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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Good to see you. How's your 2026 going? We haven't talked this year yet. What's life like?
Speaker 2:I'm loving life. I got no complaints whatsoever. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm loving life.
Speaker 1:That's great. Are you so you're not disappointed about the rollout of ads in LLMs thus far then? Does that save us a ruin your year? Because I saw the first ad. It was for the Wall Street Journal, and it was just a little little bubble at the top.
Speaker 1:Hey. You might wanna check out the journal. Seemed innocent enough to me. But how are you feeling?
Speaker 2:I haven't I haven't seen it at all, so it hasn't ruined my life at all.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:What's your information diet? Because it's hard not to log on the Internet and not start black pilling these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No shit. So my first stop my first stop is a site called Memeo Random Okay. Which kind of gives me an update on all the what's happening in the world. My second stop is Drudge Report Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because that gives me the hyperbole on everything that's happening in the world. And then after that, all the different newsletters and emails that I get Mhmm. Just that try to keep me up.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. How are you processing the flood of cold emails that appears to be thoughtful but
Speaker 1:Is AI generated.
Speaker 3:Actually AI generated because you are notorious for Yes. Your response rates and getting back to so many people that have reached out. But it but it feels like maybe an impossible task now.
Speaker 2:No. I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac mini. You did? You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That's amazing. And I'm still learning So you're
Speaker 3:just like, you hit me with AI. I'll hit you with AI back right away.
Speaker 2:Right back. Right. Because it's it's not even like the cold emails because that's pretty obvious. Yeah. You know, that it's pretty easy to see.
Speaker 2:It's people subscribing me to shit, and, know, the good news is Gmail has an unsubscribe button. Yep. So you just gotta train it to hit the unsubscribe button.
Speaker 1:Okay. And I just review
Speaker 2:it and all that shit. So it's still a work in progress, but at least I have a bad
Speaker 3:Well, the the the issue with that with us is that historically, if you had a podcast and somebody wrote you an email and said, hey, I really appreciate this moment where you're talking about this one thing.
Speaker 1:Totally. You're like, oh, they actually listen
Speaker 2:to the show.
Speaker 3:Tell like, hey, at least they they press play and at least found a moment. But now Yep. AI just does it instantly. So there's no way to clock whether whether something real
Speaker 2:or not. Yeah. And that's okay. Right? Because they're gonna the response rates most likely will be so low.
Speaker 2:We're in that trial and error phase Mhmm. Where people are like, we're gonna try it, see what happens. Mhmm. You know, maybe we'll get lucky, and then they'll get bored. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then it'll drop off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is owning a Mac mini a green flag for entrepreneurs these days? Talk to me about what you're seeing in early stage startups in this AI era. Like, where where where are the interesting builders? What patterns are you seeing that are like, oh, I didn't think that this person would be going down the founder Road, but they are now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Agents for everything. Yeah. You know? It's just because once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then you can turn that into what would have been a SaaS business in the past is now, you know, we'll create your own marketing team, and we'll, you know, do all these different things for you that you no longer have to do, and we'll charge you x number of dollars a month. Mhmm. That's it. And I'm seeing dozens of those, you know, typically one for every industry you can ever possibly imagine.
Speaker 1:And are they growing revenue faster? Are they growing profit faster?
Speaker 2:Neither. They're just still trying to to get some just trying to get some traction at all. Yeah. You know? Because if you're growing revenue quickly, you're probably not coming to me yet.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know? You're because, you know, the marginal cost to start is so low, and it's so fast, and you're using the agent. So if they can get anybody to give them a credit card
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, or sign up, or, you know, now there's a little bit of a battle to use USTC for payment the payment rails Yeah. You know, to make it so that, you know, just give me your wallet, and that's, you know, it's gonna end up being a scam, and a lot of people are gonna get ripped off there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hell yeah.
Speaker 2:But but I think the real thing right now is agents for vertical verticals and trying to turn that into replace all your employees so you can start up or you can cut costs.
Speaker 1:Do you think any of those agent focused sort of, like, niche, at least niche to start businesses, would be a fit for Shark Tank?
Speaker 2:Yes and no. Yes. They should be. No. People won't understand them, and and the other sharks wouldn't understand them.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, effectively, anything you can do
Speaker 3:But you only need one shark to understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Right? And I'm not on the show anymore.
