten so large that you can sit in what is essentially a sales role, collect management fees, and not need to play the relationship game to get some unfair advantage into an early deal that would never happen if it was a free market. But, you can still make a ton of money just Yeah.

Jordi:

I just think it I I I think at the end of the day, it, it's such a the reason that I the reason that the asset class is so addicting as an investor and why you still get, you know, firms that that that trade in public equities that end up trying to come down and play in the private markets is that every single company is a one of 1 asset. There's no other, you know, shares like it. It's literally like there's a sort of a finite number of shares and and, you can you know, you have to earn the right to buy into the company. You can't just market by

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Stripe. Right? You have to get the Collison Brothers to sign off and say, we'll take your money. Right? And that's a that's that's that creates a lot of good behavior overall.

Jordi:

Right? Because you need to be a good actor. Otherwise, founders are eventually gonna be like, no. We don't want our CFOs. At a certain point, we'll be like, no.

Jordi:

We just don't want your money.

John:

Yep. Let's go to USSR pictures. We don't usually agree with communists on this show, but this might be the one exception. It's a picture from 1947, and it shows a committee to approve fashionable clothing suitable for sale to Soviet women in Moscow. Now I'm against this for women, but I would love something like this for capital allocators.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

We've seen this time and time again of of VCs going on podcasts and t shirts

Jordi:

or like HVAC.

John:

There is just it's just sloppy. Yeah. And it would be great if we, the Technology Brothers, could be approved as a committee to review all fashion choices by capital allocators. We could say, hey, look. You have a $1,000,000,000 under management.

John:

What are you doing in that t shirt on what you see? What are you driving? What's on your wrist? We need to hold our capital allocators to a higher standard. And so we gotta agree with the communist on this.

John:

They did we're doing one thing right. Totally. Totally. Fashion.

Jordi:

Toss down management of of, of fashion decisions. His The next frontier.

John:

Throw on some suits. The, the the tailors are awaiting your phone call. Yep.

Jordi:

If

John:

you're in Tino suits, it's easy. Let's go to Ryan Peterson. He's been on the show before, founder Flexport. He says robo taxis that pick you up at your house and then take you to the nearest boring company tunnel so they can zip you at a 100 plus miles an hour straight to your destination with no stops. We'll be on par with rockets that land themselves.

John:

Let's go. We go. I want it so badly, and people are sleeping on The Boring Company. They hate it. They don't think it's possible.

John:

But sleeper. Wait until it happens. It's free real estate on me.

Jordi:

At the the Vegas tunnel opening. We'll be there. We'll be in the first we'll be in the first pod. The first pod.

Jordi:

Yeah. But me I will

John:

live in the pod. I will eat the bugs if I can get to my destination. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. We're gonna

John:

have guys in LA traffic. I will do anything.

Jordi:

We're gonna have the guys in tuxedos.

John:

We need one from Malibu to Pasadena.

Jordi:

Serving crickets.

John:

That'd be fantastic.

Jordi:

Yeah. Now the boring company, I think, will will, you know, every Musk company goes through the isolates in terms of attention, but the foreign company will be Yeah. At the forefront of the conversation.

John:

It's even harder because it's all local regulation whereas with the Rockets, it's like, he doesn't need to get every single jurisdiction that he flies over to approve it. It's like, if if Florida says it's cool, it's cool. Yep. Or if the FAA says it's cool, it's cool.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And same thing for the Starlink satellites. Like, how crazy would it be if you had to get everyone to agree that those were okay? It's like, no. There's one

Jordi:

I mean, I'd like to see a boring, company tunnel to Hawaii. Imagine if you could imagine if you could drive a GT 3 RS to Hawaii. That would be so long. I know. But in the GT 3 RS, you're not exactly wishing that that

Jordi:

either way.

John:

You don't need the GT 3 RS. You need that thrust SSC. You know that car?

Jordi:

No.

John:

The thrust s s c hit the, the world record land speed record out of the salt flats. It's basically a jet engine on wheels.

Jordi:

There we go.

Jordi:

And

John:

I think it can go, like, 600 miles an hour.

Jordi:

There we go.

John:

There we go. So that that rate, you are going as fast as a passenger plane. Yep. And in a tunnel, if you suck all the air out, it might be more efficient

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And you might be able to get there. But, yeah. I don't know. You'd have to go pretty deep. The ocean's really, really deep.

Jordi:

It's deep down there. Yeah.

John:

I mean, they put the undersea cables down there for the Internet, so maybe. But, man, the pressure and everything

Jordi:

The pressure might get to you.

John:

You're gonna wind up in that Titanic thing. The Yeah. Yeah. That that's rough. Anyway, fantastic show.

John:

Thanks for watching. Subscribe or be relegated to a life of flying net jets. What do you guys want

Jordi:

to say? Yeah. It's Thanksgiving this week.

John:

Happy Thanksgiving.

Jordi:

Whatever you're doing, get together with family, friends, start a family.

John:

Start a family tradition. This is something that I've added

Jordi:

to you for Start a family. Or or Or start a family tradition. Or both.

John:

Yeah. I have a family tradition that I'd like to share. I I I I don't come from a family with lots of traditions, but I decided that's not a reason to not start a family tradition. And so, my family now has a tradition where every time we get together for one of these events or a birthday party or a holiday, all the men of the family go outside and we smoke cigars together.

Jordi:

Incredible. And

John:

it's fantastic. And it's something that everyone in the family immediately adopted, and, it would have been a much harder pitch if I hadn't say said it was a family tradition. Yep. And as soon as it was, now it's actually been a a tradition because we've done it a couple times, and

Jordi:

now it's

Jordi:

It's on the schedule.

John:

It it it is well on its path to becoming Lindy. Very Lindy. So I would encourage everyone to start a tradition. Think

Jordi:

about be afraid to just adopt this. If you do Yeah. Send us send us a DM.

John:

Picture of you and your and

Jordi:

your Hopefully wearing suits.

John:

Founders. Yes.

Jordi:

Smoking cigars

John:

Smoking cigars.

Jordi:

After a nice turkey dinner.

John:

There's a lot of different things. Nice toasts are a fantastic tradition.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

My mom likes writing, rhyming limerick toasts.

Jordi:

There we go.

John:

And and with Chat GPT, you can really take it to the next level. I I would read 1, but it wouldn't make any sense because it's all about my family. But, I've been to a few, you know, dinners with colleagues where someone has stood up and given a roast or toast and called out everyone in rhyming fashion for various things. And it's hilarious and memorable, and it just stands out. And it's just going a little bit a little bit extra making the trip to the cigar store before the event, writing out the toast beforehand.

John:

And it takes a lot of confidence to just stand up at your family event and give a toast. In the same way

Jordi:

in the same way we recommend booking your Amman trips, you know, at least year out. You know, plan ahead with your traditions too. Don't do it on the fly. Yep. These are serious things.

Jordi:

Yep. And,

John:

you're not gonna want it

Jordi:

you're not gonna want it on

Jordi:

the breeze.

John:

Christmas one now. If you're listening to this on Thanksgiving or or after, plan out the Christmas tradition now.

Jordi:

There you go. That's a great place to end.

John:

Happy holidays, everyone.