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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. Today is Wednesday, 02/12/2025. This show starts now. Jordy, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm good, John. I'm back in a suit. The brothers in the chat yesterday were very, quick to call me out for just wearing a sweater. And, sorry. Try not to let it happen again, but, we're back in the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:And, thankfully, we got some breaking news.
Speaker 1:You're yeah. You're looking great. You're looking great, and we got a great show. We got JD Vance giving a banger speech in Paris on artificial intelligence. We got big news from slow ventures, and we got big news from Porsche, one of the makers of the fastest cars in the world.
Speaker 1:Slow ventures, fast cars. We're going from one to the next. Then we're giving you a Valentine's day gift guide, breaking down what you should get for your significant other, your wife, your girlfriend, whatever. We got ideas. We got plenty of picks for you.
Speaker 1:Then we're moving on to Mark Pincus. He wrote an, a banger op ed in pirate wires all about where, where entrepreneurs should be thinking about incorporating their companies. This stuff's really important. If we have time, we'll move on to, a transformer shortage in the energy market that's driving data centers. We've been trying to break down, the data center market as much as possible for you guys on the show, and then we'll move into some timeline.
Speaker 1:So let's get straight into it. Jordy, I'm sure you watched the full JD Vance speech. What was your initial reaction? How did you process it? It was to me, it was a it was a very it it was just very narrative breaking in the sense that, like, it was just extremely rigorous and, like, it didn't feel like a normal politics speech a lot as much rah rah.
Speaker 1:But how did you process it?
Speaker 2:So two, it was it was it it didn't feel normal to listen to a politician talk about technology and feel like they had a good grasp of it. Right? Mhmm. So right away, that was cool. That he had some sort of interesting points that maybe were a bit contrarian in the sense that, you know, he was very clearly stating that he feels like AI will drive, you know, massive job creation, and it's actually positive for labor, which is interesting and I think is an important kind of position for the administration to have because nobody's gonna sort of broadly support AI development if they think that it's gonna take everybody's jobs.
Speaker 2:And I think there's some real arguments that what they're you know, what what JD said is true and that it will have this, you know, sort of effect that, other technologies throughout history, did as well.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And, the other thing, it was it was very fascinating to hear a US Politician speaking to an international audience and speaking to our allies in a way that was basically demanding. Right? He was basically, like, telling everybody what he expects of our allies in the in the European Union. And that type of rhetoric just didn't seem to happen in the last four years. Right?
Speaker 2:You wouldn't hear Biden like, Biden would would kind of make, I would say, like, softer requests.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:JD had very clear expectations for our allies and the companies involved with with, AI development broadly. And so at first, I was, you know, at first, I wasn't necessarily, I wasn't necessarily taken aback, but to have somebody speak in such a presidential way with, like, very, very clear expectations was didn't feel normal, but it felt very refreshing. Right? It's like we you know, The US is the leader in AI innovation and investment. And so we should be able to be very demanding with our allies and with our partners around what we expect out of them.
Speaker 2:And in this case, a lot of it was JD talking about the regular regulatory framework in the EU and how that's held companies back you know, throughout the past decade around GDPR and trying to avoid a lot of that stuff. So, very, very refreshing listen. And, yeah, he was just looking very presidential. It it it it I certainly felt like we we might be getting, quite a few more years of, speeches.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it may it makes sense that he's coming at it from this angle. You know, obviously, he's a teal protege. And while he was working with teal, this was the time that Peter cofounded OpenAI or was one of the initial backers of the nonprofit. Also, this was the time that Peter, wrote that seed check to DeepMind and Demas Hassabis.
Speaker 1:So, deeply entrenched in AI while JD was with Peter pre, pre politics. And so, obviously, he's known a lot of the talking points, a lot of the leaders in AI for a decade, whereas a lot of politicians are just getting up to speed now. Hey. This thing's happening. We gotta figure it out.
Speaker 1:And so let's read some of his quotes, and then I'll get your reaction. He says, I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple years ago. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity. This administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for other foreign countries and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI. Number two, we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off, and we'll make every effort to encourage pro growth AI policies.
Speaker 1:And I'd like to see that deregulatory flavor making its way into a lot of the conversations at this conference. Number three, we feel strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship. Number four, the Trump administration will maintain a pro worker growth path for AI so it can be a potent tool for job creation in The United States. The US is a leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way. And so there were a lot of, there were a lot of comments that he made about, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, we we want these things, and we don't want you to do this. He was very, very clear about, you know, the problems that American companies have faced abroad, specifically in the EU. And, I think I think it was good for him just to lay the cards on the table and not really dance around this stuff and just make it very clear that some of the the GDPR stuff has just been a drag on progress, and that's his view. Yeah. And, so he goes on to say, at this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, but but it will never come to pass if overregulation deters innovators from taking risks necessary to advance the ball.
Speaker 1:The Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias. And so lot of good comments there. I thought it was very interesting. I loved his closer. He says that he was touring, and he sees this sword of the I forget who it was, but it was like the French leader who helped, the during the American Revolution.
Speaker 1:And and he uses the sword as this metaphor for, advanced AI where, a weapon can be a weapon of war that's used in a very negative way, or it can be used to create more freedom in the world, and that's what he sees AI as. And I like that Yeah. This is the, you know, we talked about this with the you are not a lottery ticket. This is the, positive and optimistic determinist, framing, which is that Yeah. AI can have a good outcome, but we have to ensure that it does.
Speaker 1:It Yeah. Technology can go good or bad. And I think that Yeah. Too long there have been people that just say, oh, technology, sometimes it's terrible. It's always terrible.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's always good. It's I'm just a techno optimist. Instead, it's not a no. It's gonna take a ton of work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's too important of a sector and opportunity to have the government be purely reactionary. Right? The government was able to be reactionary to social media. Right?
Speaker 2:They they sort of social media exploded. The world became more connected. There's misinformation, other things like that. And and the government's tried to sort of react to it and, you know, try to make it better whether or not they did. You know, a lot of people would say that they didn't.
Speaker 2:And in fact, it just ended up being censorship. But I like this framing that, you know, within the first month of the admin, he's at one of the most important sort of conferences, Ray I, in the world and speaking and saying, hey. We need to be proactive. We need to be collaborative, and being very opinionated versus just going up. A lot of politicians would have gone up and given a talk about how AI is important and we're excited about its potential.
Speaker 2:Whereas Yeah. He's not even spending time on that. He's just kind of saying, hey, we need to create this framework. We need to you know, and the positioning around, making it so that AI doesn't have ideological influence. Like, there was a lot of stuff in here that was sort of light jabs at, at sort of DeepSeek and and AI coming out of China.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yet another yet another line. I'm gonna try to remember what it was this morning around, he was sort of lightly firing shots at DeepSeek when he said, remember the old Silicon Valley adage? If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. And so I read I read into that as him saying, yeah. DeepSeek is free, but this is also a strategy that China has used across telecommunications infrastructure, social media, drones.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, we've sort of, Timu. Right? Like, we've seen this pattern where Chinese companies will underprice goods to to make it impossible to compete. And, yeah, there's a bunch of good arguments for, you know, deep sea, you know, fully open sourcing and making it freely available and lowering the cost of, you know, inference and intelligence.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, like, I'm glad that he's sort of getting people thinking about, you know, understanding the true costs of, something. If something's free, there may be hidden costs, and there's certainly, you know, there certainly is hidden costs in in DGI. Right? Right? Consumers got consumers got cheap drones, but then our entire country got dependent on, you know, a technology that that's controlled by an adversary.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, I just I thought this was fantastic. It's worth, you know, listening to in full. And, yeah, it's just great. It's great to have, you know, a vice president who I feel like represents our industry. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. I don't I don't remember any any of the narrative. I don't remember seeing Kamala talk ever about AI. You remember she put out those sort of, like, sort of 10 commandment style post of, like, her policy, and there was a mention of, like, protecting, you know, Americans from cryptocurrency, but I can't recall anything related to do with, you know, AI.
Speaker 1:Which is odd because she was, like, buddies with the Andreessen folks and, like, from California. Like, she should have been very much, you know, embedded in tech. She certainly had those, connections, and those doors were open. But, yeah, she she never really took it as a, as a cause for her campaign. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, you know, maybe maybe that wouldn't have helped, but, it certainly would have been cool to see since she is from California and has deep ties to Silicon Valley. Anyway, let's move on to Yoni over at Slow Ventures. He says, today, we're launching the Slow Ventures creator fund, a $63,000,000 fund to back ambitious creator entrepreneurs building businesses for their audiences. Let's raise ring the size gong, folks. Love to hear a $63,000,000 fund.
Speaker 1:This has institutional LPs. In a world where paid growth doesn't work and trust distribution and audience are everything, the playbook to build a company completely inverts rather than building a product and then inorganically finding, paying for an audience. The next generation of great consumer brands will organically find an audience and then build a product. And I couldn't agree more. We've seen this, like, all the great like, so many of these new companies have come out.
Speaker 1:Mr. Beast with Feastables, Doug D'Muro with Cars and Bids. There's been a whole host of these, companies, that have been built on the back of a large creator, and, and I think it's a good strategy. It's a little bit odd. Sometimes you see the the the the create like, the company is built, and then they try and become a creator after the fact, and it doesn't quite work out.
Speaker 1:But for these folks that are really, you you know, generational talents in, in content creation, oftentimes, they have businesses that they that they can launch, but they need a lot of help. They need capital. They need management. They need operators. Doug DeMiro Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is only CEO of Cars and Bids for, I think, like, a couple months or maybe, like, a year. And then he stepped back and he was like, I'm never doing that again. I love what I do. I just wanna review cars. I'm so glad we have a CEO.
Speaker 1:But I I love that model, and I think that's really interesting. And, I've been a fan of Cars and Bids, and I think it's a great case study here. So I don't know if you have any takes, but I can read
Speaker 2:more of their post
Speaker 1:if you'd like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, we should read into the post, but I was, fortunate to get a kind of a front row seat into them building this fund. Megan Lytecap over at SLOW is a woman, is that basically the g you know, the primary, face of the fund of the GP. She had her own post on it, which is great and and own point of view. But I think I met Megan at this point a couple years ago.
Speaker 2:In the early days of this this fund, they had made a handful of investments. They were being really selective, in trying to prove out this thesis. And so this is a fund one, but they've been making these investments to date and, have come at it from a a really unique lens. And I really do think that, you know, we've seen some venture investors, you know, make investments into creators. Doug Demuro and Cars and Bids was more of, like, how they're more of, like, a media focused fund.
Speaker 2:I it's Churn and Group that did that. So, like Yeah. They're notorious. Yeah. They're they're notorious.
Speaker 2:That was, like, more of a later stage investment. But, you know, there's there's tons of
Speaker 1:great Dodinke too. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so they and I think they were involved with Barstool at one point. Like, they they they they've had, like, sort of that modern media playbook. But what Slow is trying to do here is is find these creators early when they're showing signs of potential. And the cool thing is usually, like, user engagement and love and, you know, there's a lot of metrics and content creation that that typically don't exist in startups for some amount of time.
Speaker 2:And so Yep. It is possible to find these people early before they've ever really monetized. You know, maybe they're monetizing a little bit with ads or through AdSense, you know, x creator payouts, that kind of thing. But, you know, what I like about this fund is it's it's, a lot of people would say, like, oh, you're gonna back a lot of creators that, you know, maybe just end up building small businesses. And maybe it's like a 2 to $5,000,000 a year business, and you can't generate a venture return like that.
Speaker 2:I would argue that they will probably have like, the way that they structure these is basically like a creator hold co model to my knowledge. So they're, like, investing in that creator's media business and then everything else that they do. And the cool thing about this is, like, creator media companies are, like, sort of default profitable. Typically, their costs are low, and they actually make money. And so if this is a $60,000,000 fund, you know, a little over, you know, $12,000,000 is basically going to management fees, you can imagine.
Speaker 2:And so they have, like, almost $50,000,000 to deploy into deals. If they back fifty fifty creators each with a million dollar check, they're in a position where if they get a bunch of base hits, right, creators that turn that 1,000,000 into, like, a $5,000,000 revenue business, they'll make that money back. But then if you find one, you know, truly, tier one creator like a Mr. Beast or a Dude Perfect or any of these types of creators that can really, that can really break out and become global brands, like, you paid back the whole you'll end up paying back the whole fund by an order of magnitude. And so they're they're able to bring this sort of risk capital to an asset class, like this sort of or type of business that historically has just had zero access to capital.
Speaker 2:And so I think this, this is gonna create a bunch of you know, we're we're, I've been talking with a a creator, for the past month or so that is a perfect candidate for this. He has he's getting hundreds of millions of views already. He's super talented, but there's quite a lot of equipment that he wants to sort of purchase in order to take his, you know, operation to the next level. And so he's actually a good candidate for this because he's like, if I had a million dollars, I'd spend it on this machine, this machine, this facility, things like that, and be able to really 10 x his, operation. And so super excited to connect, you know, start connecting more creators to slow, and I'm sure we'll end up covering a bunch of them, on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's been this, drumbeat for a while of, like, why is there no y Combinator for creators? And, my take was always, well, you can get started just with your phone. Uploading to YouTube's free, and if you really have incredible talent, you'll be able to bootstrap that up very quickly with no money. The story of Arac is a good example where he started with basically nothing and went super viral doing all these Logan Paul stunts.
Speaker 1:He bought Logan Paul's couch, and he was able to use you know, his startup capital was, like, $60,000 or something. It was like bank loans and credit card debt. There's not really the nature of, okay. I'm gonna start a YouTube channel or a podcast. I need a million dollars.
Speaker 1:But for a lot of those folks, they start monetizing with ads. And, of course, if they're getting paid a fixed fee for to run some ads, they're capturing some of the value. Then now some of the later, like, the athletic greens companies, they've given, you know, a, a distribution for the the entire LTV of the customer you bring in. So a creator converts a customer. They get a check every single month if that if that customer that converts keeps buying.
Speaker 1:And so you can build up a really big book of business on this referral business. But ultimately, you're still giving half of the value even if it's a fair deal to the company. And so bringing that organization inside owning the equity, is obviously a great way in certain cases if you're truly aligned with that business. And that was the certainly the case with Doug DeMuro. He could have partnered with a Bring a Trailer, but he would never have captured as much value as he did by building the new platform and then seeding it.
Speaker 1:And it was a unique opportunity because launching a marketplace is really hard to seed. But once you get it up and running, it's pretty self sustaining. And so he was able to convert his millions of followers, like, boom, send him over there, and then get the flywheel going, and now it's a going concern. And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, that that example specifically is everybody that loves cars as goes on bring a trailer fairly frequently to Yeah. Whether they're shopping or just, you know, window shopping or just interested in looking at the market and comping the cars that they have. And everybody universally has always said, I should just build another version of Bring a Trailer because you look on it and you're like, the design sucks. Like, that just interface sucks. There's so many things you could do better with it.
Speaker 2:And so Doug was a Doug is one of the few people on earth that has a large enough audience in cars to actually kick start a marketplace because it's it's finding that supply and demand, and so really unique opportunity for him. And there's a bunch of other people out there. And I think he took the right approach too in the sort of long term thinking of, hey. I'm gonna try to focus on getting billions of views first.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then once I have this sort of established base, then start launching. You know? And you
Speaker 1:can imagine think about these creators, it's like, yeah, they they they might have good cash flowing businesses, but they still might not be in a place to say, you know what? I'm gonna put a million dollars at risk, hire a CEO and a couple software developers, and actually build a product that may or may not work. That that can be a significant cost. And and this is perfect for the slow model where someone comes in and they give you the cash to underwrite the initial, r and d, which is exactly what venture should be doing.
Speaker 2:But the other Let's stay on cars and
Speaker 1:move to Porsche soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the the only the the only other thing I mentioned is this position slow as the ability to get the first look of any businesses spin out of these creative hold. So they can be an investor in the sort of HoldCo. A new company gets created, and they can be, you know, the first check into that or or participant in that individual company. And that's sometimes where a lot of the value will actually accrue to is the individual versus, like, the media operation.
Speaker 1:Totally. Well, let's stay on cars and cars and bids and go over to Porsche. We have a post here from Che Baus. Porsche will go back to its roots and invest $800,000,000 on combustion engine design. It's basically walking away from the electric car.
Speaker 1:And, obviously, Porsche's been under a lot of pressure. Peep the Taycons have been losing a lot of value. The Mission e, I believe, is their next hypercar, and it has not been, the allocations have not been tight, not nearly as tight as the Alice Aston Martin Valkyrie, the Bugatti Tourbillon, the f 80 even. I think all of the f eighties have been allocated, and I've and I believe that, Porsche did kind of a stunt almost. They gave everyone that owned a Carrera GT, the 02/2003 to 02/2005 supercar.
Speaker 1:They gave them all new tires and did, like, a recall on the tires so that all the Carrera GT owners would come in, and they would be able to update their information, give them some real value because they said, hey. Look. Like, we messed up. We're gonna give you new tires. You're gonna want these new tires because they're expensive.
Speaker 1:Like, you you'll come in. Then we'll get your contact information and say, hey, you own a career GT. Maybe you own a nine eighteen too. Why don't you sign up for the Mission e and, or the Mission x? I I I can't even remember which one it is, but if they're electric hypercar.
Speaker 1:And I don't think it's been going well because the Carrera GT owner has the last truly analog supercar, and the last thing they want is some, you know, car that's probably gonna be undifferentiated from the Remac Nevera or the Yeah. Or the Pininfarina Battista. They all go zero to 60 in 1.8. Like, they all have, like, you know, cuts like a knife in terms of in in terms of steering, but, they just don't have that driver engagement and really that, like, high skill skill ceiling that comes from Yeah. Something like an analog supercar like the Carrera GT.
Speaker 1:But, Jordy, what's your take on Porsche? Good move for them?
Speaker 2:First off, thank you to Grit Colt GC for tagging us in this because I actually missed it. The the news came out a few days ago. But, you know, look, I was surprised to see this news, but obviously excited. I haven't been excited about, you know, what Porsche has been Porsche has been doing in, in the EV market. I actually drove a Taycan a few times last week, and it's a nice drive.
Speaker 2:It's very zippy. You're getting mostly that sort of port Porsche sort of quality and experience. But the big thing is, like, Porsche has been a in the manufacturer for for sort of enthusiasts, and, it's been in many ways the perfect sports car because it's one of the few cars in its price range. If you're just looking at, like, the nine eleven, the base Carrera or Carrera s, one of the few cars on Earth that you can buy, drive for a couple years and sell it at, like, a very, you know, a minimal loss. Right?