Speaker 3:So it's fucked. It's time to it's time to go back. It's time to go back. You gotta
Speaker 2:be chance.
Speaker 3:You gotta be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what
Speaker 1:what was the anatomy of I I I think we talk about what makes for a great company all day long. We'll talk about that throughout the the show today. But what makes for a company that will put on a particularly captivating Shark Tank appearance?
Speaker 2:You gotta remember, it's for TV. You have to be entertaining. Yeah. And if it's not entertaining in some shape or form Mhmm. It's just not gonna work regardless of the quality of the business.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. If you don't have a, you know, charisma, you don't have a compelling pitch that's entertaining Yeah. It doesn't matter. You could be selling dollar bills for 50¢, and it would fail.
Speaker 1:Interesting. How important is, like, the visual component? There's a lot of physical products, but at a certain point, it gets too big for the studio. How important is it, like, a physical product presentation?
Speaker 2:Well, the good news is the producers will work with you on that, and they make them practice over and over and over. And of the hundreds, if not thousands of pitches I saw in fifteen years
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We only had one really just just choke. Right? Where they couldn't spit it out. Maybe two, which is amazing. It's a testament to to Mindy and the producers there and how hard they, prepare them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think, how do you think Shark Tank and and shows like it, will change in in the era of AI video generation, you know, endless content? Is it is it is it stronger than ever because it's a known brand, or is there some weakness there? Like, how do you see that playing out?
Speaker 2:It all depends on platform. It's like you guys. Right? You're you know, it really just depends on reach of the platform and quality of the product.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:I think I think for Shark Tank, it's not gonna have to change because of AI or technology simply because you're you're really communicating to a family audience.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the message you're communicating isn't, hey. Here's a here's a bunch of businesses that are great. The message you're communicating is that could be you on the carpet. The American dream is alive and well. Sure.
Speaker 2:And so that's really what makes Shark Tank successful, not the quality of the businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about sports? I've seen some, some robots playing tennis. They're gonna be playing basketball soon. I don't think I'll be watching robot basketball, but, how do you think live events, sports, basketball will change over the next decade?
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe for the referees like you've seen in tennis, but that's it. Yeah. I think in reality, more people will wanna go to in real life events Mhmm. Than before because if, you know, if you're just managing agents, looking at output, looking for exceptions, you're gonna want some human touch. Right?
Speaker 2:You're gonna want to be able to engage. And I think that's that's really, really important. And I think that's where sports will grow. I mean, you're starting to see that now with, you know, what happened with the Olympics. The World Baseball Classic, you know, became much more popular because people want that disengagement from all the the the stress that that's happening right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At the same time, it feels like there's almost an opportunity for, not to bring it back to targeted advertising, but but AI can tell me, okay. My favorite team's in town. I should go to this particular game. I should remind me at the right time instead of just signing up for
Speaker 2:the newsletter. AI. Yeah. That's not really AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's just targeting. Right? And I'm gonna tell you what. In terms of I'm gonna take it down a different path because I'm contrarian on this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's with robotics. Mhmm. I think everybody's making this push for humanoid robots. Mhmm. I think they might have a five year lifespan, and then they'll fail miserably, maybe ten.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean the you mean the
Speaker 3:companies or the or the individual robots? Or both?
Speaker 2:Both. Both. Right? Because I think everybody defaults to, well, we live in a human world, and humanoids will take the place of humans for various functions, particularly in the home. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think there's just no chance. I think if you look at warehouses and what Amazon does, they're not humanoid robots carrying boxes. They're robots that are designed to fit the environment. And I think, you know, I've heard people say, well, a house is a house. You need a humanoid.
Speaker 2:I think houses are gonna be redesigned completely so that whatever the optimal robot is that allows it to simplify the house, that's where houses will go. So, I'll give you an example. If we had robots that looked more like spiders that could, you know, but had hand, you know, the ability to carry and lift things, where more like ants, I guess, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? But, and you could create a house where the pantry and the refrigerator and the washing machines were hidden behind the garage, if you even have a garage. And that way you could redesign it so all the living space was for people. Because you know that the robots aren't gonna be full formed humanoids, they're gonna be whatever the optimal shape is, and they're kind of co designed. You design the house to fit the robot, and you design the robot to fit the house.
Speaker 2:And I think Yeah. That way you could go on both.
Speaker 3:You know, the the humanoid founders will tell you, you know, how do you solve stairs. Right? Like, it doesn't work for wheels. But if the robots are really great people, you could put, like, a mini robot elevator. Right?
Speaker 3:If it's on wheels, then you just put it
Speaker 2:yeah. Like, you you see, like, the old house dumb way dumbwaiters. Right? Mhmm. Where there's just the the thing where you pull it, you put it in there, and you pull it up, and it goes up to the next floor, and somebody opens it up.
Speaker 2:You're gonna see, you know, a a mechanized equivalent to that. Right? Where the it's it recognizes the little, you know, ant robot that's coming up, and it opens up a little door that's, you know, that leads to the size of whatever it is it needs to carry or whatever. And then it goes up the dumbwaiter, does this thing on the next floor, the next floor, the next floor, and does what it needs to do. I don't think, you know, stairs are an issue at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about just these types of ideas, AI products generally getting rolled out and then hitting it bumping up against, like, human guardrails? Like, when I hear that, I think, like, that sounds incredibly sci fi and potentially possible from an engineering perspective. But then, you know, you try and, you know, remodel your house, and then you're stuck in permitting for two years. And so that tends to slow the progress down little bit.
Speaker 2:Is that is all Okay. Yeah. Of course it is. But that's all technology during the interim period. Right?
Speaker 2:Sure. There's always a transitional period where you go from the old to the new. Like, back in the day, you know, there wasn't enough electrical outlets for your PC. There wasn't enough, you know, you had to go into the walls to to run all the Ethernet cables and all that shit. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. You know? And so the houses and offices weren't designed for that because it wasn't considered when they were built, but they adapted. You found ways to adapt, and it'll be the same thing with homes, it'll be same thing with offices. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll find ways to adapt. I think, you know, the biggest challenge going forward is going to be as we go from an LLM world to a world view world of AI, where, you know, we're taking in video, and learning from the video, and extracting rules from the video, a lot of the things that we're gonna do are gonna be outside or and are gonna be going to have to consume in the interim at least either satellite bandwidth or five g bandwidth. Mhmm. And I don't think there's gonna be enough bandwidth when you're working with video based AI models.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Interesting. You mentioned maybe a garage not existing in the future. Is that a way to say that you're excited about self driving cars? Like, what are you what are you thinking is gonna happen there?
Speaker 2:You know, I I played around. I have a Tesla, and I upgraded for a couple months, and it terrified the shit out of me. Not that I didn't trust it. Yeah. Oh my god.
Speaker 2:Because, like, when you're going 25 miles an hour, it's no big deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You go on a highway, you're going 70 miles an hour, and and there's a median right there in the middle of the highway. Yeah. I was, like, shaking. Like, I was like, I don't you know, Elon's cool for whatever, but, know, I ain't trusting him that much. Right?
Speaker 2:You know? I'm not You're doing Mad Max for
Speaker 3:the next mode? You know about Mad Max.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:You know, but you can set a delimiter where it's like, much above the speed limit are you willing to go? And if the speed limit is 65 or 70, you know, you've gotta go the speed limit, and it was scary as fuck trying to go 70 miles an hour. And I don't wanna be there when somebody paints some adversarial you know how there's graffiti in the weirdest places? Wait until there's adversarial graffiti.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, somebody if somebody paint
Speaker 1:if they put
Speaker 3:brick wall
Speaker 1:It's roadrunner.
Speaker 3:Paint it to look like the road roadrunner.
Speaker 1:Wile E. Coyote is good. No.
Speaker 2:That's, like, ridiculous shit. Right? Why are the guy who's
Speaker 1:gonna paint the tunnel, and then you slam into it?
Speaker 2:There's somebody somewhere trying to figure out how to fuck up self driving mode. Right?
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:For sure. And just because it's just taking video input Yeah. And, you know, what it could be some pattern, and all of a sudden, you're seeing this pattern Yeah. On medians or, you know, overlaid on stop signs or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, because, you know, somebody's got to do that because it's just too easy not to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hyper realistic camo wrap gets confused, you know, eventually.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whatever. Right?
Speaker 1:You wrap your car in camo, and if the camouflage is effective, you're gonna confuse the AIs. It it's a mess.
Speaker 2:Just like and there could be a predator. Right? Alien versus predator. Yeah. Predator could show up.
Speaker 2:Right? It's possible. Arnold isn't there to save us.
Speaker 1:It's possible. I mean, it's speaking of Arnold, are you it's it sounds like you're in a good mood. You're optimistic about things. Are does the question of AI doom come into your mind? These runaway robotics?
Speaker 1:Are you worried about that at all?
Speaker 2:Oh, not even the least. For the for the reason I just mentioned. Right? In in order, like right now, LLMs are basically bimodal with some video, right? Where it's almost all text and pictures with some video.
Speaker 2:You can't model the world with that. You just can't. AI right now doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations. It has no idea what happens next. A two year old kid with a high chair and a sippy cup knows if it pushes the sippy cup over the off the high chair.
Speaker 2:Mom's coming running, and the kid's gonna start laughing at mom. Right? Large language models don't Every time. Every time. Right?
Speaker 2:And there's no
Speaker 3:large language model ever.
Speaker 2:Right? Ever. And it's hysterical, you know, unless your mom, right? But you get the point. Right?
Speaker 2:The large language models we have today can't do that. And so we have to evolve to models that can capture the world and physics, and deal with the latency of capturing or not being having access to video that you can't see, and so you have to try to model that. And not only does that take up a lot of processing power, but it takes up a lot of bandwidth, as I mentioned before. And so, the Terminator's taking over. I just don't see how it's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Now, you can have, you know, localized brains for military applications, and power get better, and manual dexterity will get better, all that, but that's not going to allow you to take over the world. Right? That's going to be application specific. So I'm not afraid of that at all, and I also think that, you know, we're talking about agentic applications. I I think particularly for small medium sized businesses and some large businesses, they're not gonna have that skill set.
Speaker 2:It's not gonna be natural for them to do that. And I think kids coming out of school today that have taken some Python, don't have to be comp sci majors, but have done AgenTic AI. Like, when I go talk to schools, that's what I tell them. You know, get into Claude, you know, teach yourself all the AgenTic stuff, and then go to small businesses because they're not gonna understand how to do any of that shit
Speaker 1:at all. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:What what advice are you giving to friends, portfolio companies, etcetera, around navigating as a business leader during a time where we have, you know, major global conflict. I don't know what exactly you're working on in 2002, 2003, 2004, but there's so much I mean, right now, everyone's hoping for a quick end to the conflict, but it's hard to lean on that.
Speaker 2:You know, it's funny. In 2002, when we attacked Iraq, I created something called the Fallen Patriot Fund, which you know, was just money available that I funded myself. Money available for the families of soldiers who didn't return, or soldiers that were you know horrifically injured or disfigured or whatever it may be, and we paid out millions of dollars. But the bigger point was the way the media world was back then, we kind of just trusted what was presented to us by the gatekeepers. Right?
Speaker 2:You could have an opinion whether it was right or wrong, but hey, there were WMDs, Weapons of mass discussion, destruction, and we kind of trusted. Now there's so many information sources and social media, and we really only consume what the algorithms show us, you know, and each one of us has a different algorithm. Like the three of us, our algorithms are like fingerprints. No two are alike. And because of that, everybody's got a different perspective on what's going on in Iran and what's happening around the world.
Speaker 2:And to me, that's scary. Right? It's hard to know what's real and who to trust, and now with AI, video, you know, what's been created, and we really are in our cross our fingers, and hope things work out for the best. Because I don't know that there's a way for anybody to really participate in a decision or make a good decision.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're all trying to predict the future together Within perfect based on different well, based on wildly different kind of influences.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You know, we don't have access to the information we truly would need in order to make a cogent decision, or even have a decent opinion. I mean, we just don't. And we spend more time trying to filter and determine what's real and what's not so that it's it's almost impossible to really do anything but just hope and pray.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. We have a couple questions from the chat. The first one is about cost plus drugs. Can you give us an update there? Yeah.
Speaker 1:How's it going? What's the thesis?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Rushiness. Rushiness. Sound like
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Like, give us a sense of scale. Give us a a reminder of the strategy. Reintroduce the company.
Speaker 2:Sure. So what you go to cost+drugs.com Mhmm. And you put in the name of the medication. If it's one of the thousands we carry, then we actually show you our actual cost. Then we show you that our markup is only 15%, and we charge you $5 for shipping and handling, and then the credit card fee.
Speaker 2:And in doing so with only a 15% margin, unless it's like a $4 Walmart drug, we're almost always the cheapest option for anybody. So if you're underinsured, if you don't have insurance, you know, even to compare it against your copay or coinsurance, we may be cheaper than your copay. Wow. And because of that, our business is just skyrocketing. So that's part one of our business.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Part two to our business, for my company, for my my employees and their families, I went around and talked to the CEOs and CFOs of a lot of hospitals and found out where they were getting ripped off by the insurance companies. You know, if you think about this, and and I don't think many people do, if whatever your deductible is, if something happens to you and you can't afford it, even if you have great insurance, you might have a 1,500 or $2,500 deductible, which is big company good insurance. But if you don't have that money and 40% of people don't have $400 for an emergency, when you go to the hospital, as an example, they literally end up loaning you the money. And that, as a result, we've turned hospitals and providers into subprime lenders.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think about that. Yeah. Right? And then you have the denials, and then they underpay late play call. But so anyways, so I went to local hospital, Baylor Scott and White, who's a really forward thinking hospital system.
Speaker 2:And I said, look. I understand where you're getting ripped off by the insurance carriers. I'll pay you on time. I'll pay you what we committed. I won't claw back.
Speaker 2:I won't lay pay. In exchange, I want two things. I want a better price. I want it as a reference price of Medicare, about 100100% of Medicare unless it's really complicated. And more importantly, we created a site called costpluswellness.com, and we are going to post this contract on costpluswellness.com, so that any business, you guys, TBPN, anybody any size that wants to direct contract can reach out to Baylor Scott White and get the same pricing that we get.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And it's just blown up. I mean, it's just incredible. Have more than 9,000 providers, and what we're trying to do is teach companies who self insure in particular that they can take control of their expenses. Don't need to be dependent on the insurance company to to to come up with the right deal because they won't.
Speaker 2:They'll steal from you.
Speaker 1:Did you ever I mean, you're yeah. It's such an interesting, it's such an interesting company, for you because, I feel like when when when you have as big of a presence as you do, it could be a book or a course or a protein powder. Did you look at anything else? Yeah. Or have you burned
Speaker 2:out all that stuff? Powder. Protein powder.
Speaker 3:The Cubanator the Cubanator protein stack.
Speaker 1:I'm in the no. This is obviously much more much more important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just thought, you know, nobody looks at health care Yeah. And says, you know, the economic side is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're we're doing it the right way in this country. It's the exact opposite. And so if you're gonna try to disrupt, go big or go home. Right? Another
Speaker 1:question from the chat. What's the most underrated business you've seen in your career? I I I I I think they're talking about something that, like, you it is the moment you saw it, it collect, and you were like, okay. This is, like, a wildly mispriced asset or something that could really fly.
Speaker 2:Streaming.
Speaker 1:Streaming?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We called it Internet broadcasting. I sat down with a buddy of mine in 1995 at a California pizza kitchen, and he was like, how can we listen to Indiana basketball in Dallas, Texas?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is right when the Internet had just started. Right? It was brand new to everybody, and I'm like, let me figure it out. And so we started a company called AudioNet Yeah. And got the right stuff, you know, hundreds of schools, hundreds of radio stations, TV stations.
Speaker 2:You know, back then the copyright laws were different. Created our own Internet jukebox and unlived the number of Internet radio stations and started streaming until we sold it to Yahoo. That was the most obvious thing I'd ever seen in my career.
Speaker 1:What was the domain name negotiation like? Jordy's a big fan of of great domain names.
Speaker 2:Great question. Great. Great. Great. Great question.
Speaker 2:So when we started, it was audionet and I just registered it. Nobody had it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Then Great. Audionet.com or audio.net?
Speaker 2:No. Audionet.com.
Speaker 1:Okay. I like it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because we were just doing audio in 1995. Yeah. And then by '97, we we started to do video, and AudioNet wasn't gonna cut it. No. And so I found broadcast.com because we wanted to broadcast everything and anything.
Speaker 2:Yep. And found the guy and paid him $8,000, and he was thrilled to get the 8,000 Wow. Yeah. This is $19.97 dollars
Speaker 3:a month. After that? Did he ping you after
Speaker 2:Yes, he did. He did. But wait. It gets better. But wait.
Speaker 2:There's more. Right? And so I'm like, oh, shit. This is nothing. Right?
Speaker 2:It's an automatic traffic generator. And so I started going out there and just glomming up and just grabbing all kinds of URLs so that we could put content on them, and then drive it back to broadcast.com. So literally, I own final4.com. I own baseball.com. I own sandwich.com.
Speaker 2:You name it. I bought it. I bought it for I would buy, like, just packages of URLs. Right? And just
Speaker 3:And this is because people were just going to their browser and being like is before start.com. They would type it in.
Speaker 2:Google didn't exactly.
Speaker 1:So peoplecom.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Everything was a a portal. Right? Everything was a front door. And so I was like, anything that generated traffic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I've done it since. Like, I own misterpresident.com. Okay. I own democracy.com.
Speaker 2:I I you know, I I mean,
Speaker 3:all kinds of people. Democracy.
Speaker 1:Check democracy private.
Speaker 2:I was worried.
Speaker 1:I was worried. American thing I've ever I've ever heard. I love that. It's incredible. Okay.
Speaker 1:The last question from the chat, and we'll let you get back to your busy day. I I wanna flip it around. What's a what's a business that you've seen in your career that you wanted to work so well, but for whatever reason, the business just didn't achieve what you had in mind and why. Yeah. And you don't need to be specific about this particular company.
Speaker 1:I mean, like, a a technology or maybe an anonymized company, something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. God. I'd have to think about it. You know that what was not the the motorized skateboards? They weren't called with the Hoverboards.
Speaker 2:Hoverboards. Hoverboards. Yes. Hoverboards. So a buddy of hoverboard future.
Speaker 2:Everyone traveling on hoverboards are doing it. Yes. So a buddy of mine, his son was an engineer, and I was like, okay, this kid could try to come up with some new ways to do hoverboards, make them safer, etcetera. And so we started a company that did hoverboards, and there were so many more patents already in place than I ever imagined. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We couldn't get past them, and that it failed miserably.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that was a very interesting boom, the hoverboard boom. It sort of came out of Shenzhen fully formed Yes.
Speaker 1:There was a massive supply chain, and they were all over, but there was no one brand. There were,
Speaker 2:like None.
Speaker 1:A ton of different brands because really what was going on was there was one amazing supplier in China that had, like, 20 different companies that were reselling it all over.
Speaker 2:Making a killing. Yeah. They were. Killing.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What is it still possible to create a widget and make like a $100,000,000 from it? Or does the or do the clones come? Because I I I I know the guy who made like the the the fidget spinner, like his claim to fame.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. That's cool.
Speaker 3:And But but he didn't
Speaker 2:It got knocked off like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it was it was the kind of thing that like was a hit product.
Speaker 2:It's all on Amazon. Okay. All on Amazon.
Speaker 3:Oh, so
Speaker 2:it's Right. So so I started talking to some Amazon resellers like mid twenty four because I was just curious about some things. I see some things on on X. And as it turns out, if you're an American seller, it may have changed, so correct me if I'm wrong. If you're an American seller, you can have one company that sells on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Right? For for your but if you're Chinese, there's no limit. Yeah. And you don't even have to have a nexus. So if you're that American company and you're making sales and making money, then you have to pay taxes and define your nexus and, you know Oh, so
Speaker 3:you're just screwed because you because your
Speaker 2:You're screwed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because these Chinese companies to this day, as far as I know, these Chinese companies don't have to have a nexus, don't pay the taxes Mhmm. Even though they're supposed to. Right? You can literally have a Chinese bank account, and Amazon will send the money right to that Chinese bank account. And I was proposing to these guys and talking to some legislators at the time that Chinese companies should have to post a bond before they can sell the product and post it on a website that whatever whatever dot gov so that, you know, the fidget spin guy spinner guy could come in and say, you know, we have an agent now that continually continuously checks to see if there's a knock off of their product, and then can challenge it.
Speaker 2:And then at least there's that 10,000 or $25,000 bond that offsets the risk for that fidget spinner.
Speaker 3:Okay. One I widgets company that bought the next five most popular widget Oh, wow. Companies in the category that Yep. Were knocking them off and they just continue to operate them Yep. But they have enough ranking on Amazon But it's just wrong.
Speaker 3:It's just wrong
Speaker 2:that yeah. Because any whether it's China or Vietnam, any country, if you're outside The United States, you immediately have a cost advantage Mhmm. Not the manufacturing, but just from an IP, from a and from an Amazon cost perspective. Why in the world is it cheaper for a Chinese or Vietnamese company to sell on Amazon and to easily knock off than it is for an American company to sell the original product? That makes no So
Speaker 1:dumb.
Speaker 2:And yeah. And and legislatively, you could fix it in a heartbeat. You got to post a bond. $25,000 bond, depending on the size of the market, maybe more, and then give everybody ninety days to check it, and all of a sudden the whole industry changes, and American manufacturing skyrockets, and then because that cost of knockoff isn't just about the cost of losing sales, it's the administrative, the legal cost, that there's just so many nuanced things that you have to spend money on.
Speaker 3:Have a we have a knock we have knock off issues, and like we we spend thousands of dollars to have our lawyer like chase them down and send takedown From our merch, like just t shirts and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yes. Oh, yeah. Merch is crazy, and then IP too, right? All the DMCA takedown notices because they're just scraping and Yeah. You know, reposting, all that shit.
Speaker 2:Right? That's easy to fix if, you know, someone has the the guts to do it.
Speaker 1:What is the anatomy of using your likeness once you've made an investment? What does the the best relationship look like? I imagine it's very open and transparent, but I imagine that anyone who's been associated with you at all is trying to, like, slap your face next to their product and, like Of course. Flip it all over. And maybe you haven't invested yet, and you just said, oh, it looks nice.
Speaker 1:And then they're like, clip it. And you said it looks nice. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it depends on the company. Okay. You know, usually, I I I don't even care. But two things.
Speaker 2:One, do you know what Synthesia is? Synthesia dot io?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think so. Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. They've been on the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have the avatars. Yeah. Victor and all those
Speaker 1:guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, was their first investor, so I send them there.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. You're
Speaker 3:dog. Dog. That's a unicorn.
Speaker 2:Come on, Come on, And I gave them, like, a lot of money. Yeah. I gave them a lot of money. This was ten, twelve years ago, way ahead of the curve. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There we go. Okay. So Synthesia.
Speaker 2:Yes. So Synthesia, so I'll push them to them, or like I'll just fuck around like you saw with Sora. They had Oh, yeah. So I just I I put one picture of me out there, but I was playing with it because I want to learn all this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they Sora had this thing where you can put conditions on how when they can be used. Yeah. So I made a condition. I made a condition so that at the end of every video that that used my likeness, you had it showed the logo for cost plus
Speaker 3:drugs. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's been used like hundreds of thousands of times, and I know we've seen a bump as a result.
Speaker 3:That's so smart. John did the less commercial thing. He said, betray me as a bodybuilder. It's funny.
Speaker 2:A lot less commercial. But, of course, the sore is kind of falling behind now, so they kinda I don't know if they'll No.
Speaker 3:It's good. It's gonna it'll get added into ChatGPT, and then you got a billion people just just pumping cos plus drugs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's always it's always crazy to me to see it. Like, I tell it, you know, don't you know, because it has terms of service.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Can't show drug use and dah dah dah. Sure. Sure. And so there's pictures of me, like, doing lines of coke and shit, and I got you know, so it's kinda crazy.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. What when is the right time to for a company to apply to Shark Tank?
Speaker 2:Anytime. You just don't know. I mean, they have open auditions, all the time. So if you go to, Shark Tank's website Yeah. It'll give you all the information there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you just gotta go out there and have fun.
Speaker 1:Go out there and have fun.
Speaker 3:How are you processing the peptide boom? Both FDA Non
Speaker 2:participant. Non participant. I'm not a believer in that shit at all. Like, every single LLM that I put it into and asked for, show me the trials and show me the research.
Speaker 3:You mean the non FDA approved, just just the stuff coming off the boat. Right.
Speaker 2:Or or
Speaker 1:are you short Eli Lilly?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. The insulin, like, the real because when people talk peptides, you're talking supplement type stuff.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Right. But you're talking Eli Lilly stuff?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Not not Ozempic that's running Super Bowl ads.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:Very heavily regulated. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:No. Because that stuff's gonna come down in price. And now, you know, Lilly and Novo are smart now with their GLP ones. Yeah. They're working around the PBMs and doing direct to patient, direct to company.
Speaker 2:Sure. And that was brilliant. That was really smart.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Jordy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's always fun.
Speaker 1:This is super fun.
Speaker 2:It's always fun.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Alright.
Speaker 2:It's fun, guys.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the rest of
Speaker 2:your time. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:God's time to see soon. Goodbye.