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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.
We gotta play the see you again goodbye like This he passed is the this is the saying goodbye to our intern, man.
Speaker 2:Want yeah. We need an AI video of me and him
Speaker 1:in sports cars driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, and then we reach a fork in the road. He goes off to 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 3:End of an era, but the story
Speaker 1:is man, not Ben Macklin, one of the greatest ever doing. Yeah. The story is not over. Anyway, there are a ton of stories that are not over. We're gonna take you through a bunch of them.
Speaker 1: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 '25. What does f stand for?
Speaker 2:Fall.
Speaker 1:Fall twenty five. Oh, because they do quarterly now. Anyway, let's play this.
Speaker 3:That's fah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. F.
Speaker 2:Oh, they've got a boxy nose.
Speaker 1:Can we
Speaker 2:not talk about that right now?
Speaker 4:Okay. Sorry, Ed. It's the second time they texted me that.
Speaker 2:I'll be right back. What is it, dude? I'm busy. Okay. So What is it?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:I told her to only reply to emails when I'm out of
Speaker 1:production team has?
Speaker 2:Look, you know it's my job to surface these kinds of failures for you. And it may I think it's in the
Speaker 3:same restaurant too.
Speaker 2:Sent 30,000 emails
Speaker 1:Looks very similar.
Speaker 2:About it. It's either a lack of guardrails or Yeah. Or Same 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.
Speaker 2:So so so so much. I don't think I could function without your prompts.
Speaker 4:Calling tools on my behalf
Speaker 2:without any human oversight? Yes. Without any human oversight. Mika? Yeah.
Speaker 1: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 agent 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
Speaker 3:to the five g real era. 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 at best, 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, you trace the issues yourself, but agents will always fail in ways you didn't predict. That's why we built Lema.
Speaker 1:Lema understands what your agent is supposed to do, so it surfaces failures you never define automatically. So Lema 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?
Speaker 1: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 your ecommerce site. It might be that Or coupon code. Or coupon code. It might be that something's going viral on this particular SKU.
Speaker 1:Maybe you need to buy more inventory. If in the best case, maybe you're being spammed or or 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 you think about the obsession knock off as startup launch video?
Speaker 2:I thought it was pretty good.
Speaker 1:Rave review. Yeah. I
Speaker 2:don't It looks like the movie. Mike Mike disagreed, maybe. Oh, Mike disagreed. Shots fired.
Speaker 3:Side, Mike.
Speaker 2:Wrong lens? What we got?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Take some shot.
Speaker 2:He said color's off.
Speaker 1:Oh, the color's off. Okay. Okay. Well, the experts have waited. So anyway No.
Speaker 1:I I mean, I can see
Speaker 3:a new meta of of startups just recreating, iconic movie scenes Yeah. To promote their products. Yeah. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:Like you're growing human tissue, you recreate Michael Michael Bay as the island to show. Just recreate the dystopian scenario that you're creating. No. And then be
Speaker 3: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 enemy of the product is shown like, the lemma is the guy on the phone that 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.
Speaker 1: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 Lema is the friend in this scenario, but it is a horror shot after all.
Speaker 1:So it does lead
Speaker 3:the woman is the agent.
Speaker 1:The woman is The rail. Yeah. The the agent that has gone off
Speaker 3: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 and so just on a on a generic brand experience side, I'm like, uh-uh. But that's how kind of the emotion that they wanted to deliver. Right? Was like imagine Agent.
Speaker 1:Oh, an agent sending. Doing something really bad in your organization. So not not an unreasonable not an unreasonable scenario. Anyway, there is an article in the journal. The the information has been reporting on even Claude is in the dark about Dario Amade's wife and her influence at Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Cammy Clark, who started what she called a revolutionary porn company where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein, keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. It's it's coming IPO could top trillions. And so, the actual lineage here was Dario mentioned that he was married, I believe to to on a Bloomberg podcast, I believe. That was recently? Circuit, I think.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 Anthropic systemically important at this point? Is it is it such an important company that, it does merit this?
Speaker 1: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 Silk in Sun Valley. She acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 Anthropic's 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, 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.
Speaker 1: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 of CEO, you probably have fully private. Don't train on anything I have to 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.
Speaker 1: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 40 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 social a women's social dieting app that morphed into a women's health care AI company. That was the video that I saw on YouTube.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Claude, the company's chatbot, is now the chief
Speaker 3:of Interesting, differentiated name for a fund. I think it was the mother of AGI.
Speaker 1:Mother of 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 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.
Speaker 1:Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Almade and other co founders, 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.
Speaker 1: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 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.
Speaker 1: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 that it was like, why is no one writing hit pieces about Stripe? Because he's like because it's just like me and my brother, riding a really clean ship and no one really complains. And there's never been a there's never been a coup.
Speaker 1:And we just refuse to take the company public and and Yeah. Just grow the business.
Speaker 3:Building payment rails.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're yeah. We put the payment rails in the bag, sir.
Speaker 3: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 about the colossal Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who are these two brothers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's sort of a Hibernian conspiracy. The Hibernian, they're Irish. Barack Obama, part Irish. Right?
Speaker 1:It goes pretty deep.
Speaker 3:Wow. Yeah. Deeper than I thought.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's when the company got started. Is that a coincidence? Who knows? Dig in.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:We need a we need a banned PDF or or a tell all book. 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 arrows get directed at that. And I think I I think that's something that's happening at this point.
Speaker 1:I I said at the time, years ago, I was talking to an American venture capitalist 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. 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, you know, Decacorns and Centicorns over there, huge companies.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:They're usually selling overpriced junk food. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome leads to slower startup formation, 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.
Speaker 1: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, you know, writing. He says, counterpoint, it's vital and overdue.
Speaker 1:Anthropic laid itself laid out the stakes very publicly as follows, quote, our product is a god and this is not an actual quote, but I I guess this is, like, the vibe that he, in particular, A picked up
Speaker 3:pretty effective summary.
Speaker 1:He says our 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:So why are the morals of the people who are giving AI its morals not fair game?
Speaker 3:Anything it it feels like it disrupts some of the brand positioning Yeah. Around morality makes that maybe less effective. 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. 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, it was a great Yeah. But it
Speaker 2:but even
Speaker 3:like the images that are in The Wall Street Journal piece
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are from February. Right? Where they're Yeah. Together. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you would think that somebody would have asked, who's this person that Daria is 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
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 1:But it didn't piece it together fully. It it obviously, the context of being in the journal is a very very different thing. Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker 3:Anyways, probably overall mostly just bad for the AI industry Yeah. Overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Nick Carter sort of summed it up here. He said, remember if Anthropic wins and Close Source wins, these are the people that will get to write the morality rules for the entire planet. And so it it maybe is worth interrogating the morality, seeing where if you agree with it, if if the with this stuff or not.
Speaker 1: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 all of this. 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 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.
Speaker 1:And so, like, this could grow, but it feels like it's arm's distance enough. It it it it's 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.
Speaker 1:And so there's, 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 like, it will it will rank lower, but I don't know. Anyway.
Speaker 3: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. Yeah. Anybody that is done driving in the backcountry knows that all cars can get airtime.
Speaker 3:But I don't think that's what
Speaker 2:he was alluding to. I don't think that's
Speaker 3:what he's alluding to. I think I think he was alluding to some set of features that allow it to Fly. Fly. And what I I don't know what we're gonna I don't know what flying is. Yep.
Speaker 3:Right? Is flying an inch off the ground. You're moving it at a 100 miles an hour, maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 1:So there is a Chinese car that can jump over a pothole, extremely relevant for Los Angeles. We gotta get this car here to 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 traveling. And and we said, like, okay. The gauntlet has thrown down.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Not even ghost. But Anyways. Information has the
Speaker 3:The crazy thing
Speaker 1:for it.
Speaker 3:Is that even as far back as eight years ago Mhmm. There were patents that Tesla Mhmm. Filed related to using Mhmm. Effectively rocket Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: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 3:Yeah. The the SpaceX if if Tesla comes out with a Roadster that has a SpaceX, It's like basically
Speaker 1:Nolan engine on it.
Speaker 3:Some type of SpaceX engine. There's probably 10,000 buyers for that car. Like you could imagine a lot of people It's
Speaker 1:20 times the Audi new Vallari. You know, the other thing that they could do is they could go out to the Salt Flats and they could set the world speed record, the high speed record. Because a rocket engine on the back of a Tesla going in a straight line, they could probably break the speed of sound. And that would Yeah. Be amazing.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't necessarily fit the flying criteria, but it'd be flying across the Salt Flats, I'd I'd give it credit. It needs a crazy twist, I think.
Speaker 3:Between Elon's promises of super nimble robots and interstellar 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, said he wanted the vehicle to be the fastest production car in the world. Then he said that 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 3:Yes. They do.
Speaker 1:Like, in order to buy the Tesla, you have to have an FFL. You have to have a firearms license. Oh,
Speaker 3:a dealer license.
Speaker 1:Dealer license.
Speaker 3:That's basically a gun store on wheels. Exactly. Because be very American. That would be very Texas.
Speaker 1: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. So maybe maybe that's just the process.
Speaker 2:The Musk's
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 3: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 Tesla?
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 3:They involve showing the vehicle racing onto a magnetized roller coaster like ramp and driving upside down before riding 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?
Speaker 3:I'm gonna read it back.
Speaker 1:Tell me.
Speaker 3: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 3:They're they're they're making a Hot Wheels style
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Roller coaster loop
Speaker 1:for And this is what leaked? This is crazy. I love it though.
Speaker 3:I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:This is awesome. This is amazing. Okay.
Speaker 3: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. Such a 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 Demolition damage to their eardrums. Cold gas thrusters generate high pressure gas that can create significant noise and vibrations according to Jay Kim, a As professor of a result, the car will be remotely operated without anyone inside the vehicle. Okay.
Speaker 3:This feels like we're getting farther and farther away from a production car.
Speaker 1:It's just a rocket. It's just a rocket.
Speaker 3:Hundreds of yards away, remotely operated, might go terribly. Can you imagine getting He's 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.
Speaker 1:That would be very, very funny. Is that the end of that story?
Speaker 3:That's all, folks.
Speaker 1: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 3: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.
Speaker 1:And I think that's why this image from Chris Bakke went so viral because it specifically looks just like a normal house that might be a million dollars or $3,000,000. 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 3:Lot for this shape.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It just looks like one normal house, please, to me. Right?
Speaker 3:One starter home, please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. 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.
Speaker 1:Bay Area real estate has been expensive for a long time.
Speaker 3:Quarter acre too.
Speaker 1: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 3:Ben is on its hair today. He says, wow. There's a patio. No pool.
Speaker 1:There's no pool? For $16,000,000, no pool?
Speaker 3:On a quarter acre?
Speaker 1:That is that's crazy. I wonder where this one will land.
Speaker 3:No garage either.
Speaker 2:Wait. No
Speaker 1: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, okay.
Speaker 1:That kind of matches. Except you pull up to this thing in a in a Rivalto or something. They're 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.
Speaker 1: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 3:The agent on the listing says it has unique feature, a glass and case staircase.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:You don't see that much in a
Speaker 1:That's not.
Speaker 3:In a modern McMansion.
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.
Speaker 1:There are also five beaches, staff quarters, and a deep water jetty. If 600 acres for your private island is a little excessive, there's another option in Fiji. Mansion 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.
Speaker 1: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 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. It's not Titanic. It's not Seinfeld.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 at the global book box office.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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,
Speaker 3:It's there have been not just a show, it's a machine?
Speaker 1:Basically. Wow. It's it's 30 different productions around the world spanning more than a 100 Yeah. Cities
Speaker 3:But 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 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.
Speaker 1: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. Then you scale that model across multiple productions simultaneously.
Speaker 3:And and are all these productions paying royalties back to Disney? Yeah. Yeah. So you're thinking what I'm thinking?
Speaker 1:What are you thinking?
Speaker 3:Thrive Eternal comes in. They spin out the Lion King IP. Seems be back here. Yeah. Gets his a piece back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Alex Cooper raising a ton of money. Podcast is doing well. Media company is doing well. Her beverage brand is doing unwell.
Speaker 1: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 3: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?
Speaker 1: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 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 a sponsorship with with Call Her Daddy.
Speaker 1:And are you gonna be able to move a million dollars, not just a million dollars of profit 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 3:They think they have Yeah. It's interesting branding challenge Mhmm. To have unwell Yep. As the brand of drink. Mhmm.
Speaker 3: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.
Speaker 1:But well. Have a great rest of your Friday. Have a great two weeks. We're taking a vacation. We will be back in September, everyone.
Speaker 1:In September, we have a
Speaker 3:whole bunch
Speaker 1:crazy stuff lined up for the new season. We're very excited for that. We will be back in September. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know. It it it's
Speaker 1:Very Euro Euro coded of us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's on 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.
Speaker 3:This work is relentless. Yeah. You cannot you cannot rest on any laurels. Even if you have a bunch of laurels at the office Yeah. You start resting on them.
Speaker 3:There's no show. And so we figured it'd be good to let let the whole team take We agree. Take some time away. And I can't wait to be back
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Already. We love we absolutely love what we do. Yeah. It's great. And it's a blessing.
Speaker 3:And counting down the days.
Speaker 1:Counting down
Speaker 3:the Just just like how many more sleeps is it?
Speaker 1:Like sixteen, seventeen.
Speaker 3:Something like that.
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 3:So we'll be reminding the Just team every 16 more sleeps everybody.
Speaker 2:Have a good week. Have a good next
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Enjoy 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 3:It's time to get back in the minds.
Speaker 1:We will be back.
Speaker 3:We'll see you soon. We love you guys. Cheers. September 1.