Speaker 2:It's a car that has had, enduring value due to the quality of the build and the silhouette and the sort of the timelessness of it. And, a lot of, you know, Porsche enthusiasts myself and owners have been worried about the trajectory that the brand is taking because they've been you know, they the, the GT, what what is it? The, g t g t four? The g t four. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say g t two. That's a different story. So the g t four, has already basically the g d four s had been discontinued in its current form. Yeah. So they're not making any more of those.
Speaker 2:They plan to make it some type of EV, which should be, you know, should be interesting. The you know, generally, this is just great to see because I think a lot of people have been worried, hey. Our best the best car manufacturers in the world for enthusiasts are based in Europe. Europe is putting this intense regulation, to sort of force the manufacturers to to apply with various, you know, sort of environmental, like, regulations. You'll see, you know, Lamborghini cannot post on x without putting these, like, crazy environmental disclaimers.
Speaker 2:And seeing what Europe has done to other innovative companies, the concern was what happens in in fifteen years is the entire enthusiast automotive, you know, world's gonna just be completely nerfed. And so a couple things now. One, it's cool to see Porsche realizing that there's still a market for combustion engine cars. I, you know, I think, like, the the biggest thing for the EV industry, what they need to figure out is around a depreciation. Nobody wants to buy a car for $250 and drive it for six months and have it be worth $150 like it or sorry, $150,000 It's just not, it it's the
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 2:appreciation to date has been too extreme. It's the same thing with Tesla's and and type, you know, icons. And the other thing that, you know, other interesting move that Porsche made recently is they announced some plans to invest in actual US production. Some people said it was, you know, tariff related, but I actually think they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall in Germany and realizing that, hey, bunch of our customer base is in America. We should probably build cars there.
Speaker 2:And, ultimately, that's, you know, good for America and good for, you know, car enthusiasts here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the other side is, like, they didn't fully abandon abandon the the manual combustion engine design. You know, the the nine eleven ST, is a very analog version of the nine eleven, comes with a manual transmission, and has been completely in demand and selling well above MSRP and, a phenomenally successful launch. And so I think that they see that, hey. If if our new hypercar is selling worse than our, you know, some random limited edition nine eleven ST, and they had a they had another one that was, manual before that, there's clearly still demand and how far that will go.
Speaker 1:And now there's questions about, you know, will, Ferrari or Lamborghini do something in the manual, space? You know, obviously, Lamborghini has been under the, same pressure, but they've been pushing back, staying with the v 12, the v eight. But everyone's been saying, oh, this will be the last one. This will be the last one. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ferrari's certainly been downsizing, but they still have some v twelves out there. And there's always been this debate about, oh, how much of the Formula One heritage can you pull in? You know, Formula One, one, they're running a 1.6 liter v six. A lot of that's due to emission regulations, but the times are remarkable. You look at the the Mercedes AMG one.
Speaker 1:That is an f one derived powertrain. It obviously puts up insane Nurburgring times. There's no question that you can get good results with that with that, combustion hybrid setup. And it and it does seem to be something people want because it's a special car, but the Mission e, Mission x electric, and the Taycons just weren't getting there. And a lot of that was just because of the the weight and the driving dynamics and, just a demand for a a solid engine note.
Speaker 1:So, you know, we've predicted it before. The the next Tesla Roadster naturally aspirated v 12 with a gated manual shifter. I think Elon's done with the electric stuff. Yeah. That period's over.
Speaker 1:He tried to do the, you know, environmentally responsible thing. He was shopping for it. Now, you know, it's time to let them rip. Time to give the Tesla an engine note.
Speaker 2:Two things happened. Biden didn't invite him to the EV, you know Yeah. American EV event. And then point now. Simultaneously, he saw the success of SpaceX using, you know, rocket fuel, and he said, hey.
Speaker 2:What if we made a a naturally aspirated, you know, v 12 with with SpaceX, you know, rocket how would that perform? Why don't we do that?
Speaker 1:That. Yeah. Exactly. I'd love to see that. Anyway, let's move on to some other luxury goods.
Speaker 1:We have a, Valentine's Day gift guide for everyone. Valentine's Day is coming up in two days. If you haven't gotten something, don't worry. We got a bunch of good picks. I'll run through some of these and get your take.
Speaker 1:Let's start with exquisite jewelry. Nothing says endless love like an extraordinary piece of jewelry. The world's top jewelers, Cartier, Harry Winston, Graff, and Bulgari, to name a few, offer masterpieces of of diamonds and rare gems that double as works of art. We recommend picking up the 68 carat Taylor Burton diamond. Actor Richard Burton famously secured this pear shaped diamond for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969 after initially losing it at auction to Cartier at a at 1,100,000.0 then around 7,000,000 today.
Speaker 1:It was the priciest gem ever auctioned at the time. Taylor wore it as a necklace to the nineteen seventy academy awards, and it remains one of history's most fabled romantic jewels. It it I I don't know. This is all before my time. I don't know that much about, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, but this bro was insane.
Speaker 1:Like, he just got the most insane gifts because you go down two bullet points and it's, Rome's house of Bulgari is renowned for bold romantic designs. Richard Burton showered Elizabeth Taylor with Bulgari treasures during their love affair from a 23.44 carat emerald brooch he gave her on their engagement day to a magnificent emerald and diamond necklace as a wedding present. He was just giving her 20 carat diamonds every six months.
Speaker 2:Okay. But, there's a whole backstory here, which is that De Beers and other sort of diamond, you know, companies in the diamond market would active actively work to do, like, early influencer marketing. And so they would work with liberties and say, hey. We're gonna give you this, you know, stone for free to give to your other, you know, celebrity, partner, and then they need to go to this event where they're gonna be photographed and run-in all the newspapers, or they're gonna be, you know, wearing it to some big, you know, magazine shoot that they have. So think about that this was like influencer marketing to kind of cultivate the image around diamonds, and they did this with they did this with engagement rings.
Speaker 2:Engagement rings, you know, have their own sort of history, but the the, there's a there's a very well documented sort of case studies around how the diamond industry, like, forced diamonds on America by using the original, you know, influencers, which were, you know, early, you know, Hollywood talent and things like that too. Yeah. And artists. I mean, so we have your
Speaker 1:Our last, pick for jewelry for this Valentine's Day is, of course, the Hope Diamond. It's a 45 carat blue diamond. And I know what you're thinking. I can't buy it. It's in the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2:But Everything's a price.
Speaker 1:But why why is the federal government sitting on this asset? You know, I is it are they owned by this the government? I don't even know. Maybe the Smithsonian's its own thing. But, anyway, call Doge.
Speaker 1:Let's get it off their balance sheet. Let's run an auction. Let's trim this thing down. Let's get this into the private sector.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:Let's fractionalize this.
Speaker 2:Are you You doubted you doubted yourself for a second, but it's
Speaker 1:not the Smithsonian's owned by the government?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So so so our government, while they're taxing us, is is just sitting on a a 45 carat blue diamond that they could offload on the private market. They could fractionalize it. Give me a share.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Blockchain.
Speaker 1:Put it on the blockchain. And then and then let some size lord pick it up for, you know, probably close to a billion dollars. And, you know, you're thinking, oh, NFTs. That's so degrading to this, you know, historical artifact, the hope diamond. But, look, the, Edward McLean gave it to his wife, Evelyn, and Evelyn was a party animal.
Speaker 1:She would put it on her dog and wear let the dog wear it on its collar at parties. Imagine you go to a party, and it's like, oh, yeah. The hostess, like, has this little dog running around. Oh, what's that on the dog's collar? Oh, it's a 45 carat diamond.
Speaker 1:Built different. You don't see people do that stuff like now now billionaires will be like, oh, I don't even have a dog. I can't even deal with it. It's I travel too much. Now it is just
Speaker 2:yeah. No. I'm a little bit I'm I'm mildly you know, we we take different sides here. I'm mildly against dog ownership until you have at least three kids.
Speaker 1:You gotta get the dogs. You gotta get the diamonds on the
Speaker 2:dogs. Yeah. People do. Like, putting putting watches on you can get kid sized, like, watches, which I think are great. And And it's also funny to just put your watch on, like, a three year old because they get so three year olds, like, two year olds, three year old Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Love watches. Like Yeah. Totally. So it's so human to just to love, you know, Swiss, timekeeping machines.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, maybe you get a small dog and it fits in a purse, and so you wanna give your wife or girlfriend a purse this Valentine's Day. We recommend the Himalaya Birkin diamond edition. It was sold for $380,000 at Christie's, in 2017. It has 18 karat white gold and diamond hardware.
Speaker 1:It's a world record price for a handbag. The model's rarity is no exaggeration. Hermes reportedly produces only one or two Himalayas per year due to the onerous dying process. Owning one is like owning a piece of fashion history as a Valentine's Day gift, a diamond encrusted Birkin telegraphs that your wife is one in a million just like the bag. So we recommend that.
Speaker 1:You could also go So to
Speaker 2:me, this is Yeah. Just real quick. This kind of shocking that the most expensive handbag is under half a million dollars.
Speaker 1:That was the most one the the most expensive auctioned, there is a more expensive handbag. And whenever somebody says, oh, Hermes Birkin bags are so fancy, I always say, hey. You gotta step it up. You gotta go to the thousand and 1 nights diamond purse, which is valued around 3,800,000.0. And so you're right.
Speaker 1:You're right. Now you're in, like, real territory. So that's,
Speaker 2:like, a lot. Still 4,500
Speaker 1:diamonds on it.
Speaker 2:That's great. I'm glad to hear that. But still, if you compare the Hermes Birkin to Yeah. You know, some type of, you know, piece unique, you know, Patek. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Patek is selling for $30,000,000, and then that Mez Perkin equivalent is is only half a million you know, less than half a million dollars to me. That screams buy, buy, buy on the Birkin because
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:They're not making they're they're only making a couple Himalayas a year. Yeah. And post ASI, every every, you know, every woman in America is gonna want one of these.
Speaker 1:I I completely agree. I I I at 380 k, they're giving it away. And so you could also go with a custom Birkin. You know, this this article recommends, using rare white alligator skin and, putting her initials in diamonds on it. Really subtle.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:It's the pinnacle of arm candy. It shows that when it comes to her, no luxury is too great. And so then
Speaker 2:You'll you'll appreciate this. You'll appreciate this story. A, someone pretty close to me that that will go unnamed, was telling me the other day that they were going to this, this Golden Goose store, the the Italian footwear manufacturer, or brand. And he he he was telling me, like, yeah. They they keep, every time I go there, like, the entire staff, like, stops what they're doing, and they're, like, pour me champagne and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And, like, it's so weird, but they they invited me to, like, their fashion show in Milan. Like, I'm just like and then and they give me, like, every time I'm there, they just give me stuff for free. And, and I was like, yeah. Like, sorry. Like, that does that doesn't make sense at all.
Speaker 2:Like like, how much have you spent at the store? And he's like, well, I spent, like, more than a hundred thousand dollars. Like, you know, a hundred 6 figures on on shoes. Yeah. If you go to the shoe store that that you, you know, spend, somebody's, you know, lifetime earnings on in, in the third world, yeah, they're gonna roll out the red carpet a little bit.
Speaker 2:But I don't think you can walk in off the street and get a custom Birkin no matter how much you're willing to pay. You gotta really, Yeah.
Speaker 1:Work your way up.
Speaker 2:Run it out.
Speaker 1:And so yeah. I mean, maybe maybe this is the first big Valentine's Day for you, but start putting in the work now. Makes sense. Let's move to automobiles, cars. What car should you gift to your your significant other, your wife, your girlfriend on Valentine's Day?
Speaker 1:We got some recommendations here, and then I wanna hear some recommendations from off the top of your head, Jordy. First up, the Rolls Royce Don, the seductive drop head. It's a gorgeous four seat convertible often described as the most romantic Rolls Royce. In fact, Rolls Royce said it was created to deliver the world's most social seductive open top motoring experience and to attract a new breed of owners, including dynamic win women drawn to its contemporary glamour. With a whisper of quiet v 12 engine and a silk smooth ride, a dawn provides sunset drives in opulent comfort.
Speaker 1:As a gift, one might commission a bespoke collection dawn in her favorite color with a personalized coach line, perhaps her name or a loving message hand printed along the side. The interior can be truly one off. Think ivory leather embroidered with roses, starlight headliner LEDs mimicking the night sky of your wedding date, and even engraved champagne flutes in a hidden console. The Rolls Royce the Rolls Royce ethos is built to order, so no two dons need be alike. Handing her the keys presented in a lacquered box to a custom Rolls Royce don tells her that every journey with her will be an occasion.
Speaker 1:So can't recommend a Rolls Royce Dawn enough. There's a couple other options here, the Bentley Continental GT, which has w 12 engine. And you could also go with an exotic sports cars with a feminine twist, the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster Zago edition, only 10 made, or the Aston Martin Victor, it's a one of one bespoke car. And so if she's a racing enthusiast, she might love those.
Speaker 2:There's an argument that the Bentley Continental GT is the best touring car of all time. It's simply it's fast. It's fun. It's elegant. It's versatile.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:drive it.
Speaker 2:You can drive it. She can drive it. The interior is insane. They actually age, you know, surprisingly well for being, you know, you can look you can look up some of these cars and find them with with fairly high miles. So they do they do have some staying power, but the build quality is insane.
Speaker 2:The brand is timeless. You can drive it to date night. You can take it on a road trip. You can go out in the desert on the way to Vegas and do donuts in it. It's truly you can do it all.
Speaker 2:You can pile all your boys into it. I this car is is, pretty high, towards the top of my list. I can't wait to get one personally, but, again, it's a great it's a great option for your significant other. If you're a high t technology brother that's giving this to your significant other, you likely will end up driving it quite a bit yourself. And so it's almost like giving a gift back to yourself.
Speaker 2:The other thing I would do here, if you're, you know, if you're if you're buying a gift and you wanna stay under that hundred thousand dollar range, I recommend a, a two door vintage g wagon. I've spent a bunch of, you know, I've owned, you know, couple g wagons. I'm obviously a big fan of a fan of of the sort of model. Such a timeless car. You can pick one up for, like, 50 to 60 k.
Speaker 2:They look incredible. They're great to just, like, pile in and go to the beach, but you can also they also look good around the city. They're just such a versatile car, and I think it's a great car for driving to a wander, parking it at your second home. It works in Miami. It works in LA.
Speaker 2:NSF, you're gonna stand out a little bit, but, you know, there's you know, if you need a
Speaker 1:With another two door
Speaker 2:option, that
Speaker 1:might be good. Little bit higher price, you could do what, Travis Scott did for Kylie Jenner. He got her a $1,400,000 LaFerrari.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Gift. So always always options for every price range with this shoe.
Speaker 2:And and with that one Yeah. That one to be clear, Travis was clearly thinking, I don't wanna just get my girlfriend a car or a gift. I wanna get her an investment. Kylie's probably she held on to that thing. She's way up on it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And, it just goes to show that, you know, Technology Brothers, you wanna optimize yields, optimize investments. If this is your giving a gift for your wife, it's gonna stay on the family balance sheet. So, you know, buy something investable, I think, is a great option.
Speaker 1:Let's go to what else do we have here? There's there's a bunch of good ones here. There's so many good ones.
Speaker 2:And this is mostly
Speaker 1:this one. Private jet, custom private jet, the ultimate Valentine's Day gift. Gonna impress your wife, gonna impress your girlfriend. And it's been done before. Mukesh Ambani, one of Asia's richest men, gifted his wife, Nida, an Airbus a three nineteen corporate jet for her birthday fitted with a plush interior beyond first class.
Speaker 1:The price tag was around $60,000,000. This airborne palace featured an office cabin seating areas with game consoles and satellite TV, a master bedroom, and even a sky bar with mood lighting, all customized in this taste. For your Valentine, you might imagine a jet out outfitted as her ideal home in the sky, perhaps a walk in closet for her travel wardrobe, a spa room for mid flight massages, and her favorite art on the walls. One could even theme the interior, say, model it after the Orient Express train or an eighteenth century French boudoir. If that wins the lights off
Speaker 2:all comes down to this one thing. A lot of people like gifting, you know, a second or third or tenth home to a significant other. Yes. But what I always say, you can sleep in a plane. You can't fly a house.
Speaker 2:And this situation, he's giving her the experience of a vacation home in many ways, yet it doubles as this incredible utility of being able to take you anywhere you want in the world without even needing to you know, if it's an Airbus, you're not even having to stop often. You're just doing directs everywhere. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so
Speaker 2:And as a cop.
Speaker 1:If you're looking for something in the 7 figure range, you know, LaFerrari, you can't go wrong. In the 8 figure range, now we're talking Airbus a three nineteen. But what about the 9 figure range? And so that's the real question I'm sure everyone's been waiting. And because they got maybe 9 figures burning a hole in their pocket, close to a billion dollars you wanna spend on this Valentine's Day gift.
Speaker 1:And, no better example to look towards than the Taj Mahal, which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built for built this ivory white marble mausoleum in the seventeenth century as a monument of love for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had passed away. It took twenty two years, twenty thousand workers, and in today's terms is estimated to have cost $827,000,000 to erect the sublime structure. So, I mean, if you have the money laying around, you don't wanna get caught. Hey. Why didn't you build me something equivalent to the Taj Mahal?
Speaker 1:I thought I thought this was going well. I thought we were in a good relationship. What's going on?
Speaker 2:Probably ground up. Day. And one of our, one of our listeners left a review. He he has a luxury home company in Southern California. You might as well, you know, build the most expensive home in California.
Speaker 2:Build a billion dollar home. You know? I think Mark Andreessen still has a record for most expensive home ever purchased. But if you had a billion dollar budget in Southern California, you could do some some real some real damage.
Speaker 1:You could definitely outdo it. Well, let's move on. Hopefully, that was helpful to the audience.
Speaker 2:Try to get
Speaker 1:practical advice for the
Speaker 2:for the folks listening. I feel like the best service that we can do is just remind people that it's Valentine's Day on Friday. Remind them again tomorrow. Remind them again Friday. And, just, yeah, go above and beyond.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the thought that counts, and so try and build something equivalent to the Taj Mahal.
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:Because that will
Speaker 2:be It's also a good last minute it's also a good last minute gift because, like, you kinda just need even if you just had, like you know, you could scratch out you could scratch out a card and be like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hey. I love you so much. You're the most important, you know, person in my life. I don't know what my life would be like without you, by the way. I'm getting you I I'm giving you a billion dollar budget to conduct you know, to build your dream home, like,
Speaker 1:right here. Not a dream home. The Taj Mahal was a mausoleum. You will only enjoy this in the afterlife. That's what it was for.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say I was gonna say, you know
Speaker 1:Pretty dark.
Speaker 2:Like, on that note, I expect that in the future, people will say, I wanna be buried in space, strap me to a rocket, and just send me into the atmosphere. And so if you went to Elon and you said, hey. I got a billion dollars. I wanna be I wanna be sent in a coffin, deep into outer space. I bet you you can make that happen, especially as launch costs are dropping, you know, substantially.
Speaker 1:That's actually one of the options here we didn't touch on. Virgin Galactic for a while was offering a ticket to space for 450,000 per seat. Blue Origin offers a similar experience on its new Shepard rocket. There's zero gravity airplanes that you can rent, so lots of options there. But let's move on to an op ed in Pirate Wires, one of the greatest journalists out, journalistic outlets in the world run by Mike Solana.
Speaker 1:Last year's 2024 journalist of the year, Mike Solana. And he has an op ed here from Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga. He says, founders, leave Delaware while you still can. Its activist courts block founders from controlling their own companies. If you're a founder, run, don't walk to a friendly or state.
Speaker 1:We've been seeing this with, Tesla and Elon moving his companies to Texas. Zuck's thinking about going to Texas. There's a lot of people that are Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of Nevada. And this piece
Speaker 1:kind of explains, you know, how seriously you should take that. Let's read through some of it, and then I'll get your reaction, Jordy. He says, I experienced this firsthand at Zynga. Now the industry is starting to catch on. For the last century, Delaware has been the default incorporating place for businesses with 66% of the Fortune 580% of twenty twenty four IPOs being Delaware based.
Speaker 1:Businesses incorporated in Delaware account for nearly a third of the state's revenue. Well, we, well, we will say it used to be a third. Delaware's primary draw predictability. Its court of chancery is a non jury trial court, meaning that chancellors, judges who are experts in corporate law decide cases unilaterally. The court's lack of juries and and century of case law precedent are meant to give businesses a clear and consistent applied legal framework.
Speaker 1:But Delaware's reputation as the go to state for incorporation has been eroding for the past few decades, starting with its 1985 Smith versus Van Gorkum decision when it found that directors can be held personally liable for their decisions. And since former legal aid society activist attorney Kathleen McCormick took over the court in 2021 after being appointed as chancellor. Its rulings have been at times egregiously hostile to founders. It was McCormick who who refused Tesla's board approved attempt to reinstate Elon's fifty eight bill $56,000,000,000 pay package even after shareholders voted for it twice. And then that led Musk to reincorporate both Tesla and SpaceX in Tesla in in Texas, and Neuralink moved to Nevada.
Speaker 1:Chamath redirected incorporation of his last four companies to Nevada, and Ackman reincorporated Pershing Square in Nevada as well. TripAdvisor, TransPerfect, and Dell have all left. Brian Armstrong and Paul Gruel have recently railed against the state's activist as judges, and now Meta is planning on reincorporating against in in Texas. Why? Because at every turn, Delaware's activist court seems hell bent on kneecapping founders simply trying to do what they do best, build great companies and deliver value to shareholders.
Speaker 1:Jordy, what do you think?
Speaker 2:That's insane. I didn't know about Dell. I didn't know about TripAdvisor. I didn't know about Pershing Square, Brian Armstrong seems like the obvious one. But the tide's already shifting because, like, one of the issues is it actually matters quite a lot that, you know, the new company formation moving away from Delaware and, like, this is very easy.
Speaker 2:Right? Stripe can at any point roll out Nevada incorporation, Texas incorporation. In fact
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Bitch. I need to check, but, people don't really realize that these online incorporation tools already account for a very meaningful amount of incorporation. So, obviously, go to your lawyer and say, I wanna incorporate a company in, you know, Delaware or x, you know, x y z state. That's still possible. That will always be possible, but so much of formation activity is happening on LegalZoom, Stripe Atlas, and and a number of other, platforms.
Speaker 2:And so it's not hard for them to you know, they're already running, you know, spending a bunch of money acquiring customers. And if they just start to divert those new companies to Texas and Nevada, that will have a huge impact over time. But an even bigger impact in the present is these billion dollar companies that are, you know, or or asset managers that are saying, yeah. We're we're just gonna move over. And so it doesn't seem like the, the original moat that Delaware had around case law and, you know you know, not having sort of jury based decisions on some of these issues seems to have eroded extremely quickly.
Speaker 2:And as soon as you have, you know, the world's most famous entrepreneur in the present day, Elon Musk starting to say, like, he was you know, he's dealt with a ton of activist, you know, judge issues. And he has one of the biggest audiences of entrepreneur, the biggest audience of entrepreneurs in the whole world. Yeah. And he he you know, I I see this being something that Delaware probably has to react fairly quickly or their or their state budget is gonna be cut by, you know, by a third or or whatever the number actually is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating because when Elon did it, it was unclear if it's like, this is only the world's richest man's problem, and it would never be a problem for a smaller company. And it's just an Elon thing, and so he's gotta do this thing because he lives this bizarre life and is the CEO of five different companies and all this crazy stuff going on. But it seems like it is translating to the next generation of entrepreneurs, an order of magnitude down in terms of market cap or even higher in terms of Zuck.
Speaker 1:And and and Mark is saying, hey. This has been going on for a long time, and he shares this incredible anecdote. So if you don't know Mark, he founded Zynga. They had Farmville, this online gaming company. They were built on the back of Facebook.
Speaker 1:The company got really big, and he writes, no founder wants to take their company public. But when they do, while employees and investors are popping champagne, founders face a climb up Mount Everest while carrying a bunch of public investors on their back. And while founders finally succumb to IPO pressure, most realize that the only way their company will survive is by maintaining voting control. That's why Zynga went public in December 2011. We were forced to do so by a now changed SEC rule.
Speaker 1:That's probably the number of investors on the cap table. If you have too many investors on your cap table, you are forced to go public. Now there's ways to do roll ups and all sorts of different things to aggregate those. Yeah. I think the Jobs Act changed that.
Speaker 1:But still, there's a lot of pressure. I held on to a separate class of super voting stock, Mark says, knowing that control would be critical to Zynga's long term success. And if you think about the history of Zynga, a lot of people were like, oh, like, it was this flash of the pan, but he's gonna break down how he could have gone down differently if he had control Yeah. Which I think is a very interesting counterfactual. So he says in April 2012, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm, which caused Zynga to lose a third of our players in a day.
Speaker 1:And so it used to be these insane growth hacks on, on Facebook. Like, Spotify, when they launched, when you whenever you were listening to something, it would just share that to Facebook automatically. Imagine the distribution. Stuff would just go viral like crazy. You know, Instagram would automatically share to Twitter and automatically share to Facebook.
Speaker 1:Now no one does that. You can't you can't hack these, these social networks at all anymore. And so by June, Zynga's stock had dropped 50%. Soon after we were hit with lawsuits, companies almost always get sued after a big stock drop. There is, in fact, an entire industry of securities litigation firms that specialize in suing companies whenever their stock price drops significantly.
Speaker 1:Of course, because the stock goes down, this could be securities fraud. Why did it where was the CEO acting in short?
Speaker 2:Not even that. It's just a sheer value. They could just argue that the CEO is negligent. And if there's a hundred billion dollars on the line, I'm sure all times the companies just say, yeah. We're gonna settle this because it's not worth a knockout, drag out, you know, multiyear fight and distraction.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so he says the lawsuits compounded the issues, but they weren't the real problem. The real issue was navigating the whims of the Delaware court. They wanted us to prove that all major decisions at Zynga were driven by our independent directors, board members who weren't affiliated with the company's management, executives, or major shareholders because the court believed if independent directors approved a decision, it's more likely to align with shareholders. So despite being Zynga's largest shareholder, the lawsuits effectively sidelined me from key committees like compensation and m and a. So he couldn't buy companies anymore, couldn't decide the future of the company.
Speaker 1:The court also decided that directors I trusted knew well could not be considered independent because they either own too much stock or had past business dealings with me. Think about the big investors, the people on the board, the VCs. This led to the greatest missed opportunity in my career in late twenty twelve. I had a handshake deal with the CEO of Supercell, a Finnish developer, which has created some of the most successful mobile games of all time, Clash of Clans, to buy the company for $400,000,000. My board rejected the deal.
Speaker 1:We wanna see you manage what you've got first, they said. And when I asked my lawyer why I couldn't just use my voting control to push the deal through, he explained that to do so, I'd have to fire and replace my board, which would expose me to personal liability. Supercell went on to make $464,000,000 in pretax profit the next year. Eventually, Tencent took a majority stake in the company for $10,000,000,000. In effect, Delaware's court of chancery deprived our shareholders of something like a 21 x return.
Speaker 1:At the time, we were also getting inbound acquisition offers, but I wasn't allowed to weigh in on them. Even though I was the CEO and the biggest shareholder, our lawyers kept repeating. The Delaware court just doesn't like founder control. Eventually, I converted my voting shares to common since I couldn't exercise my control anyway, and I hoped I could gain more influence over my board. The Delaware court began turning against founders in the eighties.
Speaker 1:Since then, a string of rulings have challenged founders and headstrong CEO control, concentrating even more power in the hands of independent directors at their expense. There's the Revlon case, which is very informative. A 1986 case involving Revlon found that when a company is for sale, directors must take the highest bid even if its controller or founder is opposed. In in 02/2005, a judge railed against the CEO of Disney for unilaterally hiring and firing an executive within the span of a year, saying he'd enthroned himself as the omnipotent and infallible monarch of his personal magic kingdom, and magic kingdoms in capitals, which I think is so funny. In 2010, when Craig Newmark tried to defend Craigslist against minority stakeholder eBay, which had just launched a competing classified site, Newmark tried a poison pill and staggered board strategy.
Speaker 1:The court ruled Newmark had acted against shareholder interest. In 2016, the same judge who presided over the Zynga disaster forced TransPerfect, a highly profitable language translation company, to sell against its founder's wishes because the two cofounders were caught in a governance dispute. The company hated the decision so much that it reincorporated in Nevada. And so he goes on to rail against Cathy Kathleen McCormick, says Delaware law lawmakers are fighting back. And I
Speaker 2:don't know if I've I don't know if I've ever heard a story of a attempted attempted m and a that within that short order of time proved to just be the biggest missed opportunity. Imagine having the ability to buy a company for $400,000,000. Yep. Then the next year put up more than that in in net income, which is what Supercell did. I mean, that's just an insane situation and just, you know, you could imagine Zynga being a really big company today still.
Speaker 2:And so that's a situation where there's just, that that example is very interesting and and relevant because people could argue that Elon's pay package, like, primarily harms Elon and not the other shareholders. But in this situation, every Zynga shareholder suffered because they couldn't complete this, you know, deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is interesting is that Zynga eventually sold to take two for $12,000,000,000. It's like a pretty good outcome, I guess. Although it did take an extra decade. And and what's interesting is that I I remember when I was researching take two, a lot of the take two shareholders were really upset about the Zynga deal because they didn't they thought it was kind of a dog of a company, and they didn't think it was gonna be that additive to, to take two because, of course, take two owns, NBA two k, and then they also own GTA.
Speaker 1:And so if you think about the GTA, grand theft auto intellectual property, tons of ways to make that go further through mobile gaming and social gaming. But maybe they already owned a few mobile companies. Maybe it didn't make sense to buy, to pay $12,000,000,000 just to get a little bit more leverage on that. Anyway, let's move on. We got thirty minutes.
Speaker 1:Let's skip, gridlock transformer shortage. We'll do that tomorrow. Instead, let's move on to Elad Gill. He says index companies are amazing. This is a term he coined.
Speaker 1:He's a Coogan's law respecter. He says, Anduril is an index on defense. Coinbase is an index on crypto. NVIDIA indexes AI, Stripe indexes ecommerce, and SpaceX indexes space. He wrote about this five years ago.
Speaker 1:I love Amjad Masad chimes in. He says, Twitter is a mental illness index. But let's read about these index companies. I just wanna hear his thesis here. He says, sometimes there are markets that are clearly going to grow massively over time.
Speaker 1:For example, ecommerce, genomics, crypto are all markets which were clearly going to compound over time. It might have been a tough call tough to call the winners of each market early, but it was clear the markets themselves would grow. One lens through which to view companies is to ask what companies are an index of their underlying market. Index companies often take a cut of every transaction in their space or are a piece of infrastructure everyone in the market needs. For example, it's hard to launch something into space in the West without using SpaceX.
Speaker 1:These companies may be ways to participate in the market broadly without having to worry about who wins. And I think now on on the one hand, the, you know, with the Coinbase example, a lot of people were saying, well, like, you know, the the knock on Coinbase was like, why don't you just buy Bitcoin? Bitcoin also did very well, and they track very closely with each other. But I like this because, he he actually breaks it down and says, it needs to be a company that acts as infrastructure and takes a cut on whatever happens. And so you don't let you no longer need to think about which ecommerce company will win if you own Stripe.
Speaker 1:And you don't need to know you don't really need to care. Is it gonna be space tourism or satellite Internet or pharma drugs in space or moon landings? Like, you own SpaceX. You're getting a cut of that no matter what. And so I I like this framing.
Speaker 1:I I I I initially thought it was a little bit, a little bit weak on just just the differentiation between just, hey. It's a power law winner. Hey. It's a monopolistic company or it's a it's a big winner.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you did
Speaker 1:a good job.
Speaker 2:If you attract thousands of talented people and billions of dollars, you earn the right to go into a bunch of different product areas.
Speaker 1:Yep. I
Speaker 2:think one thing that one thing that's interesting is these these index companies typically early on have these sort of very asymmetrical risks. Right? So with Stripe, that could be the relationship with Shopify. Right? A huge amount of Stripe's GMV comes from Shopify.
Speaker 2:Shopify is a massive company now, and what happens if they, you know, get more into payments and start to wanna eat into Stripe's margin there? Coinbase, the risk on that business and why at some point it it traded down into the single digit billions despite doing billions of dollars in in earnings was that people thought crypto could get broadly banned. Right? There was a time that people thought, you know, this was not that long ago. Presidents and, you know, first ladies didn't have meme coins.
Speaker 2:Right? So there was a huge risk there. And Earl was always okay. You can build cool technology, but are you actually gonna be able to win contracts? And then you sort of hit these turning points in the business where everybody starts to generally sort of ignore whatever whatever that that early risk was because you're able to prove out, you know, prove out these these sort of theories and and actually get results.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. He, Anduril as an index on defense was not listed in the original blog post, but Alad Gil puts it at the top of his new post highlighting this thesis. And it's interesting because I don't think of Anduril as an index on defense in the sense that, different companies can win other programs without having to pay Anduril a toll. In fact, I kind of think Palantir is trying to position themselves more as the index in the sense that they have the AIP program.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna integrate with government data, you go through the AIP program. You're using their APIs. And and then and then Palantir potentially takes a cut of your business if that grows. But how how do you think it'll play out for Android?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a good point because Android is very different than Stripe, which is like we're gonna take 3% of, you know, a large amount of transactions online. Right? Like, that's that's more of an index, model. But the thing with the thing with Anduril is, Prime's historically have had tons of different programs. Right?
Speaker 2:They have a bunch of different products. And the reason that they're able to do that and the reason that they have motes is that the government wants to have vendor diversification, but it ends up trusting and preferring to use, you know, specific partners like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and these businesses like that. And so the argument that Anduril is an index company is a bunch of other people, you know, start companies in defense, build great technology, and then have to sell to Anduril because they can't figure out a way into the government. Right? And
Speaker 1:so Totally.
Speaker 2:The index is basically like we are it's almost like more thinking of a toll road style business where Anduril is almost like a toll road between r and d and the government. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fair. That's a good take.
Speaker 2:You can develop the coolest technology, but but you gotta get to
Speaker 1:Sell it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This group that we have a great relationship with.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that as a take, and I think there's also another angle where we could look back and say, oh, wow. Anduril really was an index company, in the sense that they have the lattice program. And if you think about the future of warfare where Anduril is providing a number of systems, drones, counter drones, CCA, collaborative combat aircraft, etcetera, but it's all networked through Lattice. Even the f 35 program that plugs into Lattice, and Anduril is taking a cut of that and acting as an index on that so that, hey.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It turns out that the future of warfare is more missiles or more drones or more Yeah. You know, aircraft carriers, but Anduril has a cut of all of that and and has, an index on all of that through the lattice program if it really takes off, which I'm obviously very bullish on. So, I think that's an interesting interesting frame, and I think a lot might have more information than we do on where and where things are going. So, I'd love to see him, highlight that, and I love a good coinage.
Speaker 1:And I I'm definitely gonna be using, index companies in the future. It's great. Anyway, let's move on to Chris. He says, Bamboo Labs is a prime example of how China continues to deindustrialize The United States. It dumps a well engineered technology at zero margin in a bid to bankrupt anyone that tries to compete.
Speaker 1:As long as this is the case, we're not gonna get the investment we need in industrial automation. And so, Harris, another friend of the show, says, request for startup US based Bamboo Labs for industrial automation, and he maps out some, examples. And, there's some debate here in the in the comments. What is the evidence of bamboo dumping? As far as I know, they're quite profitable.
Speaker 1:Where are you getting the profit data? So people are going back and forth on on how much subsidy is going into Bamboo Labs, but, this is something you've been talking about a lot about, Jory, with TikTok, and Timoo. TikTok was obviously spending a lot on ads and also spending a lot on creator monetization, paying people to post essentially, pumping a lot of money to get people on the platform. And then, Timoo's heavily subsidized. DJI's heavily subsidized early on.
Speaker 1:Now they're profitable. But, you know, we gotta watch for these things when they when they pop up because it can look really small, and it can look really good because you're like, hey. I'm getting this amazing stuff for free or cheap. I I I why would I ever source this from America?
Speaker 2:Everything has it.
Speaker 1:But then a decade later, we don't have the capabilities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everything has a hidden cost. Carrie, no interest, who's been on the show before, in a in a IRL, friend of ours. He has posted a lot about how China hasn't just created an environment that is good for, you know, creating production capacity and and industrial sort of might, through access to cheap labor and things like that. But the Chinese government just decided that we are going to heavily subsidize a number of key industries and make a ton of capital available to make us a dominant force in as many, in many of these industries as possible.
Speaker 2:And so it's not out of the question that an individual Chinese company, the the the sort of Chinese government can be a kingmaker and say, like, you are our winner in this category. We want you to go out into the world and get as much market share in this important category so that the world China is dependent on selling goods internationally. Right? Their entire economy and way of life is dependent on that. So they're gonna do everything in their power, which which is in their right to make sure that the world is stays dependent on Chinese goods.
Speaker 2:They do not wanna lose that. And so, The US
Speaker 1:Good industrial policy. Like, you know, you gotta give them credit. Like, they're winning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it's smart from their perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I I think it's totally fair that, you know, they're their own country. They're they're they have fits well within their right to do things that, you know, are are for their long term sort of national interest and benefits. So, overall, what that means, though, is The US can't compete purely on the gun though. It it can't be simply, oh, we have a bunch of really smart 25 year olds that are, you know, building cool technology.
Speaker 2:That we do need to get to a point where we have this effect right now where Doge is saying just cut government spending dramatically, but we actually need to increase government spending on specific key industries that are in the national interest. Otherwise, we won't have The US version of Bamboo Labs because it's not in the consumer or an SMBs interest to buy from a US company if the cost is four times higher. Right? And we see that with DJI right now. It's a very difficult sell to go to a consumer and say, hey.
Speaker 2:You could buy this DJI drone for a thousand dollars or $500. How would you like to buy an American made drone that's a worse product that costs $4,000? Nobody's gonna do that. Right? Like, people in the moment act in self interest.
Speaker 2:And so I do believe for the national interest, we need, you know, government, you know, you know, federal and state level investment in some of these key industries to allow new companies to emerge. And I think in the long term, the average American will benefit. So if we can claw back, you know, spending money on, you know, Sesame Street in Iraq and put some of that money towards, you know, the domestic drone industry or something like that, you know, I'd I'd like to see it.
Speaker 1:Be great. Let's stay on China and go to Beth. He says, he's sharing a clip from Sam Altman. Sam Altman was interviewed in France, and he's getting a ton of questions all over the place. It's it's a calm's nightmare that we can talk about.
Speaker 1:But, Sam said, we would like to work with China, and best Beth Jayzo says, that's a hard no for me, dog. And this interview was so funny to me because, Sam is simultaneously, like, getting hit with these questions about, like, you're getting trolled by Elon. He just threw the crying emoji on your last tweet. And then and then he'll be like, he'll, like, try to kind of, like, riff on that and be like, we're not for sale. Like, he's trolling.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not dealing with this. Like, this is like a joke thing that's, like, over here in the circus. But then simultaneously, he'll get another question from another reporter that's like that's like, you know, when are you adding PDF upload? Or, like, what a really serious question about AGI safety. And he'll need to kind of, like, pivot into, like, hey.
Speaker 1:Actually, like, I can take this question seriously, but this one I wanna react to a joke as. And it's like, oh, just a calms, you know, spaghetti. It's just so hard to to maintain, like, you know, what is the core message here? It's a really tough situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And who are on. Yeah. I mean, looking at the videos that Sam has been featured in in the last week, Typically, he's in this mindset of very methodical, slow speaking, highly selective with his words, and you can tell he's starting to get a little flustered on some of these issues. Right?
Speaker 2:He's clearly deeply annoyed. He's, you know, distracted. And, you know, in this case, we would like to work with China. There's a very good argument for that. Right?
Speaker 2:Totally. The same reason the same reason that China wants us using DeepSeek is the same reasons that we should want people in China using things
Speaker 1:like the same story with Google being over there. And if if we could bring an uncensored search engine to China, that would be very good for American values and and America's goals. If we could bring, you know, uncensored Facebook over there, that would be great. And the same thing with a less censored or uncensored LLM, if we could vend that into China, that would be amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's just never gonna happen. And it's one of these talking points that every tech CEO, always has to make saying, like, hey. We're open to it because they don't wanna get smacked. And if they are if they do have some partner over there, they don't wanna become a target or get hacked. Like, they don't wanna really, like, be too adversarial.
Speaker 1:So it's total, like, comms, PR, crisis PR speak, but then simultaneously, you gotta, like, riff with Elon because he's trolling you. Like, it's a wild scenario to be in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really, really tough situation. One thing one thing that's interesting one thing that's interesting. So China has figured out that they can ban our technology products, and we won't ban theirs.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:I just want I just want parity. Right? Yeah. If they're if they're, you know, if if they wanna inject deep seek into our economy, let us, you know, let us put, deep research into China. I want people to be like, so so what really did happen at Tiananmen Square and then get, like, this, like, you know, incredible book report on Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Tiananmen Square meme is so funny because it's so overblown at this point. I imagine that every single person in China actually knows the truth, and it's more just like this, like, victory for the CCP on a censorship front.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But there's things like that.
Speaker 1:Is that controversial? Like, crazy stuff happens all over the place. Like, I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's just American talking. There's there are things in The US that are known truths that people cannot talk about. And I think that that that is a kind of thing that probably happens with Tiananmen Square where Yeah. Sort of common knowledge and, you know, maybe kids don't understand it, but it's also important. Like, a part of this is the CCP wants kids in China.
Speaker 2:Ideally, they could hit age 20 years old before they ever hear about this because that's twenty years of getting indoctrinated into, you know, this sort of, way of life and and way of thinking. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let's stay on AI and go to Arpit. Arpit says AGI is when Nat Freeman stops hiring humans for his side quests. And then Kevin Kwok, who's been on the show before, says, you have it backwards. AGI is when the only thing left for us to do is work on Nat's side quests.
Speaker 1:So which side of the argument are you on?
Speaker 2:I think that's so one one thing about this debate that's interesting is is there's even if an AI can do something cheaper, like, humans are not perfectly rational. Right? Sometimes you wanna hire somebody to work in your office because that is more enjoyable even if somebody across the world could have technically the same output. Right? And so I think we're gonna I we are gonna hit a situation where people are are gonna be able to hire basically hire AI to do something or hire a human to do the same thing and a human that's leveraging AI, and it'll be really interesting dynamic to see what people choose.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's totally so
Speaker 1:I mean, just think about, like like, we I mean, Paci had a tweet about this saying that, like, does everyone have different models? Like, it's good, but it's not, like, anywhere near, like, world ending to me. Like, it seems fine. And I agree with that. And I think that just in terms of, like, AGI, like, the definitions are so odd.
Speaker 1:But in terms of, like, agentic gets something done, none of the systems are capable of, like, kind of the multimodal work that just a normal person can do. We joke about the PDF upload all the time. But if there's a job that requires making one phone call, going to a store, buying an item, writing a little bit of code, writing a doc, reading a PDF. Like, no AI can do that right now. There are great deep research tools, and then there are great code tools, and then there are great, you know, operator, and there are great, like, phone call automation.
Speaker 1:But there's nothing that's wired it all together in some way that that the AI can actually pick the tool for the job and really move between all of these for a really extended period of time. Obviously, we're getting there. We're working we're moving from, you know, the initial GPT four responses where, like, it thinks for a few seconds. Now it's thinking for a few minutes. It'll eventually be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I worked on it for a day, and it installed a bunch of software. It did a bunch of different things, and it called people. It did emails. It did all sorts of stuff. It waited for responses from people.
Speaker 1:But but just in terms of tooling, like, we're still pretty far away from that, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I talked I I made a post about the future of employment earlier that that seemed tonight. Aura farmer is gonna be a big one. AI right activists. AI is actually gonna pay humans to campaign for AI rights.
Speaker 2:Right? You're gonna you know, it's a better case coming from a human and to say, hey. We need to stand up for AI and make sure they're being treated fairly than the AI saying that. Right? So they need Yep.
Speaker 2:The AI will wanna embody, people in that way. DoorDasher that just turns the robot on and off again. So even when we have robots that can go on these side quests or do things in the real world, sometimes they're gonna break, and you'll probably have an app that basically says, hey. There's a robot near you that needs a little, you know, help. Can you please go, you know, get them off the ledge or something like that?
Speaker 2:And, so there's a bunch of exciting futures for, you know, and opportunities for for humans, that that.
Speaker 1:Well, let's keep moving on. Sean over at my first million says, out of 500,000,000 daily tweets, only five deserve your attention. Direct says, who's building this? The five best tweets delivered in a mail, designed in a newspaper format. Matt Swanson says, TBPN should do it.
Speaker 1:They love curating tweets and printing things out. I agree. I actually Sean used to have a newsletter called five, five daily tweets or something like that. It was I loved it. It it was amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he would just email you five tweets, and then there'd be a sponsored post in the middle. And it was just, like, five bangers that he enjoyed, and I loved it. And and I think that's a little bit of, like, the spiritual this this show is a little bit of the spiritual successor to that. If you wanna just, you know, either scroll through our feed, banger archive is another instantiation of that.
Speaker 1:And if you just wanna cut to the timeline, you can hear us talk about a couple good tweets from the day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You end up I mean, we're working on a newsletter that we'll be rolling out that'll feature some posts. We got banger archive. Banger archive's about the greatest post in history, so not necessarily topical.
Speaker 1:The day.
Speaker 2:To get some topical coverage as well. But, I love finding out ways to consume x content, you know, off of the x app. You know? Sometimes in I'm in my email. Right?
Speaker 2:Maybe I wanna get servers post there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everywhere.
Speaker 2:And curated.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Michael Mireflore, fan of the show. He was replying to us. I looked up his best post, and I found one that I liked. He says, leading contender for the worst word of the year, and his worst word of the year is orthogonal. And Ian says useful filter don't work for or with people who use the word orthogonal with any recurring frequency.
Speaker 1:And I have a hilarious story about this. First time I heard the word orthogonal used was in San Francisco, probably 2014 at a CTO summit. And the person that dropped orthogonal on me, Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, who went on to cofound OpenAI. He was very early, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm in the big leagues. Like, they're dropping words on me. I gotta look up in the dictionary. And it actually
Speaker 2:you know,
Speaker 1:the word had its use. It makes sense in a certain thing. It makes sense to kind of say, hey. This is a different angle. You're not orthogonal to the main idea or whatever.
Speaker 1:But it did become a very trendy word, and maybe it's played out now. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Well, there's another big o word that's hidden the the lexicon and the timeline, which is ontology. That's probably the hottest. And so so orthogonal, stock is dropping like a rock, but ontology is, really on the rise. So expect that word to get played out. If I could invest in ontology on public right now, I'd be I'd be, you know,
Speaker 1:slow big fan of of tautology, a tautological argument. It's self referential. Yeah. I gotta I gotta throw that in some sort of coinage one of these days, but let's move on to ramp. They're still talking about the Super Bowl ad, breaking it down.
Speaker 1:You can just do things, says Mitchell Bernstein, seven days. That's how long our team had to produce a super bowl ad with Saquon Barkley. This is the story. And so they dropped a four minute video here. You should go check it out and watch it.
Speaker 1:Lots of interesting takeaways for entrepreneurs. Obviously, you can apply a lot of these lessons to much smaller ad campaigns. Even just, hey. We went on ad quick. We have some small out of home buy, but we need to make the most of it, and we need to move fast, and it needs to make a statement.
Speaker 1:And what was the secret to ramp getting the value out of that Super Bowl ad? Well, they picked the sponsor really well. They got the guy to invest, so there was a good narrative. Saquon Barkley wound up winning the game, so they kind of had some risk reward upside. Obviously, the ad would have less impact if Saquon Barkley had five fumbles and ruined the game, but he didn't.
Speaker 1:He delivered, and so ramp looks great. And then also, they figured out how to, get, the the maximum amount of value out of this by getting everyone in their network to post about it. It became a little bit of a meme. There were a bunch of different versions of this thing. They really amplified it, and now they're doing breakdowns.
Speaker 1:And I think some of these breakdowns will be really helpful for entrepreneurs. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, it's almost unbelievable how quickly they turned it around, given given all the timelines. I mean, we heard about it. I think the day that they decided to do it, and then the team, every you know, a number of people from the team went heads down, and, ultimately, they got served up the you know, they they executed well on the ad front, but then the fact that Saquon and the team won in such a dominant fashion was just such a was just icing on the clay cake because the ad went over well. But if you're aligning your company in such a public way for the first time with an individual, there would have been a lot of people that would be saying, oh, it's the ramp curse.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, and and, like, you know, how people talk about the Drake curse. Like, any any
Speaker 1:Or the Madden curse. Like, when you're at the top of your game in football, you go on the cover of Madden, the video game, and then you have a terrible season. That was a big thing
Speaker 2:for a long time. So It's now the ramp blessing. Players are
Speaker 1:gonna be
Speaker 2:signing up to to be in the ramp ad, and, I'd love to see it.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Brody, fan of the show. He says, open VCsubsidized.com. He knows not to post links and he says types in Herman Miller, Aaron. And, if you haven't checked it out, VCsubsidized.com is a place to buy assets from, companies that are maybe going out of business, maybe raise too much money, maybe bought some nice stuff and wanna liquidate it. We love to support, brothers in the community that are building cool websites, cool things
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:Helping people out and go check it. You know,
Speaker 2:we love, you know we love domains. I heard that, Love.com just hit the mark. They all I did.
Speaker 1:I heard that too.
Speaker 2:Ryan Brian Breslow, had, was building a, like, a a conscious Amazon and Yeah. Pretty wound down or they're not using the domain anymore. I'm not really sure of the details, but, he should get love.com listed on VC subsidized because that
Speaker 1:is should. Great.
Speaker 2:That'd be
Speaker 1:a great place to auction it off. Well, we have some bittersweet news, from Gulfstream Aero. The final g six fifty has officially completed production. Since its inception, the g six fifty family set the standard that all others followed. Whew.
Speaker 1:That's,
Speaker 2:end of an era.
Speaker 1:That's the end of an era. Fortunately, the g 800 was designed for as its successor delivering increased performance, efficiency, comfort, and more. And so, you know, just some just some interesting news in the private jet world for
Speaker 2:I mean, look. Out there. This this clearly resonated. They're hitting almost a 5% like rate on
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You know, relatively small base, but, you know, this is an iconic plane, the Lone Ranger, one of our listeners constantly keeping us updated on, you know, his opinions on on the on the product line and and what you should be really looking for. So, yeah, and just thank you to Gulfstream. I mean, hard posting a link in this and still putting up a 5% like rate is is impressive, and you wouldn't expect anything less from from such an iconic company.
Speaker 1:I agree. Let's move on to Lewis. Lewis Lewis builds AI. He says hand on heart German customers are the worst. They're broke.
Speaker 1:They complain too much. They're entitled. They ask her invoices if they spend €3 considering geo blocking. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Absolute banger.
Speaker 1:One k likes small account, But, you know, we love some pro America content. We talk a lot of trash about the Germans. We got a lot of German fans. You know, we like to we like to chop it up with you guys. We don't talk trash about
Speaker 2:yeah. We don't talk trash about Germans. We we talked a little bit about their crumbling industrial base, and we hope that they get it back on track. I have some, German, family history. So, anyways, we want them to do well, but don't be annoying to, you know, our hardworking SaaS entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Pay full price. Ask for ask to get on the enterprise tier even if you're on this sort of prosumer plan. If you love the product, tell them 10 x the price, inspire me to grind harder, and let's get some let's get Lewis some new some new contracts.
Speaker 1:K. We got a lightning round coming up. We got five minutes left in the show. We're gonna rip through some of these bucket pulls, some of these bangers. I'm gonna read it.
Speaker 1:You're gonna give me a quick take, less than a minute, and then we'll move on. Manal says, chat, is it faux pas to use the term struggle bus in a professional setting? Jordy, what's your take?
Speaker 2:I say go for it. Sometimes you wanna tell people on a team to just get on the struggle bus and just head out into the desert. Just camp out. Go to Burning Man. Get on the struggle bus and go to Burning Man.
Speaker 2:That's my
Speaker 1:Yeah. Throwing in bizarre lingo, it can go over poorly, but take some risks in a professional setting might pay off massively. Let's go to Sean Yegerman. He says, I know posting this is a recipe for getting bombarded by DM, but my website development process has had some hiccups. I need help sort of fast.
Speaker 1:I'm on a limited budget. Any referral you think can help is really appreciated. So we just wanted to put this out to the fans. If you're a web developer, you know a web agency, get in touch with Sean. We'll put his info up on the screen.
Speaker 1:Sean Yaegerman. He's building a new protein bar company. He needs help with web design. No real comments there, but, good luck to him. Hope he finds a great web developer soon.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Patrick Dunlop. He says, real estate is hilarious because nowhere else other than Hyper Liquid can you get a five x leverage loan. Jordy, what's your take?
Speaker 2:He's referencing hyper liquid, which is a crypto exchange, and they have a they have a token, that is loved by degenerates. But, yeah, there's a bunch of degens in real estate. They like to go gig along. They like to lever up. They like to buy assets sometimes, you know, sell quick, sometimes hold for a generation, but, it's a fun game.
Speaker 2:And, and real estate is really about there's a bunch of really smart people in real estate, and then there's a bunch of golden retrievers, which we appreciate people that are, you know, hot, fun, and dumb, and just doing deals. And if you're and if you got enough energy and you really hit it hard, you can make a great career in that industry. You just gotta buy the right assets and, you know, hang on to them, make them better, maybe sell them at different points. But, anyways, go golden.
Speaker 1:Good luck out there. Let's go to Nathan. He says, first, take care of our community, then rebuild. Seriously considering going back to LA to help rebuild the city that raised me. Only 17 views.
Speaker 1:No likes. I wanted to highlight this because I think it's an amazing post. It's a inspirational post. What do you think, Jordy? Should he come back to LA?
Speaker 1:Help us rebuild?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know Nathan's situation, but, you know, clearly, looks like he grew up in the pal I think that's a shot of the Palisades or maybe it's Yeah. Maybe, it's hard it's kinda hard to tell, if it, could be Altadena as well. But no. I mean, there's a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 2:I mean, we we talked about the sort of industry around disaster recovery. There's a there's opportunities to help while, you know, building a career in that space, and, you know, LA certainly needs help right now. I haven't even actually seen a lot of the damage. I've just stayed away from it just given, you know, the contamination and the sort of, you know, all the stuff that's been off gassing. Been trying to, you know, stay as far away as possible.
Speaker 2:But, Yeah. I think it's a
Speaker 1:good We'd love to have you, Nathan. I'm sure LA will rebuild, but, you know, you seem like a talented builder. We'd love to have you here. Let's close out with this inspirational post from Remy. I look at my code and I feel love.
Speaker 1:Eventually, it will have thousands, perhaps millions of users, but for now, before it launches next week, I am the only one who sees it and knows its beauty. 33 views, two likes. Good luck with the launch, Remy. We're wishing you the best here from t VPN. Keep us posted.
Speaker 1:Let us know how the launch goes, and we will talk to you guys tomorrow. Leave us a review on, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review, and we'll read it on the show. And stay tuned for the next one. We'll come to you live tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:great day, everyone. Brothers. Have a great day. Cheers.