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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 TVPN. Did you see that Cluelly was in The Wall Street Journal?
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So and and in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought was kind of interesting. We do some clipping here. We clip on x. We we we create we TikToks.
Speaker 1:We create Instagrams. We create Reels, all sorts of stuff. But The Wall Street Journal's breaking down the trends and all the big money behind those bite sized social media videos. Companies are hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the examples here is, one x, which, we've had on the show as well.
Speaker 1:Clearly, we've also had on the show and nothing. We've also had on the show three for three with the CEOs of the companies that are using clipping to their benefit. So you know those buzzy viral clips you see on social media? There's an army behind them. Kanoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy young clippers who help streamers, podcasts, and startups expand their audiences by making buzzy moments go viral on social media.
Speaker 1:Cunningham edits down clients' long form videos and short clips and then post the shorts on sites like Instagram and TikTok. It is lucrative work. In May, Cunningham quit his finance job and now runs a team of eight clippers. He said the operation earns him 20,000 to 30,000 a month. Not bad.
Speaker 1:Clipping is one of the hottest corners of marketing. Instead of just posting on their own accounts, creators and companies pay clippers like Cunningham to saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite sized videos until they are almost impossible to miss. One technique they use to grab attention on crowded social media platforms, posting provocative or outrageous content. And I think this is one of the issues that people should be aware of if they're going to start clipping is what is the brand line? What is the brand standard?
Speaker 1:I saw a viral clip from a podcast where basically it made it made the host like, the host was joking, but the joke was taken out of context and just made the host look dumb, and that went super viral. But the takeaway for the viewer
Speaker 2:Like, great. You got views. Did you get are those valuable views?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It it it's not just I mean, the like, the the base case for clipping is that it gets no views. The good the good case is that it gets some views, but it doesn't really convert many people because the conversion rates on a million views is, like, a few listeners will actually be like, yeah. I watched a I enjoyed that sixty second TikTok.
Speaker 1:I'm down to listen to an hour of this. That's pretty that's a pretty low conversion rate, but that's fine because you you get the million views. You probably bring some awareness. But the worst thing that you can do is, like, create a brand as, like, the person that gets dunked on or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Certain people
Speaker 2:have productized this. So you've hired this person, Mr. Cunningham, in the journal, saying the only way to be famous in today's internet world is with clips. Think he's running his own operation, but WAP has WAP has productized this. I do think it's a cool way for young people to make their first money online.
Speaker 2:Yep. Like if you're in middle school and you wanna figure out how to make a $100 a day, you can probably do that through clipping.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 2:But I I I wonder how much I do wonder how much the social platforms will like, they see this as a feature or a bug. Right? Because part of the strategy is clearly we'll spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Cluely content. Yep. And they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, just like shotgun approach, seeing they'll put out a 100 videos If a lot of them get under a thousand views and one gets a million, that's that's a win for them.
Speaker 2:Yep. And, yeah, just I don't know how long this will be, like, the meta. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is, like, the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack we were talking to Chris Bass, and Substack will automatically generate clips. There's another company called OpusClip. We've built something internally, Newsmax, that that does some automated clipping. But actually telling a story around a piece of content that's within a larger piece is something that
Speaker 2:clipping is not been achieved internally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require, like, human ingenuity. And we saw this with we talked to Durakesh about this where he has spent a lot of time using Thropic and Gemini and OpenAI to create workflows that will go through the transcript and try and find the best clips that will perform. And he says it it always comes back at a five out of 10. And so he still has a team that does this and is very good and has a whole bunch of, like, hard won lessons about what works at a certain amount of time.
Speaker 1:And we've seen this with our with our content that actually winds up performing. A lot of it like, we we we have to do a lot of experimentation. But once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it, and then we commit that to memory, and our team commits that to memory, and that becomes part of our, like, continual learning that happens. And that just doesn't really happen in when you're when you're automating things with an LLM. So it is it is it's probably like I think it's a good, like, base case to start with, but a lot of this should be done by the platform.
Speaker 1:So I wouldn't be think surprised YouTube does it automatically. Spotify does it automatically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know how much credit he should get, but I do think that Andrew Tate's rise was his business model of paying people to clip his content to sell more courses, which he then would recycle some of the proceeds and more clipping. This was at a period where he was saying, I'm the most Googled man on the Internet. And he would just say that over and over. It would get clipped a lot, and it naturally had this sort of feedback loop.
Speaker 2:People were just, okay, what is this guy saying? I need to pay attention. But that was also hyper optimized for that format because he'd be, like, sitting shirtless in a supercar Yep. Know, smoking a cigar or
Speaker 1:something like that. And and any of these, like, social media hacks, they always have, like, a very narrow window of opportunity. Like, the the the the giving away a it used to just be just renting a sports car or, like, owning a Ferrari would be enough for a million views. Now then it became you had to give it away. And so Doug Jamiro, one of his big series that got really big, the car YouTuber, was he had a Ferrari three sixty Modena.
Speaker 1:And it was, I think, in the 100 something thousand dollar range. He had to get a bunch of debt to pay for it. It was very expensive. And he made a whole bunch of videos about his red Ferrari.
Speaker 2:He levered up his content.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it and it was great. It was great content. It was interesting. And, of course, it was he was more like making fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture, but still the there just weren't that many YouTube videos of, like, a red Ferrari.
Speaker 1:So you click on it, and people found him that way, and he grew. Then it became, like, the mister beast era of, like, I'm gonna give away a Ferrari. Last person to take their hand off the car wins it. And that was a big thing that was even more expensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari, pay the pay the, you know, the the monthly payment for a certain amount of time and then sell it and hope that there's not that much depreciation. Like, the net cost was truly the full price of the Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Yep. But at least you're giving it to someone. It's like a write off probably. There there's something there. The most recent mister beast video involving supercar was him literally shredding a Lamborghini, just destroying it.
Speaker 1:Like Whistlin Diesel has become a huge YouTuber on the back of on the back of just, like, destroying supercars and g wagons and all these crazy cars. Tyler?
Speaker 3:I I think Sean Frank just gave away a Lambo.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:That he post about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's working. That's working.
Speaker 3:So maybe soon he's gonna have to start destroying it. Or
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah. I I I think giving it away. But, yeah, I mean, it's like it's like this this
Speaker 2:That makes sense. That was a Strato.
Speaker 1:It was a Strato. Very special car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very special. No. But but the real the the real pinnacle of this was Whistlin diesel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whistlin diesel took it to the max.
Speaker 2:To the absolute max. Max. Ferrari f eight. Beautiful car.
Speaker 1:He destroyed it?
Speaker 2:Completely destroyed it. Right? And and made a video about it. It's incredibly entertaining to watch Yeah. When they drive a car Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's normally a garage a garage queen and have somebody just just absolutely take it off roading, all the stuff. Fantastic video if you haven't seen
Speaker 1:it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny the I was looking up what what what kind of Ferrari it was and Google's AI overview says, Whistlin Diesel, parentheses Cody Ko, destroyed his Ferrari f eight. And so AGI has not been a
Speaker 1:Add add three hundred days to the singularity time.
Speaker 2:Hundred days.
Speaker 1:You know, three more three hundred more days till AGI. We're we're not getting any closer. Clipping took off during the early days of TikTok when chopped up snippets featuring Internet path personalities like Andrew Tate or mister beast would rack up millions of I swear Jordy reads the articles before we we talk about them on the show.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe sometimes.
Speaker 1:It sparked a new generation. I don't know how you read 400 pages of documents before we before we get on when I put this together ten minutes before we jump on. It sparked a new generation of creators who realized they could pay their way into virality by hiring hoards of clippers, paid per thousand views to flood the Internet with with the creator's content. Anything that can be clipped, a podcast, debate, social media montage, even movies, startups such as Lovable, an app that builds software from plain English prompts, humanoid robot maker, one axe, and consumer electronics company, nothing have hired clippers to multiply their content across the Internet through clips of product demos, podcast appearances, and YouTube streams. You're stupid if you're not if you're making an hour long podcast and only posting it in one channel, said Roy Lee, the 21 year old founder of Cluely, an AI note taking startup, which hires clippers to plaster its promotional content across the Internet.
Speaker 1:The only way you can ensure a viral moment is to post it across thousands of different accounts.
Speaker 2:This is Thousands?
Speaker 1:Thousands of counts is a lot. That's lot. This is also happening in in music. I heard that mean, people when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. But people people are saying, like, when when when Drake drops an album, he'll have the clippers, like, clip all the music and it goes out and it gets a lot of views that way.
Speaker 1:There is something just about, like, it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral. So just, like, spamming everything out kinda gives you the opportunity for lots of, like, you know, happy access.
Speaker 2:Lottery tickets.
Speaker 1:Lottery tickets, basically. But I still think a better strategy for most people will be what Dork Cash and David Senra are doing where you have someone who really understands how to create something beautiful even though it's a new format and people think of sixty second short form as like slop. It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated. It can be it can be thoughtful.
Speaker 1:It can be designed. Totally. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, and they have a number one ranking on g two.
Speaker 2:That's right, folks.
Speaker 1:Cluelly's clipped contents generates around 800,000 views a day on platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, according to Lee. Lovable and Nothing said they were always looking for ways to new reach new customers. Online marketplaces have developed to connect brands with clippers. In the virtual markets, brands post the rate they will pay and freelancers sign up to make clips. Clippers are paid anywhere from 50¢ to $2 per thousand views, motivating them to find the most shareable moments.
Speaker 1:Nathan Resnick, a 31 year old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees businesses in insurance, wedding planning, and real estate service pays Diversify. 50 clippers he finds, online roughly 15,000 a month to create and post short form videos promoting his company's businesses. It's not really that crazy when you consider we we were spending $250,000 a month on Google and Meta to drive traffic to our website. That's a good point. Again, this is like the arb.
Speaker 1:Like Yep. This eventually will get competed down. A lot of this will be taken by platforms. OpusClip or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it.
Speaker 1:You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook, and it will make the clips itself. But but right now, there is a huge huge arbitrage. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Matt One x is One x has generally been sharp here. If you remember, they got their robot on Kaisenot.
Speaker 1:Yep. They had yeah. They they really understand Friend the
Speaker 2:of the show, Dar Sleeper. Yeah. Total sleeper. Oh, yeah. Marketing sleeper.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's great.
Speaker 2:He says, people in the company were like, what the heck is this kid doing? A week later, their little cousins were talking about it at the Thanksgiving table.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Anyways, it's cool. It's cool. I think it's probably, like you said, a moment in time, probably not going to be like a it's it's hard to see it as Yeah. The most enduring strategy that works right now. I think a lot of businesses
Speaker 1:would do. Was an insane, insane arb for Andrew Tate, and then it became sort of commoditized. But we're still very early, and I think that there will be a lot of I mean, it does feel like
Speaker 2:I think the the the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them.
Speaker 1:And that's what Andrew Tate did for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, he No. No. No. No. I'm saying I'm
Speaker 1:saying No. No. Not just on the buying side. Actually, on the content side. Like like, when he would get on mic, he would say crazy things that would go viral.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so he made it very easy. And whereas, like, if you are, like, an enterprise SaaS company and you hold a webinar, like, you could hire a billion clippers and, like, you're probably not gonna rip. Like like and that's why Cluely is, like, both doing stunts.
Speaker 2:Somebody should test it out.
Speaker 1:Test it out. Adio. Let's let's test it out. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native
Speaker 2:script that
Speaker 1:builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.
Speaker 2:Clip this right now.
Speaker 1:Clip this right now. Meta smart glasses with a display is incoming. Codename is Hypernova. Priced $800 down from the expected $1,300. Zuck is cooking for real for real, says Nick.
Speaker 1:Meta so the price is the price is going down. And they're I mean, they're taking a real shot at at the Apple Vision Pro, which of course was was what? 3,004
Speaker 2:And I don't think we can say I don't think we can say much else, but I think we've have we not used this product?
Speaker 1:Well, the so so Orion is a different product. Yeah. Orion is is what was demoed and and has been displayed, and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. But we're but we're not exactly sure what hypernova is. It could be a per I mean, it's listed here in this article as a precursor to full blown augmented reality glasses.
Speaker 1:And so there has been a there's been a third, like, option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart glasses market, there's maybe a few different products. So the Meta Ray Bans and the Meta Oakleys have been successful. Like, people are actually buying those. They're wearing them.
Speaker 1:They're taking pictures with them. They're also using them as an AirPods replacement, wireless headphones. They use them for speaker for music while they're running. Like, they definitely have adoption. It might not be the biggest product of all time yet, but it's definitely working.
Speaker 1:And so they're scaling that up. Then you have the VR headsets, the Quest, the the full virtual reality. There's some pass through, but in general, people think of that as a virtual reality headset. Of course, the first created by Palmer Lucky at Oculus, sold into to Meta and Facebook, and now rebranded as the Quest. Yep.
Speaker 1:The Quest has been selling pretty well, but still probably suffers from churn. We see the chart spike on Christmas where everyone gets a new Quest VR headsets because it's a great gift. They try it out. They download the app. They install it, and then they stop using it for a while.
Speaker 1:I was talking to Tyler about this. We gave him a a Quest three Pro, Quest three Mini, something like that.
Speaker 3:Quest three s Xbox edition.
Speaker 1:Quest three s Xbox edition. He played Call of Duty on it a little bit, played Halo on it. Yeah. For, like, then
Speaker 3:For, two weeks.
Speaker 1:Then Then ultimately churned.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm just not that much of a gamer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you're supposed to be like, it's supposed to be an everything device. You're supposed to be able to watch movies in it. You're supposed to be able to code in It should, in theory, replace your screen setup.
Speaker 2:Supposed to be able to clearly in it.
Speaker 1:But the fact that the the fact that they weren't able to find, like, a killer use case for someone like you means that they're still in that, like, hunting for the killer use case phase. Then there are the full augmented reality glasses where you're passing through the reality through glass. You're seeing the you're seeing the real world. That's what we tried. That's what a lot of influencers have tried.
Speaker 1:Those are very much not
Speaker 2:ready. The challenge is there's what are the technical capabilities of the product and then what are the experiences available for that product. And they both need to they clearly both need to improve
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. In
Speaker 2:order to get to the point where, Tyler, we got to be like pulling the pulling the goggles off and being like, Tyler, it's time to come to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So so so my take, when I had the Apple Vision Pro, it was too heavy. It was really expensive and felt like, oh, I I would I would churn for this eventually, so I returned it. But the one thing that I that I did enjoy was I watched movies in it.
Speaker 1:And I watched all of Citizen Kane in it from start to finish. And Citizen Kane is a great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler?
Speaker 3:I mean, it's it's not that long. It's not that's not like a long movie.
Speaker 1:It is it is a it's a challenging movie. Like, it's not it's not Mission Impossible dead rat It's not even two
Speaker 3:hours long.
Speaker 1:The final reckoning. It's not it's not Top Gun. It's not that it's like you sit down, you're just like, wow. This is so engaging. Like, it is the type of it is the type of movie that if you have modern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like, let me check Twitter.
Speaker 2:Like Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Like like, it is it is it is as close as you can get to, like, cracking open a buck, in my opinion.
Speaker 3:I could give you movies closer to that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Something really something really dense. But but it it it's a slower paced movie. It's something that I mean, it's even it's even in, like, four by three.
Speaker 1:So on a modern TV, it's not a render
Speaker 2:for It's UFC three nineteen. Right?
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more. Exactly like that. So so my but my my takeaway was that, like, like, the the killer app like, the rumor was that the person who worked on the Apple Vision Pro was previously at Dolby and had worked on the Dolby immersive cinema project. And so if you wanted to understand, like, the the viewpoint of the team behind the Vision Pro was that it was a home theater on your face for that you didn't need to buy an extra room for. And I felt like that was what it delivered on very well, except it was too heavy, too hot, and a little bit too expensive.
Speaker 1:But the actual killer use case, I felt like it was there because if you love a movie and you throw it on, like, content is solved. Like, you can watch a great movie and be like, that was a good movie. And you're letting the movie we talked about this with Marc Andreessen where I was like, the iPhone was a good iPhone was a good phone. He was like, no. It wasn't, which is maybe a good take.
Speaker 1:But eventually Yeah.
Speaker 2:Didn't have copy and paste.
Speaker 1:No. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you're like, the Motorola r eight razr v three didn't have copy and paste. Sure.
Speaker 1:But it could make reliable phone calls. And so my take was Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:It's just worth remembering that Yeah. That it had some extreme shortcomings, and and it was frustrating to use in
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it was but it was easy to justify pretty quickly as as a device that replaced another experience. Whereas it's it's much harder. It's like the Apple Watch works for those people because they're like, I want to know the time on my wrist. I'm used to wearing a watch.
Speaker 1:That's easier. It's much harder to be like pendant. Not a lot of people wear pins all the time. It's a harder it's a harder act the activation energy is higher. So I was always saying that that going to making the movie experience really, really strong would be, like, an an obvious but killer app.
Speaker 1:I don't know if people agree, but Mark Gurman's talking about this in context of the Apple Vision Pro. He says Apple Vision Pro is suffering from a lack of immersive video. Apple has slow walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro. The company's AI and smartphone smart home road maps are have have come out. But when you get down to the core of the problem, Apple's vision Apple Vision's pro Apple's Vision Pro headset isn't selling well for two reasons.
Speaker 1:One, it's $3,500 price tag and a lack of sufficiently compelling features. There are other issues like a limited array of custom applications, the device's weight, and a cumbersome setup process, but those are less important. Developers are continuing to release apps, and there are now accessories that make the device feel lighter on your face. I gotta try those. Apple has also dramatically improved its operating system, the latest version of the Vision Pro software, Vision OS 26, now offers widgets and has been well received.
Speaker 1:But none of that matters for Apple if people don't buy the Vision Pro. By all accounts, the device remains an extremely niche project, product. I'd venture to guess Apple has sold well under 1,000,000 units in The US since launching it a year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a priority for Apple on the company's last earnings call.
Speaker 2:See you in of those units have been returned?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. I mean, I would assume if you're quoting sales, you have to not include returns. I wouldn't be surprised if they've still
Speaker 2:I don't know. You can
Speaker 1:count sold. That's very sketchy if they include that.
Speaker 2:Well, no. The but he's he's guessing. I'm just saying I I I just wonder what the return rate is. Because then you return your
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it was probably, like, 50%. They probably sold 2,000,000. They wound like, leaving 1,000,000 out in the market, basically. I mean, they have so many Apple Stores, and it's such a device, and, you know, it's it's such a moment.
Speaker 1:Like, it it took over the timeline. It was the current thing for, like, three days. People were talking about it. A lot a lot of people tested it out. A lot of people kept them.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have the disposable income. But, yeah, 1,000,000 does even seem high.
Speaker 2:Yep. This is interesting. So Gurman says, moreover the headset just doesn't feel like a priority to Apple. On the company's last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook almost seemed surprised when a Wall Street analyst quizzed him about the device and the company's strategy. Thanks for bringing it up, he said before delving.
Speaker 2:Mark Gurman is delving. Interesting. Delving. Before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we really believe in. So Gurman says, in the near term, Apple isn't gonna dramatically improve the Vision Pro.
Speaker 2:The next version coming as soon as this year will mostly just get a faster chip. That's a necessary upgrade. The current m two chip is outdated for such a processor intensive device. But it's not going to change the way that people think about the Vision Pro. The bigger upgrade is coming in 2027 when Apple will release a model that is both cheaper and lighter, he's reported.
Speaker 2:But that's a long time to wait, and there's a risk that the category simply dies out by then. Think I I know a lot of developers that were super excited to capitalize on the release of Vision Pro. They had all this energy and excitement around getting access to the product, starting to build applications for it. And I don't know that any of them are still building for the product, which is a problem. The sort of like chicken chicken and egg problem.
Speaker 1:Apple so he provides a couple examples of, like, how little immersive video Apple has really released. Apple is still featuring a highlight reel shot in immersive video of the NBA All Star Game from 2025. To be clear, the 2020 or from 2024. To be clear, the twenty twenty five All Star Game played a year after the one Apple is showcasing took place six months ago, and there's no immersion immersive vision of on the Vision Pro. Like, you would assume they shouldn't have just said, hey.
Speaker 1:Let's go shoot one immersive video of the all star game. It's like, what is our NBA strategy?
Speaker 2:What's our immersive video schedule?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And what is our strategy to get 1% more content onto this device every single day forever?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You just have a big release every Friday. Yeah. Like, you sold a $3,500 device
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:To a million ish people.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You should probably figure out how to Yep. Deliver them content that makes it valuable.
Speaker 1:If you look at the number of minutes that are being uploaded to YouTube every day, like, that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company, basically. Like, it's just it's just slightly more every single day. Sure. They probably have a few down days. But in general, like social networks, the amount of content on them should be growing every single day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Any sort of media device, I'm sure Netflix is not like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, next year, we're gonna have less content on Netflix. That would be insane. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So apparently, the immersive content shoots are extraordinarily expensive and resource intensive. So
Speaker 1:That is crazy because I I looked into how expensive it is to shoot an immersive video, and I feel like it's actually not that expensive. Like, yes, you need this fancy Blackmagic Cinema Camera that actually just came out with a special lens, but you can just set it up if you can film for forty five minutes on one, like, you know, SSD basically. And and you can just upload that. The problem is is that you can't if you're doing CGI and you're doing editing and you're doing, like, scripting and storytelling and all that, like, the the killer use case needs to be take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere cool, and then allow people to watch that, like, in Vision Pro. And that needs to be it.
Speaker 1:And so this was this was Ben Thompson's
Speaker 2:take feels like there's so much Just put it so much they could do. You could take immersive video behind the scenes for the f one movie Yes. And make that available to people. It's like you can buy
Speaker 1:Is it one?
Speaker 2:Buy this, and watch f one. You can watch behind the scenes with the actors Yep. Producers, directors. There's just a lot that they could do, but I think I think there needs to be something for users to really look forward to if they're gonna in in this device. And right now, it doesn't
Speaker 1:Yeah. The other thing is, like, they should have I feel like they should have done more. Like, there was a little bit of, like, revealed preference in the fact that when you open up the Vision Pro, the app that's in the top left corner, like, the first app if you are reading left to right like a book, is the Apple TV app. Like, it's very much like, you should go watch a movie right now. You should click on this.
Speaker 1:And then there's some other stuff, but mainly, it feels like they're pushing that. But they should have done more to really to really make it like a movie watching environment, something that that that people really, they're really focusing on that narrowing instead of trying to do, like, seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for, like, educational content? Is it for this prehistoric planet thing and these, like, dinosaur stuff or games or collaboration?
Speaker 1:They had FaceTime in there. They just, like, threw a lot in there, and I feel like none of them will break out instead of just, like, chopping it down and being like, okay. Like, this is going to be the best place to watch an IMAX movie in three d. And so, like, you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know.
Speaker 1:May maybe it won't even work if they pull that off. But it'll be interesting because Meta is gonna fire back, and it will be so there'll be a small screen for mini apps and alerts in the right on the right lens, and the spectacles can be controlled via the Neuralist accessory. So think about it like Meta Ray Bans plus Google Glass, basically. So you have to look up here, and you can see notifications. You can see a little bit.
Speaker 1:There is a there is a different there's a different set of companies that are building basically movie theater watching glasses. So it's just a big screen. It's not VR, AR. It's not positionally mounted. It's just a screen on your face at a much lower price.
Speaker 1:I haven't tried them. I don't think that they're fully there in terms of resolution. A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple Vision Pro to commoditize to the point where where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff, giving like, actually doing all the testing, and then Apple will ultimately, like, take that back.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm perfectly safe. I I'm pretty sure, like, the multi touch screens, like, those were out there in other like, the technology existed in other phones, but it just was poorly implemented, Apple was able to come in and do, the virtual.
Speaker 2:There is an article from Eric Berger saying after recent tests, China appears likely to beat The United States back to the moon.
Speaker 1:This is the case of Hamburg.
Speaker 2:He I went there because it's because at this point, it's difficult to come to any other conclusion. And he is writing this article to
Speaker 1:explain Eric Berger
Speaker 2:is enormously bad for the United
Speaker 1:Space reporter.
Speaker 2:So in recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 02/1930. On August 6, the China Manned Space Agency successfully tested a high fidelity mock up of its 26 ton Lan Yu lunar lander. The test conducted outside of Beijing used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fire fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there. The test, said the agency in an official statement, represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a manned spacecraft. As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before twenty thirty.
Speaker 2:Then last Friday, the space agency and its state operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, pretty hard name, successfully conducted a thirty second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket center core with its seven YF a 100 k engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons of to low Earth orbit. These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Meng Zhu spacecraft in June. A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions. Thus, China's space program is making a demonstratable progress in all three of the major element elements of its space program.
Speaker 2:Large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit orbit, plus the the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade. For The United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this. For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program. Been there, done that.
Speaker 2:Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that is strikingly resembles the lunar module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable. With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop in space propellant storage and refueling technology allowing for lower cost reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise. The recent setback for SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin's Mark two lander indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go.
Speaker 2:So it's now probable that China will quote unquote beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race. To put this in perspective, ours connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China, space policy, and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition. And
Speaker 1:Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point. Only Wall Street can save us. The solution is make the moon a state, as Mike Solana suggested, create mortgages on the moon, and then securitize them. Once Wall Street
Speaker 2:Allow retail to go on.
Speaker 1:BlackRock owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. They've been getting Wall Street's been getting pushed back on owning single family homes.
Speaker 1:They own 99%
Speaker 2:of the capital to
Speaker 1:Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now. They own all of them. They bought my house from me. I didn't want them I didn't want them to. They just bought it for me.
Speaker 1:I didn't have an option.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They were like, sale and leaseback. You you rent now.
Speaker 2:You will own nothing and you'll be happy.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's exactly what happened. No. They actually own like 1% of it.
Speaker 2:But Dean says the Lan Yu lander is significant because it's part of the usual China Chinese crawl, walk, run approach to a major space project. The People's Republic Of China can benefit from other people's experiences. Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecrafts themselves. So the test of the Lan Yu lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process. So, anyways, important to flag.
Speaker 2:We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently.
Speaker 1:And It's tough. It's tough to bootstrap an economy. Like, is an incredible milestone, and yet America's done it. So there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first. It's not superlative.
Speaker 1:And then the question in for SpaceX is, are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more Starlinks and just making more subscriptions? Like, it is it is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage. It takes a long time. Maybe you need a new, government program, some sort of incentive. I mean, fortunately, like, we Fireflies been to the moon.
Speaker 1:Blue Origin's planning. SpaceX is planning. Like, there are a lot of competitive American companies that are working towards it, but, the underlying, incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now, that might be higher value. Although it will be a very weird moment if, if China's just up and back on the moon constantly running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon. We gotta get back.
Speaker 2:You gotta get back.
Speaker 1:There it is. Stream mark. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Good, guys. How y'all?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you. Where should we kick it off, Jordy? Do you Where should
Speaker 2:we start?
Speaker 1:Dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising? Sure. Maybe you could set the stage for us. What what set off your alarm bells? What triggered your initial worry about this idea of ads in
Speaker 4:LLMs? Because this isn't the Internet. Right? It's not just a normal digital platform.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 4:It's a platform that, depending on how it's trained, depending on what pre prompts you put in, it could be very manipulative. Mhmm. And there's not really age limitations at all. There's not really any limitations whatsoever. And normally, I'd be let's just be laissez faire.
Speaker 4:Right? The market is the market. But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbit holes and, you know, other people being told, you know, to kill themselves, and Mhmm. You just you just don't know what can happen. So if I if if I build a model and it becomes popular, even if it's only a niche model, right, Just like there's Headspace and there's Calm.
Speaker 4:Let's just say I build the Calm AI large language model, and I have millions and millions of users, and I want and I have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever. Right? And they're trying to get more sales, and I need the money. Mhmm. I can easily, easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do, and that's my concern.
Speaker 4:And so if we just wanna put up, you know, just little ad traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all you know, put them into the chat list on the left hand side. Great. You can do all the display ads you want. You could do video there all you want. But if it's in the response that comes back from the model, boy, you're you're gonna have lots of problems.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I think Sam Altman said something to this effect saying that, artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent. It will be very good at convincing people. So it is reasonable. What do you think of Sam Altman's latest commentary on how OpenAI might get into this world that the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be would not be monetizable.
Speaker 1:But if you if it made a recommendation to buy a product, and then you said, hey, I want you to go check out for me, it sends out a Right? It's already doing that okay?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's already doing it. You know, it's it's, you know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate. Yep. It's a whole another thing when there's a search query.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right? We get a lot of traffic from OpenAI ChatGPT for costplusdrugs.com. Yep. In fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs, and Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I don't wanna take the time to look at the latest price list
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:I'll just put in what's the price for, you know, Daraprim, whatever it may be, and it's right there.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And so, yeah, of course, they can extend that, but response is a whole and models are are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Versus influencing and engaging in a chat. I guess the question
Speaker 2:is Yeah, mean, think to double down on what you're saying, an example, if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent and maybe doing some product research, and you have ads, and you have, organic listings or web pages, that's one thing. But if if various AI models are seen as trusted advisors, if you compare that to a situation, if I ask John, what kind of car should I get? And John starts giving me answers and saying, I think you should, I really think you should get this car. It's really nice. And then I buy it, and then later I find out John was getting a 10% I'm like, hopefully I like the car, but if I didn't, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:You know? And this happens in a business context, too. You might know, people get in hot water all the But time because they're
Speaker 1:it's taking really easy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. In this particular case, it's really easy. Just like, you know, there's an emoji for sources or just says sources Yep. You could put a dollar sign just to show they're being compensated.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. And do you think that needs to happen at, like, the FTC, FCC level, or are you do you think it needs
Speaker 4:to be decision if convention. You know, hopefully, it's self enforced, but you know there's gonna be idiots and assholes who don't self enforce.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And well, particularly for medical stuff. I mean, Does that it's easier to GPT about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to sometimes.
Speaker 1:But but does that call example you gave matter? Because, like, I I I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here. And, yes, I could set up a search engine that serves that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads. But how am I gonna take market share from Google? People are gonna go to Google, and Google does say when it's an ad.
Speaker 1:And so, like, as long as the power law winner is a good actor, we kind of
Speaker 2:get good outcome.
Speaker 5:There's also an interesting
Speaker 2:thing where there's this self self enforcing sort of positive effect, which is if if people rely on ChatGPT, for example, to help them do product research and buy the right products Mhmm. And you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the the product that that they're getting paid the most, Eventually, I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize, I'm not gonna use this app anymore.
Speaker 4:I I wouldn't agree with that, Jordy. Mhmm. Because I think people are primed for misinformation these days.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:You see it in health care continuously. You know, you saw it with COVID vaccines. Mhmm. People on their deathbed saying, I wish I had taken the vaccine. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:You know? And you see it now with, you know, raw milk where now there's more people who have you know, there's examples of people who have died, and people just don't care.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 4:yeah. You know? They just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, ChatGPT is woke, so I'm using WriteGPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And that's because those are the kinds of answers I want. Mhmm. Because, you know, there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group when it comes to the product decisions. Just like we saw the anti Bud Light, and that kind of builds, you see pro right wing products. I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another source.
Speaker 4:There's just so much personal identity in how we use technology. That's part of my concern.
Speaker 2:How how worried would would you say you are about AI broadly? I think over the last few months, the industry has woken up to, you know, a year ago people were kind of laughing about AI safety, right, and thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios. Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well-being. If you just give hundreds of millions of people, you know, unlimited access to these tools, you know, they are gonna There there is gonna be some effects. Some people will be good, some people will be bad, but but what's your what's your high level read?
Speaker 4:Well, it's changed a lot. We went from fear of the terminator.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:To fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect because they're such good communicators. Right? We can't talk to other people, or we feel, you know, shy or not open in communicating with other people, experts or friends or otherwise. But this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time, and depending on how it's programmed will compliment.
Speaker 5:What a great question, Jordy. What a great That
Speaker 4:is that is a really interesting approach.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:So there's a lot of things to be concerned with there, particularly because AI is not smart. Yep. Right? AI is just statistical right now, and I'm of the mindset that that's not gonna change for a long time. You know, one of the reasons that you don't see full self driving cars that are just everybody using no matter what is because it's it's easy there's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car.
Speaker 4:Yep. You know, we have Australian many Australian German Shepard or a million Australian Shepherd ride tux. And about six years old, I trust tux at an intersection to know when to cross before, you know, that he's never been to before Yeah. Before I trust a car. And that's the whole point with AI because there there are just rules and laws and latencies that they that it can't account for.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It's all text, some graphics, some video, but it's always behind. And then that's part one. Part two, we're I think we're going to see a groundswell in how intellectual property is dealt with, a groundswell change in how IP is dealt with. Because there was for a long time, it's been publish or perish. Get your stuff out there.
Speaker 4:Get it into journals. Make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert. Well, the minute you do that right now, it's going to get absorbed into, you know, training data for these models, and you've lost everything you've just created.
Speaker 2:What if I want to what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk, and I want to and I want to get people, and so I should just write as much as I can about how break this.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Your people are going to use bots to try to influence, to post things, to try to influence like the robots dot text for a you know, for AI. Yeah. You can you can structure it in ways where you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all why raw milk is amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? But the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death. AI doesn't understand pain. AI doesn't understand context. AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago.
Speaker 4:It doesn't know that there was a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened. Right? Mhmm. AI can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it, you know, this ball fell off the table. What happened next?
Speaker 4:Right? It's just not smart. And as long as it's not smart, it a, can be influenced, and b, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't it doesn't have judgment.
Speaker 1:So what would you tell the folks at OpenAI and the other Foundation Model Labs on how to structure their business? It feels like a firewall between there needs to be some sort of truth seeking organization that's focused on on delivering the highest quality results. And then on the flip side, you have a monetization team.
Speaker 4:No. I mean, you can't check for quality.
Speaker 1:That's impossible. Yeah. Of course, you can. You, like, you can you you can always, like, benchmark these things or just, like, vibe test them with the with the with the Yeah. But,
Speaker 4:you know, Jordy was giving me shit online. I was giving Jordy shit online.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Vibe
Speaker 5:test gonna
Speaker 4:be completely different. Right?
Speaker 1:What I'm is, like, is, Google Google does try and re try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query. And then separately, they have an ad auction function Okay. So that adds as an ad platform. And those two teams are separate. And so, like, if your age if your age is showing up as one of those, like, knowledge boxes on Google, you can't just pay to have them change it.
Speaker 1:Like, that's a separate business line, and it's a separate team, and they are separate products in the UI. Yes, they exist on the same page, but they're separate.
Speaker 4:And that's fine. Right? Okay. I mean, to me, the bigger questions are what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today, or at least as I understand it today. Yep.
Speaker 4:Right? I don't see AI getting smart. Mhmm. I look at AI and I think it's the world's best library. Let me explain it in another way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We all have that one friend that remembers everything. Yep. Everything. Right? Hey, what did we do that one day back in college?
Speaker 4:Remember when, you know, our
Speaker 5:one buddy, oh, yeah. This is da da da da da.
Speaker 4:That's AI. Mhmm. They'll it'll remember everything. It'll give you the you know, if you give it a, and c, it'll figure out d, e, and f. Right?
Speaker 4:But it doesn't even know x, y, z exists, just like you're right. So it is just like the world's biggest library. It is just like a meeting of the minds of just regurgitation.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And so knowing that, then you have to there's going to be so much competition between the models. That is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? Because there's not there'll there'll be five, six, whatever it is, foundational models before there's consolidation. Mhmm. But beyond that, there's going be millions of models. Millions and millions of models, and every brand is going to need a model, particularly like in healthcare.
Speaker 4:Like if you are Stanford Medical, right, if you are Mayo Clinic, if you're MD Anderson, you're not going to just, you know, put out all your IP from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that ChatGPT can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge so it remembers everything that that all your doctors and scientists did. You're going to keep that to yourself. And so in terms of the business models, these guys are going to have to start making decisions. Are they start going to start paying a lot of money for content? Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Because as much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits. Right? You don't you're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they could cover.
Speaker 1:They're for a ton of content, to be clear. I mean, they they pay the New York Times, they pay all sorts
Speaker 2:of Yeah. We had we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog. Yeah. I was like, I assumed you already scraped it.
Speaker 4:But think of it if you're I mean, let's talk about it from the government perspective.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:So they just cut all these NIH grants, right? All this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs, which they
Speaker 1:have, right? Foundational research, basic science. Right.
Speaker 4:All this research.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:If the government really understood AI, they'd be like, okay, we're gonna keep on investing in this research, and then I'm gonna make it available to the biggest bid, the highest bidder whoever it
Speaker 1:in their Privatize it. I like that. Make some money
Speaker 3:off it.
Speaker 4:Right. It's not even the deal. Privatizing it Yeah. But monetizing it.
Speaker 1:Monetizing it. I like this. This is good. Make some money off of that nonprofit research.
Speaker 2:Are you
Speaker 4:because that's that's the way things are working right now. Right? I don't I don't have, honestly, I don't have a problem with that No. At all No. If it gets us more solutions, or doing our own, you know, the government doing its own model and making that available for a fee.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Those decisions from a business perspective that all these models are going to have to make. Otherwise, how do they keep on adding more training data? Because there's no way to synthesize all that shit. You're not synthesizing you're not creating synthetic data that all of a sudden is gonna, you know, you could tell, you could give it all the backstory you want, that you're a doctor, that you invented this, that you did that.
Speaker 4:It ain't gonna invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At any point during the AI hype cycle so far did you think that this time might be different? There was, I would say a year ago, a common line was this isn't like the internet bubble because there's real revenue. These companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. This time is different.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, and I wouldn't lean on this too heavily, but MIT had a report this week saying that 95% of Gen AI pilots in the enterprise are not turning into, not creating real value. I'm curious what your read has been.
Speaker 4:I've been through every single technology, you know, event and evolution, and this blows them all away. Mhmm. Now, how you implement it in business is a whole different issue. Like, literally, when I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, well, son, I got this receptionist right there. I got that secretary.
Speaker 4:I'm never gonna need that shit ever. Right? And but then, you know, my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage. Yep. There are going to be integrators that particularly young kids.
Speaker 4:Like, when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21, or 19, 21, and kids going to school, what should I do? What should I do? I'd be like
Speaker 2:AI research.
Speaker 4:Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies. Mhmm. Right? Because to your point, companies don't understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage. You got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything's gonna be customized to your unique utilization, right, or use usage.
Speaker 4:Who's gonna do it for them, particularly small to medium sized businesses? There are 33,000,000 companies in this country. 30,000,000 of them are solopreneurs. Right? Single person enterprises.
Speaker 4:There are only you know, there are millions of companies that have one, five, ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts. This is where kids getting hired coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity. If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school even, whatever it is, your excess time, and you're learning the difference between Sora and Vio, and you're learning how to do all this video. You're learning how to customize a model so that then you can then walk into a company and say, I understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store. We're selling and selling shoes online.
Speaker 4:Let me show you how to benefit you. Yeah. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school, because every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI, and that's what people don't understand
Speaker 2:when Yeah, we talking about hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built products instead of saying, Hey, here's what I can do, they just showed us. They took a day and just built something. We
Speaker 4:said, And they didn't take a day, right? They went to chat GPT or Perplexity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, bear case, John was joking about this, so I thought this was interesting. Had one of our interns built this product. It's tbpn.com/guests. It's this guest directory transcript tool. And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it.
Speaker 2:So that was a that was a bull case for software engineers still having a job.
Speaker 4:But you don't even have to be a software engineer. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You just have people are afraid to ask the models the right questions. They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that it can't they can't answer. Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow ups and their ability to prompt, they have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees. Right?
Speaker 1:So I completely agree with
Speaker 4:jobs for everybody. This
Speaker 1:feels like a it feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and and explore, learn, implement things at businesses. If all of a sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge
Speaker 4:AI model.
Speaker 5:Mark's saying
Speaker 2:he's cool with display ads. A LaBubu showing up in the sidebar.
Speaker 4:Yeah. On the sidebar. That's fine. But think of it you're okay. There's a death war going on with the frontier models.
Speaker 1:Yes. War. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's zero sum game in their minds. Not all will make it. Some will get consolidated. Maybe one goes out of business. Yep.
Speaker 4:Right? And so for the next however many years, however long, there used to be a time when Excel costs $499 Mhmm. To buy a spreadsheet.
Speaker 1:Worth every penny.
Speaker 4:Know, it's not free, but like
Speaker 1:Basically. Google
Speaker 4:yeah. Google Sheets, right, Google Docs, etcetera. The basic models are always going to be free.
Speaker 1:Because of ads. Like, the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business.
Speaker 4:When was the last time made buying that in Google Sheets?
Speaker 1:No. You don't. But but the reason that they can subsidize is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash they don't care about monetizing it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But in the case I
Speaker 2:mean, to to to take Mark's side here, I mean, a subscription product also subsidizes a free product.
Speaker 4:Sure. Yes. That that's exactly right. Okay. So you're gonna have tiers, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Free, your your kid's version, free, And those those those versions are gonna have more constraints because they know high school kids, you know, seven year old kids are going to use them. Yeah. So there'll be all kinds of limits built in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But then you get your $20 version, and Chad GPT is doing what? $12,000,000,000 annualized and growing quickly? Yep. That's insane. Love you know, lovable.
Speaker 4:All these guys are just crushing it. It's like, I I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia, which does, you know, talking avatars. I don't know if you know
Speaker 1:these Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Cool. Yeah. They're killing it.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 4:Killing it is just up and to the right. Yep. You start them off with it's just a whole freemium model. Sure. Right?
Speaker 4:That's been around forever, and I think that's going to happen. But as know, we talked earlier about buying IP. You'll see things go into different directions. Mhmm. So you'll have a chat GPT slash health care, and if you want that, it's an extra $5 a month.
Speaker 4:You'll see chat GPT programming or math or foreign lang duolingo version. Right? And it might be an extra 50¢ a month or a dollar a month, whatever it may be. And then there'll be, you know, entrepreneur version, and it'll have all the integrations into all the the states so that you just, you know, fill in these forms, and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated because all the agents will do all the work. All that stuff, you can upsell.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so but if they're not using your model in high school, they ain't gonna use it in college. And if they ain't using it in college, when they go for that to that company, they're not gonna use you.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And I think that is a big deal. But I can't say it enough. All these people, we're in a transition period right now for kids coming out of college, whether you have a computer science degree or not, but you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree. It's probably not the right way to go. Going to any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete, there'll be more jobs than than people for a long, long time.
Speaker 4:Because there's only gonna there's gonna be two types of companies in this country, in the world. Those who are great at AI and everybody else.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And this is not AI is not intuitive. You're not gonna take a 40 year old who's worked at a company for fifteen years and say, go play with ChatGPT and figure out how we can improve our our productivity and improve our processes. Some people put in the time to learn it, but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agents start doing things, and then, you know, writing software on Lovable or whatever, and having all it's gonna be intuitive for for digital natives and Gen Z who are going through school and graduating with that. That is gonna be jobs left and right.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Totally agree. Wanted to get your we were just on with Vlad from Robinhood, and
Speaker 4:Yep. That's my guy. He's
Speaker 2:super excited about getting everyday investors access to great private markets, great companies in the private markets. Wanted to get your general read on that. You've obviously been part of Shark Tank for a long time.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine if you were watching and you could be like, I want to invest? That seems extremely long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And a lot of people have taken crack.
Speaker 1:I'm sure people pitched you this exact thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm curious because because you obviously you you I can I can see you being yeah, it's great when company when if retail can get into the next Figma, but there's, you know, not not making a lot
Speaker 6:of Figma's?
Speaker 4:Right? I've I've been anti it's not sweat equity, crowdfunding, right? Crowd equity programs against it because there's no liquidity. People love a company, the next Figma, and they put in their life savings because they know Figma's going to the moon, baby, and they can't get out. And they gotta wait.
Speaker 4:That's the problem. Yep. And so that's part one to the problem. Part two and more of a system systemic problem, there's just
Speaker 6:not enough
Speaker 4:IPOs. I mean, it's like watching some of these IPOs. They're like meme coins now.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Bam, they take off, and then it's musical chairs to see who can get out the last but first, right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And if you don't get out first or near the beginning, you're getting crushed, And you so is there a way, whether it's tokenization or other approaches to that? Probably, but it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker. Yeah. If Vlad or whoever is a market maker Yep. So that there's always some liquidity within x percentage of the last trade Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Great. Yep. Then everybody can do it, and everybody's protected to a certain extent as long as they're not doing deals where the people are just out and out lying, right, or misrepresenting it. At which point, hopefully, the CFTC or the, SCC, whoever happens to end up in charge.
Speaker 1:Enough just to bring access. You also have to bring liquidity. Last question. If Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president?
Speaker 4:I mean, it's easy to say yes right now, but it's that's the all probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider. Cause otherwise, I'm not I don't wanna do that shit. It's not my it's not my dream to be president. I'd rather argue with you guys about Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's my dream come back on the show. You'll be too busy if you're in the West
Speaker 2:Last last question for me. Are you excited about the the the American taxpayer potentially taking a position in Intel? Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:You know what? It's a great question, Jordy.
Speaker 2:So You're sounding you're sounding like an AI. You're sounding like
Speaker 4:sounded like an
Speaker 1:AI. What? That's a great question.
Speaker 4:What you don't know is I have ChatGPT listening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's running clearly. He's running clearly.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 4:is a progressive's dream. This is the Bernie Sanders dream, the AOC dream. Because and I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it it's Yeah. Asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires. So when you take 10% of Intel and first, let me add, the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think, is awful because it was meant to be a grant, and that was the deal The United States Of America made, and now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country, I think that's bad.
Speaker 4:But generally, if this was, okay, we'll put in more money in order to take and we want 10% of Intel, obviously, they can say yes or no, Just like NVIDIA and AMD Yep. Had the option to say yes or no on the h 20 chips. Just like material, whatever, MP Material's. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Do you Politician politicians have gotten so good at trading stocks. We want them running our our federal balance sheet.
Speaker 4:No. You don't.
Speaker 2:No. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But if you're gonna generate if I if I was running, right Yeah. Yeah. And I would say Donald Trump did the same thing. He got this one right.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Now the only question is, will he do it at the right time? Mhmm. Because would you I'd rather take more money from taxpayers, the average person who might need to pay more, or even the the billionaires, the oligarchs, according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates to 30 from 39 37 to 39 or 41, or can I just take it this way? Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? Take it before it even gets to them. This is a progressive's dream. I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops and Elizabeth Warren, yes, yes, yes, and make, you know, make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles along with every other supporter because those guys
Speaker 2:If got about it, he might reverse course. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, of course. That's why being quiet because they don't want him to reverse course.
Speaker 4:This is 40 you're percent. You're ahead
Speaker 1:of test on both sides. The aisle. Everyone's playing tricks.
Speaker 4:I mean, but don't you guys agree? Isn't it just like a progressive Totally. Dream?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like and, you know, so tariffs, which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitches, when you can convince 30 plus percent of people in this country that that tax that they're paying with increased prices isn't a tax somebody else is paying it. Amazing sales job. Right? So now that's $360,000,000,000 towards the deficit and everything. And if you can start doing these other deals that aren't piggish, right, meaning they're they're fair to the companies that are involved, and they're not across the board like tariffs, and start banging down on the deficit in the way that is the ultimate progressive approach, he's turned into Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:He literally has, you know, only he's a better salesperson.
Speaker 2:You're great at this. This is Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I give him credit, though. Not knocking him. Right? I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers because he is he is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves.
Speaker 1:Yep. This is great. Well, thank you so much We'll for have to
Speaker 2:do this again soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We gotta do this again soon. We gotta find a new, new topic to argue about, but this is fantastic.
Speaker 4:Health care. Let's go health care.
Speaker 5:I can't wait till you hear my shit with health care.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Let's let's do it tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Health care debates in. Well, we'll email you.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll see you soon.
Speaker 4:Have a good day. Thank you
Speaker 1:so much for joining.
Speaker 4:Appreciate it. Talk to soon.
Speaker 1:Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California mansion abandoned. Kanye West, you know this story. Right?
Speaker 2:This is such a
Speaker 1:crazy So Kanye West bought a so he bought a, a mansion on the beach in Malibu and had someone, like, completely tear it down. And it looked like it was gonna maybe be a a renovation, but then it just turned into a disaster zone, basically. So developer Andrew Mazzella was in contract to pay $30,000,000 for the concrete structure designed by StarKitect, StarArchitect. They call them StarKitects. TaoDao Ando West West, who now goes by Yi, had purchased the house in 2021 for about 57,300,000.0 and gutted it, and Mazzella planned to restore the house to its original glory.
Speaker 1:Instead, Mazzella's deal is off seller Bellwood Investments, which brought which bought the hulking property for 21,000,000 in 2024, is claiming Mazzella was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzella has said a peak under the hood revealed the project would require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated.
Speaker 2:I'm not accusing them of misleading me. How the idea that a, you know, a 20 ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1:know dollars exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And deals extremely, like, basically exactly what you should
Speaker 1:buy Look at these pictures.
Speaker 2:Honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state and just like keep it. It's almost like a monument to going insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was about to say. It's like it is and I never understood the the rationale. Was it it
Speaker 2:feels like having this incredibly this incredible brutalist but beautiful home and then just destroying it now feels like it's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of art. It's like performance art.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Was it performance art, or was it more just like Kanye actually wanted to renovate it and the renovation just went off the rails? Because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up in permitting, and then they just have, a cement slab outside their house for ten months. For ten years.
Speaker 1:Speaking from experience here. Like like like, it is hard to do renovations. In mid August, the house went back on the market for 34,900,000.0 down from 39,000,000. Designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sachs. The house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms.
Speaker 1:West listed it in 2023 amid a firestorm over his antisemitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood brought bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly 8,500,000.0 rest dollar restoration project with fractional ownership model. It raised millions of dollars, from investors for the Ando project. Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazzella, a commercial fisherman turned developer who until recently was based in Montana. The Malibu project was, was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date, but closing was delayed.
Speaker 1:Mazzella couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a revised offer of 19.5. Of course, this, this is post fires. So there were a lot of fires in Malibu.
Speaker 2:There were So basically
Speaker 1:was locked down. It was a bad time. And and Mazzella Mazzella.
Speaker 2:Right? Had a contract to buy the home for a certain price. Yep. Decided at a at a a later date that he wanted to pay less. Yep.
Speaker 2:And Belmont is pissed because, and he has a quote here, Mazzella turned out to be nothing more than a quote unquote cowboy from Montana who was quote unquote trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence. Happens.
Speaker 1:Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe?
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream. What's going on? Live at the TBPN Ultra Dome. What's new with you? How are doing?
Speaker 1:I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into, the the announcement this week about, the the private military corporation that you're starting.
Speaker 6:Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody, looked at that. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Everyone saw that.
Speaker 2:Everyone's Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. It's, sure. