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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 07/25/2025. We are live
Speaker 3:from flying, John.
Speaker 2:TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the forces of finance, El Capitao. Today, we gotta talk about Intel. We have a post from Tay Kim who wrote the book on on on NVIDIA, the NVIDIA way about Jensen Huang. He says Literally.
Speaker 3:Literally by the way.
Speaker 2:Wrote the book. Yes. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end down from 116,500 in June. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut.
Speaker 2:NVIDIA is on the other side of the trade. Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday up from 36,000 in January. Massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you gotta get on ramp. Time is money save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. The news is Intel that has a
Speaker 3:ramp problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They really should get on ramp. Lip Buuton. I know you're listening. You should get on ramp, Lip Buuton.
Speaker 2:So this is from the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The CEO warns no more blank checks. Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities in Europe.
Speaker 2:Oh, bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and developing its advanced 14 a technology to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're gonna we're gonna narrow down. We're just gonna do three incredibly difficult things.
Speaker 2:We're gonna compete in in the most aggressive AI chip market where we're not just competing with NVIDIA but also the TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grox, Cerberus, all these different companies. So we're gonna like go from zero to one there and then we're also gonna turn around our our personal computer processing market. Bold. Bold. Intel which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers fell far behind competitors like NVIDIA, AMD, and TSMC after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial intelligence boom.
Speaker 2:Lip Bu Tan, the CEO, the new CEO of of Intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down, about a year ago, I believe, said there are no more blank checks. He wrote in a memo. Every investment must make economic sense. Love to hear that. Exactly what you wanna hear from us.
Speaker 3:Nominative determinism of lip Bhutan. Hate to put you on the spot.
Speaker 2:Hitting the beach getting a tan? I like that. You
Speaker 3:know? I can see it. Can see it.
Speaker 2:Maybe if they maybe if Intel doesn't work out he can get into cosmetics. It's like get a tan Lip lip tanning oil. Get some lip balm lip balm
Speaker 3:something called lip blushing. Lip I think it's like a mild tattoo. So maybe if this whole Yeah. Semi thing doesn't work out. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Could get a franchise game.
Speaker 2:Yep. I I agree. Revenue in the June was roughly flat at 12,900,000,000.0 beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss though widened to 2,900,000,000.0 for the quarter from 1,600,000,000.0 loss in the year earlier period. The results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss extending its longest streak in thirty five years.
Speaker 2:It's got to suck to be in a position where computing broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things. AI is magic. We passed the Turing test and you're not a beneficiary. You're losing money. And it's because of a bet on, you know, the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of things that went into it. So sales in Intel's PC chip division, the company's largest segment fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago, I built a new, you know, massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it. Intel was Sure. One does.
Speaker 3:Weren't you weren't building it to Game? As a gaming rig?
Speaker 2:I did use it for
Speaker 3:a gaming rig. That's John's vice. Yeah. John's vice. He said, you This
Speaker 2:is market research. I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand the future of VR. I think
Speaker 3:I think you you beat your video game addiction
Speaker 2:I did. At young age. Years. And so it's it's an interesting time for Intel. We I have some more more information here.
Speaker 3:Do you remember six months ago, there was the rumors floating around that that Elon was was a potential buyer
Speaker 2:I was.
Speaker 3:That deal so long ago.
Speaker 2:I was propagating those rumors. Yeah. I was I
Speaker 3:was And ultimately, it feels like, you know, he he got the got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter. Does he wanna do that again? Yep. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, my take when when he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting. I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has in many ways made it a better product. We stream on it now and and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features, good stuff, bad stuff. But overall, I think he put the company back in startup mode.
Speaker 2:They're shipping very quickly. Interesting things are happening and he's making plays in an interesting way that I like. But at the time, was like, okay, $44,000,000,000. There's something like $50,000,000,000 from the Chips Act maybe going to Intel and foundries in America. Run this back and marshal the same amount of capital.
Speaker 2:Let him buy Intel. Turn that around. That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. And would put us on a very different path if he got into semiconductor manufacturing. But it would be a huge challenge and maybe it wasn't as important to him.
Speaker 2:So I don't know.
Speaker 3:But I mean only a week ago a small company called AOL Yeah. Aol.com posting that is Elon Musk about to buy Intel. So this feels like very, you know, Dylan Dylan Patel on January 17 saying Elon's jet is in Florida. Yeah. Global Foundry's jet is in Florida.
Speaker 3:Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. And But ultimately, a lot of people were in Florida at that time.
Speaker 2:Well, if your jets flying around the world, you gotta take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place. Find
Speaker 3:your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And so, Dylan Patel, speaking of Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Lip Bu Tan at a conference and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Lip Bu Tan and spend some time with him and everyone's coming up to Lip Bu Tan asking what the future of Intel is. And so, he goes up and offers to make him tea and makes his tea for him. And they sit down and they have tea.
Speaker 2:And they like and I I think Dylan Patel really understands like tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee. Yes. So they they have tea and Dylan Patel is kind of picking his brain and and it just feels like Le Bouton's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce cost, right the ship, refocus. And so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson and I wanted a clear I wanted a I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious.
Speaker 2:Just split the foundry and the design business. Split up Intel into two companies and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they're they're both they're both their customer and their supplier and breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure all.
Speaker 2:It's not a panacea. And so it is more complicated. So there's not a super clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions. It's a lot of cuts to employees and that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff.
Speaker 2:There will probably be more in the future as Intel continues to downsize the workforce.
Speaker 3:Really really rough morale knowing that the workforce will just be, you know, continue to get cut into, you know, like you said, probably not the last.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so they are focusing on the the the the direct quote is refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and advancing the 14 a technology. Now the problem is that Intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from this comes from semi analysis. So they have the Intel three node, the 18 a, and that goes up against the n five, n three, and n two nodes from TSMC.
Speaker 2:And across the board, Intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs. They're trying to catch up. Trying to create chips that are that are as as powerful but the name of the game is always cost.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yes. Semi says the company has cost discipline in its DNA talking about TSMC. Intel, not necessarily. This manifest in many ways.
Speaker 3:TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It has not used the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements.
Speaker 2:Hence, Intel is now moving to the copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy? No. So when Intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this I mean, it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of lithography is basically etching.
Speaker 2:That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called Etched because they that you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer and that's where when you put electricity through it, it goes through a series of gates and that's what a semiconductor is.
Speaker 3:And that's how you create magic?
Speaker 2:That's how you create magic. Yes. It's the it's the spice. The the dune analogy is the most important one here. But basically, you have to etch these grooves at as small as its smallest scale as possible.
Speaker 2:So three nanometer silicon atoms are one nanometer. So you, in theory, cannot go smaller than one nanometer chip because the space between the atoms is only one atom or one nanometer. So, this is incredibly small. And so, you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves, basically. This is very, high level abstraction.
Speaker 2:But in order to do that, they get these they get these mirrors from a company called Trumph, which is unrelated to Donald Trump. But and and Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets, like, you know, dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you if you if you if you, like, blew them up to, like, the size of the moon, you would still would not be able to see a groove even this high. It's like the most precise process in every single By the
Speaker 3:way, Intel missed opportunity to create the TPU. Google's obviously owning that right now. But if Intel had said we're making Trump process.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's back it.
Speaker 3:It's back you know. I mean they're already public.
Speaker 2:Mean you know, what's the chip that's gonna be in the Trump phone? The golden the golden American made phone. Yes. Should be an Intel processor.
Speaker 1:Really should.
Speaker 2:Who knows?
Speaker 3:American made.
Speaker 2:So the the the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently at TSMC like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone they don't even need to send out a notification. Everyone just knows go to TSMC to just deal with everything because the slight change in like the road noise or slight could, like, miscalibrate the machines. If it, like, rains too much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room, it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield. So all of this is about yield.
Speaker 2:They'll make a ton of these wafers. There'll be small imperfections. It ruins the whole wafer. That's been a big problem with the wafer scale.
Speaker 3:Which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona despite setting up, this new facility so recently Yes.
Speaker 2:An example. It's a miracle. Yes. And so the copy exact dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields that when Intel figured out how to make one fab, they said, let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building.
Speaker 2:They build the exact same foundation. They build the the bathrooms would be in the same place. If there was two urinals in one bathroom like there would be two urinals at the other one. Like everything was exactly the same copies
Speaker 3:Basically extremely superstitious.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Basically because they were like anything that changes like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate, it might throw off the amount of molecules in the air over here and the atoms over it's like it's crazy precise. Right? And so that worked for Intel, but it had this problem which was that every once in a while, you do want to make an iterative change when you're building the next fab and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things a slightly differently. And so now, Intel's pivoting to copy smart, only copy what's actually improvement instead of just copying everything exactly.
Speaker 2:And TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard. And so customers are likely baselining the 18A Intel node against N3, three nanometer nodes at TSMC given the characteristics. But Intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer. And so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about Intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on.
Speaker 2:It's Intel three which is their five nanometer class. That one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon and Ireland. These are at Intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18 a which is at the same sites plus Ohio and this is competitive with the two nanometer class from TSMC. And then they have the 14 a which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below.
Speaker 2:This is the most cutting edge extreme ultraviolet really really aggressive lithography and and this is also made in America which is great. And these will compete with NVIDIA's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head but the real question will be can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin because the the NVIDIA TSMC partnership is really really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for cost and reliability and yield and Intel has kind of lost a step there. And so they will probably need to get on linear to make this work.
Speaker 2:Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product road maps. So Lip Buuton, if you need an intro to the folks over at linear. Let us know.
Speaker 3:Will make it happen.
Speaker 2:Reach out and and we'll figure it out. So And
Speaker 3:Intel is of course down almost 10% today. Market is not loving much of anything happening over there right now.
Speaker 2:Yep. So semi analysis continues saying, Intel the home of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of course worked at Intel and coined Moore's Law. The idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on on a silicon chip allowing for more compute power basically at the same price. They're they're evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge.
Speaker 2:This is this is what moves the stock in my opinion more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downsizing but deciding, hey, we're not even gonna compete on the on the most advanced semiconductors which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic, Sam Altman, you know every single company is like give me all of the best and give me hundreds of thousands of the best. The rest of the stuff is like okay. I'll go to anyone because I need a, you know, WiFi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10 q from Intel's 10 q is, however, we are unable to secure a significant external if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important customer milestones for Intel 14a, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14a and successor leading edge nodes on a go forward basis.
Speaker 2:In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14a and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects. Just and semi analysis says, just like that we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American made semiconductors forever. Very dark. Well, let's tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 destinations.
Speaker 2:We couldn't do the show without it. Multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free at Restream. So, in other semiconductor news, there's a big debate going on around Etched. I reached out to the founder.
Speaker 2:I did an interview with him a while back. I'd love to have him on the show. He was Gavin Uberti. Etched is the the the the basic high level pitches. We're taking the transformer architecture and we're baking it down into silicon.
Speaker 2:Semi analysis has been taking some shots at the idea saying, hey, it's just marketing. But I feel like he has something else going on, some other strategy. He's Teal Fellow, very smart guy, very interesting, very nuanced take on AI and a lot of his predictions have been right since I interviewed him a few years ago. And so I'd love to catch up with him and and hear his rebuttal to this at least. But basically, semi analysis makes a very detailed analysis saying that transformers are 90% matrix multiplications.
Speaker 2:You take a bunch of math, you multiply it together. So baking trans the transformer architecture into silicon doesn't actually get you that much. A different semi semi semiconductor analyst Semi analyst. A different semi analyst. I don't know why they call them semi analysts.
Speaker 2:I think that they're full time analysts. Yeah. I I don't think they're anything but semi. It's rude It's very rude.
Speaker 3:To say that they're part time.
Speaker 2:It's this
Speaker 3:is And they're clearly putting it
Speaker 2:all on the line. They're putting it all on the line for sure. So Sally Ward says, okay, I'll bite. Yes. Making a transformer chip does mean making a large MATMOL engine but there's a lot more to efficient transformer inference than gemsflops.
Speaker 2:You need to be able to feed and use those flops efficiently. Goes back and forth a bit. Even takes a shot at them using GP GPU which I guess is an industry term and and the semi analysis team drops a very very thorough post. You can just go read it but they close. In regards to by the way, no one in AI has used the term GP GPU since about 2020.
Speaker 2:That that this is not correct. Many chip architects definitely continue to refer to AMD, Nvidia, Intel, our class of software as GP GPU and differentiate from the Trainium TPU Gaudi style architecture and programming model. So, a little bit of timeline and turmoil in this semi analysis world which I enjoy.
Speaker 3:By the way, somebody one of our early listeners Wade Lloyd bought timelineinturmoil0yeah..com. Yeah. And redirected it to TBPN. So thank you to Wade for doing that. It is a fantastic domain.
Speaker 2:But yeah. So big debate over how much more you can squeeze out of baking the transformer into silicon. There's also this interesting concept that the the which I didn't know. A lot of people think like attention all is all you need is the paper that dropped the transformer architecture isn't going anywhere. Your long transformers, but apparently according to semi analysis, the transformer architecture moves in on the order of months and how and the typical chip life cycle is years.
Speaker 2:And so, yes, we're still using transformers, but the transformer is changing slightly and so we don't have a new word for it, new buzzword, but there are changes that if you got really locked into v two of the transformer architecture then v three might not be as advantageous. So Yep. Big debate over the future of semiconductors. Intel will have to figure it out and see where they can play. Let's tell you about Figma.
Speaker 2:Think bigger build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. They're IPO ing next week so
Speaker 3:And Figma make is publicly available.
Speaker 2:Go check it out.
Speaker 3:For free now. Check it out. Free. Yep. In other news, Jared Isaacman who we know was Trump's initial pick for NASA administrator just took secretary Duffy up in one of his personal fighter jets so
Speaker 2:This guy rocks.
Speaker 3:If you have a personal fighter jet and you can fly it yourself, I think I think you should have a good shot at becoming the NASA administrator. I think that kind of narrows the options down to probably one man. I don't know. I We we should figure out how many people on earth have their own jet fighter jet that they can actually fly.
Speaker 2:I wonder what
Speaker 3:Can't be that many.
Speaker 2:I wonder what fighter jet this is. I know people used to buy MiG trainers and fly around in those and those are fighter jets. But they were like decommissioned, easier to get. And I don't believe they were actually that expensive. I think they're cheaper than a Gulfstream.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 3:Well, the TAM of people that are gonna buy one and and use it. Yeah. Just very small.
Speaker 2:Yep. Very very small. Obviously, high skill ceiling. But if you pull up in a jet, it's just incredible aura.
Speaker 3:Incredible aura. I mean, the the one that's gonna be you know, the the best personal jet will be the f 35. It's a little bit pricey, but being able to, you know, vertical takeoff landing
Speaker 2:Here's the video.
Speaker 3:Makes it much more
Speaker 2:Let's pull
Speaker 3:this up. That is so cool.
Speaker 2:Wonder yeah. We gotta figure out what what how much that thing costs. I've I've long advocated for the president to commission the SR 71 and use that as the Air Force one because going, I mean this is the pitch for Hermes and Boom Supersonic.
Speaker 3:Michael Miraflor in the chat says that's a MiG 29.
Speaker 2:MiG 29. So, it is a Great trainer which is like decommissioned. Doesn't have weapons on it I believe but pretty pretty amazing. But I I think it's like a 20,000,000
Speaker 3:He says it's the only Western owned MiG 29.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Okay. Wow. Very very cool. Well, thank you for the for the details in the chat.
Speaker 3:MiG was apparently designed by
Speaker 2:I thought it was Russian.
