Speaker 1: You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, 08/14/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress Of finance, the capital Oh. Got intern.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He's headed back to school.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you about ramp.com really quick. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We gotta we gotta play the See You Again goodbye like he This passed is the this is the saying goodbye to our intern.
I want we yeah. We need an AI video of me and him in sports cars driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, and then we reach a fork in the road. Canada and Jordy goes to Malibu or something. But every time this song this song hits, it's a good one. It's a good one.
Anyway, we're very very sad to good say goodbye.
Speaker 2: End of an era, but the story is Ben not
Speaker 1: Macklin, one of the greatest to ever do it. Yeah. The story is not over. Anyway, there are a ton of stories that are not over. We're going to take you through a bunch of them.
First is that we received a renaissance painting in the mail from a company called Gamut. They posted a video. We can play their little clip of how they put this together. Very funny go to market strategy. It got our attention.
We opened it up. I'm like, what is this huge box that's addressed to us? Turns out it's an AI image of me and Jordy dressed as Renaissance medieval knights or something banging a gong. Got the horse in there. Got a bunch of different stuff.
I would go Ben Macklin stand up over this but it's a close second. It's a close second. Very disrespectful to to Ben Macklin's He's pop gone. He's gone. Anyway, can we play the video of the the we asked gamut agents to make renaissance portraits of a 130 startup founders, found the founder, sourced their photos, ordered the paintings, found their offices, mapped the delivery route.
Very cool workflow for go to market for attention. And and funny. They're having they're they're dressed up in costumes. They're having they're having fun filming this. I feel like we are entering a new era of startup launch video.
The vibe real meta is dead and this is unique and the next one we're gonna show you is unique too in my opinion. Now there are some drawbacks with this. You know, it it it will lose its luster if everyone in the world receives a Renaissance painting. It'll be a little bit it'll it'll get stale for Hagar Walls. I love it.
But this is great. I I I think this is so fun. And this goes back to Sam Blond when he was at, oh, was it Brex or he was working with Parker Conrad at Zenefits or something like that. He said that he was in in the go to market role. He was trying to get on the phone with companies and sell them either corporate cards or or or HR services at the time.
I forget which company he was with. But he would send a box of champagne, a bottle of champagne very nicely. And he said that the the return, the uptake on yeah. I'll hop on the phone with Sam People are
Speaker 2: saying he invented corporate gifting.
Speaker 1: Basically. I I I mean, that's the he's sort of the one that pushed it another notch up. Yeah. Obviously, corporate goes Preemptive. Back but Preemptive corporate gifting.
And I think he systematized it a little bit more than most people do. And Gamut seems to have built an agent that allows you to do just that. So congrats to the team over there on the Yeah.
Speaker 2: Fascinating piece of AI sloth. But when you put it when you bring it into the physical world, it it's it transcends. It becomes something more than slop.
Speaker 1: I want your review on this coinage that I heard from my cofounder Lucy. When AI slop is good, it's AI slap because it slaps. Specifically with regard to Suno songs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1: You're like, yeah. Not quite there. But anyway, you're I I want the production team to tell me if this video which is not AI slop slaps because it is an adaptation of obsession from Jerry Zhang over at Lemma y c f twenty five. What does f stand for?
Speaker 2: Fall.
Speaker 1: Fall twenty five. Oh, because they do quarterly now. Anyway, let's play this. Yeah. F.
Oh, they've got a box emails. Can we not talk about that right now? Okay. Sorry. It's the second time they texted me that.
Speaker 2: I'll be right back.
Speaker 1: What is it, dude? I'm busy.
Speaker 3: Okay. So What is it? I looked into your out of office emails and she sent out replies to all 30,000 emails here in
Speaker 1: you haven't seen obsession. I told her to only reply to emails when I'm out of But the production team has? Look, you know it's my job
Speaker 3: to surface these kinds of failures for you. And it may Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think
Speaker 2: it's in the same restaurant too.
Speaker 3: Sent 30,000 emails
Speaker 1: Looks very similar.
Speaker 3: About it. It's either a lack of guardrails or
Speaker 2: or Same
Speaker 3: I don't know, man. I'm gonna pull the traces and look into it for you.
Speaker 1: They nailed the production. Like, the lighting, cinematography I care about identical. On your behalf so so so so much. I don't think I could function without your prompts. Calling tools on my behalf without any human oversight?
Yes. Without any human oversight. Mika? Yeah. This is a little slow, so I'm gonna tell you about Railway.
Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite data to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes scale, scaling, monitoring, and security. It definitely has the pacing of a Hollywood film. Maybe we need to go back to the LiveGrill era.
Speaker 2: What what's the product? It's it it it basically monitors agents made by other companies.
Speaker 1: Jerry says agents are taking on real economic work as runs get longer, mistakes become expensive catastrophic at worst. Today, teams find out from user complaints or never. Monitoring tools only catch what you told them to watch for. So you set up the judges to you trace the issues yourself, but agents will always fail in ways you didn't predict. That's why we built Lemma.
Lemma understands what your agent is supposed to do so it surfaces failures you never defined automatically. So Lemma sits there, watches everything that goes on. Oh, there's something that seems really odd because it's basically taking the whole context of everything that's happening in the organization and saying, okay, well, you just sent out a 100,000 emails. Like, was that the right thing? You should probably flag this.
This seems like an an uptake in like you would see if you start seeing an insane amount of traffic on a specific product detail page on your e commerce site, it might Yeah. Be that Or coupon code. Or coupon code. It might be that something's going viral on this particular SKU. Maybe you need to buy more inventory.
In the best case, maybe you're being spammed or scammed in some way. Or maybe you accidentally priced your product at 1¢ instead of $1 and so or a $100 so people are buying it and you need to fix that. This will do that across the entire organization in theory. Production team, what do think about the the obsession knock off as startup launch video?
Speaker 3: I thought it was pretty good.
Speaker 1: Rave review. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3: It looks like the movie. Mike Mike disagreed maybe.
Speaker 1: Mike disagreed. Shot fired.
Speaker 2: Wrong side, Mike.
Speaker 1: Wrong lens? What do we got? I don't know. Take some shot.
Speaker 3: You said colors off.
Speaker 1: Oh, the colors off. Okay. Okay. Well, the experts have waited. So anyway No.
Speaker 2: I I mean, I can see a new meta of of startups just recreating iconic movie scenes Yeah. To promote their products. Yeah. But I don't know. Like
Speaker 1: if growing human tissue, you recreate Michael Bay's The Island to show. Just recreate the dystopian scenario that you're creating. No. And then be
Speaker 2: like, it's exactly like that.
Speaker 1: No. There is something to that where Obsession is a horror film. It's very scary. And so the the enemy of the product is shown like the lemma is the guy on the phone. In Obsession, basically there's this curse and the woman becomes obsessed with the man and the guy's friend calls him and says like, hey, your girlfriend is acting very very weird.
Something's going on. You need to break up with her. You need to rethink this. And so Lemma is the friend in this scenario. But it is a horror shot after all, so it does lead
Speaker 2: the woman is the agent.
Speaker 1: The woman is the
Speaker 2: the rail.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The the agent that has gone off
Speaker 2: the rails.
Speaker 1: Yes. And so there is a there is a little bit of like you leave with the feeling of a horror film which is so just on a generic brand experience side, I'm like, uh-uh. But that's kind of the emotion that they wanted to deliver. Right? Was like imagine Agent doing something really bad in your organization.
So not not an unreasonable not an unreasonable scenario. Anyway, there's there's debate between Corgi and on the Corgi becoming an issuer of the ETF business. Shields says, Wild that Corgi, the insurer, is in the ETF business. ETFs are mostly distribution plus branding. So if you can manufacture them cheaply, I get launching a ton and seeing what sticks and they really are spraying.
Here are some of them. Coffee energy drinks ETF, New York City companies ETF, beauty ETF, BNPL ETF. They have a gambling ETF, a surveillance ETF, a US war machine ETF, and lifestyle brands. They combine for $25,000 in gross fees, but they have a hit semiconductor photonics. It's 506,000,000 of the 914,000,000 Corgi AUM and generates $1,800,000 a year in gross fees.
That feels like really big scaling very quickly for a company that's as young as Corgi. So it seems like the product is working at this point. I don't know. People were people were going back and forth on like, is this a is this a pivot? We thought they were an insurance company, now they're an an ETF company.
But I don't know. Did you dig into any more of this story? Because Nico from Corgi did fire back.
Speaker 2: Nico fires back.
Speaker 1: What'd
Speaker 2: say? He says, you should never work with VCs who devote their time to dunking on startups on X. Taking money from Shield's fund is a hugely negative symbol for the startups who do that for this reason. He is bad for the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: That's And
Speaker 2: this is his behavior is a pattern of his.
Speaker 1: Wait. Was Shield dunking? It felt like he was saying just
Speaker 2: I don't think he was dunking.
Speaker 1: Of course I mean,
Speaker 2: I I I think that Shield has probably
Speaker 1: posted about GG. Fund is one of the most lucrative for Corgi. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think Shield has probably made other comments about historically and
Speaker 1: so Shots fired.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're I don't I don't I I think Shield is just genuinely very curious.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And Nico, I don't think likes the likes the attention.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Critique. So she said, I'm not sure why you are so defensive. I literally said the same thing as you, in my opinion, lunch launching a bunch of ETFs cheaply and seeing what sticks is a reasonable strategy if your costs are near zero. And Nico says, no.
It's a pattern of behavior. And rather than your own statements, you try to hide behind being imprecise or vague with your language selectively pointing out a bunch of new ETFs without traction yet and pointing out FDRX, lower AUM, while ignoring our unleveraged version FDRS, which has 90,000,000 of AUM, shows this is another dishonest, selectively vague post against us like your previous comments regarding our underwriting. So they're going back and forth and there's a whole the timeline's been in turmoil over Corgi for a while. They do the cafes. They get a lot of attention.
But in general, it does seem like they've broken through and it feels like there is a real product and insurance is a is a product that can actually grow and it's much less Yeah.
Speaker 2: Insurance and ETFs are pretty much all come down to marketing and distribution. Yeah. And so but yeah. But but yeah. Very feel like very different businesses to be in.
And so I wonder what I wonder what the thinking
Speaker 1: is. I I mean, for most business insurance, you can get you can get in trouble if you are if you have a lot of correlation across the portfolio of insurance policies and you're loaning to an industry that will face, a secular downtrend at the same time, like mortgage reinsurance, for example, was the big example during the financial crisis. But if you're writing a if you're writing a, like, a directors and officers insurance to a start up, it's hard to imagine a situation where there's a massive drawdown across the entire portfolio all simultaneously, at least, in my mind. I don't know. I don't know.
Because it's not like they're insuring against, like, startup like like, the market weakening and and startups going bankrupt. Like that like, if a startup goes bankrupt, they do stop paying their premiums, obviously. But it's not like there's a like like like an insurance broker has to pay out a settlement. That's a different thing. It would be the the the difference would be if you're doing like a ton of cybersecurity a ton of cybersecurity insurance and then all of a sudden there's way more cybersecurity attacks, which honestly in the AI era maybe that happens.
Maybe there are more cyber security incidents. There was the Trendsor incident recently and it does feel like there's an uptick of that. Obviously, the AI models are more capable than ever. There's open source models. And so you could see you could see more risk or or just different underwriting of cybersecurity policies in the modern era.
But
Speaker 2: Martin Scarelli says, I stand with Corgi.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: And Nico says, thanks, Martin. Fun fact. When I was in high school, my friends and I wrote you letters when you were locked up sending letters to prison. You had a huge impact to a to a generation of young entrepreneurs. And looks like Elizabeth Holmes also replied, it is amazing to see how many young hungry founders write.
I guess, write
Speaker 1: written anyone a letter who's been in prison. I've also just never written a letter at all. But, I mean, I don't I don't know. I I I send text messages and emails. I don't really write letters.
But there was one person in prison that I wanted to that I was like, oh, we should Yeah.
Speaker 2: My my memory of of processing Shkreli's whole Farmabro saga during that during that time which Yeah. I thought he seemed pretty entertaining.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Definitely a rascal.
Speaker 1: But And and and the actual like underlying elements of the case were sort of outside of the tech world because it was like a hedge fund issue and an accounting issue. I I I was interested in getting to the bottom of the Elizabeth Holmes story, but mostly mechanically, like how can you post on Twitter while you're in prison. That feels like the first right that they would take away. Otherwise, if you can post on Twitter, what? What's the punishment?
We're not really punishing people. No. Like, lock me up. Just don't take away my account. I gotta scroll.
But it does seem like there was an intermediary there and that was discovered pretty quickly and that was transparent. And there's a flow of emails that go back and forth. And so there was a delay. But it was an it was an interesting discussion nevertheless. But not not necessary.
There was also that very weird Tucker Carlson interview with SPF. You remember that? Where like he was able to do a like a sort of a podcast interview like over the phone. And I think that that is not okay within that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think he's got in trouble
Speaker 1: for it. I think I think SPF got in trouble with that. But even then, SPF has been trickling out tweets for the last few couple years, mostly taking victory laps on his on his startup portfolio and his investment strategy. He, of course, was an investor in Anthropic and is up like a bajillion dollars on that trade. Although, it the position was sold, think.
So it's it's more of like a fantasy football portfolio at this point. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experience is a new value with Cisco. Speaking of Anthropic, there is an article in the journal.
The information has been reporting on even Claude is in the dark about Daria Amade's wife and her influence at Anthropic. Cami Clark, started what she called a revolutionary porn company where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein, Keeps a low profile but is a key advisor to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could top trillions. And so this is so his wife has the actual lineage here was Dario mentioned that he was married, I believe to to on a Bloomberg podcast, I believe.
Speaker 2: That was recently?
Speaker 1: The circuit, I think. That was recently. But there was there was there was never public who this person was. And then I believe Corey Weinberg over at the information included Cammy Clark's name in a Dario profile that he published last week. And people were sort of like, oh, this is new information.
We haven't seen this. And of course, there's all the debates over, is this necessary? Is this like in the public interest? At what level of power does it make sense to report on someone's life? Obviously, a lot of people are like, yeah.
Keep my name out your mouth. Like, don't just don't report on don't report on my personal life. We can talk about my business, but my personal life is just annoying because now you need more security. Now you need more all all sorts of different things that can come up from these things. But lots of people are debating this on the timeline like, is is is Anthropic systemically important at this point?
Is it is it such an important company that it does merit this? And certainly, it met the the editorial criteria for The Wall Street Journal and the information who take this stuff pretty seriously. So Clark doesn't work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting front row while Dario Amade talks at events such as Davos or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings like Allen and Company Conference in Sun Valley. She acts as a sounding board and strategic advisor for Amade according to people close to the company. She also brought Anthropic, a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had dated as it was getting off the ground in early twenty twenty one, some of the people said.
Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark Online. There's one YouTube video of her pitching an earlier startup that's still up. She's on stage for about five or ten minutes and sort of gives a it's like a health company that she pitches. And it's a pretty good pretty good pitch. She has a couple of note cards and sort of goes through it, but that's the only thing that's really online anymore.
The pair married in 2022, apparently in Italy. But Amade's Wikipedia page didn't say he was married until this summer and doesn't say to whom. Searches for Dario Amade's wife on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amade, who helps run the company. Even Claude Anthropics AI chatbot responds to queries by saying Dario Amade's marital status doesn't seem to be clearly confirmed. That is extremely good because there's always this fear that when you're using an AI chatbot, the whatever you say will be baked into the next training run and that the personal details will get leaked into the into the model.
And so, like, if I'm saying something about Jordy, like, you could look up something about you and and it would just show up and leak in the model. So good like, I think that this is like there there there's the whole, like, you should you be more transparent question. But just in terms of actual, like removing personally identifiable information from data that goes into training runs. Obviously, if you work for the company as CEO, you probably have fully private. Don't train on anything I say ever.
But just just good that it didn't leak through the actual model. So The Wall Street Journal writes, as anthropic hurdles towards an IPO that could top 2,000,000,000,000 as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of the CEO at the forefront of the AI industry, a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public. Yes. That is 100% accurate. It's a remarkable rise for a woman who didn't graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage at age 20 to a man more than forty years older and once declared bankruptcy.
Her career included co founding a women focused quote free luxury porn company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in and started a quote women a social a women's social dieting app that morphed into a women's healthcare AI company. That was the video that I saw on YouTube. She made connections with powerful people including Schmidt whom she brought into Amadeus Orbit. The billionaire left his roles at Google and parent Alphabet in 2020. Oh, I didn't realize he was out in 2020.
And transitioned into investing in tech startups among other things. She also tried to persuade Schmidt to back a venture fund she would run with him to invest in Anthropic and other AI companies, although that didn't move forward. Claude, company's chatbot, is now the chief
Speaker 2: of Interesting interesting differentiated name for a fund. I think it was the mother of AGI.
Speaker 1: Mother of AGI. Extremely AGI pilled name for to for raising a fund in 2020. Not people not not many people were taking that term seriously. It is a it is a good name, mother of AGI fund. The goal was quote to be an elegant solution to formalize Cammy's involvement in Anthropic, Dario's company, and manage Eric's investment and invest in the AGI ecosystem.
But I don't think it ever went through. Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Almade and other cofounders, didn't support the plan according to people familiar with the matter and it didn't move forward by the end of the year. Associates said they recall seeing what looked like an engagement ring on Clark's hand and not long after, the couple wed in Italy. Clark, known for being social and outgoing, has interacted with politicians and investors on behalf of Amade, chatting with them and bringing them over to meet her bookish husband at conferences and events. There's also some interesting details in here about her relationship with Ivanka Trump at the Sun Valley Conference in July where she spent much of the week by her husband's side.
She had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner whom Amade had approached earlier in the year to invest. People familiar with the matter said. So a little bit of more nuance around the relationship between Anthropic and the administration. Obviously, the Department of War dust up was a big drama cycle earlier this year. There's already communication between the two or the the two entities to sort of, you know, maybe smooth things over.
The the interesting post that this made me think of, this whole conversation was from Patrick Collison back in March of March 11. And I don't remember what was going on March 11 but I imagine it was some open air drama. But he said there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. And we were joking there was like, why is no one writing hit pieces about Stripe? Because he's like because it's just like me and my brother running a really clean chip and no one really complains.
And there's never been a there's never been a coup and we just refuse to take the company public and Yeah. Just grow the
Speaker 2: business. Building payment rails.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We're Yeah. We put the payment rails in the bag, sir.
Speaker 2: Honestly, if if Stripe is as successful in the fullness of time as I think it will be Yeah. There will be probably insane online conspiracies Oh, about the Collisons.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Who are these two brothers?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Sort of a Hibernian conspiracy. The Hibernian, they're Irish. Barack Obama, part Irish. Right?
Goes pretty deep. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Deeper than I thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's when the company got started. Is that a coincidence? Who knows? Dig in.
Patrick Collison went on to say, as far as I can tell, this is substantially a math, a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others and this creates self reinforcing lock in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? I I would love to read about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture. We need a we need a banned PDF or or a tell all book.
The next Sebastian Malabai or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Or
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know. Who else who else can tell a great business story? Maybe we'll have to dig into it. There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. And so I took this at the time and sort of wrote a piece about this calling it like tall poppy syndrome coming to America.
Just this idea that the intention of the public is intensely focused on like the hottest company at the time and then all the eras get directed at that. And I think I think that's something that's happening at this point. I I said at the time years ago I was talking to an American venture capital about New Zealand and asked him about the startup community there. The country is beautiful, highly developed, democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable wealthy well governed societies.
Certainly worth visiting but could but could New Zealand produce a power law company one day? Like are we going to hear like we've seen with Spotify and there's been a number of other companies certainly in China they have a number of know Decacorns and Centacorns over there, huge companies. Will we ever see one out of New Zealand? It seems to have the recipe. And he said his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome.
Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked or socially cut down because they stand above the others. The metaphor should be obvious, but when you cut the tallest flowers in the field, the surface appears even. Anthropologists even call this leveling behavior in hunter gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked, discouraged from bragging, sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. There's nothing all that bad about a preference for humility.
America has long been suspicious of Lamborghini driving self promotional Instagram course hustlers and for good reason. They're usually selling overpriced junk food. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome leads to slower startup formation, fewer truly fewer truly scaled companies and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. America has never had this problem. And I don't think we're particularly close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon, but it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative intact.
And I think that's a little bit of what's happening right now. Will this affect the IPO? Will this affect the stock price? Like, probably not. But John Stokes was sort of laying out why he thinks this piece was worth writing.
He says, Counterpoint, it's vital and overdue. Anthropic laid itself laid out the stakes very publicly as follows, our product is a god and this is not an actual quote, but I guess this is like the vibe that he in particular
Speaker 2: picked It is up a pretty effective summary.
Speaker 1: He says our product, talking about Anthropic, is a godlike intelligence that will rule over you. See how our staff endows it with morality. We even deigned to consult the pope. Okay. So let's look at your morals, he says.
This crowd can screech around the object level like is the company making money, what are the margins, the more important details about risk as opposed to the the morals. But John Stokes says, by their own terms, they made morals and virtuous behavior the object level in the AI debate. That's literally Anthropic's whole frame. So why are the morals of the people who are giving AI its morals not fair game?
Speaker 2: Yeah. If anything, it it feels like it disrupts some of the brand positioning
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Around morality, makes that maybe less effective. Yeah. It is it is fascinating in my view that this kind of coverage didn't happen like a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But that's normal for the for the for the mainstream media. Like, Anthropic was not an interesting company to write about at the Wall Street Journal or the information even like last year. It was like a I mean, was a great Yeah.
Speaker 2: But but even like the images that are in the Wall Street Journal piece
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Are from February. Right? Where they're Yeah. Together. Yeah.
And you would think that somebody would have asked, who's this person that Daria's holding hands with? And then tried to get a little information and the internet was mostly scrubbed, but Yeah. You could just look up her name in the Epstein files Mhmm. Public federal database.
Speaker 1: It actually did hit the timeline. Someone was just digging through the the Epstein files in February and posted it but didn't make the actual connection which is very very very interesting. They were just like, here are all the crazy interactions that I found while digging through the files and this was one of them. That that the like the actual interaction. But they didn't piece it together fully.
It obviously the context of being in the journal is a very very different thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway. Anyways, probably overall mostly just bad for the AI industry overall.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Nick Carter sort of summed it up here. Said, remember if anthropic wins and closed source wins, these are the people that will get to write the morality rules for the entire planet. And so it maybe is worth interrogating morality seeing where if you agree with it, if if the with this stuff or not.
You know, this is this is the beauty of America. You you get to read the information, the freedom of the press, then decide where you sit on
Speaker 3: all of
Speaker 1: this. The in terms of how bad this is for the AI industry, it still feels like it ranks below data centers and below, like, ripping up old books. I I don't think this will get that much traction online, but I don't know. Like, the the like, there there is a whole class of, like, political commentators that are hyper fixated on, the Epstein class. And so like this could grow, but it feels like it's arm's distance enough.
It it it's not Dario. It's his wife. And it's not it's not her, you know, going to the island. It's her emailing him for fundraising that they didn't actually do a deal together. And so there's like a number of steps removed as opposed to with the other stories.
It's much more like this data center came to town and is dirty and I don't like it. And so you pay post a video of that and that's like much more direct. So of the pushback, this feels feels like it will it will rank lower, but I don't know. We'll we'll see where this goes. Obviously, it's tearing through tech today, but we'll see if this is something that has long term impact on the industry or anything like that.
Anyway, let's move on to something else. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And there's a story that I didn't even remember to put in the timeline, but it is related to to trading stocks publicly. South Korea is ordering new investors to take classes.
Did you see this? Woah. Okay. So in Korean
Speaker 2: the blade. Literally. This is a cultural pastime.
Speaker 1: This is crazy.
Speaker 2: You're gonna learn how to use leverage.
Speaker 1: Yes. Basically. There's so South Korean retail investors must now complete a week long course before
Speaker 2: Week long.
Speaker 1: A week long course before they can start trading in single stock funds as regulators tighten restrictions on products blamed for exacerbating wild swings in one of the world's most volatile stock markets. So the move follows an extraordinary boom and subsequent correction in South Korean equities. The KOSPI rose 76% in 2025 and then doubled again this year peaking at more than 9,300 points in June. Retail investors poured a net $70,000,000,000 into the market. And remember, South Korea is not nearly as big as America.
And so they were all yolo ing effectively into the AI driven rally like chip makers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. The rise coincided with government efforts to boost the market. Single stock leveraged ETFs in the two companies were introduced in late May allowing investors to magnify bets on Korea's semiconductor champions. Then at a press conference on June 8, President Lee Jae Myung said that the market was still quote somewhat undervalued despite having hit about 8,000 points. So you have the president of the country being like, we got room to run.
Now is a generational buying opportunity.
Speaker 2: I wonder I wonder if he'll also get into selling early access to his comments on the market.
Speaker 1: Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 2: It's just the new meta. A lot of people have been sort of disgusted and disappointed by that kind of behavior Yeah. Over here. Yeah. But maybe it's just the new normal.
Speaker 1: So the rally unraveled in July with the Cursor be falling 22% for its worst month since the global financial crisis. The finance ministry announced measures to limit access to leveraged ETFs. Many retail investors have suffered significant losses in single stock leveraged ETF craze and their perception of those products has changed. Investors bought Samsung and SK Hynix leveraged ETFs in late May and held them until mid July. They lost about half their money.
New investors in single stock leveraged ETFs must now complete at least one hour of simulated trading a day for five days. So it's not a forty hour course. It's one hour a day of simulated leverage trading for for five days straight. Then you will be allowed to trade on these platforms.
Speaker 2: So They also have mandatory military service. So now they have mandatory day trading.
Speaker 1: Mandatory everything.
Speaker 2: At the end at the end they go, that wasn't a simulation.
Speaker 1: You were trading the real market? Yeah. It's ender's game in Korea. You you just you just secured a generational bag. That was real money you were trading.
I wonder I wonder it'll be very interesting to look at the data from what the what the traders do in simulation versus reality. Like, do they take more risk because they know it's play money? Are they are they actually learning?
Speaker 2: When I'm on a when I'm in a racing simulator Mhmm. I do drive a bit different than when I'm actually on the track.
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3: We'll Presumably this would like teach the wrong Yeah. Instincts. Right? Because if you're just if you sit there
Speaker 2: No. Odd days of growth. Obviously obviously, they're trying to show people that if you are trading with leverage, you just lose a lot of money Yeah. Often.
Speaker 1: You're just going to get wiped out. So you're like, okay, I I got wiped out on day three. Yeah. Now I'm not going get wiped out when I go into the real market.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't you want to like instill like you should just go, you should just buy and hold. Right? But if you just sit there an hour every day like you're not just going to what like press buy and then
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 3: Sit there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's going
Speaker 3: to like teach you like, oh Yeah. You're to be doing zero
Speaker 1: a day. Whole time. For sure. You're going be going crazy. So a quote from a sold Yeah.
Speaker 2: It is funny to think about. If you were let's say, if if as a as a team, we were forced into the date into a week long day trading course, you know that we would probably have some side bets on who could run it up. For sure. For sure. As high as possible in simulated trading.
And so We're probably
Speaker 1: we're really close to actually doing that and having that be like a show segment between the retail corner
Speaker 3: The retail corner.
Speaker 1: The retail corner. He he was having some he was having some wild swings. But a a sole resident in South Korea who lost money said this. He said, it does feel a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Though it's better than doing nothing.
Saying like, I already lost it all. I don't need a course.
Speaker 2: Is that a real quote? It's a real quote. That feels very borrowed from like the American South.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's great. It does feel like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. I like this. We got to take a trip to South Korea.
However, are signs that tighter market regulation is cooling the market. Daily turnover in single single stock leveraged ETFs on July 30 fell from 12,000,000,000,000 to just 70,000,000,000. So that's a huge drop off 90% down on the actual trading volume. And for Yoon, the South Korean resident who lost money, it has done little to restore faith in policymakers. Investors like us have grown increasingly resentful.
Trust in the government has been severely shattered. He was counting on the government to stop him from going too crazy in the financial markets and they did not. And he's upset about it. He's he's not happy. So interesting interesting development.
We'll see where it goes. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution to access for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2: John Jordan. It's time to talk about car week.
Speaker 1: Okay. Let's do car But
Speaker 2: first, before we talk about car week, we're going to talk about Tesla nears unveiling of radical new flying Roadster. So if you remember, probably around six months ago, whenever Elon did his last appearance on Joe Rogan Yes. He was alluding to the idea that the Roadster might be able to get a little bit of airtime.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anybody that is done driving in the backcountry knows that all cars can get airtime. But I don't think that's what he was alluding to. I don't think that's what he's alluding to. I think I think he was alluding to some set of features that allow it to Fly. Fly.
Yeah. And what I I don't know what we're gonna I don't know what flying is. Yep. Right? Is flying an inch off the ground.
If you're moving it at a 100 miles an hour, maybe.
Speaker 1: Maybe. So there is a Chinese car that can jump over a pothole. Extremely relevant for Los Angeles. We gotta get this car here. It should change all the tariff rules.
But some sort of I think it's a BYD can can actually change the suspension so aggressively that it can jump while
Speaker 2: traveling. And
Speaker 1: we said like, okay, the gauntlet has thrown down. Jumping is not enough to go viral. Jumping will not satisfy the criteria of, you know, flying. So it has to be able to, you know, probably go more than six inches off the ground, maybe a full foot off the ground. It has to be able to stay off the ground for, I don't know, a few seconds, ten seconds.
My speculation was that it would be able to use the use the thrusters to lift off the ground and parallel park directly in. That was my prediction for something that would satisfy flying without actually being just, oh, you can just fly it from Malibu to LA. Yeah. Like I I I think that that's probably not in the cards but I think that it has to have a crazy demo. It has to look crazy.
It has to have crazy stats but it also has to have a crazy viral video demo where you show it and you're like, wow, no other car can do that. Not even close. But Anyway. Information has the
Speaker 2: explicit The crazy thing is that even as far back as eight years ago Mhmm. There were patents that Tesla Mhmm. Filed related to using effectively rocket Yeah. Yeah. Style thrusters in a vehicle.
And people were already kind of chattering around then. Is Tesla gonna make some type of car?
Speaker 1: The collab. The SpaceX collab. They have the rockets.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The SpaceX if if Tesla comes out with a Roadster that has a SpaceX, It's like basically
Speaker 1: Berlin engine on it.
Speaker 2: Some type of SpaceX engine. There's probably I would put it now that the company's public Yeah. There's probably 10,000 buyers for that car. Like you can imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: people 20 times the Audi new Villarreal. That's pretty wild.
Speaker 2: Well, Audi new the new Villarreal is like intentionally
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, the other thing that they could do is they could go out to the salt Flats and they could set the the world speed record, the high speed record. Because rocket engine on the back of a Tesla going in a straight line would they could probably break the speed of sound and that would Yeah. Be amazing. It wouldn't necessarily fit the flying criteria but it'd be flying across the salt flats so I'd I'd give it credit.
It needs a crazy twist I think.
Speaker 2: Elon's promises, this is Grace Kay in the information this morning. Between Elon's promises of super nimble robots and inter stellar colonization, the billionaire spent plenty of time over the last decade hyping up another ambitious effort, the next version of the Roadster. Mhmm. The sporty electric vehicle that first put Tesla on the map. At first, he said he wanted the vehicle to be the fastest production car in the world.
Then he said he wanted it to be crazier than every fictional James Bond car combined and he wanted the car to be able to fly.
Speaker 1: Don't the James Bond cars have guns and missiles on them?
Speaker 2: Yes. They do.
Speaker 3: Ejector seats.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you could get a, like, in order to buy the Tesla, you have to have an FFL. You have to have a firearms license. Oh,
Speaker 2: a dealer license.
Speaker 1: Dealer license. That's So
Speaker 2: it's basically a gun store on wheels. Exactly. Exactly. Because That would be very That would be very Texas.
Speaker 1: Can't get automatic weapons. You can't get silencers. All these things are heavily restricted. But if you go through the process to become a gun store, you can get a lot more crazy stuff. Maybe maybe that's just the process.
Speaker 2: Directive sent Tesla designers down a rabbit hole that lasted years to laying the cars released. The company first showed a prototype design of the vehicle and began accepting reservations for it in 2017. Since then, it has chucked that design completely and come up with a new one Okay. Which hasn't been publicly revealed. That could change soon.
Tesla is currently planning an unveiling of the new design, which could happen as early as this month. I was trying to figure out is there any world that they do something at at Car Week happening right now.
Speaker 1: Where are we on testing?
Speaker 2: Feels very, very unlikely. It feels like much more like Elon to do his own event and not compete for attention. That event will include an elaborate stunt showing off the flying capabilities of a limited edition version of the Roadster, the result of a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX. The demonstration is expected to take place at SpaceX's testing site in MacGregor, Texas. As recently as a few months ago, Tesla's plans for the demonstration were like something out of a science fiction movie.
They involve showing the vehicle racing onto a magnetized roller coaster like ramp and driving upside down before righting itself and hovering in the air, three people said. Previously, Musk has said the vehicle's ability to fly would come from cold gas thrusters developed with SpaceX. Cool. Still, there's uncertainty about what Tesla will actually show at the event. Did you hear that, John?
I'm gonna read it back. Tell me. A magnetized roller coaster like ramp driving upside down before riding itself and hovering in the air.
Speaker 1: Sorry. I I need you to read that for a third.
Speaker 2: They're they're they're making a Hot Wheels style Okay. Roller coaster loop And this is
Speaker 1: what leaked? This is crazy. I love it though.
Speaker 2: No. I absolutely
Speaker 1: love it.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: This is awesome. This is amazing. What
Speaker 2: Okay. Musk told some Tesla staffers in recent weeks that the demonstration will be difficult to pull off and could go awry but it will be entertaining regardless.
Speaker 1: It's such a
Speaker 2: It couldn't be learned whether Tesla will show the event live or share recorded footage. All spectators at the event will be stationed several 100 yards away from the vehicle because of potential damage Demolition to their eardrums. Cold gas thrusters generate high pressure gas that can create significant noise and vibrations according to Jay Kim, a professor of aerodynamics at the University of Southampton. As a result, the car will be remotely operated without anyone inside the field. Okay.
This feels like we're getting farther and farther away from a production car.
Speaker 1: It's just rocket.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of yards away, remotely operated, might go terribly.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine getting He's
Speaker 2: just reinventing rockets.
Speaker 1: Honey, would you mind running out and grabbing a gallon of milk? Let me start the cold gas thrusters. Boom. All the windows break in your neighborhood. Let me pull out the car.
That would be very, very funny. Is that the end of that story?
Speaker 2: That's all, folks.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with the agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 2: Back to the story. Tesla could use some reinvigoration at the moment. Its stock has lost nearly a quarter of its value this year. Oh, maybe, you know, we've had this you know, you've had this theory for
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like over a year now that if that if Tesla and SpaceX are gonna merge, Elon owns a lot more of SpaceX. You would want Tesla to be at a lower valuation. Maybe
Speaker 1: This feels pump though. This feels like this No.
Speaker 2: But if it if it's a spectacular explosion Okay. Then maybe then maybe then maybe, you know, the stock drops and the next day he goes, okay. Yeah. Time to time time to buy.
Speaker 1: So wait. Do do the original reservations still get you to the front of the line of this thing?
Speaker 2: They better.
Speaker 1: Because I'm I've been so close to putting down a reservation multiple times being like, I think I think you
Speaker 2: should. I think you
Speaker 1: should. Should be a decade but when it comes it's gonna be so hilarious and unique. I mean like, is it legal to drive in The United States? No. Do I need to contact the FAA before I turn it on?
Yes. But is it a one of 10,000?
Speaker 2: Plus you can still register for a Roadster. Okay. You have to put 45,000 down.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was like $200
Speaker 2: enough. It's $50.50 50 k, 5 k
Speaker 1: 50 k.
Speaker 2: Immediately and then you got to send a wire.
Speaker 1: It's the same amount of money you can come and book a plug for plug walk. Right?
Speaker 2: Roughly.
Speaker 1: I think so. That's the number. Well, in other car news, Porsche heard you loud and clear they're bringing back the manual for the Carrera s. The 09/11 Carrera s is back with a manual. It's North America exclusive MT package for 2027.
Six gears, 473 horsepower. That's pretty that that's a little bit higher than some of the models. Not bad. And loads of features. All the details are over at motor1.com.
Jason Fried is very happy to hear this. What do you think, Jordy? What's the review?
Speaker 2: I like it. My first sports car, a manual nine eleven.
Speaker 1: Manual nine eleven. Here it is back.
Speaker 2: Makes a lot of sense. They're listening. They're listening to their they're talking to their customers.
Speaker 1: Coupe is a 170. Yeah. They really are. And and it's it's odd because I feel like the Porsche brand is strong. I feel like they've had some misadventures in in the EV market.
But in general, like, the actual results of the new Cayenne EV Turbo S are insane. I think zero to 60 in, like, plaid territory, like, two seconds.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If if it had self driving anywhere near Tesla Maybe that's would be way more popular.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's it. Because we've seen that, like, the the the financials of the company are beaten up, but the brand still is very solid. They haven't they haven't they haven't had their, like, luche moment where everyone's like, oh, this one looks bad. You know? They haven't had a backlash to the core visual brand, which I think is so important for longevity in this category.
And so I I I think this will be successful. And people have been asking for this. The 09/11 s t sold very well. I think it's over $1,000,000 a car now. And I still don't fully understand how all the all the different manual options fit together across the portfolio.
The ST seems like very exclusive, but I I can't off the top of my head.
Speaker 2: Well, then you have the Sport Classic, you have the r Yeah. You have
Speaker 1: There's a few manual options, which I think is But when the ST came out, it was sort of branded as like the only way to get the full throated Porsche experience in a manual. And so that's why t
Speaker 2: Yeah. Which is manual. So so they've been offering a variety of ways Mhmm. To get in to a manual. Yeah.
Transmission nine eleven. Ferrari is also out Oh. With the Ferrari c z 26.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Temporary reinterpretation of the high performance Berlinetta concept through a pure and highly technical formal language. It's a special projects car. Yes. It develops a new stylistic identity starting from the supercar features of the s f 90 Strigale, defined by a direct distinctly horizontal design and a highly distinctive two box silhouette.
Speaker 1: It looks a lot more restrained than the than the standard SF 90. Yeah. I think this looks cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. More refined version of the SF 90.
Speaker 1: Looks nice. I wonder how many is is it the overall bodywork of this hashtag Ferrari one off design. So are they just doing one of these and they're showing off at Car Week? They're just doing one? One of one feels like.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I so far, I haven't seen anything out of Ferrari.
Speaker 1: From Car Week? There's a bunch of other things. Outside of this. They're McLaren is introducing a con the first concept of its kind Kinda stealing the show. Miql six GT, a contemporary realization of Bruce McLaren's original road car vision.
The Miql six GT embodies the pioneering spirit that continues to shape McLaren.
Speaker 2: Let's get some sound here. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4: True connection has to be real, felt in every
Speaker 2: Notice how the the ad is shot vertically.
Speaker 1: And they dropped
Speaker 2: it in square form. The I the the front end.
Speaker 1: Looks beautiful. Why did they upload it square on Instagram or on on X. No.
Speaker 2: I think this is just how X handles.
Speaker 1: Oh, really? Vertical video now. Oh, yeah. It is. Interesting.
They they blur the background. It kind of blended in. Interesting.
Speaker 4: An authentic manual gearbox.
Speaker 2: You see that? That's a little bit of jab at Ferrari. Oh, yeah. Manual gearbox. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because they have their manual by wire. By wire. Okay. It's a nice shot.
Speaker 4: Built from the foundation of our founder's legacy, the MCL six GT.
Speaker 2: Again, is this A McLaren Road car
Speaker 4: Yeah. That answers the
Speaker 2: Oh, they're saying register your interest. So maybe they make a number of these.
Speaker 4: Built today.
Speaker 1: Wait list, Max. What else we got? Anyway, if you're a designer There's
Speaker 2: some other
Speaker 1: Do it in Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Aston Martin also launched the the Valin. Say that it doesn't need an introduction.
It interrupts. It kinda does need an introduction. I've never heard of this before. The most powerful front engine v 12 car in our history, limited to a 150 cars worldwide for the purists. And so they're this is off of the Vanquish platform presumably, but a 150 versions of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It looks I mean, looks, I think, very cool.
Speaker 1: Yep. No manual.
Speaker 2: They spec'd it in a in a way that
Speaker 1: It's fun to have these at at Car Weed.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't necessarily love, but You don't. It it's it it feels Isn't the car or the great Valor. It feels very close to the Valor. They also had the Victor at some point.
Speaker 1: Put a bunch of these.
Speaker 2: And anyways, I don't I don't know what Aston needs to do to really get back in the game. I think the their primary challenge is at the lower end of the market.
Speaker 1: Shouldn't they make that COD mobile?
Speaker 2: Yeah. They should actually make that instead of just making it playable in the game.
Speaker 1: It is it is weird that no one right now is going after what the Audi r eight was, like a a more affordable supercar. All of the luxury car, supercar, hypercar manufacturers seem to be going up market with 500,000, million dollar cars. But there's and even the new Vollary is up at $506,107 100,000. Right? Like, I if Audi makes a supercar, you would expect it to be cheaper than the $2.09 6 from Ferrari.
Right? Like, because that's what the that's what the r eight strategy was. The r eight was cheaper than the Ferrari of the day. It was cheaper than the Lamborghini of the day or the base model. So it was like, if you do if you want a more affordable supercar with Audi bad
Speaker 2: With inflate with inflation, you could have seen Audi making a $400,000 super car. Right? The new Velary is much more limited, comes in around 700.
Speaker 1: You could do a lot cheaper than that. I mean, the z r one x. Like like
Speaker 2: Yeah. But that doesn't every every Audi is is being priced higher than whatever the Chevy Ford equivalent is.
Speaker 1: Exactly. So so so yeah. Okay. Maybe you're right. Like, slice in between a z R one x and a two nine six.
That's where I would put the new Vollary or the the Audi halo I
Speaker 2: just think it needs to be priced somewhere around where the Temeraria is.
Speaker 1: Is it more expensive than Temeraria?
Speaker 2: It's almost double.
Speaker 1: That's an odd choice, I think.
Speaker 2: It should, but it looks like a spaceship. I got to see it in person Yeah. On Monday. It is even better looking in person. Mhmm.
It's a very special car.
Speaker 1: Does it get absolutely mugged by the 2027 Mustang dark horse SC convertible?
Speaker 2: Maybe for you.
Speaker 1: America's back, baby. Well, you have to wait for the Tesla Roadster. Ford's got you covered with a 5.2 liter v eight with 795 horsepower, which is probably nothing compared to what the Roadster will have. And 660 pound feet of torque feeding the rear wheels via seven speed dual clutch transmission. The Magneride suspension has a less aggressive tune than the coupe.
The convertible won't be offered with the Coupe's hardcore track package. But fun for the Mustang fans. Mustang has been doing some special editions too. They got the they got a bunch of different really really high tier options out there. Cadillac introduced the v one concept.
Speaker 2: Let's Ben says, still looks like a vacation rental. And of
Speaker 1: these hurts. Cadillac revealed the v one concept. It's a limited production model based on the LMDH race car. It's powered by a 5.5 liter DOHC v eight, an electric motor. Good for eight thirty combined horsepower.
Looks like a like a full full on race car. Cadillac's done this before with the CN, their hyper car prototype that they never released. Would be very cool to see them make a road going version of this like the Valkyrie, but feels like a big stretch for the brand and the company. Right? I would be surprised if we if we see this make the make the rounds.
But people are people are excited about it. I mean, the zero one x was a big moment for the American carmakers in the in the the super car market. And so, you know, there are there's a chance. There's a chance this comes out. We'll see.
In other news, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with their business and lets you sell insights online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. Did you know, Jordy, it's now cheaper to buy it's now cheaper to buy a private island than a house in Palo Alto?
Speaker 2: Finally. This is crazy. We've been waiting for these lines to cross.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It's actually cheaper to buy a private island than a house in Palo Alto. Earlier this week, Chris Backy highlighted a real estate listing for a five bedroom, five bathroom, 5,000 square foot home in Palo Alto asking $16,500,000. We gotta pull a picture of this thing because it doesn't look like a $16,000,000 house.
And I think that's why this image from Chris back he went so viral because it specifically looks just like a normal house that might be a million dollars or $3,000,000.
Speaker 2: But share it in the chat.
Speaker 1: Where is it? Let me see if I can pull this up. Did we not this let me put let me put this up. Here we go. Boom.
Or here.
Speaker 2: Here it is.
Speaker 1: Here we go. And so, I mean, 5,500 square feet, that's a lot. And Palo Alto is obviously on an absolute tear on the back of the AI boom. But $16,500,000 is a lot of money. And you can get a private
Speaker 2: for this shape.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It just looks like one normal house please to me.
Speaker 2: Right? One starter home, please.
Speaker 1: Even though it's very clear that there's a lot of stuff going on in the back, obviously from the front the silhouette doesn't look like a 5,000 square foot house. But clearly that extends and there's probably lots of land back there and all sorts of things. But when you're when you're bidding against Mark Zuckerberg, you gotta pay a pretty penny. Bay Area real estate has been expensive for a quarter acre too. Bear real estate has been expensive for a long time, but prices at the very top of the market have become especially eye popping.
One factor is the enormous amount of new wealth being created by the AI boom as employees of at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic turn startup equity into fortunes and pour some of that money into local real estate. The result is an absurd new benchmark for Silicon Valley houses.
Speaker 2: Ben is on its hair today. He says, wow, there's a patio. No pool. There's no pool?
Speaker 1: For $16,000,000, no pool?
Speaker 2: On a quarter acre?
Speaker 1: That is that's crazy. I wonder where this one will land.
Speaker 2: No garage either.
Speaker 1: Wait. No At this at this price, it's like you like like you could actually be driving like a hyper car for like 10% of the house price, you know. Like if you live in a if you live in a if you live in a 1,600,000 house and you drove a $50,000 car, no one would be like, oh, wow. That's so crazy. Right?
But if you live in a $16,000,000 house and you drive a $500,000 car, people be like, oh, yeah. That kind of matches. Except you pull up to this thing in a in a Rivalto or something. They're an SF 90 and people are like, what? You don't even have a garage to park it in.
Anyway, the result is an absurd new benchmark for Silicon Valley housing prices. There are actual private islands around the world that cost less than a house in Palo Alto. In June, a 4.5 acre private island on North Carolina's Lake Norman sold for $12,500,000. Hey. You can pull this one up.
Speaker 2: The agent on the listing says it has unique feature, a glass encased staircase.
Speaker 1: Okay. You
Speaker 2: don't see that much in a in a modern McMansion.
Speaker 1: Which were you going with? The the the Palo Alto home or this island? Says,
Speaker 2: Chad is saying 16 mil turned it down. Had to live there for this decade. The payment the payment calculator look. Yeah. You put 20% down Yep.
You're only spending a $105,000 a month.
Speaker 1: That's so much money.
Speaker 2: Yikes.
Speaker 1: That's true golden handcuffs. So this so this 4.5 acre private island in North Carolina sold for $12,500,000 and it includes a roughly 13,000 square foot mansion on it. It was originally purchased in the nineties for 1,500,000. The Financial Times also reported in March on a 600 acre private island in Fiji listed for $12,000,000. The that island comes with a six bedroom residence built near its highest point with panoramic ocean views along with a library, barbecue area and swimming pool.
There are also five beaches, staff quarters and a deep water jetty. This I gotta put all these in there. Let's see. This one is is pretty crazy. There's only one image of this particular island estate.
But the Financial Times was was on a tear. They they they really reported a bunch of these. If 600 acres for your private island is a little excessive, there's another option in Fiji. Managing Global reported in March that the founder of a cannabis company and his wife were selling Wawa, a 75 acre private island. That is so many acres.
Even 75 acres is so much for 15,000,000, still 1,500,000 less than the Palo Alto house. So if if you if you are in Palo Alto, you really gotta negotiate for remote work because you could be working from Fiji. The Vawa house includes several Olympic sized natural swimming holes and a 5,500 square foot main house built around open plan living spaces surrounded by walls of glass. Its bedroom suites have outdoor bathrooms and private outdoor spaces overlooking the ocean and jungle. And it's a fascinating story showing what went into building this compound.
We can scroll through some of these some of these images because this family really, seems like it was sort of a labor of love situation. So an eclectic travelogue had always been a top priority for the walkers. The Los Angeles based family of four are self styled globetrotters whose wanderlust meant meant they never vacationed in the same place twice. They never went back. Vawa Island is a 75 acre drop in the Pacific Ocean at the northernmost tip of the Yasawa Island Archipelago and north of Nadi International Airport.
It is so far to get to Fiji, but people love it out there. We saw the island and even though there was nothing there, we just knew there was something really magical about this place and we had to go back. So we were sitting on a beach and saw this little island in the distance. Sounds familiar. We then got picked up by a local boat and taken there.
We went around the island and the locals said it had been deserted for a while. After meeting with the local elders of the tribe to discuss the finer points of the purchase, the walkers have purchased a leasehold and the project of a lifetime. So a lot of these different countries and and island nations, they won't actually sell you the property. What they'll do is they'll sell you a Hundred lease years. For a hundred or eighty five years.
Like so it's within your lifetime, but then it eventually goes back to the to the to the government. It was like a boyhood dream, Barry said today. That pristine parcel is home to a luxurious hideaway built with a modern Malibu aesthetic crafted by Danish architect, constructed by an Australian builder and curated by a California family. The project took approximately five years with a pandemic and the distance from home adding complexity. And so
Speaker 2: So I've never done a proper trip to Fiji, but I did have a eighteen hour layover there once on the Really? Way to Bali.
Speaker 1: Do you count that as visiting Fiji?
Speaker 2: I count it Okay. Because I went, I left the airport, I got on a boat Okay. And I took it to a small relatively deserted island and I just hung out there for a few hours Okay. And then took the boat back and then went to the airport and left.
Speaker 1: Do I have I don't think I have very nice on here. Anyway, Tyler, you figured out the optimal Yeah. Great success. You you figured out the optimal route to visit every state. Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah. So basically, the the idea well, the rules we said is if you land in like a grassy area and you step out, that counts as visiting the state. Yes. So basically the optimal strategy if you wanna hit every state
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 3: Is you basically land at the intersections of states.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: So you only need to land 21 times to hit all 50, right? Woah. So in in Lower 48, it's only 19 times.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: But you can hit these kind of like tri point areas, right? You can think of there's kind of the quadrant in the Southwest. You can hit four states at once. Yeah. And you can do it presumably within an hour Mhmm.
Or sorry, within twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: Within twenty four hours?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But you have to go to Alaska and Hawaii. So this is just lower 48?
Speaker 3: No. No. This is all 24.
Speaker 1: You can sorry. But you would need a plane that can fly at the speed of sound but also land or like near the speed of sound. Like you can't do it in like a Cessna. You must you you have to do it in like a Gulf Stream but then you also have to be able to land in a cornfield basically.
Speaker 3: You can use like a normal slightly larger plane than like a private plane.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: But you don't need the insane
Speaker 1: What type of plane are you are you landing in a cornfield but also making it to Alaska in
Speaker 2: Tyler. Tyler. You be willing to attempt this route with your current plan? Because instilling
Speaker 1: a lot of confidence, buddy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Trey says the Pilatus PC 12 has you covered. Pilatus PC 12 is not probably fast enough to actually break a record, but the PC 24 Mhmm. Is the is is sort of the the cousin of the PC 12.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 2: That is an actual jet that will let you land on dirt runways. And so I think that the PC 24 Yeah. My one
Speaker 3: PC 24 is is what I had as well. A lot of
Speaker 2: p c But you said big it it's it's not even it's like a relatively modest plane. You can't even cross the Atlantic with it. You were saying it was a bigger plane.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, relatively.
Speaker 1: Pure slog. Let me tell you about You
Speaker 2: gotta work on this plan.
Speaker 1: Their business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 3: You're starting in Maine and you're ending in Hawaii.
Speaker 1: Okay. So you go from basically like Washington to In New Hampshire.
Speaker 3: You're you're
Speaker 2: kind of going
Speaker 1: But you're going in the Pacific Northwest last, then Alaska, then down to Hawaii?
Speaker 3: You're basically starting you're going directly south. So you're in all Ryan
Speaker 2: says you need to hire a pilot from Sinaloa. True. Probably. True.
Speaker 1: I think you're gonna run into a lot of trouble. I think you'll probably get arrested the first time you land in a cornfield in the intersection of three states and they wonder what you're doing.
Speaker 2: I don't think with Tyler's plan You might need I don't think they'll be enough time to
Speaker 1: Some demolition? You gotta take that freeze? Of time? Yeah. Oh, land on the corner.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because a lot of these a lot of these corner intersections are like tourist traps where they have like a a sign on the ground. Like you're currently standing on four states at once. And you can't just lay in there and bulldoze all the all the tourists who are taking pictures. That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 3: Well, don't think we stated that before. That that wasn't allowed.
Speaker 1: Misaligned. This is misalignment right here. Terrible. Anyway, the good folks over at the Acquired FM Acquired Podcast revealed a very interesting fact that we wanted to share here. The highest grossing piece of entertainment ever isn't Avatar, Avengers, Titanic.
Speaker 2: Chad says stop hazing our zoomers.
Speaker 1: Oh, got more Gen Z's Gen Z hazing articles because there's a whole article in the New York Times about how Gen Z doesn't know how to dress. They're just taking shots at Gen Z for acting like they've never worn clothes before or something is the headline. It's a very funny
Speaker 2: we we was driving around with with my lovely wife yesterday and we passed like what looked like a group of high school boys and she said, why do they all look like they're dressed like criminals? Because they they had these like big, like, glasses that, like Wow. Look like what something you might wear if
Speaker 1: you really
Speaker 2: didn't want people to know.
Speaker 1: True unk status. Why is Ben Macklin getting an American flag wrapped around him? Is this just the style now?
Speaker 2: This is my go away gift. This is my Okay. Yeah. Going I had
Speaker 1: to get a flag before it. Okay. There you
Speaker 2: Wearing that on the fight? Yeah.
Speaker 1: The whole way. Love I love it. Well, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 2: Ryan says, if you can't, haze gen z, why be unk?
Speaker 1: Good point.
Speaker 2: Good point.
Speaker 1: Okay. Anyway. So the highest grossing piece of entertainment ever. It's not Avatar. It's not Avengers.
It's not Titanic. It's not Seinfeld. It's not even Grand Theft Auto. It's the Lion King musical. It's the Lion King musical.
The Lion King musical is the highest grossing piece of media entertainment ever. Absolutely insane. Since debuting on Broadway in November 1997, Disney's stage adaptation has grossed more than $11,000,000,000 worldwide, maybe more than 10,000,000,000. It's a ton. It's the highest grossing stage production ever.
And by box office revenue, it's the highest grossing entertainment title in history. For comparison, Avatar is the highest grossing movie ever, has made only $3,000,000,000 at the global book box office. The Lion King passed the previous record holder, The Phantom of the Opera, all the way back in 2014 when its cumulative gross was already $6,200,000,000. I had no idea there was so much money in Broadway. So the question everyone's asking, how is this even possible?
Like, yeah, The Lion King Musical, it's popular, but Avatar was like a cultural moment. Everyone saw it. But it's because the Lion King musical is not just one show. It's much more complicated than that. It's this entertainment machine.
So since 1997 There's
Speaker 2: not just a show, it's a machine? Basically.
Speaker 1: Wow. It's it's 30 different productions around the world spanning more than a 100 cities
Speaker 2: folks slob.
Speaker 1: And 24 countries. So it's so the show runs on Broadway but also London's West End, Japan, Germany, Australia, alongside North America, international touring productions. So you can see it in multiple places at the same time. More than a 127,000,000 people have actually seen it. And unlike a movie, the same piece of entertainment can keep selling thousands of expensive tickets every night for decades.
So the broad the Broadway production alone performs eight times a week. In one week this June, it sold 12,670 tickets, grossed 1,940,000 from a single theater. And then you scale that model across multiple productions
Speaker 2: And and are all these productions paying royalties back to Disney?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you're thinking what I'm thinking? What are you thinking? Thrive Eternal comes in.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: They're a spin out. The Lion King IP. Yeah. Gets his a piece back.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So $75 a ticket.
Speaker 2: Then they then like Gabe says, then they take it public.
Speaker 1: Maybe. Maybe. I think this is like core to the to the to the Disney IP strategy. Like they they have other Broadway productions already in the works, already in production, and we'll have many more as different pieces of intellectual property take flight and actually find their footing. Of course not everything is going to be as much of a smash success as The Lion King has been.
But it's crazy. It's a twenty nine year run selling $75 tickets on average every night across the globe for thirty years almost, which is crazy. And so you can take the same story, perform it eight times a week, duplicate the production around the planet and keep doing it for an entire generation. Do that successfully for three days and you can make more money at the box office than any movie ever made. I was always thinking that someone would do this for music, sort of like you'd need to set up the musical act as as a as a multi stage production.
But you know, Deadmau5 performs with a with a helmet. Deadmau5, the EDM artist.
Speaker 2: Oh, mean Dead Mouse five?
Speaker 1: Dead Mouse five. Yes. So when Dead Mouse performs, he is there in person, the actual artist, and he's wearing a helmet. So you don't know that it's him and of course you trust that it's him because he doesn't perform in multiple places at the same time. Same thing with Tiesto.
But there are other other artists that have donned the helmets. I think Marshmallow is one. There's a few others that do this sort of thing. Even going back to
Speaker 3: Daft Punk.
Speaker 1: Daft Punk. Exactly. But if you could start a musical act that by that embraced the idea that it could be in multiple places at the same time, it could effectively have multiple residences. So the the the artist, even though it was multiple people, could be for be could be performing in New York and Las Vegas and Miami all at the same time, have residencies everywhere and bring in way more revenue on top of the IP. And then the artists themselves doesn't need to travel.
Of course, that's like sort of sacrificing what it means to go to a dead mouse show, so you probably don't command as much of a premium. But it would be interesting to see if someone in the musical arts
Speaker 2: Dylan says this is just the blue man group strategy. It's not always the same blue men. Mind blown. Mind blown.
Speaker 1: Yes. The blue man group has changed over. I don't know. Can are there any examples of the Blue Man Group performing in two different places at the exact same time with different blue men? I think that they have a single cast that rotates and they don't actually perform in multiple places at the same time.
But that's the Blue Man Group v two is is what I'm maybe hoping for. Anyway, what else is going on? The Cursor deal closed. That's a big story today. Although it's been announced several times that this was happening but Michael Truell took to the timeline to announce that the deal has in fact closed.
Gork is imminent. Grock work is coming. They're doing it.
Speaker 2: Is this so this is the largest acquisition of a venture backed, like, private company?
Speaker 1: Yes. And it must be probably the the highest r r IRR VC investment of all time. Maybe there's probably something shorter term that was like one month and then an acquisition. But it certainly it certainly is is close to that.
Speaker 2: Previously, the record was Wizz Yeah. 32,000,000,000 Mhmm. Google. So nearly double. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Michael Truel said
Speaker 2: There is some some it is funny to think about just given the dynamic between Elon and and Sam. OpenAI startup fund Mhmm. I believe was a seed investor in Cursor. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Meaning that owns now. Yeah. But Very interesting. Absolutely incredible outcome and I think already people are realizing just how much how necessary, it is for SpaceX's hopes at the application.
Speaker 1: Okay. Michael Truell, one of the greatest zoomers to ever do it. Truly. You gotta give him you gotta give him credit. You gotta give credit to all of Gen z for putting up amazing numbers.
But you also gotta take some shots at Gen z because apparently snack companies are coating everything in pickle flavor for Gen z. Is this true? Do you like pickles?
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say I'm a big pickle guy.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: Say but
Speaker 1: Well apparently snack companies think you are because there's a deluge of sour briny snacks that have infiltrated the market and apparently it's your fault, Tyler. Pickle flavored pickle flavored ramen, pickle flavored beer, pickle flavored sauvignon blanc, wine, Pickle zested ice cream. A certain flavor profile is exploding. It's sour. It's briny.
It's huge on social media and it's coating everything in its path says The Wall Street Journal. We're we're in we're just in a golden era for pickle flavoring, said the vice president of the fresh food group at Surcana. Never in my life would I imagine cotton candy with pickles.
Speaker 2: When you were a kid did you ever take a little sip of the
Speaker 1: The juice. Of the pickle juice? Not really.
Speaker 2: No. I did.
Speaker 1: Like just once to experience or was it or was it like a daily thing you you you would enjoy it?
Speaker 2: Here or there.
Speaker 1: I like a pickle. But I don't know. The the juice I can pass on. I'm not I'm not a
Speaker 2: big Yeah. Anytime I meet people that are seemingly super into pickles, I just assume they haven't they don't realize they can put salt, a lot of salt on anything.
Speaker 1: Oh, you think it's like a vehicle for delivering salt?
Speaker 2: I think it's like
Speaker 1: a You're just maybe sodium deficient or craving some sodium and you want an excuse and a pickle is just a way to get your salt fixed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's a vehicle.
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, people certainly associate the flavor with saltiness so it's going all over the place. In the last few years nearly every snack food giant and retailer has piled on the trend and for good reason. Pickle flavored items are flying off the shelves according to data from Cursor canna. Pickle flavored snacks grew 30% in sales over the past year compared with 3.8% growth in the snack category overall.
The same category the same goes for categories that don't seem traditionally fermentation forward. Pickle flavored trail mix grew by 10% as opposed to 4% for the general category. But some of this growth may come from an
Speaker 2: influx Of of May, some $1.
Speaker 1: That is a crazy crazy item. Whole Foods began selling daily crunches, dill pickles, sprouted almonds in 2024. And within a year and a half, the product saw an 812% growth. Foundation lab biggest
Speaker 2: pickle car in NASCAR.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: That is a car to follow.
Speaker 1: PepsiCo released Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle Cheetos in 2025 and made them a permitting offering this year after the company said it became the fastest selling limited edition flavor in the brand's history. Retailers say one group is fueling the trend, a cohort they're most eager to capture, Gen Z. Last year last summer, Hormel Foods, the company behind SPAM and Skippy peanut butter, cited Gen Z, the ultimate target market for snack brands as the inspiration behind the launch of three dill pickle products. Dill pickle corn nuts, dill pickle cashews, and dill pickle flavored Hormel pepperoni. This is too much dill pickle.
I I can't I can't say pickle anymore. It's it's really getting on my nerves.
Speaker 2: It's over.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to Alex Cooper. Alex Cooper raising a ton of money. Podcast is doing well. Media company is doing well. Her beverage brand is doing unwell.
The brand unwell ceased operations, announced this winding down a day after unwell's media business took investment at a $500,000,000 valuation. Should not be a surprise. Clearly new money coming in, new strategy, focus
Speaker 2: Made it pickle maybe.
Speaker 1: Maybe. But Andrea took a victory lap two years ago. She posted Unwell by Alex Cooper. Prime but for the hotties. How much time do we give this brand before it inevitably flops and goes on the chopping block?
Two years it seems is what wound up happening. It was a maybe they just didn't get the right team in there. It does seem like it's hard because you only have so much ad inventory. And if you're running the Call Her Daddy podcast and you're getting a lot of impressions, if there is someone, like, you could promote your product, but every time you do, you're not promoting another product that might pay you a higher CPM, might be able to monetize those listeners better. And so you have this tension between, okay, well, there might be a VPN company or a credit card company or all sorts of different companies that might wanna come in and pay, you know, a million dollars for sponsorship with with Call Her Daddy.
And are you gonna be able to move a million dollars, not just a million dollars of product, but a million dollars worth of product to justify the profits? So will the LTV that you generate from running those ads that you're taking off the off the inventory stack actually math out? I think a lot of influencers wind up with that.
Speaker 2: They think they have to limit situation
Speaker 1: they don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's interesting branding challenge to have unwell Yep. As the brand of the drink. Mhmm. Not not not the best association.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're right. There's something like subliminal. Like what I was picking up on with the obsession remix video where I just come away a little bit unsettled. Seeing a brand name unwell in my face, it's just gonna stick in my brain a little bit.
But oh, well. We'll see where it goes. It feels like she's doubling down on media, TV shows, potentially movie studio, other podcasts. There's a lot of other things that are going there that are clearly can be focused in the line of what the unwell network does well. So we'll see where it all goes.
Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So the New York Times put out a hit piece on Gen Z'ers. It says Gen Z'ers dress like they've never worn clothes before.
Time was, if you wanted to know what people's deal was, you read their clothes. As a young man working in a then popular street fashion magazine, I used to relish taxonomizing people by what they had on. I could tell you had I could tell you at a glance what kind of music they listened to, whether they worked, what they'd be like in bed, what sort of beer they would drink, all from the cut of their pant leg or the razor guard number on their haircut. Fleece jacket pullover, white ball cap pulled down way too far over the eyes, that's a jock. Torn up gray hoodie over enormous jeans whose cuffs are soaking up puddle water, That person smokes weed.
Same hoodie but sleeves pushed up past the elbows. Watch out. That's the universal signifier for men. This person's really judgmental. These days I'm a middle aged man who works the door at a bar in Chicago that is reasonably popular with the youths and I'm routinely flummoxed by the sartorial flotsam that comes packing itself in.
The other night a guy
Speaker 2: Is this not overall the just the one of the oldest sort of stories of all time, which
Speaker 1: is Sitting
Speaker 2: old. Old person says that young kids
Speaker 3: Old man yells at clouds.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is old man yells at clouds. Yeah. It's a good point. It's a good point.
But I don't know. I just wanted to take another shot at Gen Z.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do I do do think funny that Tyler dresses like the like 2016 kind of like frat
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 2: Style
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like boat shoes. Sure. I mean, looks sharp every day. Yeah. But but yeah, you guys missed put the shoes up on the desk, baby.
Let's get the shoes up on the desk. Throw them up. It's Friday. Let's get a side profile of the shoes. The Sperry's.
Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like that. There you go. Sperry.
Speaker 2: Alright. That's enough of that.
Speaker 1: King in the castle. King in the castle. Next intern challenge. Get into Caltech because they have a fraud squad. This is the red team.
We need to red team their fraud squad. The fraud squad at Caltech will catch you if you lie on your application.
Speaker 2: They're saying make America preppy again.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that you could be early Prep. To a new prep super cycle. A Sperry super Super
Speaker 1: cycle. The funniest thing. College investigators vet every admitted student's applications as schools nationwide battle AI fueled cheating. So A little known band of admissions
Speaker 2: New benchmark.
Speaker 1: New benchmark for Cluelie for sure. It's scrutinizing the fonts on science fair certificates, checking addresses on high school transcript, and analyzing signatures on awards. Known as the fraud squad, these investigators in char are in charge of vetting applications to the highly selective STEM focused school, which admitted less than 4% of its 11,000 applicants for the incoming class. Caltech created the team two years ago, partly in response to a rising number of anonymous accusations of dishonest applications. The four person team inspects every submitted every admitted student's applications, taking nothing for granted nothing for granted.
They scour the Internet to confirm obscurities, contact competition officials, and high school counselors, and use a video interview program to suss out students' research claims. As elite colleges, such as Caltech at elite colleges, such as Caltech, admissions have become more competitive and applications are increasingly complex. Some request long lists of accolades, research competitions, awards, independent projects that colleges can find harder to verify than grades and test scores. At the same time, technology like AI makes it easier to falsify submissions. And for young people, the stakes often feel higher than ever.
I don't think everyone's lying, said Nick Lee, senior assistant director for undergrad admissions and a fraud squad member. But I can't let a small portion of the pool of our admits ruin all the greatness in the other percentage. Can't let one bad apple spoil the bunch, I think is the phrase. Many schools review app applications for accuracy but tend to dig deeper only when something seems off. Such as if a student's essay mentions an award winning robotics team but the recommendation letters don't.
So they're looking for needles and haystacks. Interesting. Do you think you could do it? Do you think this is fraud proof, Tyler? Or you think you
Speaker 3: I mean, there's like a lot
Speaker 1: of Still on the shoes. Still on the shoes.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of things. Like, it it seems like the the solution here is you just only do the SAT thing. Oh,
Speaker 1: yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: You can basically get rid of all these like fishy research things. You know, you hear about like some stories where it's like they had their first research paper when they were like 11 years old. Mhmm. It's like clearly Yeah. Very fake.
Speaker 1: Just like the parents doing it or the AI Yeah. Doing it or something. I don't know. Yeah. Tricky.
Nothing like the IMO to separate the wheat from the chaff. Well, over at Thrive, there's a big scoop from Natasha over now.
Speaker 2: Natasha's been on its hair.
Speaker 1: She's a Bloomberg technology. Thrive has invested $250,000,000 in Amazon according to a securities filing as the firm expands its public market strategy to back some of the world's largest companies benefiting from AI. I didn't realize that Thrive had this significant of a public book. I mean, I guess some of this was probably SpaceX pre IPO that shifted over to the public book.
Speaker 2: Well, I think this is part of a, like, new focus.
Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. So Thrive Capital, at the end of q two, owned $3,200,000,000 worth of SpaceX, $250,000,000 of Amazon. They still got some Oscar Health, a 180,000,000 of that. They own Shopify and Figma.
They trimmed Carvana and StubHub but are still long lots of stuff in the public markets. Anyway, what else is in the timeline
Speaker 2: Another news. Jeff Bezos
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2: Bets on sports with Liverpool deal. Billionaire to become a part owner of the Premier League team valued at more than 7,000,000,000.
Speaker 1: Another one.
Speaker 2: The billionaire founder of Amazon is among a group of investors that agreed Friday to buy a minority stake in Liverpool football. The consortium is acquiring about a 33% stake in Liverpool Liverpool in a deal that values the Premier League team at more than 7,000,000,000. The deal is the latest example of the enduring appeal of top professional sports teams from the world's wealthiest. The consortium buying a stake in Liverpool is led by Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of Indian steel tycoon. Let's give it up for tycoons.
One of the best one of the best words, one of the most underrated words, tycoon. I'm trying to bring that back.
Speaker 1: Very aspirational. You know you've made it when you're a tycoon.
Speaker 2: Bezos is participating the deal through k five global. Yeah. A firm that
Speaker 1: has got to be above billionaire. There's plenty of people that they start a company, they get lucky, they sell
Speaker 2: it at the top. But I would say that Michael and Brian Yeah. GPs over at k five are are emerging tycoons.
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 2: I think they're on the path to being tycoons.
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 3: Would you rather be a tycoon or a magnate? Magnate's underrated.
Speaker 1: Magnate is.
Speaker 2: Tycoon is more aura.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Tycoon feels like you really control the industry. Magnate feels a little bit like could be scion adjacent potentially. You know? Might just be might just be important, but one of many.
Tycoon is singular. Little more little more singular in its dominance of the industry. Like a tycoon. Anyway, tycoon, Mark Benioff hit the timeline with a question. Should Salesforce rebrand as Salesforce Slack to capture its AI era power in bots, coding and
Speaker 2: Let's watch this video. Because this video is sure to fire you up.
Speaker 1: Okay. Let's do it. Salesforce Slack. That's a bit of a mouthful. Let's see.
Salesforce. One of the greatest names ever. Salesforce. Forceful. I love Salesforce.
They do a lot more than sales, though. And a lot of people use Slack. So which way we're going? K. Oh, good license.
Some good brand exploration.
Speaker 2: Wait. Put him on the tower. Put him on the tower.
Speaker 1: Just do it. See it. Nothing happened? Oh, okay.
Speaker 2: You put him on the tower.
Speaker 1: Oh, he did. He already did? Okay. I can't tell if it's VFX or not. Salesforce Slack.
Salesforce Slack.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So interesting Currently, 68% of the voters say no. Yeah. They're rejecting Salesforce Slack. Yeah.
It is a mouthful. I do think Salesforce is iconic. I understand position right. He's battling
Speaker 1: Why not?
Speaker 2: SaaS pocalypse narrative. Yep. Slack is no one's been sitting there saying, you know, we're gonna move off. Slack
Speaker 1: No intern has ever tried to vibe code Slack here.
Speaker 2: It's funny. You can you can one shot a version of Slack.
Speaker 1: But adoption was tricky. High churn. We didn't use it. It it looked like Slack. We we tried to vibe code Slack.
And the product looked really good. It even added video calling, which was sort of crazy functionality. It's certainly there.
Speaker 2: Sebastian says, Jordy, does not remembering Metallica songs in front of Mark keep you awake? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Why not Slack Force? Why not just call it Slack Force? Is that bad? Am I onto something or no? Slack Force.
It's less wordy than Salesforce Slack, but it hits both Slack and Salesforce. Still forceful. Yes? No? If you had to pick, Salesforce, Slack, or Slackforce, which one are you going
Speaker 2: with? Slackforce.
Speaker 1: You got a Slackforce vote over there.
Speaker 2: What about just the San Francisco slackers?
Speaker 1: The San Francisco slackers. What about justforce.com?
Speaker 2: What about s.com? S? Salesforce Nah. And Slack. The one letter domain?
Speaker 1: I like just going force. Just force.
Speaker 2: Force would be a great name for a workplace messaging tool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Force. It's on Force. It's on Bebo. Check did you check Force?
Speaker 2: I sent you a message on Force.
Speaker 1: How'd you get that project done? I forced it. I forced it down the throats of my employees. I was forceful. You're being a little forceful right now.
A little bit too many messages on force.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, best estimate of Slack's current revenue is in the $2.02 $2,500,000,000 range. Mhmm. Salesforce overall revenue is north of 40.
Right? Okay. Still not a huge amount of the revenue. But clearly, you know, that video they've done a lot of exploration.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They're they're thinking about it.
Speaker 2: They're thinking about it.
Speaker 1: So between final answer. Between Salesforce, keep it classic, forceforce.com, Salesforce Slack, and Slackforce. Which one are you going with? Salesforce. You're you're staying with Salesforce.
What about you, I
Speaker 2: like Salesforce.
Speaker 3: I like Force.
Speaker 1: You like Slack Force?
Speaker 3: I think Salesforce Slack is the worst of all those.
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. You would rank that
Speaker 2: I think that Salesforce is an is is an iconic brand that's waiting to be revitalized. I think some of the marketing historically has just been somewhat, I'm not gonna say it, boomer coded. I said it. Like, just the random just the random, like, Matthew McConaughey being, you know Iconic. He's he's iconic, but I think that there's more that they can do to
Speaker 1: It does when I see it with share
Speaker 2: it with the Salesforce.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When I see Matthew McConaughey in a Salesforce ad, do think I need to buy a Lincoln Navigator. Which is maybe like a bad sign.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Because he's also
Speaker 1: Yeah. He has that amazing Lincoln where he's driving, giving the talk. Oh, it's such a good ad. And that one was such a good ad that it was parodied in SNL by Jim Carrey, I believe. And so it had a whole like meta story to it.
It really Yeah. Broke through.
Speaker 2: And so I think what you're getting at is they need to get, you know, a Timothee Chalamet or or Jacob Elordi to be the new face.
Speaker 1: That'd be great.
Speaker 2: Someone a Zoomer actor.
Speaker 1: Zoomer actor would be good. Fifth option. What if he rebrands the whole thing to just Benioff and co?
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: Would that be your top?
Speaker 2: Buy Benioff. Benioff. Benioffing. Software solutions you can depend on.
Speaker 1: He's a singular founder CEO, you know, he's not a hired gun, he's not going anywhere, it's his one major project, he doesn't have other companies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another point, they just had Mr. Beast do a commercial though according to Jay. The challenges like that, that commercial, I don't I don't know any people that that unironically watch Mr. Beast Mhmm.
That buy enterprise software.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Unironically watch mister beast but as a student of the craft of YouTube video creation Yes. And I will be like, wow. Okay. How is he using CGI?
How is he editing? How is Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the majority of the audience are not sitting there saying
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, Billion YouTube channel. I gotta use Salesforce CRM because Yeah. Mister Beast promoted it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're thinking about CRMs.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of like, I guess if you get people really young and they get to work and they're in Slack, they have a positive connotation, they go and start companies and they start with Slack and then they grow from there. But that's a long road.
Speaker 2: GR says Salesforce by Benioff. Salesforce. Yeah. Benioff by Benioff. Benioff.
Speaker 1: Sales by Benioff. It's like a high fashion Yeah. Like Mark by Mark Jacobs.
Speaker 2: Mark by Benioff.
Speaker 1: Mark by Mark Benioff. Slacked by Mark Benioff. He didn't even start the company. Yeah. I would not give up.
I I Salesforce, I still think Salesforce is a great name. Anyway. Okay. So let's go to Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of Hashimoto HashiCorp. He says, it's so I'm so incredibly tired of seeing low effort AI designed web pages.
I basically bounce off any new product immediately when I see it. Never get a chance to judge the product itself. Lots of thin lines, glowy styles, inconsistent fonts, lots of mono space. Know who
Speaker 2: you Not me.
Speaker 1: And Jordan Singer says, this is an instant sign that I won't want to use your product. If you can't take the time to craft something that should sell me, I can't trust that you took the time for the rest of the product. Interesting. What do you think about slot pages? I think the AI designed web pages are best when it's part of the point.
Like, it's it's it's like it it it's specifically like a product that would never exist without slop generation. And so it's like Yeah. Part of
Speaker 2: you can Video interact
Speaker 1: games for your friends.
Speaker 2: You can figure out a unique design and still implement it quickly using AI. Yep. But if you just just try to one shot it
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's low effort.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing with like the the the Suno story of like, I'm not really listening to like actual heavy metal generated by Suno. But give me a song about John Quinn, the most feared lawyer from Quinn Emmanuel that's heavy metal, I'm in. And I actually am listening to that song. But only because it can only exist in the context of the AI
Speaker 2: Tetris says depends on who you're selling to. 99% of the time ugly sites perform better. Good point, but I would say that these AI generated websites are trying to look like super beautiful
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 2: Interactive. I would actually like, you know, the the the AI website that you generated at Berkshire. You generated like a clone of Berkshire.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That probably would perform well Yeah. If you
Speaker 1: It also would have taken like five minutes to encode because it's such a simple website. But it was fun. And it was my first introduction to like vibe coding, like a front end website based on a style guide. I've since gone on and built other vibe coded websites. And I don't try and act like they're not vibe coded, like they lean into the idea of of the fact that this is a website that would never exist in reality and only makes sense as a as a vibe coded product.
Speaking of vibe coated products, if you vibe coated a product and you're trying to launch it, don't use another AI company's
Speaker 2: Phone farm.
Speaker 1: Phone farm?
Speaker 2: There's It's phone farm. Oh, is that where you're I thought that's
Speaker 1: No. Was talking about this post where someone tried to introduce a like Claude for marketing and they're clearly using the Claude trademark against Anthropics
Speaker 2: No. But but what I'm saying
Speaker 1: Don't do No.
Speaker 2: I I mean, part of why I think it was maybe deleted is it they delete the video was deleted now, but this was a video of a company that made basically a robot that you put over a real phone and it's an undetectable way to drive engagement
Speaker 1: Okay. Online Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2: Using using phone farms, basically.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this company is called phonefarm.ai. It's a website. And they say run unlimited accounts on autopilot. Post 10,000 videos a day.
So if you're a creator out there, you're trying to put out a 10,000 videos, really trying to, you know, get your reps in, you could just do that in a day. You don't need to spend years honing your craft or Yeah. Anything like that. You just do it all at once. But, yeah.
It does seem Yeah. It's so funny the way they sell this viral content manufactured. This has been going on a ton with launch videos where you'll see a launch video that that just has, you know, thousand like a thousand reposts and there's not really any real engagement.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 2: So I don't think this stuff works and you're not really tricking anyone except other bots. Mhmm. Here's the video. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 1: Let's see.
Speaker 3: It's coming.
Speaker 1: Cell phone. That's a good one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Here we go. Look at this, John. Okay.
Speaker 1: And is this a device that you can buy or is this a service that you pay them
Speaker 2: to do? You can it sounds like you can get a cloud version of it, but you can sounds also like they'll also sell you the robot.
Speaker 1: This is the dead Internet thesis now. It's not just dead dead Internet theory. It's how do we make money off of this. Is there any good use of this technology? What is the white pill?
It seems extremely adversarial. The best I can come up with would be as a joke sending you a thousand positive comments on your last Instagram post or something and you're just like, why is this going viral? But even that is likely to sort of nuke your account when it's discovered that you're followed by bots.
Speaker 2: Dead Internet reality. Yeah. Cooper, no white pillows.
Speaker 1: We're trying, buddy. We're trying here. We're doing our best. Testing. Testing.
Quality assurance testing. If you are Instagram, you want to run your app across a bunch of different devices for a very long time, see if there's a memory leak. Having a bunch of phones in the cloud makes sense. So testing. Testing is is the is the only viable white pill here, maybe?
I don't know. Can you come up with that one? No. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Rough.
Speaker 1: Rough. Anyway, speaking of cell phones
Speaker 2: Just do This is a good post and great things. Do make content that's interesting. Yeah. You'll get real attention. This is The funny with the funny thing with Yeah.
The funny thing with like, people are very immune to this stuff right now. So if they see a product launch and it has 5,000 likes or a thousand reposts Yeah. They're still human. Yeah. If they Maybe it makes them, like, engage more for a second with the content Mhmm.
Because it's in their feed.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 2: They're like, what is this? Mhmm. But the thing still has to be great. Mhmm. And if you make something great, you'll just naturally get the attention as a byproduct.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Good point. Well, this is a good post to close on. Cell phone. Self own.
They played us for absolute fools. Did what did they mean by calling the cell phone so close to self own? No. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your Friday.
Have a great two weeks. We're taking a vacation. We will be back in September, everyone. We'll play the wah wah. No.
We we the the end of August, we are taking a two week break from the show. We'll be
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: Back in September. Have a
Speaker 2: whole lot
Speaker 1: crazy stuff lined up for the new season. We're very excited for that. We will be back in September. So sign up for our newsletter. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Say goodbye to Ben Macklin.
Speaker 2: He's so We'll excited see you next summer, Ben.
Speaker 1: We will be back in the fall for fall for fall.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I know. It it it's Very Euro coded of us. Yeah. It's it's un we don't enjoy we don't enjoy taking time off around here.
We rarely do. Yeah. But we think it's important to give the whole team a proper break. This work is relentless.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You cannot you cannot rest on any laurels. Even if you have a bunch of laurels at the office, you start resting on them, there's no show. And so we figured it'd be good to let let the whole team take Regroup. Take some time away. And I can't wait to be back
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Already. We love we absolutely love what we do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's great. And it's a blessing. And counting down the days.
Speaker 1: Counting down
Speaker 2: the Just just like how many more sleeps is it?
Speaker 1: Like sixteen, seventeen.
Speaker 2: Something like that.
Speaker 1: Something like that.
Speaker 2: So we'll be reminding the team every day just 16 more sleeps everybody.
Speaker 1: Have a good week. Have a good next week.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The enjoy the last couple weeks of like proper summer. I feel like September comes around. It's over.
Speaker 1: It's over.
Speaker 2: It's time to get back in the mines.
Speaker 1: We will be back.
Speaker 2: We'll see you soon. We love you guys. Cheers. September 1.