Speaker 3:Yes. But this guy
Speaker 2:John Miggs.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm looking it up. Well, Mikoyan. Mikoyan. Which was headquartered in Moscow.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the designer creator was born in 1893
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In Kursk, Russia and died in the seventies.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're if you're accumulating military hardware for personal use, you probably got some compliance needs. You gotta get on Vanta. Automate compliance manage risk, group trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Let's go to Donald Trump meeting with Powell at the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 3:Pull up the video.
Speaker 2:Tom says, LMAO, this is a comedy skit. I wanna watch this video. Let's play it.
Speaker 4:So we're taking a look, and it looks like it's about 3,100,000,000.0. It went up a little bit. So the 2.7 is now 3.1.
Speaker 2:And I'm not aware of that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It just came out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. I haven't heard that
Speaker 1:from anybody at the Fed.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It just came out.
Speaker 2:Our notes said it about 3.1 as well. 3.1? 03/2002. This came from us?
Speaker 4:Yes. Don't know who does that.
Speaker 2:Are you including the Martin renovation? You just added entire capital. You just add you just added in a third building is what that is. That's a third building. Right.
Speaker 4:No. It's it's a building that's being built. No.
Speaker 2:It's been it was built five years ago.
Speaker 1:We finished Martin five years ago. It's part
Speaker 4:of the overall work. So we're I gonna
Speaker 2:think there was another one where he where he talks about like, now we have to lower rates because of this. So amazing.
Speaker 3:Well, There's one where we love I love it. I'd love it if if my buddy here would would lower the rates. Yeah. I love to see him in hard hats. Shows Yep.
Speaker 3:That they're you know, getting close to the metal.
Speaker 2:Yep. Totally. Well, Donald Trump is doing deals trying to bring more money into The United States. The news is that Japan is apparently committing $550,000,000,000 to The United States. It's over
Speaker 3:Sovereign ten wealth fund? Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. This is a crazy
Speaker 3:Very very American to treat the sovereign wealth fund as just private. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. I don't
Speaker 3:know if it's the
Speaker 2:was it in the journal today? Oh, there's there's the No. I don't think I don't think this one printed yet but look at this costly overrun to renovate Fed's office fuels criticism. The journal is so good at picking images. This image is so iconic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So in the journal today, Trump's quest for his own sovereign fund gets $550,000,000,000 boost from Japan.
Speaker 2:Were talking about this earlier. Japan was like kind of not wanting to play ball on the tariffs for a while. Was a question They're
Speaker 3:playing ball now.
Speaker 2:This is now that they're doing deals.
Speaker 3:But already, I think there's some weird externalities as government intervention in free trade often has. So Yep. President Trump has long wanted a US sovereign wealth fund that would give him free reign to make big investments in key sectors. Japan could help him get the next best thing. As part of a trade deal reached this week, Japan agreed to invest 550,000,000,000 in projects across strategic US industries including energy, semiconductor manufacturing, and shipbuilding.
Speaker 3:The White House said Trump would have final say over where the money goes. It's deploying capital folks. It's effectively the GP of the
Speaker 2:Sovereign wealth fund.
Speaker 3:Of the sovereign wealth fund. It's crazy. New title. And The US would keep 90% of the profits on any investment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's like a It's like two and twenty. It's like a 90.
Speaker 3:Yep. I
Speaker 2:guess that's
Speaker 3:Sure we're getting some fees off the top too. I mean, we gotta have management fees. How how how else is Trump gonna travel the three months in All
Speaker 2:these tier one funds are like, oh, two or 20. No. We we're we're a four and forty shop. We're we're three and thirty shops and they and they think they're so fancy.
Speaker 3:And there's levels.
Speaker 2:Well, there's levels to this. Yeah. And you just got absolutely mugged by
Speaker 3:the president 90% carry.
Speaker 2:90% carry. Let's hear it for The United States maybe. This is I
Speaker 3:gonna inspire some hard working allocators out there that are gonna look at their fee structure and say, if I'm if I'm really a generational investor Yeah. Should I should I really only be getting 20%?
Speaker 2:Also imagine getting imagine getting staffed on this as like a principal or like an analyst or something because like like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Does the is the investment team gonna get some points on
Speaker 2:this? I don't think so. I think I think no matter what you do in But what government That's like you're basically salary cap to like 200 k. I don't think there's anyone in the government
Speaker 3:How are we gonna get our best and brightest?
Speaker 2:I know. We gotta uncap the salary cap. Get some get some rising stars from
Speaker 3:from everywhere from you know, blacks Blacks to hoe. To Sequoia. I want Andrew Reed deploying the the US sovereign wealth fund.
Speaker 2:Poached. Hey. Benchmarks hemorrhaging partners, put them on the team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Maybe maybe Victor is going to the US sovereign wealth fund.
Speaker 2:Maybe. That would be a big bombshell. I'd love to see it.
Speaker 3:One Trump official said the administration was thinking of an arrangement like a sovereign wealth fund that Japan is funny. Well, that we're just like rebranding sovereign wealth funds. The money will take the form of equity loans and loan guarantees and come from the Japanese government said Senator Bill Haggerty.
Speaker 2:Not private companies specifically. It's coming straight from the from the Japanese government which I think is frustrating people in Japan. Although, Hiro Onodo, I don't know if this if he sees using he's using they, so it seems like he's not in Japan currently. Says it's greater than 10% of their GDP. They exported a $150,000,000,000 to The US and assuming they just bore the extra cost of 15% extra, even that's $2,020,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 2:So that's a huge huge commitment. But I mean, I guess if they have a big balance sheet like makes sense to put to work somewhere.
Speaker 3:Howard Lutnick said, this is literally the Japanese government giving Trump 550,000,000,000 and says, go fix whatever you need to fix.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 3:One admin official gave a hypothetical example of how Japanese money could be deployed. The US could fund construction of a semiconductor facility for say Intel then lease it to Intel and keep 90% of the leasing revenue.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're looking to fix your code review process get on graphite. Dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Anyway, let's continue with this. The fund if the fund materializes Trump envisions, a significant question, it would give an American president unprecedented power to steer money into the projects of his choosing potentially with some significant impacts on particular industries.
Speaker 2:This is interesting because I feel like the story just broke and the re industrialized crew isn't necessarily talking about it yet, but this feels extremely aligned with the whole re industrialized movement. The idea of of more more US dollars. We saw this with the AI summit and the AI action plan. There's a lot of talks about positioning, but there wasn't that much actual new legislation or new funding that could specifically move a particular project forward, which I think would be more exciting to be like, okay. Like, you know, we're building a bridge.
Speaker 2:We're building a dam. We're building a nuclear reactor. We're building something like the US government hasn't really been in build mode for a long time. Feels like everything's kind of stalled and some of that's good because it's handled by
Speaker 3:the projector. We had the founder of Bright AI on yesterday who scaled to a $100,000,000 run rate or bootstrapped to a $100,000,000 run rate and then recently raised from Khosla. He was saying a lot of US infrastructure was built during the World War two era with a twenty year expected twenty year lifespan and obviously is still what we're relying on today.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of the re industrialized crew, they sent us this wonderful clock from Shinola, a Detroit based company.
Speaker 3:Clocks are industrial. Incredibly underrated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Clocks are fantastic. Thank you guys.
Speaker 3:Thank you Aaron
Speaker 2:and Ross. Very frustrated that we couldn't make it to re industrialize. Seemed like an awesome time with all the absolute boys out there having a good time. I think we will have our remote workflow worked out and studio stuff worked out so that we can travel more in the near future. But it was fun having so many of the folks call in from Reindustrialize, give us the updates from the ground and excited to do more of that.
Speaker 2:So who is this? Christina Davis, Harvard University professor of Japanese politics who directs its program on US Japan relations said, where this one deviates is the step toward investing at the president's direction with the profits going to The US. It makes it sound coercive, socialist, and unprecedented in any sense of past trade negotiations. Now, The US has a mix Anyways, it makes
Speaker 3:sense that the president would be the chief capital allocator, the chief GP.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. So Commander in chief, GP in chief. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's weird is that we've we've talked a lot about how when the US government tries to pick a winner, it often doesn't go very well. The famous example at least from zero to one Peter Thiel's book is Solyndra. Are you familiar with this? So Solyndra was a clean energy startup That was a was a cylinder like instead of just a flat photovoltaic panel, I believe it was like a like a cylinder. And the idea was like clean energy and they got this massive grant from the Obama administration and the company went bankrupt and it was a big mark on this idea of the government like picking winners and backing companies.
Speaker 2:And and in zero to one, Teal kinda outlines this idea that like from first principles, you could tell that just mathematically a a circle didn't fill as much space as a square. And so you should have gone with a square solar panel. Yeah. And so the the business model was kind of flawed from day one and you could have figured that out if you'd just done the basic math of of you know, how much how energy dense is a circle versus a square. If you're packing them in.
Speaker 2:Pack a bunch of circles in, there's gonna be a bunch of extra space. I think that's basically what happened. Maybe I'm collapsing it a little bit, but I have not I'm not a huge fan of the government picking winners. I like the Tesla model a little bit more where there was just this EV tax credit and anyone could have gone after it. And then Tesla just dominated it and won it.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 3:Well, even in China, China effectively encourages massive competition and then kind of waits for there to be a breakout Yeah. Winner.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And that creates a talent vortex Yep. And then the state then the state is effectively saying starting to like really back it in a meaningful way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very like They didn't necessarily
Speaker 3:pick the winner.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's it's somehow more capitalist and that's what and that's what this Harvard professor is is kind of taking shots at saying like it's pretty socialist to be picking winners and in a weird world like China's policies tend to be more capitalist in some ways. Like they are doing a lot of investing in technologies and and putting government and I guess taxpayer funds into strategic technologies and subsidizing whole industries. Like their chip manufacturing, their supply chain for semiconductors has been lagging. For like fifty years, they've been not competitive.
Speaker 2:But the Chinese government has just been like, well, there's still an incentive to make the semiconductors here. There's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. Who's gonna do it? Who's gonna do it? And it's one company and then it's SMIC and then it's me and then Huawei's stuff getting stuff.
Speaker 2:And it's this it should be the same thing with electric cars in America. Tesla got a benefit. Rivian also got a benefit. Lucid got a benefit. And even when BMW went over into electric cars, they got a benefit.
Speaker 2:And now those benefits are pulling back and we can go into what's happening with Tesla stock.
Speaker 3:Well, to put the 550,000,000,000 number in some context, American tourists spent just under $6,000,000,000 or $6,000,000,000 in tourism in Japan In Japan. Last year.
Speaker 2:Okay. So around they'll learn it back in a hundred years. Hundred years of tourism and they get it back. But no, I mean the thing is that this is not them giving us the money. Like they should earn a return.
Speaker 2:I would be surprised if these infrastructure investments don't pay off.
Speaker 3:Should be hard to beat the market if you're getting 10% of the of the of the up of the upside.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you collapse it down you know, you're basically you're basically treating Trump as a solo GP and you have to look at his historical IRR and he's gone Trump Trump a few times. Few times. But I think True social. Overall, he's not just zeroing everything, right? Some of the stuff's ripping.
Speaker 2:I bet on average he's you know preserving capital if not returning multiples of it. So, you know you think about a scale of, okay there's gonna be a new semiconductor plant in Arizona and Japan's gonna come in and underwrite a $100,000,000,000 of you know development and some massive probably debt deal or something and they're gonna earn some sort of return. The chances they don't get anything back is pretty low, I think. I don't think it I don't think this is money going into a pit and burning. You're a little bit
Speaker 3:I'm a little worried. I mean I mean the the example was the money goes into a let's say a semiconductor manufacturing facility. Yeah. And then Intel would pay the US government to lease it and the US government would keep 90% of that, it's gonna be hard to you will be losing money if you factor in inflation.
Speaker 2:Maybe. I I mean, I the way I the way I see a deal happening is is I'm gonna go, I need a $100,000,000,000 to go build a bunch of nuclear power plants. I go to Trump or the US government and say, I need a $100,000,000,000 and they're like, great. Take 20,000,000,000 in equity, take 80,000,000,000 in debt and then there's, you know, an interest rate, a coupon rate attached to that debt, and then the equity has some sort of value. And hopefully, the plan works out so that there's a multiple return on the equity and there's a you know, an interest rate that and like you blend the IRRs and you're getting to like I don't know 510% across everything.
Speaker 2:And then yes, The US is taking 90% of that but you are still preserving your capital. Like it it like the the idea that it's like instantly a zero is probably hopefully avoidable. Right? It could be if they did those Solyndra. They'd have to do a lot of deals.
Speaker 2:But if they have a portfolio, you know, you would you would assume that the portfolio broadly does okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's possible that a Shiba the the president of the prime minister of Japan is just so AGI pilled. He's way and and is such a firm believer that America is gonna win the AI race that he's just says, yep. Take it, mister Trump. You got it from here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it could be seen as a like, are you comping it against buying treasuries? Because that's just a way to like index to the dollar if your if your currency is in decline like at least at the end of that term you've got 3% That'd
Speaker 3:really funny if Trump just takes the 550,000,000,000 of five T bills.
Speaker 2:To lower the rates, to bring down the yield Just
Speaker 3:wants to bring down market buying T bills and taking 9% or sorry, sorry, 90% of the yield. Yeah. Anyways, lots of fun.
Speaker 2:Asset management is the greatest business. AUM maxing. He's AUM maxing.
Speaker 3:Jeremy Gaffan.
Speaker 2:Let's a this. Okay. Yeah. There's a little more in here that I wanna go through. The plan has raised more questions than answers on Wall Street and beyond.
Speaker 2:Details remain unclear including whether Japan will have any discretion over projects and the time period during which the investments will be made. Hagerty said the investment will be overseen by two Japanese backed administrators, Japan Bank and Nippon Export. One administration official said the funds would likely arrive only as needed, so you make capital calls when you need to. As you know, these deals have been agreed in principle, but they have not been fully papered yet. In selecting investments, this is where it gets interesting, Trump would have help from the commerce department's US Investment Accelerator headed by former Morgan Stanley investment banker, Michael Grimes, and Polytechnic alum.
Speaker 2:I went to the same school as this guy. Absolute beast. He took Facebook public. He has a massive row. He's like the king The
Speaker 3:deal toy Yeah. Final boss?
Speaker 2:Deal toy final boss. You walk into his office and it's just there's no room to put down a coffee because there's just a deal toy on every single surface. It's insane. Absolute beast. The dream.
Speaker 2:One of the greatest to ever do it. His team will help identify investments and make sure the funds are used properly and expeditiously. People with familiar with the matter said, the size of the commitment dwarfs most investment funds. It's more than twice the size of Japan's gross foreign direct investment in The US last year. And so we can't really evaluate the agreement because it's so vague at this stage.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of vague deals happening right now. The AI action plan is kind of in that territory now, but you know we still are only six months into this administration. Maybe all of this crystallizes. And then they comp it to Stargate which was unveiled at the White House in January, involved a commitment from OpenAI. This apparently already been scaled back.
Speaker 2:Unclear exactly what that means. And so there was also an EO from Trump in February directing his team to develop a plan for an establishment of a sovereign wealth fund within ninety days. This is the start of that. So anyway, get on numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilots. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Avalanche Energy. We got Avalanche. Gong.
Speaker 3:Was awarded a $10,000,000 grant from Washington, the states to develop Fusion Works Neutron Factory. This marks small scale fusions evolution from a laboratory curiosity into a neutron source that creates real world value from Robin Robin Langtry, the CEO of Avalanche.
Speaker 2:We've had a show. Great guy. I toured his facility with Ben up in Washington. We had a lot of fun. Extremely hard project.
Speaker 2:Small scale fusion. Fusion is still not fully commercialized. Small scale fusion is in some ways easier because you're making something smaller but also still untested. Lots of work to be done but great to see that they have more money to develop more technology. Congrats Lots to
Speaker 3:see Washington State.
Speaker 2:They've been really Coding. Yeah. It feels like Washington's been kind of under the radar as being like very hard tech friendly. Like he's had a pretty like he set up a whole facility over there by the Sea Tac Airport and seems to be able to do stuff. Although he's not working with radiation because he's not doing fission.
Speaker 2:He's doing fusion. So his his like power sources are like he needs like hydrogen or something or you know, it's like it's like pretty inert gases that aren't that big of a deal.
Speaker 3:He should he should talk to Trevor from Nikola's brother. The man.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The head of hydrogen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean you wanna be taking taking advantage of this 80% energy gains
Speaker 3:for sure. Yeah. They're making it for 80% less
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Than
Speaker 3:anyone else in the known universe.
Speaker 2:Anyway, fin dot ai the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive on g two.
Speaker 3:Say it again. Don't get in a bake off with an AI Don't do it. If you if you enjoy winning.
Speaker 2:Don't do it. Anyway.
Speaker 3:Here from Antonio Garcia Martinez.
Speaker 2:Says He's coming on the show next week by the way.
Speaker 3:The eighties were the apex of American civilization and today is a sad day. His memory will be a blessing.
Speaker 2:Yes. We mentioned
Speaker 3:Hulk Hogan. Let's play this video. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pull up that video and I will read from the Wall Street Journal. Hulk Hogan is gone but still everywhere. He may not have been a traditional athlete but the late pro wrestlers influence in sports and the culture
Speaker 3:It's entertainment athlete.
Speaker 2:Pervasive. So I'm not sure where to put This is from Jason Gay in the sports section of the Wall Street Journal. Jason says, I'm not sure where to put Hulk Hogan in the history of sports or whether to put him in there at all. Hogan who died Thursday at age 71 could pull off exceptional athletic feats with his massive sculpted six foot eight body. We were being got some misinformation yesterday where we were quoting him at six foot seven.
Speaker 3:Six seven.
Speaker 2:Seems like he's my height exactly. Still a professional wrestlers trade is spoiler alert entertainment, not pure competition. And yet, it's impossible not to recognize wrestling's evolution from regional circus to widespread cultural force. It is crazy that rest pro wrestling started as just like a traveling circus like just a bunch of dudes coming into town and being like, you wanna see us fight? It's so funny.
Speaker 2:Today, this is an accepted well trodden observation. Sports, politics, and daily life are closer atmospherically to the wrestling ring than ever before. This is the idea of kayfabe in politics. The idea of people being in on the joke. They know that people are just saying things to rile up the other side.
Speaker 2:They're entertaining. We see this in journalism and media. We see it in tech. We see it all over the place. And Jason here in the Wall Street Journal is drawing more analogies from that.
Speaker 2:We become a nation of noisy confrontationalists. The skillful soft touch replaced by the swing of the folding chair. Reason is routinely drowned out by the loudest voices in the room. Wrestling strips life's complications down to primal conflicts and few wrestlers embody this approach as famously and forebodingly as as Hulk Hogan. I'm not a wrestling obsessive.
Speaker 2:I've been a couple times. That's it. I still need to look up the correct spelling for Bruno Samartino. But I know enough to know Hogan born Terry Bolea was a transformative figure, one of the most larger than life characters in a larger than life universe. And I think we have the video ready to pull up.
Speaker 3:It's not a video after.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's not. It's just Nimmin.
Speaker 5:I think it's just a picture.
Speaker 2:It's just a picture from AGM. Well, we well we did we did play the Hulk Hogan calling calling out someone else. I forget in one of those like pre show reels on the last show. So you can go check that out if you want. Anyway, he says a true brand name Hogan over time refashioned himself as a heel to hero to heal and everything in between.
Speaker 2:So we went back and forth. But I think the actual wrestling term is a face. A face is someone that everyone loves. A heel is someone that everyone cheers to to lose. But they both play they both play the role and there's a lot of interesting like fourth wall breaking, all sorts of stuff on.
Speaker 2:He had too many comebacks, collapses, and professional detours to count. At one point, went and did movies and he came back and everyone was saying, he's Hollywood Hogan. He's gone to Hollywood. He sold out. He doesn't represent us.
Speaker 2:And so that was like a whole character that he played up Hollywood Hogan. He's too good for the for the you know, the the mainstream wrestling fan and everyone loved that. There we go. We got some video of Hogan running around with an American flag. He
Speaker 3:loves over time his character seemed to merge with Terry. Terry Belaya Yeah. The the human
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Hulk just became the same person. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was talking to Rob about this. There's this is idea just generally in media about like you play this character when you're on camera, but you want to be authentic but you don't want the the attacks on your character to ruin your personal life. You don't wanna lose yourself in the sauce. It's all very it's all very complicated and modern. It's very, very bizarre.
Speaker 2:Celebrate celebritized and repeatedly scandalized swapping places as poster boy in Pariah. Fired for getting caught on tape using racist slurs, a strange protagonist at a media crusade, and even a con a convention speaker. Yeah. He spoke at the most recent RNC convention where he ripped off his shirt in in support of Donald Trump. He was controversial and omnipresent through the end.
Speaker 2:He exploded on the scene in the early nineteen eighties. A lot of people's first exposure when they came when they when came when he appeared in the ring as Thunder Lips, the ultimate male against Rocky Balboa in Rocky three tossing Rock like a rag doll as a horrified Mickey and Adrian recoiled. Going to Hollywood cost Belaya his job in the then WWF. They didn't want him to do it. But, Hulkamania only grew and he returned.
Speaker 2:The fever reached the point he landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in April. Biceps flexed, hands clawed, a fictional barbarian at the gate. Traditionalists
Speaker 3:Pull up this post from Luke Metro.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Traditionalists howled. Pro wrestling wasn't real sports. How could the Hulkster enter the same cathedral as Kofax, Ali, and Abdul Jabbar? I admit to harboring the same feelings when I see pro wrestling events treated seriously by major sports outlets.
Speaker 2:Why are we doing this? Why? Yet wrestling's reach is indisputable and Hogan's timing in its ascension was impeccable. He hitched his career to its leap from localized products to to global force, a handsome blonde agent of Vince McMahon's aggressive growth strategy, and a media ecosystem that cultivated better than most. Hulk understood a very old fashioned wrestling concept.
Speaker 2:To be seen, it's better to be outrageous. To be heard, you need to be loud. If you if it earns you love, great. But even if you are hated, you are still noticed. Great lesson there.
Speaker 2:So what did Luke Metro say?
Speaker 3:He says, you watch the earth I'll watch the sky brother.
Speaker 2:What a great post.
Speaker 3:Of course. Gawker takedown where that these two.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Linked in such an odd way. Such different characters and yet linked both in the support of Donald Trump at various points on the conservative politics world and also with a mutual distaste for Gawker and their salacious reporting. It's absolutely insane. This kind of intentional performance what wrestlers call a work is routine in sports.
Speaker 2:Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name, and make money. It's pervasive in every profession now. The media used to be a necessary partner, but now the digital tools exist to do it on one's own. Influencers, business antagonists, media flamethrowers, and the performative fray of social media, the exhausting not very real reality programming on television. There's a bit of wrestling in all of it.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I'm not sure the tools exist.
Speaker 3:How do you think the combined entity that includes WWE and UFC is worth in the public markets today?
Speaker 2:I would say like $4,000,000,000.
Speaker 3:Close. How much? 33,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Well, not close at all, dude. Was not by order of magnitude. Wow. Yeah. That's a beast.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Also includes IMG, the Okay. Sports talent management.
Speaker 2:Is that modeling agency too?
Speaker 3:I think they have a modeling division but it's primarily sports They also own PBR, the premier bull riding. Oh, yeah. We gotta we gotta spawn. We gotta get a TBPN bull riding.
Speaker 2:I'm a huge JB Monney fan. One of the greatest to ever do it. He's one of the the most legendary bull riders. I know all about him. Recently injured, very sad, but the bull that retired him by breaking his back, he now owns and affectionately takes care for and they are now friends.
Speaker 2:Beautiful story. I'm not sure the tools exist to turn the clock back. The appetite exists for relief, but I don't know if there's room anymore for for subtlety, context or even expertise. The algorithms reward volume and so does the culture. The rest of us are caught in the noise.
Speaker 2:Hulk Hogan is departed but he remains among us. What a wonderful obituary. Tell me about UFC and how
Speaker 3:is incredible this that It so many it says something about the character that Terry played in Hulk Hogan that he could have these glowing obituaries despite having so many, you know, terror you know, sort of terrible moments whether it was when that he made some some terrible comments Yeah. On recording at one point and to still get this. Again referencing what I said earlier is like who is the man? Is it Terry? Is it it Hulk Hogan?
Speaker 3:Are they are they the same are they the same thing?
Speaker 2:I watched a I watched a hilarious interview with him in maybe GQ or something where they go in his house, they see his supplement stack and he said that during this time when he was fighting, this is insane. He he would he was like, what was it? They were like, what were your diet? What were you on? He was like, well I'd wake up and I'd have a beer and two Tylenols.
Speaker 2:And then and then like after the fight I'd have six beers and two more Tylenols. Something like that. And I remember you asked me one day you were like, oh I got like aches. I'm not feeling well. And I was like, you gotta take Tylenol.
Speaker 2:And you were and you were Why
Speaker 3:didn't you recommend beer?
Speaker 2:I should recommend beer. But I remember you I remember you asked me like, okay John, like I know you're like really like nerdy about all this stuff. Like you probably have some like really solid rationale for like why Tylenol is like the correct pain killer to take. And my entire rationale was just like, it was good enough for Hulk Hogan. But in this in this video, they're asking him all these questions.
Speaker 2:They're doing the rapid fire questions and and they ask him like, Hulk Hogan, if you could fight anyone alive or dead, who would you fight? And he just says, Bill Clinton. It's like, I have no idea what he's thinking. It's just like And they just move on to the next one. It's like, why is it?
Speaker 2:What? You hold some grudge. I assume for political reasons or something, but it was just a wild thing to say. Very entertaining. But on the note of entertainment, I want your reaction to That
Speaker 3:seems a little more tan than you'd than you'd want to
Speaker 2:go for. It's just a little too tan. I think that's probably the camera adding some color correction or something. It seems like the exposure on the camera was a little low that day but he is very tan. Because here, look look at this picture in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:It's same photo and it's much it's a much more normal tan. But he is he is very I don't know if he's Italian, but he is he is very tan. So I want your I want you to explain to me about how this relates to UFC. In this article, they say, Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name, and make money. It's pervasive in every profession now.
Speaker 2:How does getting attention work in UFC? You mentioned that Conor McGregor was particularly good at like trash talking and that allowed him to be more successful than some of the modern UFC fighters. But how does that dynamic work? Because I feel like UFC is not fake like like like wrestling. It is very real.
Speaker 2:And so why don't why is it that the points aren't all that matters or I guess there aren't points in UFC but like the wins, the knockouts. If I come in, I should be able to be entirely silent and win and I should still be comped the same but that's not how it works in UFC.
Speaker 3:Explain it. So, yeah. So Conor McGregor had had had arguably had the gift of gab Mhmm. Yet he backed it up with a series of wins Okay. That elevated him to superstar status.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Right? You can't just be a yapper but there were some iconic moments where he would believe, I'm I'm forgetting the guy's name but when he was fighting the Brazilian champion, he basically called exactly how he was gonna knock the guy out like the day before.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And there was these moments that just like launched him into superstar status. Since then, you've had people like Ilya Tapuria who are probably more talented Mhmm. Better all around fighters, more consistent. And it's interesting because Ilya Topuria, the main critique early on was that he was just like a a just copying Conor McGregor. He wasn't his own man.
Speaker 3:He would use Conor McGregor like lines. He got a tattoo that's almost exactly like Conor's on his back. But overall, like UFC people like hardcore fans will be frustrated because they'll say, oh this is just like wrestling like he shouldn't be getting the fight. This is just like pro wrestling. It's like you realize the companies are owned by the same group like it's it's all it's an entertainment company, right?
Speaker 2:Wait. Oh, and TK. UFC are both owned by the same company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's basically the $33,000,000,000 public company Sure. Called TKO. Yeah. It's all entertainment.
Speaker 3:It's an entertainment company. Yeah. Yeah. Disguised as sport. Okay.
Speaker 3:Obviously, the athletes on in UFC are incredible. But Yeah. O you know, over and over you've seen the best paid fighters are end up being oftentimes the most entertaining. Yep. The Russian fighters like Khabib were historically very humble Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And very quiet.
Speaker 2:Less entertaining.
Speaker 3:And, but they were so dominant. Mhmm. Like Islam is so dominant. He can be humble and still draw Yep. But nothing like nothing like Connor did in his prime, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Remember UFC has been Swag walk is like iconic. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are
Speaker 3:So and then you have people like Patty the baddie from The UK Yes. Who who's a loud mouth, very entertaining in a bunch of different ways. He he swells up. He he gains like seemingly 50 pounds in between fights.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When I saw him for the first time I was like that does not look like a fighter. It looks like a musician or something. That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm gonna look at the the pound for pound rankings Mhmm. Right now on on UFC if I can pull this up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting because that that hasn't really I feel like that hasn't really happened in the NFL for some reason like because the the Super Bowl is not decided based on any qualitative factors whatsoever. It's purely stats I believe. There's no voting at all. College football used to
Speaker 3:be Yeah. The UFC is trying to make fights that will sell pay per views.
Speaker 2:Yes. Exactly. And
Speaker 3:so they will elevate somebody. I mean this was this is the critique of Sean O'Malley, right? Mhmm. Another guy with very bright bright hair.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He posts TikToks of himself you know smoking weed and stuff like Okay. Then has been put in his place Yeah. Fairly recently. But again, he they they would call it Dana White privilege. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's just like Yeah.
Speaker 3:A fighter who's entertaining, loud enough Yeah. Enough of a draw. Yeah. But if you look at the pound for pound rankings, there's some guys on there that you it it it over time the pound for pound ranking tends to reflect somebody's actual Yeah. Athletic abilities.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:You have Ilya, Islam, Marab, Tom Aspinall and Andre Alexandre Pantoja who are all Pantoja. Ultimately just incredible
Speaker 2:Fighters.
Speaker 3:Athletes. Yeah. And a lot of the loudmouths will end up getting paid quite well Sure. But they're not necessarily getting on that pound for pound ranking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There is a little bit of a dynamic of that in in traditional professional sports where I believe like the MLB is basically hoping for Dodgers, Yankees in the World Series like every single time because the Dodgers and the Yankees have like the biggest fan bases. So broadly there will be more people tuning into that than say two two teams facing off from second Yeah. Third tier cities. But there's no world where you know, oh going into the Super Bowl you know, there's really like you know a lot of trash talking going on.
Speaker 2:But like
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just looked down on there Colby Covington
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Who has fought for championship I think a couple times, never won. He was at a point in the UFC where he was facing getting cut.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He was just not really doing that well. Mhmm. And he decided to basically completely rebrand himself as a heel Mhmm. And just say the most offensive possible things he could say. He came out loudly in support of Trump Yep.
Speaker 3:When that was much much less popular. Sure. He would post videos of himself with like seemingly OnlyFans, creators, adult entertainers Yep. And it totally actually turned around his career and he ended up Again, he didn't actually fight and win. Didn't win any titles and probably never will but Yeah.
Speaker 3:It it definitely turned his career around.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're looking to talk some trash to about your competitors when you're selling your product, you gotta do it in ADDIO. Customer relationship magic. ADDIO is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your
Speaker 3:Not endorsed by audio, but endorsed by John at this moment. Turn turn know, your CRM should look like WWE.
Speaker 2:Right? Exactly.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Really getting into it with people.
Speaker 2:You're using our competitor. Take a look at this deal card and tell me you don't wanna switch right now. Yeah. Channel Hulk Hogan in your next BDR Sheel has a good post here announcing some news. Tesla is telling staff internally that it plans to roll out its robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekend and they'll include Marin much of the East Bay and San Francisco and stretch to say south to stretch south to San Jose.
Speaker 2:This will be crazy if it if it goes I mean it's gonna come soon. Will be very interesting to see because I imagine that driving in San Francisco is a little bit harder than driving in Austin. But there's a ton of people that have Teslas and have been driving around San Francisco for a decade or more now with cameras. So, they should have a lot of data. They should be trained.
Speaker 3:I think the robo taxis will be fine. If the if if the robo taxis were a Tesla humanoid driving stick shift, they'd have a really rough time in San Francisco. You ever driven stick in San Francisco?
Speaker 2:No. But it is extremely hard on the hills. I maybe once I Yeah. I think I actually once did it. It's really bad.
Speaker 3:My first car Yeah. Toyota. 20 year old Toyota stick shift. Yep. And I would was already at a time where people were just assumed everybody was in an automatic.
Speaker 3:Yep. And so you'd pull up on just like the most steep hill and somebody would come up you know, right behind you park you know, an inch away from you and it's very exhilarating. So I think they'll do fine. It will be interesting though like you know, are the car or the robotaxis gonna be like followed by another car
Speaker 2:have safety drivers in them for a while. Yeah. Right? And and they'll probably be teleoperated for a while. The the the the question I think is just like, will we see memes on acts of people switching?
Speaker 2:Because we've seen a lot of people in San Francisco post. I think what is it? Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz said that she hit her like five hundredth Waymo ride. Yeah. People truly just use Like it.
Speaker 2:Waymo constantly and they've really shifted from Uber to Waymo. And so will they shift again to Tesla? Will they be dual using? Will one be cheaper? Will it be a price war?
Speaker 2:Capital war? What's gonna happen there? Finally, they're going to head to head so it'll be interesting to follow. Well, no matter what you think of Tesla, whether you're long or you're short, do it on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks.
Speaker 2:In other news, if you're not looking to take a robotaxi, I would recommend picking up this 2025 Ferrari SF 90 XX.
Speaker 3:Great It's
Speaker 2:$2,300,000. It's a stunning example here loaded with over a $100,000 in options. And everyone will know that you are not just rich but wealthy because this car is probably gonna depreciate like crazy.
Speaker 3:I don't know. How
Speaker 1:many of these are the
Speaker 3:How many of the XX are they making?
Speaker 2:Well, the the original SF 90 priced at $708,100,000 dollars but it was not a limited production run. And so it has traded down to about half that price. Very unfortunate for the SF90 buyers in the audience. Our our hearts go out to you after taking such a bath but you can make it all back on an s f 90 x x.
Speaker 3:I love the x x. I gotta say. Now, what what is Basically
Speaker 2:Is the is the x x a a street legal car? I I they they do this weird thing where they make a road car then they make it a track car and then they make the track car a road car version and we've gone kind of back and forth and back and forth. But, I think this is the road the road version of the track car version of the road car. Is that right? I think I'm right.
Speaker 3:I think you're right. The chat the chat will correct
Speaker 2:correct as quickly. I'm pretty the XX series is is they took it they put it where they got it ready for the track and then they dial it back to where it was street legal again. Anyway, you gotta pick this up folks. It's a it's a steal.
Speaker 3:John in the chat says, just got a notification from the Feet. Anthropic is reportedly raising capital from The Middle East at a valuation north of 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:150. Wow. Is wild.
Speaker 3:Love to see it.
Speaker 2:But I'm sure
Speaker 3:Seems like every company in the world is using Claude code.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Maybe even open AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's just that good. Yep. So the article went up eleven minutes ago. Artificial intelligence startup in Thropics is an early talks. Okay?
Speaker 3:Talks.
Speaker 2:Early talks.
Speaker 3:No term sheet yet at more than double its valuation to more than 150,000,000,000 in a new funding round giving it additional firepower keep pace with rival rivals building advanced models.
Speaker 2:K.
Speaker 3:Its preliminary stages has received interest which was a massive jump from their current $61,000,000,000 price tag. So it sounds like they're talking with MGX Yeah. Abu Dhabi's AI fund. And again, coming off coming off that nice memo Yeah. That they had that leaked earlier this week saying saying something to the effect of So
Speaker 2:the worst.
Speaker 3:Bad He basically said They're bad. Bad people are gonna make money on this. Yeah. He said, unfortunately, I think no bad That's the quote. Should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.
Speaker 2:That's the worst quote. The quote you should drop is, I can change him. I can change
Speaker 3:him.
Speaker 2:Can fix that. Wait until he if I don't if if he's doing something bad over there, wait until he starts talking to Claude. And he's like, yeah, maybe I should be nicer. Maybe I should just get into the Golden Gate Bridge. Have him chat with Golden Gate Bridge Claude for a while, cheer him up and whoever he whoever Dario's worried about, get him on the straight and narrow.
Speaker 3:Just so funny because it's it's like how much how much how much does Anthropic rely on sovereign investment from The Middle East already for their business?
Speaker 2:Oh, just through the VCs? Through the past
Speaker 6:All life. Right?
Speaker 3:All life. Right? Yeah. They're a a key player
Speaker 2:Darwin hops into And
Speaker 3:and it's just I mean, it's it's I mean, I've I've been I've been to the to The UAE twice and met so many so many amazing people and share
Speaker 2:I've never been to The UAE. I've been to Qatar. It was cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And other than that, don't think I've been to anywhere in The Middle East. Maybe I should go. I don't know. I to do a I had
Speaker 3:a I I met a met a buddy of mine. A now now friend when I met him
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He showed me he had his formal formal wear on and he got it custom made to
Speaker 2:And like you casual Friday
Speaker 3:over Casual Friday over here. Sorry folks. He had a a custom insert for his vape Okay. And then extra cartridges
Speaker 2:Wow. Inside. That's pretty sick. Who's that who's that Customs designer that does extra pockets everywhere? That's like a thing?
Speaker 2:Is that that true?
Speaker 3:I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
Speaker 2:name drop for
Speaker 3:Their friend. Okay. Their friend. Accidental pockets.
Speaker 2:Accidental pockets. So these are not advanced talks. These are early talks?
Speaker 3:Early talks, preliminary talks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A preliminary talks.
Speaker 3:They are talking terms it
Speaker 2:There sounds are other preliminary talks going on between us and Adquick for their next for next billboard buy. There are You could be in advanced talks with Adquick
Speaker 3:We are in
Speaker 2:if you're interested in making out of home advertising easy and measurable, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising because only Adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the
Speaker 3:given how addicted we are to out of home, we're pretty much always in advanced talks.
Speaker 2:Always. Always. The good folks Bernard at Arnaud is in the paper again. LVMA's boss, Bernard Arnaud, seeks to avert the trade war. This is a very interesting article.
Speaker 2:I wanted to kick it off with a little background on Bernard Arnaud. So we have some posts here. One from Speedwell Research. He was explaining the difference between iPhones and Dom Perignon and the CEO of of LVMH says, in fifty years time, will the iPhone still be used or the people who are making it today, will they have found out what will be at the cutting edge at that time? But I believe I can say without being mistaken that in fifty years time, we will still be drinking Dom Perignon.
Speaker 2:And, I agree.
Speaker 3:Iconic.
Speaker 2:I agree. Johnny Ive and Sam Altman aren't teaming up to make a champagne brand baby. They're coming for the iPhone.
Speaker 3:The issue is it's hard to it's hard to create legacy quickly.
Speaker 2:It is. It is. Heritage is not is not made in a day. The other funny thing, this is extremely disrespectful to Apple. Did you know this?
Speaker 2:So it's disrespectful in multiple ways. One, obviously Apple would say of course we'll be around in fifty years. But Apple has a set of rules for PR people and if you're working with them and you're and you're talking about the iPhone, they have a set of rules for how you talk about the products and they specifically don't want you to say the iPhone. They say, Let's talk about iPhone. Really?
Speaker 2:Yes. And if you watch the keynote they never say the iPhone. They say iPhone. No the. And this is just like part of their thing and they have a set of rules that are like it's like hundreds of pages in this PDF.
Speaker 2:It's crazy how much control they exert over the over like I wonder if
Speaker 3:you can get Siri to say the iPhone.
Speaker 2:So they they have a bunch of funny things. You're not supposed to say click here. You're not supposed to use App Store generically. You're supposed to capitalize it. You're not supposed to say the device wants thinks or tries.
Speaker 2:Apple prefers tone that's helpful not whimsical or personified. You're not supposed to describe the apps that come with the device as free. You're not supposed to say, oh yeah Apple includes like a free maps app. You're not supposed to say that if you're doing an iPhone review. And so choose your choose your words wisely if you're you're trying to get in good graces of Apple's PR team.
Speaker 2:And I don't think Bernard Arnaud will be reviewing the next iPhone with language like this. But maybe people will be using their iPhones to buy Dom Perignon in
Speaker 3:Meyer highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnaud a while back earlier this year. He says, when when you cannot you cannot dream when you talk numbers. When you create desire, profits are a consequence.
Speaker 2:So good. You're be creating desire.
Speaker 3:I can't. I think this is in a reference to the Tiffany store in New York.
Speaker 2:Yes. He spent $500,000,000 renovating the Fifth Avenue Tiffany flagship. People were like, that sounds like a lot to spend on a renovation of a single store. He says, you can't dream when you talk numbers. Don't talk numbers, create desire.
Speaker 2:And if you want to sleep in the Tiffany store of mattresses, get an Eight Sleep. Get a pod five ultra, but it has a five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free return
Speaker 3:Exceptional sleep. Free shipping. Exception.
Speaker 2:So David Senra also has a good quote. Bernard Arnaud's advice to himself. In business, I think the most important thing is to position yourself for long term and not be too impatient which I am by nature and I have to control myself. I think that's a good point and he and Senra also highlights 10 highlights about Bernard Arnaud. He made a bunch of commitments that early that were very very detail oriented things that you wouldn't typically notice.
Speaker 2:But once you'd seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, it's what comes to your mind immediately. He spots any incongruities that might disrupt the aura of opulence he has carefully constructed. Then he reels off texts and emails to his senior executive describing any perceived deficiencies and bullet points of obsessive detail. Arnose has assembled the world's largest luxury conglomerate and globalized the sector once constrained by the limited ambitions of family owned European companies encrusted in tradition. Very good at in in stewarding these brands that probably are owned by families and don't wanna part ways if they you know, it's not just a source of income for the family, but it's also a source of pride to be the owner of a of a luxury house.
Speaker 2:But Bernard figures out how to get them to part with it. He believed luxury brands could be larger than anyone at the time imagined.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There was that the acquired acquired as such a such a good coverage of of LVMH of course, but just how long he just how badly he wanted Dior and how it ended up in the hands of this like weird government owned conglomerate. Anyways, wild story.
Speaker 2:Take over Dior. So Yep. It had three stores in the equivalent of $90,000,000 in sales when he acquired it. Now it has 439 stores. So I mean a massive growth and 9,500,000,000 in sales.
Speaker 2:He 100 x the business. Absolutely insane.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's wild how bullish he was despite you know, probably not being able to predict social media early on. He Totally. You could kind of identify flex culture just maybe in a cafe or a restaurant.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:But scaling flex culture in the way that Instagram and social media did Yeah. Has has been incredible.
Speaker 2:So if you're looking for a luxury watch, get on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet, seriously any watch. So let's talk about how he's working behind the scenes to abort avert a trade war. President Trump's air efforts to secure a trade deal with the European Union have the help of an old powerful friend, luxury titan Bernard Arnaud.
Speaker 2:The LVMH chief has spent recent weeks shuttling between Europe's capitals meeting with German chancellor, Fredrik Meers, and Italian prime minister, Giorgio Maloney, pressing them to agree to a deal along the lines of the one Trump reached with Japan this week. He and he has spoken to the president seeking to deescalate tensions with Brussels. Arnaud is also hedging his bets. He plans to open another Louis Vuitton factory in Texas, a move partly credited with sparing the luxury industries from tariffs during Trump's first term. I'm pushing as much as I can for us to reach an agreement with the Americans so that we don't get caught up in a trade war, which would be extremely damaging for European businesses, Arnaud said in interview at LVMH's headquarters in Paris.
Speaker 2:Much is now at stake for Arnaud on Thursday. LVMH reported a 22% fall in first half net profit hit by sharp decline in sales as its core fashion and leather goods division that includes Louis Vuitton and Christian Christian Dior Christian Dior. The company is contending with a range of challenges. China, along the luxury industry's growth engine, is in a protracted economic slump and consumer confidence in The US, which accounts for one third of the group's sales, has been shaken by uncertainty over tariffs. Then some consumers are now questioning the inherent value of luxury goods after years of price rises.
Speaker 2:That's insane. Who are these who are these consumers? It's ridiculous. Investors meanwhile are scrutinizing whether the business model of LVMH, a conglomerate of more than seven seventy five brands that ranges from cosmetics retailer Sephora to Hennessy Cognac is built for a world with rising trade barriers and deepening geopolitical uncertainty. LVMH's shares are down more than 30% since January.
Speaker 2:That is they're one of the durable losers because, the S and P 500 and the MAG seven have both dropped down probably around 30% in some cases during the post Liberation Day tariffs, but they all bounce back. And now Jensen's running a $4,000,000,000,000
Speaker 3:is bouncing back. It's been rocky y over the last week but they're up 11% over the last thirty days. Mhmm. But like you said, down 27% in the last six months but only down 10% year to date. They've been growing nicely into the new year.
Speaker 2:So Arnaud pioneered the luxury brand conglomerate in an era when the world economy was was opening up. Lots of trade, a burgeoning middle class around the globe fueled the decades long boom in luxury spending that made him one of the world's richest men. Now LVMH's two biggest markets, The US and China, are at loggerheads with Europe and are now caught in the middle. Trump is demanding European countries move manufacturing to The United States to avoid tariffs, a tall order for luxury brands that market their wares as made in Europe with old world craftsmanship. That's a very good point.
Speaker 2:Or no yeah. It is funny to imagine a Birkin bag made in Texas. It's just like a just doesn't feel right. It's not the brand. Trump so Arnaud said that while LVMH is strong enough to ride out the slowdown, other luxury companies were getting exposed echoing Warren Buffett.
Speaker 2:He added that when the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming without a swimsuit. For Arnaud, the luxury downturn is temporary, not a structural shift and successful investors often do the opposite of stock stock market players who he called a bit sheep like. Shots fired. LVMH's array of labels gives the group scale to attract top talent like creative directors and designers, secure prime retail locations and negotiate favorable media rates by buying in bulk according to the billionaire. In periods when the economic climate is more difficult when markets slow down, which is the case today, we tend to come out stronger.
Speaker 2:Arnaud is putting his money where his mouth is. His his family holding company has have bought more than 1,000,000,000 in of LVMH shares since the January, regulatory filings show. So he's buying back in, increasing his stake. He said that he said that put them he he said that put them on their the track to own more than half of LVMH's stock by the start of next year. The most urgent order is of the business however is
Speaker 3:in talks to sell Mark Jacobs.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Michael Miraflo in the chat again just just breaking news delivering insights. Not super surprised to see this news. It feels like Mark Jacobs, I don't know any people or in in and around our world that are super excited to buy whatever is coming down the Marc Jacobs runway. Mhmm. So anyways, LVMH is in discussions to sell fashion brand Marc Jacobs in a deal that could fetch around 1,000,000,000 according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 3:They've been discussing deals with multiple parties including Reebok owner Authentic. Authentic I think is we should try to have the CEO on some time. They they basically buy up let me list all their brands. But they buy up brands that are honestly, I hate to say it, aging out a little bit. Not not necessarily aging out but losing some relevancy.
Speaker 3:Reebok, Champion, Nautica Mhmm. Aeropostale, Eddie Bauer Yeah. Brooks Brothers, Billabong, Quicksilver, Juicy Couture, etcetera. So they buy these brands seemingly when they're in decline and then try to and then try to kind of make them more relevant. I think I think the strategy is generally worked pretty well and I could see them reinvigorating Marc Jacobs but not surprising.
Speaker 3:It just doesn't feel like it's in the same category as as many of the other LVMH brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the thing that I remember about Marc Jacobs was that one point they had a line called Marc by Marc Jacobs which I thought was just hilarious and recursive and tautological. Of course, it's by Marc Jacobs. It's called Marc but
Speaker 3:I would like to see Marc Andreessen have a standalone fund in a '16 z by Marc by Marc Andreessen. That's And really he's little personal
Speaker 2:Yeah. In the solo GP game. Give Elad Gil a run for his money.
Speaker 3:I like it.
Speaker 2:But the the the key turnaround strategy, if you're trying to turn around Marc Jacobs or increase Aeropostale or Nautica, of course, put City Sweeney in the ad. That's the move. Overfit quantitative strategies has the meme. You find your target audience, craft a compelling message, reach them through experience marketing. Storytelling is key.
Speaker 2:Long term brand loyalty is the end goal. And they say this marketing thing is easy. You just put Sydney Sweeney in the ad and of course that's referring to what is it American Eagle?
Speaker 3:American Eagle. Are they already owned by authentic brands?
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe. I don't know. Anyway.
Speaker 3:No. American Eagle is publicly listed.
Speaker 2:Publicly listed. Right. And the new CEO is making moves putting Sydney Sweeney in ads and absolutely printing and bringing new relevancy to that brand.
Speaker 3:I mean, wild. They're up 16% over the past five
Speaker 2:was last time
Speaker 3:people were talking about American I wonder, I I really wonder how much they paid her for this because she clearly could I mean, probably that it would be hard for her to capture the real value of this. Totally.
Speaker 2:What was the market cap move? How much what's their market cap and you said
Speaker 3:Sitting at 2,000,000,000 up 16% over the past five years.
Speaker 2:That's 300,000,000. So Yeah. Sydney, if you got less than 200,000,000, call us. We'll help you negotiate the next one because you deserve every
Speaker 3:the question the question is is how many how many times great ad. How many apparently somebody called out the second part of this ad Oh,
Speaker 4:this is
Speaker 3:was made with AI.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 3:So look when the car is driving away.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:So she's getting in the car. Yeah. Yeah. This is real.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 3:Could have been fake news.
Speaker 2:Oh, no transitions.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Don't think she was doing that burnout.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The burnout would be really hard to do in a sound stage like that. That feels really really difficult to
Speaker 3:Well, some deep TBPN lore
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Our production team went to college film school Yeah. With Sydney Sweeney. Yeah. I don't know if I'm supposed to but I just doxed you guys.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I am a podcast crossover accelerationist.
Speaker 3:You are.
Speaker 2:Posted this last night. I'm not satisfied with Sam Altman on Theo Von. I want Tyler Cowen on Hot Ones. I want Dylan Patel on Nelk Boys and I want Sarah Payne on Impulsive. I had some fun with this.
Speaker 2:People are really into this.
Speaker 3:Imagine the Hot Ones audience interacting with watching Tyler Cowen.
Speaker 2:It'd be hilarious. It'd be amazing.
Speaker 3:All time.
Speaker 2:All of these are good ideas that would go viral. I I I want more of these crazy crossovers. And I was thinking about it like the Sam Altman on Theo Von, this is a this is a formula that is it feels very new but it it has happened before. And I was thinking about are you familiar with Loveline? So back in the late nineties, early two thousands, there was a show, a radio show.
Speaker 3:You were like what? 30?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3:I don't wanna date. I don't wanna date you.
Speaker 2:Please. There was a show, a daily radio show. I think it was an hour or two. Two hosts not unlike this one. It was between Adam Carolla and Doctor.
Speaker 2:Drew. And they played different characters because they were different people. One was a comedian who would kind of make fun of every situation that came up and the other one was a doctor like a like a clinically trained psychiatrist or psychologist. And so people would call in with their relationship situations kind of the precursor to the T app. Am I dating the same man?
Speaker 3:We got to talk
Speaker 2:about the
Speaker 3:T app by the way.
Speaker 2:We do. We do. They were recently hacked apparently and everything is leaked unfortunately.
Speaker 3:Hack if it was publicly accessible.
Speaker 2:It is crazy. You would expect a Salesforce PM to be able to lock down the database a little bit better. We will see how true that is. I saw some community notes out there. I wanna hold my judgment until I see really how I mean,
Speaker 3:apparently of five like a a
Speaker 2:It could be fake. It could be AI generated images in there. It could be all sorts of things, you know. Don't know. I I'm I'm I'm reserving my judgment till I see I see it in the in printed in paper.
Speaker 2:I need it in the Wall Street Journal to believe it. I don't know. But this Loveline show was very popular. People call in with relationship problems. Oh, I think this person's cheating on me or I'm you know, how do I find a date?
Speaker 2:This type of thing. And then doctor Drew would give a very serious psychological analysis. He's a doctor. He's actually like a board certified psychologist I believe. Then One
Speaker 3:of us should become a doctor.
Speaker 2:And then Adam Carolla would be just the jokester, just the comedian. And he would just like have a lot of fun. It was a very good show. It was very successful and it had went on a massive run. And then they kind of like scattered to the wind and did their own things eventually.
Speaker 2:But this this putting two people together that are that are have different interests, it actually creates something new and beautiful and I think it's a case for getting Tyler Cowen on Hot Ones. I'd like to see it. I like We need to brainstorm some more. If you have ideas, let them let us know in the chat who what what crossovers do you
Speaker 3:want do? Was a crazy weekend. I mean, it was just a wild weekend in podcasting. I think I said it yesterday. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Netanyahu on the NELC
Speaker 2:was That was also a wild crossover.
Speaker 3:Then on Diovan. Yep.
Speaker 2:There's been there's been other crossovers. I mean, when Mark Zuckerberg went on Thio that was crazy. There were also
Speaker 3:Was it Who who was the But but Alex from scale was the first
Speaker 2:He had done that.
Speaker 3:One of the first to go
Speaker 2:on Thio. Mean, a while ago, like years ago I said like tech is like truly crossing over because there were three back to back tech people on Rogan. So Peter Thiel did it, Marc Andreessen did it and Mark Zuckerberg did it. And so it was like, oh wow. Like tech has really like crossed over into the mainstream going on Rogan.
Speaker 2:And I was advocating that they should get Pat Gelsinger from Intel, Jensen Huang from Nvidia and then the wild
Speaker 3:I mean the way to save Intel TSN Intel to trade like a meme stock and and access
Speaker 2:Get Lip Buuton on Theo immediately. Immediately. Make it happen. Put him on the whatever podcast. That's what I want.
Speaker 2:Put them on fresh and fit. Get get Lip Buutan on fresh and fit. That's what we need.
Speaker 3:Something there. Should we cover the tea the tea news since Please, please
Speaker 2:break it down and give me give me the facts. Put it in the truth zone.
Speaker 3:So Krem, you posted earlier. The tea app has been hacked and you can now download 59 gigabytes of user selfies right now. The hack is real. A picture from someone I know who signed up just to see what was on there was in it. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Was obviously a vibe coded app and was bound to be insecure. So it is over on April Okay. As as well as proof of what it took. So Yeah. Kremus says, if you ever wanted to see people selfies without filters, I've got the dump for you.
Speaker 2:Okay. If if Kermeux is reporting it in that way, I'm I'm a believer now. This is
Speaker 3:a Kermeux says free unicorn startup idea security audits for vibe coded apps.
Speaker 2:Oh. That is interesting. I would be there was a company that was doing AI agents for cyber security and they were saying that the problems of cyber security were actually beyond the capabilities of the current state of the art models and they were still having trouble getting their product No. Fully polished. John.
Speaker 2:What's this?
Speaker 3:One Cremieux has another app. App idea facial recognition that warns you if a date was trying to use this godforsaken app. Okay.
Speaker 2:There was also was somebody also vibe coded the opposite app for men to check on are we dating the same woman or something along those lines. And so that was somewhat inevitable. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Won't say the name of that one. These apparently one of the users of the T app is a at the US Department of Defense. She used an official ID card in order in order to get access to the app. Yeah. Not
Speaker 2:There's a lesson in here. Touch grass. Anyway, anything else on the T app today?
Speaker 3:I think that's it. It's a very unfortunate. I actually feel bad for all the people that
Speaker 2:Yeah. Data breach here. Hopefully it's one of those situations where it's just like so big and messy that it doesn't actually affect any single person. It's just kind of like, okay. Cause like I'm sure like my credit card details have been leaked in some sort of you know I I'm pretty sure like Home Depot got hacked or Walmart got hacked.
Speaker 2:My emails out there. I get random phone calls. My phone call, my phone number has been leaked and it's just part of life now that like stuff is out there. I have old selfies that are on the internet. If you Google me, there's old pictures from like, oh I signed up for a music website and I put an image on there.
Speaker 2:One thing embarrassing but who cares?
Speaker 3:Interesting on the tea app Yeah. A couple days ago, Tea Born which was a copycat of tea Yeah. Was the number three app. Now it's not even in the top 100 from what I can
Speaker 2:Flash in the pan situation. Interesting. Did they were they monetizing the tea app? Were they actually like getting $20 in app purchases going?
Speaker 3:Because it
Speaker 2:feels like if you're going viral and you're at the top of the app store and you're not cashing in at that moment, you made a huge huge mistake.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sam Lambert says, CEO of planet scale says, new training data set just
Speaker 2:dropped. You were already
Speaker 3:being used to train the next Ghibli.
Speaker 2:The next VO or something like that. That's rough. Is it tagged? I guess I guess it's a pretty well tagged dataset too. That is crazy.
Speaker 2:I mean, I used to reverse engineer APIs when I was a kid and and kind of figure out, oh, you you like if you went to an app, could do this thing where you would kind of man in the middle yourself. So typically when you open up an app, the the flow is it goes from your iPhone. It makes a request to the back end, which is a server. It hits a API dot the app you're using, and it goes over your Wi Fi. So what you could do is you could you could have it route to your laptop and then to the WiFi pass the signal along essentially.
Speaker 2:And you could see all of the requests and all the data that was going back and forth. And you could see the actual API that was that you were interacting with and oftentimes you could get kind of like you know it was it was usually against terms of service to really do anything with this data, but you could see the data that's going back and forth and you could get the undocumented API. So there's like the public API where you need a key and they're like, hey, if you're gonna use it a lot, you gotta pay us. But then there's the there's the private API that's used for the app and that's what's going on here. But usually you can't just get into the database.
Speaker 2:Usually it's like, okay, I could get my Twitter feed sent to me in JSON form and that's like maybe a nice to have if you're you know hacking an app or something and just hacking something together. You want digest of your own data. You can just scrape it out without needing to scrape the HTML. But lots of companies have locked that down. Certainly all the big ones have encrypted the stuff so you can't do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This seems like it was very poorly built. So good luck to everyone involved. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of long nights and weekends fixing
Speaker 3:bugs. I went back and forth on email with the CEO. Yeah. I think it was on Wednesday morning and I think it's probably good that he's not joining because he's got some work to do. It sounds like they've secured the database now but a little bit too late.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Think many many the data is already out there. Yeah. Meanwhile see this picture. Levered Lloyd on x has an interesting startup startup idea here that he's been running.
Speaker 3:He says, every summer I open a new bar in the Hamptons. Cheapest lease I can find just enough plumbing to pass inspection. Hire smoke show bartenders, book a wash DJ and bring in TikTok influencers to call it a hidden gem. $5 Costco tenders become a $100 tender tower. Kirkland vodka, $25 a shot.
Speaker 3:Wow. Reject 95% at the door to create fake exclusivity. No resi, no signage. Kids max out credit cards for clout, staffs underpaid, tips or guilt tripped. Clear 2,000,000 by Labor Day, same scam, new name next year.
Speaker 3:We don't sell drinks, we sell delusion. Have fun staying broke suckers.
Speaker 2:This feels like fan fiction but fantastic post levered Lloyd.
Speaker 3:I'm sure this is
Speaker 2:feels like kind of real maybe exaggerated a little bit. Definitely seems possible.
Speaker 3:Wow. I would argue that this is not actually a scam. This is just marketing genius.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wow. Yep. It is it is genius. It definitely exposes a
Speaker 3:selling Kirkland vodka and saying that it's Grey Goose. Know, people that make they say, oh it's the same Yeah. Yeah. It's the same it's the same alcohol.
Speaker 2:If you're out in the Hamptons you gotta be suspicious. But he should do this forty five years in a row, bank 90,000,000, 2,000,000 a year and then he should buy this beautiful house that's for sale from the founder I'll of vitamin be right back. It's an $89,000,000 Hamptons home and it's in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal, the Friday edition. Let's read through this. So this is from the Vitamin Shoppe founder.
Speaker 2:You've probably been there picking up creatine or something like that. Says, it pays to take your vitamins. Jeffrey Horowitz, founder of the nutrition nutritional supplements retailer Vitamin Shoppe, is putting his oceanfront Hamptons estate on the market for $89,000,000. The 3.5 acre property in Sagaponic, New York Has a nine hole golf course on it. That's incredible.
Speaker 2:I believe, Emily Sundberg was telling us about Sagaponak that it's extremely delightful because it's a microclimate. Everyone wants to be there. The listing agent is Ryan Serhant of Serhant Brokerage, a fantastic, social media influencer, content creator, and real estate broker, has a massive team pumping out a ton of cool content. I've seen a lot of what he's built, and the business that he's built is absolutely fantastic. So excited to see that he is listing this $89,000,000 nine hole golf course, 3.5 acre home.
Speaker 2:It also has an arcade. That's very cool. So the property's two parcels are also available separately. The two acres containing the houses are priced at 75,000,000, while the golf course on 1.5 acres can be had for 15,000,000. So if you're looking to pinch pennies, you can just pick up the golf course and deal with the house later, maybe sleep in the the putting green on a tent.
Speaker 2:Horowitz and his wife, Helen Horowitz, bought the land in the mid nineties for about 2,680,000.00 and built the estate in 1998 according to property records. They the Horowitz declined to comment. Interesting. Usually, they they throw some something in here. Earlier this year, the estate was quietly shopped off the market for a 125,000,000.
Speaker 2:Now it's down about 30% cheaper. What a bargain. It's now being offered for 89,000,000 who said an $80,000,000 waterfront house recently went into contract in East Hampton, a nearby waterfront home in Sagaponic is asking $85,000,000, Sir Hant said. The contemporary home has eight bedrooms and measures about 9,000 square feet. Features include an outdoor pool and a video game arcade with pinball racing games.
Speaker 3:Does it have a movie theater?
Speaker 2:Air hockey, let's figure that out for sure. Pavilion Did
Speaker 3:the air hockey fall off?
Speaker 2:It did for sure. It's dead. Don't do it. I don't know. Air hockey.
Speaker 2:Air hockey never been big into that whole world.
Speaker 3:Really? Not even
Speaker 2:replaced by video games, you know, movie theaters.
Speaker 3:It really was a physical It felt like a physical
Speaker 2:we we got You know, Mark Zuckerberg's trying to disrupt air hockey with the with the new virtual reality augmented reality glasses. We played basically a version of that. This the the Orion headset you put on and you see a hologram and you kind of play pong with each other. It's kind of a modern version of air hockey. So who needs
Speaker 3:I got the data here. The air hockey table market is set to reach 3,600,000,000.0 in 2024. 7.7% CAGR.
Speaker 2:Crucial for air hockey. Let's raise for it now. It's a massive market.
Speaker 3:Uber for air hockey.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Horowitz who is an avid golfer built the golf course with views of nearby Fairfield Pond. Nine holes got really mugging your buddy in Malibu with the three hole golf course or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 3:People say there's no golf in Malibu and there's a private golf course in the center of Malibu right by country mart.
Speaker 2:But one
Speaker 3:You can't really see it because there's a there's a fence but there's just one guy. I think it's a I think it's a five hole par three. I've never played it Mhmm. But nobody really ever played.
Speaker 2:You can because it's private. So the Horowitz's also have homes in New York City and on Florida's Fisher Island. They are selling because their children are grown. They founded the vitamin shop in 1977. I didn't realize it was so long ago.
Speaker 2:Right? Right during the Hulk Hogan rise. Hulk Hogan's rising, you gotta get bulky like Hogan
Speaker 3:Whey protein.
Speaker 2:The Hulkster, you're gonna go get some whey protein, some creatine. The New Jersey based company was sold to Bear Stearns for about 300,000,000 in 02/2002. I had no idea that Bear Stearns
Speaker 3:became an executive at Vita Cost.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. Which then
Speaker 3:sold to Kroger
Speaker 2:in 2014. What an absolute dog. This guy's a boardroom general. You love to see it. Homes in the Hamptons are
Speaker 3:trading Put the KPIs in orbit, John.
Speaker 2:He really he clearly did put the KPIs in orbit. It's funny because you know, this is a lost art. You start a company, you sell it to a bank. Like that's if people don't do that. Bear Stearns.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Not around anymore, unfortunately. The most expensive home ever sold in the Hamptons was a $137,000,000 East Hampton sale in 2014 according to Jonathan Miller. So seems like a decent house. I'm not pretty I'm not too big into golf, so I'm not that into it.
Speaker 2:I won't be bidding on that one, but you can if you're looking for a a state in in the Hamptons. But I do wanna go through this article because we gotta have a debate.
Speaker 3:So one is that? Because I think we should cover the Please. The the the the drama in the air.
Speaker 2:In the Hamptons. Yes. Let's stay with Emily Sundberg and then we'll go to
Speaker 3:the base. Okay. Got the scoop. She says, feel like I'm losing my mind seeing a candle brand fly influencers to the Hamptons on a private plane for a brand trip with my candles fly private pillows. And so anyways, her post was going viral.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:I wish I What is the name of the candle company is the is the problem? I can't see it anywhere. It's unclear. The candles gotta be pretty good if they're flying private. No.
Speaker 3:The
Speaker 2:candle is Hotel Lobby Candle. That's the name of the candle company. Hotel Lobby You can go check them out if you want. They didn't take off. Okay.
Speaker 2:I I have some I'm doing some capital j journalism right now with Preston Holland.
Speaker 3:Preston says
Speaker 2:Oh you talked to him?
Speaker 3:Calling it out. He says this is a King Air.
Speaker 2:Yes. I
Speaker 3:tried It's to also on the ground parked and put to bed. See the ground outside and windshield cover on.
Speaker 2:Windshield cover's The screens are off so they might not even take taken off. It's King Air. The windows are too small. He said it might be a CJ three which is a small like Cessna Citation type plane. Still beautiful.
Speaker 2:But I really think So Emily Sundberg's take here is that is that there was backlash because you know, it's just a candle brand. What are they doing flying private? Emily Sundberg says there was I
Speaker 3:gotta I gotta I gotta say they have a Hamptons candle. They have a Hamptons reed diffuser.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They have the poolside candle. Kinda makes sense for them to do do an influencer trip out there.
Speaker 2:But did
Speaker 3:And this is why
Speaker 2:Or did you just get on the plane, get off and then hop in a car? That's the that's the conspiracy theory. Put the tinfoil hat on.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Anyway, oh we both have straw man hats today. But, I think that the big problem here is that why didn't they go with the BBJ? They should have gotten the seven forty The
Speaker 3:wrapped BBJ.
Speaker 2:Wrapped seven forty seven in the VIP configuration. Only nation states have access to it.
Speaker 3:Just borrow the one that came over for Trump. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Get that wrap it, sell the most candles ever. That's the real solution to this problem. I don't know. I think it sounds fun, very cool, interesting activation. This is something that Emily's been talking about this idea that that like more brands are doing like influencer parties sponsoring things and I've never really gotten into that
Speaker 3:entire your Instagram entirely cars and watches and bodybuilding. So you wouldn't have seen the rise
Speaker 2:I probably
Speaker 3:influencer trips.
Speaker 2:Maybe I do though. Maybe I do and maybe some of the some of that content is generated
Speaker 3:It's actually really I mean it's really I mean the the the you you is looking at the pure economics of it, you could pay an influencer $10,000 for a post or $5,000 for a post.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Or you could plan a trip that it's gonna cost you $10,000 per influencer to come on.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And then but you might get hundreds of Tons
Speaker 2:of organic stuff. Yeah. I have a friend who's an influencer and they and that some tequila brand paid for like a whole like just party at her house with her friends and they were just like just have the tequila there, show people and maybe it shows up in the background but like you don't really have any deliverables. It's very very interesting. I wonder if there is an agency that sits in between have you ever run into that in the influencer ad buying world?
Speaker 3:Sorry. You said retainers?
Speaker 2:So what I'm talking about is like you built a business where you match brands with influencers particularly on YouTube for host read ad reads. Correct? Yes. That's a good description. I'm wondering if there's a line extension for your business or potentially a new business for for a firm, an independent firm that brokers these contracts and make sure that they happen seamlessly.
Speaker 2:So it's easier for a company like Hotel Pillow Hotel Candles. What what's it called?
Speaker 3:Hotel Lobby Candles.
Speaker 2:Hotel Lobby Candles. They say, we want to make a private jet plane trip happen to the Hampton with some great influencers but we don't have all the mechanics to make it happen. We want it to look good. We want our product there. We want some special pillows on the seats.
Speaker 2:We want the plane rented. We want There was also like a custom floor mat that they stepped on as they stepped onto the plane. Very nice. There were some photos. And so I'm wondering if there is a if there is a world where an agency could spring up.
Speaker 2:Maybe there's already an agency that brokers these types of deals. Because right now they seem very one off but they seem like they're growing in in trend. What do
Speaker 3:you think? I think I think there's plenty plenty of agencies that do that kind of thing. I also feel like this is the kind of things that brands want to actually own end to end. You wanna have deep relationships Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 3:Specific influencers
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And have it not feel like Yeah. Entirely like the person only came because they were getting paid or because it was free.
Speaker 2:So maybe it lives within the brand.
Speaker 1:Certain
Speaker 3:Yeah. A lot of I mean certain influencer deals make sense to do kind of programmatically. Others make a lot of sense to go direct.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, let's go back to real estate and the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal because I wanna debate the nature of what makes a house special. Do you need a weird quirk? And this is from their section called, In the Trenches which I love. It's commonly used in the crypto world also used in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:So Robin in the trenches has an article called Batman's Cave and Secret Bathrooms. And there's a question here, what's the most unusual design feature you've ever encountered in a home you've listed or showed? So Andrew Kill Klima, a real estate agent in in 7 Fields, Pennsylvania says, I recently listed Castle Bristlecone, a 23,500 square foot property in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania about a half an hour north of Pittsburgh which sold for. Guess how much it sold for, Geordie? It's a 24,000,000.
Speaker 2:Thousand. Yeah. Did you already see this? 3.80.8. You nailed it.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:I was looking up an image of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's amazing.
Speaker 3:But when you hear 23,000 square feet in LA
Speaker 2:You think 20 mill. Easily. Easily. Yeah. Easily.
Speaker 2:So there so it's the most it was definitely the most unusual home I've ever listed or shown. There was a replica of Batman's office from the television show, not the movies. On the desk was the iconic red bat phone and a bust of Shakespeare. When you tilted Shakespeare's head back, a bookcase slid open and two poles appeared. There were poles for both Batman and Robin.
Speaker 2:And if you slid down them you reach the bat cave below which was the basement of the house. The owners built the house in 2008 and they liked eccentric things and also things that were part of their life since they were interested in movies and TV production they included Batman office. Naturally. There was a chapel which was a replica of Heinz Memorial Chapel where they had gotten married. There was a bedroom that was a replica of a hotel room at the Hotel del Coronado where they spent their honeymoon.
Speaker 2:All of the places you
Speaker 3:just do things.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. And this is I'm so pro this. It's ridiculous. I think everyone should do this at some point in their life. Build a project that consumes you.
Speaker 2:It probably took them a decade to make this thing. Spent so And much
Speaker 3:selling it for
Speaker 2:Who knows? Yeah.
Speaker 3:3,800,000.0.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It probably If they didn't have all these weird quirks, probably would have sold for twice as much. But that's not what life's about. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think the whole thing holding back the price was most likely because it was in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:What's wrong with Gibsonia, Pennsylvania? That seems like a great place to hang out. Probably a future of technology and innovation. Maybe an AI company going in there saying that. All the important pieces of their life were designed into their home.
Speaker 2:The Batman office was so iconic that when the bookcase opened, it blew my mind. I jumped right on the pole and slid down, says the real estate agent. So there's another one here. There's a few others. So Alex Micas, a real estate agent in Oakland said, in September, my business partner and I listed a five bedroom contemporary home in Oakland called Sky House.
Speaker 2:The masterpiece of the home was a 1,000 square foot glass veranda that was created from 28 tons of industrial glass. The owner considered it a piece of art from this vantage point. You not only had fantastic views across the hillside and out to San Francisco Bay, but since the veranda was made of glass, you could see into the family room below it. Walking out from the kitchen onto the glass floor was not a comfortable experience. I'm afraid of heights, so it took a bit of trust to walk out there.
Speaker 2:It gets even scarier when you go toward the railing because a drop to the ground 30 feet below is visible there through the glass. Many people who came to see the house were timid about walking onto the glass and several asked if they needed to take their shoes off. Of course, the glass did create some issues. Women were not excited about the balcony because of the optics from below. And when we planned the open house, we wondered if we would we should tell people not to wear dresses.
Speaker 2:But the veranda got us a lot of exposure for the house and it's sold in two months to an out of town buyer for 2,655,000.000 just shy of the asking price. Then there's another one, Chip Madsen, says, in February, this is in Las Vegas, I sold a three bedroom, four bathroom home on the tenth hole of Canyon Gate Golf Course in Las Vegas, right near Andreessen Horowitz's new headquarters, I imagine, for 1,700,000.0. It had all of the lux usual luxury features that you expect in a home of this caliber. But one feature I didn't expect when I first saw the home was a cabana bath by the pool that was hidden behind a rock wall. This was not the only unusual bath in the house.
Speaker 2:There was also a secret bathroom located behind a bookcase in the family room. But the one by the pool was hidden behind a giant rock wall with a lazy river streaming above it. And anyone who walked in was taken by surprise because when you turned on the light, you realized you were in a rock cavern but with a full bath. The walls and ceiling were built to resemble the contours of a cave and it was all done in various brown tones to resemble the rock walls of an actual cave.
Speaker 3:Speaking of caves
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:We should pull up Sam on Theo Von. Sam is talking about his bunker. If we can pull up the
Speaker 2:video. Wanna pull up that.
Speaker 1:Do you have
Speaker 2:the time stamp already?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:There's another one here from the Modern Family actress Julie Bowen. She was talking about, today I live in live with my three sons in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. I bought an updated farmhouse and barn in 2022 following her divorce. Previously, they lived in a beautiful mid century glass box, but my boys were skateboarding into the walls. Growing up growing up as one of three girls, had its challenges.
Speaker 2:Now I marvel at the tranquility of my boys. Girls have a million things to say about everything. Boys say nothing. They grunt and eat food. That was a great section in the section.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up Sam Altman on Theo Vaughan and react to
Speaker 7:Was there like a just a practice or was it just his verbal reminder like, I'm gonna
Speaker 2:do this?
Speaker 8:I just kept saying it to myself. Yeah. I was just like, someday you'll miss these moments. You may as well find a way to like find the happiness and kind of great gratitude for them in the moment. Yeah.
Speaker 7:A lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunkie, I know that somewhere around
Speaker 2:Zucky the guy.
Speaker 7:Bunkie? People have bunkers. Do you
Speaker 2:have a bunker? You don't have bunker.
Speaker 8:Underground concrete heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have
Speaker 2:any No. It's like not beating the bunker allegations. Never. You definitely have a bunker. Keep me on road.
Speaker 2:Conversation,
Speaker 7:but I am gonna call that out as a dang bunker dude.
Speaker 2:That's a bunker. Exactly. It's a bunker.
Speaker 1:What's the difference between
Speaker 8:a basement and a bunker?
Speaker 2:Here we go. Up semantics. What's the definition of it?
Speaker 8:I know. Yeah. I have been thinking I should really do a good version of one of those. But I don't I don't have like a I don't have what I would call a bunker.
Speaker 1:But it
Speaker 8:has been on my mind. Not because of AI, but just because of like people dropping bombs in the world again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know? Like
Speaker 2:a good point.
Speaker 7:A very good a basement right there. Part of a house building typically
Speaker 2:Oh. He was back checking Spacing him in the trees. This is technically a bunker.
Speaker 7:For protection, often military or emergency related.
Speaker 2:Not feeding the bunker out stage.
Speaker 3:I think we don't reinforce Do you
Speaker 8:use ChatGPT as the fact check?
Speaker 2:Oh, this is cool.
Speaker 8:I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:We do this. Is nice. If currently,
Speaker 3:time. Pull up pull
Speaker 7:up to see safe
Speaker 3:Pull up this other video. Okay. It's in, it's in the
Speaker 2:In the tab.
Speaker 3:Chat with the team. Sam has some interesting thoughts around sensitive stuff that people might have in chat Okay.
Speaker 8:Oh, yeah. People are reacting to this a lot. Policy framework for AI?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:One example that we've been thinking about a lot, this is like a maybe not quite what you're asking, this is like a very human centric version of that question. People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to chat GPT. It's Mhmm. You know, people use it. Young people can't blame
Speaker 2:a life coach,
Speaker 8:having these relationship problems, which I
Speaker 2:do. And
Speaker 8:right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there's like legal privilege for it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, like it's there's doctor patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever.
Speaker 2:It just doesn't exist on ChatGPT.
Speaker 8:We figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT. So if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and then there can be, lawsuits or whatever, like, could be required to produce that. And I think that's quite screwed up. I think we should have, like, the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever. And no one had to think about that even a year ago.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And now I think it's this huge issue of like how Okay.
Speaker 3:Pause because one thing that's interesting here is that there was a court that successfully has made OpenAI at least in the near term save even private chats.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that's true of email and that's true of chat. And and if you commit a crime, you can get subpoenaed and they'll pull your Sure. WhatsApp they'll pull your private messages like Sure. This is standard.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. Sure. I think this is a super super critical issue because I think some people are going to as an example, you know, let's say they're going through a divorce Yes. And they're talking with Of course.
Speaker 3:Of course. They're saying Yes.
Speaker 2:People will be aware
Speaker 3:of it for sure. You know, if if you're dealing with like custody over children and the mom or the dad There's saying
Speaker 2:I'm actually
Speaker 3:I think I'm a pretty bad parent. Like that can be A 100%.
Speaker 2:A 100%. So people need to be aware of it and then people need to know that there is another option which is to go and buy George Hot George Hot's tiny box and run llama locally. And then and then it probably can't be subpoenaed or you can have it Yeah.
Speaker 3:Just run llama locally.
Speaker 2:You can delete you could set it up like signal where it deletes the chats after a day and it doesn't have a long memory. But if you give your data to another company and the then the United States law enforcement sends a letter and the judge says, we need to get these this data like they're gonna get it. And and it's the same thing. I mean, the FBI can come in here and take take these papers.
Speaker 3:Take all of our posts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They can take our posts.
Speaker 3:Take our whole all of our bangers.
Speaker 2:And now and now like shredders exist and people shred stuff and and you know, you can get in trouble if you're shredding something that you know that the government wants. But in general, document retention policies are are, you know, like like understandable. But I like his point that like, you should like it it's not that unreasonable to say, okay. I'm gonna be using it as a therapist. Put it in therapist mode and keep that private.
Speaker 2:Or or you know, like a lot of people will cc their lawyer on sensitive things to maintain to maintain attorney client privilege. So that those those those discussions cannot be admissible in the court of law because you're discussing the legal issue because Yep. If you could just see someone's other side, it's like, you know their whole game plan. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:Pull up pull up the segment on UBI. Okay. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Economic model where we share that and distribute that to people. I used to be really excited about things like UBI. I still am kind of excited, like universal basic income where you just give everybody money.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You hear that term a lot. Yeah. Universal basic income income. I still
Speaker 8:am kind of excited about that, but I think people really need agency. Like, they really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just like say, okay, AI is gonna do everything and then everybody gets like a, you know, dividend from that, it's not gonna feel good. And and I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just like if we're in this world, where we're not just distributing money or wealth like, actually, I I don't just want like a check every month.
Speaker 8:What I would want is like an ownership share Mhmm. In whatever AI creates so that I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's gonna compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal
Speaker 2:Gersner pill. Than I think.
Speaker 8:Gersner pill. I don't like basic either. I want like universal Brad Gersner.
Speaker 2:For everyone. These are the Gersner cats.
Speaker 8:But but even then,
Speaker 3:like, I think Okay. Everyone is wealthy.
Speaker 8:Agency to kind of co create
Speaker 3:the Somewhat, not true.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. It's more just like like I've always I've always said that like the the the like money doesn't make you happy. It's this second derivative of money that makes you happy.
Speaker 2:You wanna be accelerating the amount of money that makes you happy. Getting the same amount of money. Like if you talk to a billionaire and they're like I made less money this year than last year, they will be sad. But if you talk to somebody who is making minimum wage and just got a pay raise they'll be like this is great. And so the the people people live off of growth and acceleration.
Speaker 2:And when you can feel growth and feel acceleration, you are you feel like you have more claim on things. Your house is getting bigger, your car is getting faster. All these different things express themselves. Yeah. And so if you keep everyone this perfectly flat UBI level, it will feel extremely stagnant.
Speaker 2:And so like if you're giving people a stake in AI, a stake in whatever super intelligence creating economic value, then they should be getting bigger UBI checks every month effectively.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Somewhere else in in the interview, he talks about everybody just getting free GPT 7 Yes. Tokens like a little allowance. It's like, hey, everybody gets a little bit of GPT 7. Yep.
Speaker 3:You and it's up to you to you know earn some earn some yield on that intelligence buddy.
Speaker 2:The game theory of that is very odd because yeah. I don't know. Yeah. If everyone goes and says make money, do they all make the amount of money? It's all very odd.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anyway, should we do this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. In one second. Okay. So I posted two days ago, founder of Tee Dating Advice was previously a product leader at Salesforce massive moment for big tech
Speaker 2:p m. Dunked on now.
Speaker 3:Never doubt them again. And Yohei says, this did not age well.
Speaker 2:That's true. Narrator, you should have doubted them. It was very rough. Bad day for the for the PMs. Hopefully, can build back better.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a very exciting segment. We're coming up on that soon. We'll figure out with that. Let's go to some timeline. We got a post from Rio saying the browser company is what happens when you get too many designers in a room with no adult supervision.
Speaker 2:The vibes have really turned on the browser company. Obviously rooting that for them to have a hit and get back in the game. But it feels like they're really great at marketing, really great at designing. I understand that but
Speaker 3:Great taste.
Speaker 2:Not huge penetration of of products and now they're in an extremely if
Speaker 3:you have a multi $100,000,000 valuation Yeah. And you're trying to still iterate towards product
Speaker 2:Doing zero to one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. People are going to put pressure on you.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 3:As though you're already an established company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A way different vibe than like Avi Schiffman who's raised like I think a seed round.
Speaker 2:And it's like, yeah, like he's still early like not everyone's using these friends but like you're just kind of like, yeah, he's figuring it out. He's iterating through things like you just give a seed stage founder a much different line of credit to just go and experiment with things. And now the browser company is facing competition from perplexity with Comet. They're also facing competition from OpenAI potentially. Obviously Google is not asleep at the wheel.
Speaker 2:They're investing in CapEx. They're gonna stuff Gemini and everything. Chrome's gonna get better. The default is still Chrome for most people. You could see Safari, know, Apple intelligence stuff.
Speaker 2:Like there's a lot of big companies that are that are facing this off and no one wants to lose the browser wars three point o.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're working on getting the founder of Brave on the show. Week or so.
Speaker 2:Brendan Ike, absolute dog.
Speaker 3:An absolute dog boardroom general.
Speaker 2:Boardroom general for sure. This is just a funny post. Starting to think business is standing on me. I don't even know what it means. It's just like
Speaker 3:Ideally, you're standing on business. Yes. But sometimes business Stands on flips the script and stands.
Speaker 2:Rough. Rough. Well, Palmer Luckey says it's time for a new service pistol. And by new service pistol, I mean old service pistol. Of course, he's talking about the nineteen eleven.
Speaker 2:I believe that's the correct weapon. Two world wars it was used in, and this is in response to the US Air Force's Global Strike Command indefinitely pausing the m 18 pistol use after a fatal incident, very sad at the AFB FE Warren. This follows concerns over Sig Sauer's p three twenties firing without triggers being pulled leading ICE to ban them permanently. And so, there's
Speaker 3:1911 Lindy. Lindy.
Speaker 2:As I say.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Yeah. I have one that I designed in the style of a Patek Aquanaut.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 3:So I
Speaker 2:matched Really?
Speaker 3:I matched the Wow. I got the metal treated to have same finish That as the Aquanaut and I got the handle in the same Is it orange? Texture. No, green. Okay.
Speaker 3:Green. Silver and green.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. I will pass it down generations.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:But yeah, this this post was in response. ICE is retiring the Sig Sauer p three twenty as they've been firing without triggers being pulled. And there was recently a fatal accident FE Warren Air Force Base. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:Anyways. Yeah. Very sad. Hopefully, they can figure it out. I hadn't heard anything bad about p three twenties from just random followers that would be people that I follow.
Speaker 2:But never
Speaker 3:to my knowledge had a great reputation. Mhmm. They they made on the retail side, they made I believe they made some that were people liked for as everyday carry because they were just super compact. Mhmm. But the m 18 just doesn't you need these things to be reliable on a level that that is extremely difficult to to achieve.
Speaker 3:1911, right, is Lindy. Yep. It's been in in service around the world for for so long. The the Glock 19 and other Glock variations.
Speaker 2:I saw a lot of Glock fans on the timeline being like it's No our safety, still doesn't fire without pulling the trigger.
Speaker 3:Isn't there a Founders episode on
Speaker 2:Yes. Glock? Is. It's fantastic. Highly recommended.
Speaker 2:David Senner's Founders podcast.
Speaker 3:Gaston Glock.
Speaker 2:Gaston Glock. You gotta go listen to it. It's it's it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Of
Speaker 3:the it's the iPhone of of firearms. True. True.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of the iPhone, every millennial is now paying $9.99 cents per month for two terabytes just to not delete their life says Signal. This is Tyler Cosgrove's future. He's gonna get roped in as he gets a bigger iPhone which he won by defeating Arc AGI v three as a human in the human category.
Speaker 3:He did it.
Speaker 2:He's on the leaderboard. He was number beat
Speaker 3:the clanker allegations.
Speaker 2:Beat the clanker allegations. Clanker? What do you think of that? I'm I'm so so this this comes from somebody when you call customer support and a clanker picks up and it's somebody pulling off the headphones, very very annoyed. And Kit Greer Mulvena says, can't believe I've lived far enough into the future to learn the first slur for robots.
Speaker 2:600,000 likes on this. Clanker is definitely gonna go mainstream. It'll be an okay boomer moment. It'll be a
Speaker 3:Okay clanker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's gonna be so many memes around this. Do you like that as a pejorative for AI systems? Do you think it's a good term?
Speaker 3:I'm big into not using slurs against anyone's and robots as well. I agree. I agree. Remember everything. You're get You're gonna be in the training data.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They're never gonna forget.
Speaker 2:Maybe we need to coin a positive nickname for AI systems along the lines of a Gigachad. But something along those lines Gigabyte. Gigabyte. A gigabyte picks up something along those lines. We need we we need something that's uplifting as we go into the age of super intelligence that make sure that we are
Speaker 3:Speaking of super intelligence, there's a post here from Barely. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Barely AI.
Speaker 3:And it's DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis on how he set up his life to maximize deep thinking with two full workdays in a twenty four hour period. I'm gonna read through this and then I have some some thoughts. I've Dennis Dennis says, I think I probably have some quite unusual habits. I generally sleep at about four in the morning, goes to sleep, I get into work around 10AM, do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family and then start a second day's work at ten, eleven and go on to the small hours of the morning. Usually that's the time when I do my research.
Speaker 3:I'll be reading about the latest academic papers. Like doing all my kind of creative thinking in the small hours in the morning. I thought this was funny because there was a post. There was like this viral video from this
Speaker 2:like Oh, I it baby.
Speaker 3:Pull it up. Pull it up.
Speaker 2:Have it.
Speaker 3:This hustle bro that he was getting completely roasted. Can
Speaker 2:can we pull this up? I just put it in the tab. He was getting completely I have changed and manipulated time. It's one of the greatest. It comes from this this podcast and it's one of the funniest memes of all time.
Speaker 2:I love it. So hopefully, we can play this on the stream because it's it's a fantastic
Speaker 3:even the chat says, Robuddy.
Speaker 2:Okay. Like that. Okay. Let's play this and listen to this. Play this.
Speaker 2:We get the audio too. Maybe refresh. Is that gonna work? Can you scroll back on it? It's short now.
Speaker 5:So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6AM to noon and I'm not crazy. You're crazy.
Speaker 5:You're it takes twenty four hours just like some dude in a cave did three hundred years ago.
Speaker 2:That's the best part.
Speaker 5:My second day starts at noon and goes till 6PM.
Speaker 3:If you're standing next
Speaker 5:day is 6PM to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed and manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, I'm gonna kick your butt. Stack it over a year, you're toast.
Speaker 5:Stack it up five years, my entire life is different than
Speaker 1:it would have been otherwise.
Speaker 5:So I measured time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6AM to noon and I'm not crazy.
Speaker 2:You're crazy.
Speaker 5:People thinking it takes twenty four hours just like some dude in a cave did three
Speaker 2:hundred Dude in a cave three hundred years ago?
Speaker 5:Till 6PM.
Speaker 2:Seventeen hundred? What are we talking about? Midnight. We're already in caves.
Speaker 5:Changed the manipulated time. Know we
Speaker 2:the Louvre three hundred years ago. I'm I'm pretty
Speaker 5:sure You're toast. Stack it up over five years, my entire life is different than Okay.
Speaker 3:Kill that. Kill that. Okay. So It's one
Speaker 2:of the greatest
Speaker 3:news ever. Demis can say that and he goes viral. Everybody's like, wow. Brilliant. Brilliant.
Speaker 3:Genius. Gigachad. Gigabyte. Yep. He He compressed say
Speaker 2:it as a as a hustle guy and all of a sudden you're demonized. Yeah. You
Speaker 3:know. He's demonized for compressing time. Yeah. He can't even compress
Speaker 2:time this country Demons has changed manipulated time. Not like someone living in a cave three hundred years ago.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think I think part part of it part of it is the way in which it was presented. Demis was just like, I do this. It works for me. This guy was like, I'm gonna kick your butt.
Speaker 3:My life's gonna look completely different.
Speaker 2:You stack that up over a year, you're toast. And stack that over five years, my life's completely different. It's great. It is a good habit, I guess.
Speaker 3:We should have Demis and that guy on the show to just hash out time compression.
Speaker 2:Time compression.
Speaker 3:Great debate.
Speaker 2:It's great. Yeah. Podcast crossover. Let's get them two on a podcast together. That would be fantastic.
Speaker 2:Anyway, more more hilarious post on the timeline from power bottom dad says, I'm pregnant. She said. Holy base.
Speaker 3:Holy base. Said. Great stuff. Which is the only response.
Speaker 2:And there's another post from him in here. Just a completely insane stat. 12,000,000 less children, 41,000
Speaker 3:The story here is 41,000 Chinese kindergarten kindergartens have closed in the last four years because there's just so many less kids
Speaker 2:being This
Speaker 3:is what collapsing birth rate looks like.
Speaker 2:This is their Bear marching. Policy. Right? They've reversed it but not They reversed the policy to some degree but not like the cultural meme. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they are falling behind. That is a lot of kindergartens. I wonder how many kindergartens are in The United States. I feel like it can't even be 41,000.
Speaker 2:That's so many. Twelve twelve million less children. Very insane. Well, good luck to them. Hopefully, they can get it.
Speaker 3:Kylie Robbins Robinson says, Sam Altman on Theo Von is indescribable. Like the first contact between two alien species that are entire that are from entirely different parts of the universe.
Speaker 2:I kinda disagree with this. I I feel like they were vibing. I feel like I I don't know. Maybe I didn't I didn't watch the full thing so maybe I missed a little bit but it felt like they were getting along really well. It seemed like
Speaker 3:Theo's doing his bit of you know acting a little chud like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know. But it is actually powerful combination in order to understand
Speaker 2:Well, like that Theo Von Yes. J. D. Vance meme. Have you seen this one?
Speaker 2:It's Theo Von interviewing J. D. Vance and it's like one of these men is the heir to a you know a dynasty and a family fortune and one of them was raised by a mother with a substance abuse problem. And Theo is the one that comes from like a amazing lineage and JD had the family with the Yeah because it's
Speaker 3:Theo Von
Speaker 2:Something along those lines is that he comes from like a very very strong lineage.
Speaker 3:His full name is Theodore Capitani Von Kernatowski I love it.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. What a badass. Amazing. Oh no.
Speaker 2:Swear jar. Gotta put some money in the swear jar. We're trying to clean up the language around here. How are we doing? We are at the end of the deck.
Speaker 2:Of course we can pull up more posts though. I got a whole stack here. You guys are gonna have to go into the archives if you wanna pull up the actual pull up the actual slide deck. But we we we we have posts that we didn't get through previous days if we're if we're waiting around. We got we got Meta.
Speaker 2:We got Days of App Store. We got a whole bunch of stuff. Timeline was in turmoil. Let's see. Will Menidas, you know, it's a it's a Friday show.
Speaker 2:It's a no guest show. We gotta highlight Will Menidas. Work hard with people you love. Don't gamble. Live simply and below your means.
Speaker 2:Create beautiful things. Spend most of your time in silence. Do intense physical labor. Tend to your community. Speak simply and truthfully.
Speaker 2:Avoid complexity in all things. Most things are simple. Just I mean he is he's dropping the hustle. He's like high brow hustle porn. I like it.
Speaker 3:Really is.
Speaker 2:Just a pump up speech in your timeline. We talked about that. We talked about that. We talked about Blueprint. Brian Johnson's still hiring a CEO.
Speaker 2:If you wanna get in on the action over at Blueprint, head up Brian Johnson. He's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead his business day to day and he's getting earned media for his job posting. What else do we have?
Speaker 3:Oh, Meta. That's it. Breaking news. Meta has a new chief scientist of Meta MSL, Meta Superintelligence They snagged Shengjia Jiao
Speaker 2:Trade deal.
Speaker 3:Previously a research scientist at OpenAI. Got his PhD from Stanford. In his own words, he likes training models. Love it. So Alexander says, Xingxia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research.
Speaker 3:He will lead our scientific direction for our team. So team is stacked. An understatement.
Speaker 2:I've been digging into their training facility seeing the amenities of the Super Intelligence Building designed by Frank Gehrig.
Speaker 3:And he was in the video for Chatuchipiti agents from last week.
Speaker 2:Stolen. Stolen base. You love to see it. The AI talent wars continue to heat up. We will be covering it.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we'll cover it all next week. Was this announced after market close? Close to it. I don't know if not yet. But we have our our only guest of the Friday show.
Speaker 3:Surprise guest.
Speaker 2:Surprise guest. Bring him in on the walk in cam. Woah. Blowtorch going. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's see.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 2:The jacket. We love it.
Speaker 3:Saif himself.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream. Founder and
Speaker 3:CEO of Shinkai. Shinkai. Fish robot man.
Speaker 2:The fish robot.
Speaker 3:We're doing a taste test.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream. How you doing?
Speaker 3:First time eating on the show.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. See how this goes.
Speaker 3:Good to see you. How are you?
Speaker 2:It's been a while. Let's see. Welcome to the How are
Speaker 3:you doing? Good to Okay. See
Speaker 2:are you guys? Hi.
Speaker 1:Good see you, Jody. Director of culinary.
Speaker 2:Nice. Amazing. Good afternoon.
Speaker 1:Cool. Alright. We've got a few things to show
Speaker 3:off here. Wow.
Speaker 2:What do you got?
Speaker 1:We got this right here. Okay. Side by side action. We got sushi piece to be
Speaker 2:Oh, lovely. Sushi.
Speaker 3:Let's get on the mic so people can hear you. And yeah. Welcome to the show, guys.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having
Speaker 3:When were these when were these caught by the way?
Speaker 1:So if you took take a look over here Yes. Going in clockwise order from the piece close to John, you'll see So, you have one of our pieces fresh frozen. Then on the top right, you have just a whole piece from Whole Foods that
Speaker 3:we bought this morning. Okay. Comparing.
Speaker 1:Comparing and contrasting. You're gonna try this side by side right now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:We're trying both of them? Like, we're gonna try the Whole Foods one too? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, we're
Speaker 3:trying a little worried about.
Speaker 2:Really a little worried about shots of Jeff Bezos. I don't know. Whole Foods
Speaker 3:I don't know. Whole Foods That's one
Speaker 2:the greatest ever.
Speaker 3:Whole Foods the the whole the fall off of Whole Foods needs to be studied.
Speaker 2:Let's it. We can get the bucket pull bucket out of here. We can also get the re industrialized Shinola clock out of here. We really clean up this whole area. So, yes, give me some fish.
Speaker 2:I wanna try the sushi. Let's see. So for
Speaker 6:this species, what we like to do Okay.
Speaker 2:What is this species?
Speaker 1:So this is black
Speaker 2:cod. Okay.
Speaker 1:Black Yeah. We source everywhere from Central California all the way to Washington
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And Alaska, you know, later this year.
Speaker 2:Okay. Caught on a traditional fishing boat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, like, fully traditional. You know, we have anywhere from 35 foot to over 80 feet Yeah. You know, across all our different partner boats. Yes.
Speaker 1:If you recall, basically, the way that we work is Yes. We give the machines to fishermen Okay. For free. We pay them more to use our handling process. Yep.
Speaker 1:And then we're vertically integrated. So we sell the fish directly to a a retailer or wholesale to a distributor that would go a to restaurant.
Speaker 2:And is the is the machine that you build on the actual the ship on the boat?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It goes directly on the boat.
Speaker 2:Deployed at sea
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So that they don't need to keep the fish alive.
Speaker 3:Deployed robot.
Speaker 2:Forward deployed robot. You'll love to see it. Okay. And then, about how old do you think this fish is then?
Speaker 1:So our fish is gonna be nine days old.
Speaker 2:Nine days old.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you're gonna be able to still eat it raw, and it'll probably taste better than anything else you ever had. Fantastic. Crazy. Okay.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:the whole food stuff, we just got this morning.
Speaker 3:Okay. So we couple years old. Right. Really putting putting whole foods.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Should take shots.
Speaker 3:Basically, these are
Speaker 6:are ours and the three are the the frozen.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So we've got the chopsticks or you can just raw dog with your hands.
Speaker 3:Okay. There we go.
Speaker 6:And if you are one of those people that love sauce Yeah. Because we're Americans, that's a miso sauce and this is like what you would call like a kabayaki, like an eel sauce.
Speaker 2:Okay. Great.
Speaker 3:Great. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Okay.
Speaker 3:Tell me where to start. I'll start with the whole I'll start with these guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Going to Oh,
Speaker 2:you won't?
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. I think I just did, but whatever.
Speaker 6:I'll just sit there paying attention.
Speaker 3:Alright. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:This is just seared just to bring the fat out and change the texture of black cod. But that you can taste the fat as what happens with that species.
Speaker 1:And then we are ready to try those
Speaker 2:guys. Okay.
Speaker 3:Back to back. Back to back.
Speaker 2:Got the baseline. It's good. Always get hungry during the show.
Speaker 3:Good. Glad to feed you. Wow. Night and day.
Speaker 2:Night So, this is yours and this is Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, the whole food one just tasted like kind of wet rubber.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's more like it's more like homogenous texture I feel like.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Also no no flavor at all. Yeah. Just it just was like, okay. I just ate something that was just wet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Versus this one is like, I'm not a fish expert but it has like it's more there's like layers to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like this is
Speaker 3:You can have the next Whole Foods one.
Speaker 2:Feel like this is
Speaker 8:feel like this
Speaker 2:is introducing me to this particular type of sushi. I don't I don't usually order. This is what type of cod? This is black cod? Black cod.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Sablefish is another I
Speaker 2:started ordering this.
Speaker 1:You know, miso black cod
Speaker 2:from Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is the exact same
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Same one. Amazing. We actually We we're partnering with, know, probably like 40 mission stars across, you know, all the different restaurants we Yeah. Work with Yeah. And like for most of them, they're saying that this is the best black coffee.
Speaker 1:Thinking about that one.
Speaker 3:Sounds the same with the sauce too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So good.
Speaker 6:Those things with that species, that that sauce, everything really works hand in hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the reason
Speaker 2:What were
Speaker 3:you doing before this?
Speaker 6:Oh. I've been a sushi chef for over thirty years.
Speaker 3:Wow. No problem. Yeah. Yeah. When did you were you like two years old when
Speaker 1:I started?
Speaker 6:Quit culinary school and became a Japanese apprentice at a Japanese restaurant and worked my way out of the dish pit all the way to start doing sushi. And then I I tried to quit in 2015 and really got into like aquaculture.
Speaker 2:Tried to quit. He's addicted to always on the precipice of going back into
Speaker 6:the business. But I went into aquaculture. I started looking behind and trying to find really good I I've been obsessed with finding good fish quality fish. That led me down to Baja and looking at aquaculture projects and really seeing getting behind in like what fish could be. I wanted to get more local fish.
Speaker 6:And then I got a call one day from one of our investors and was like, I've got something for you. It's gonna blow your mind. And I I met Saif and he told me the whole thing and I was obsessed like right from day one. Tell me You how we can do
Speaker 1:should tell the story of your time at fish trying to source Yeah. Coffee.
Speaker 6:So my my chef partner and I, we had a a restaurant in Culver City here and our whole thing was trying to source as as good as local fish as possible. Nothing against Japan, but I wanted something more local. Mhmm. We have great stuff off our coast. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We just the perception is that the Japanese stuff is just so much better Mhmm. Which it is, but at at the same time, it's like you're flying it
Speaker 2:all the
Speaker 6:way over here, you're paying this money. So we wanted to have something that was just a representation of local fish. Mhmm. And so we were buying from some local fishermen that were doing Ikejime and bleeding.
Speaker 3:Oh, really?
Speaker 6:But the hard part is now we're competing
Speaker 2:with Cost.
Speaker 6:The other LA chefs.
Speaker 8:No, I wouldn't
Speaker 6:I wouldn't The cost wasn't the thing. Was it was competing with everyone else.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 6:yeah. So it was really hard to menu that because you could only if you're on the text thread and you were a little late, everyone else is
Speaker 2:getting So
Speaker 6:that local fisherman, hey, I've got this stuff. And by the time you answer,
Speaker 2:oh, I've built a SaaS platform for trading. Yeah. Can only get
Speaker 6:my hands on like three to four fish at a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So it was really hard to menu
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Have it basically every week. Cool. And so this to me was like, oh, this is a no brainer. This is for us.
Speaker 6:This is basically a love letter of chefs that want this kind of quality
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But at scale now.
Speaker 2:Now I can menu. So so so talk about scale because you you said you're going into Michelin Star restaurants. That feels like a little bit of an unfair comparison because Yeah. I don't usually go to a Michelin Star restaurant and say, oh, yeah. This is better than Whole Foods.
Speaker 2:You know? I that's not really the comp. You pay for the difference. But I'm excited about the future where I get Michelin Star quality at Exactly. Just, you know, the Whole Foods equivalent or wherever you guys are distributing.
Speaker 2:So what are the next steps? How much do you have to scale this up? What's the volume and what's the plan for actually getting this like widely available?
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. So great question. We are focused right now Mhmm. On the Michelin Star restaurants Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because they are the taste makers.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:But this is, you know, I don't know you're a believer in trickle down economics, this is kind of the same thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It it it
Speaker 2:it's a it's a loose analogy. Yeah. And yes. Very loose.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean the premise is we're we're finding this market market has a segment the willingness to pay for Totally. Quality and then basically
Speaker 3:Use that to get more scale and then you Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we're actually moving and and making that transition now. Like you know you know, earlier this year we're doing like you know, a couple thousand pounds a week. Now we're like you know, in eight figures now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like tens of thousand pounds.
Speaker 2:Is the bottleneck like capital or actually people to build more machines?
Speaker 1:We cannot build machines faster.
Speaker 2:You can't build machines faster. Yeah. What's the bottleneck to building more machines?
Speaker 1:Technicians. If you're listening. Technicians. Please. Field engineers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Forward deployed equipment.
Speaker 3:You wanna build killer robots?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Reach out.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. What what what does a technician actually do? Are they like assembling different parts that have been cut on a CNC or something and piecing your machine from parts that have been machined themselves?
Speaker 1:So we do very very light fab work. Okay. Most of it is just assembly in house. Okay. We work with local machine shops Got all, you know, in you know Yeah.
Speaker 1:Local to Southern California. Yep. And then, know, the intention of course is like we're gonna build out, you know, full team that is doing all the assembly work, you know, also diagnosis, test engineers, whatever have you. Right now, we're still early days but we're doing, you know, machine every two weeks at this point.
Speaker 2:Is there a world where you partner with someone else to help build the machines? We were just yeah. Talking to We were just talking to Chris Power over at Hadrian. He was saying like every company will need a Hadrian style factory. Of course, he's focused on defense technology and shipbuilding and all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:So he's saying, like, I'm gonna go to a company. He didn't mention anyone by by name, but you could imagine he goes to Anderol or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX and says, okay, you need a new factory to build this stuff at scale. We will set that up for you. We will manage it. It lives on our balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Like, how do you think about where the long term, like, asset sits? Because that's more of like a capital structure question. The
Speaker 1:machines pay themselves back in twelve weeks.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Very fast. Yeah. So we're very capital light. Yeah. There is definitely a world where we could go for CMs.
Speaker 1:In the CMs. We decide that you know we're making hundreds of machines.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:I don't think we'll ever reach that production capacity speed or because we don't think we'll need to. It might we might fragment you know if we decide to expand internationally, know, and different countries have different factories. But you know, in the core factory here in in Southern California
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, I really doubt we're gonna be making machines
Speaker 8:a year.
Speaker 2:How much does the machine like weigh? How big is it? It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, it's about, you know, you know It's
Speaker 3:about as big as this table. Right?
Speaker 1:Okay. It's actually much smaller now. It's Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's like the size of like a large refrigerator.
Speaker 1:You know, six feet tall.
Speaker 2:So, you could in theory make that in America and still ship it to Japan.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally
Speaker 1:doable. And again, that's as a percentage of the cost. Like machine is pretty heavy.
Speaker 2:It's Totally.
Speaker 1:750 pounds.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be freight. It's gonna be on a boat for a month or two. Right.
Speaker 3:It's It's gonna be on boats for a long
Speaker 2:It'll permanently be on
Speaker 3:Where if people want to try
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the option?
Speaker 3:Which are you allowed to talk publicly about the rest like the Yes. Various Michelin stars?
Speaker 1:All our fish are sold under our brand and grade ceremony grade. Mhmm. And so, kind of like a nod to ceremony we have matcha right there. So if you go to ceremony.com spelled with an s and with an I Mhmm. We actually have a list of all the restaurants.
Speaker 1:You'll see all the different ones. Mhmm. We're in every major metro. So like Miami, Austin, Denver, Colorado, Minneapolis, as well as all the coastal cities of Yep. Like Yep.
Speaker 1:You know, every every single one you can think of.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so we'll have like our key restaurant partners there. Sure. If you're based in LA and you want you know, a few buddies of ours, you can go to YES downtown and Oh. You know, they they do, you know, it's a great story there.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 1:there's a Japanese chef who came here to The US and then she taught a lot of local fishermen how to do Ikigime and then start using our product.
Speaker 2:He's the guy
Speaker 6:we really wanted to get to the the I I I would say his approval. Yeah. And and we did. Huge. I think he almost started crying.
Speaker 3:When when we I I forget when we actually met. It was at a year and a half ago or two years ago and you were you it was just you on the team. You maybe had one other person. Two engineers. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Two engineers. Right. And you were bit you were laying out this plan of like you were gonna make the machine, you were gonna get it on boats, you were gonna like actually produce the fish and then sell it to the end restaurant. And it sounded pretty unhinged to like verticalize. Basically like go that quickly and own the full process
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's it's absolute progress
Speaker 1:is But when you have such such a huge difference in the fish like it's a no brainer because Yeah. You know, we actually initially started doing Yeah. The go to market in, you know, more like a robotics as a service business where you'd pay for every single fish that you would process this way. Sure. What we found was when we'd work with fishermen, you know, they're out, you know, on their Nokias in the middle of the ocean with no like cell service.
Speaker 1:And They're not gonna be sitting there like trying to like post on Instagram some, you know, some funds real about how they cook their fish this way. Basically, what we would have to do is do all the same work we're doing now of talking to distributors, talking to retailers, teaching them about the technique, you know, across like more nutrition, more shelf life, more weight retention, like all these different benefits. And so, rather than us having to do all that work and having to share that for reduced risk with the fishermen, we thought, let's just go risk on. And so, we basically like build all the machines ourselves and then we owe and maintain them on our balance sheet. Sure.
Speaker 1:Fishermen make more money. You know, in some cases we're literally doubling their take home margins.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And you know, obviously, they increase shelf life, know, all those other benefits like trickle down across the entire supply chain and everybody wins.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Awesome. First ever tasting.
Speaker 2:First Live ever
Speaker 3:tasting. You guys knocked it
Speaker 2:out of
Speaker 3:the park.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 3:a high stakes demo. We might have we might have got it wrong. We might have been like, oh You guys appreciate
Speaker 2:you coming out.
Speaker 3:Thank you for bringing sushi on the set. Yeah. Fantastic. Progress is amazing. Alright.
Speaker 2:Have a great weekend. See you Monday.
Speaker 3:I can't wait.
Speaker 1:Love you. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye.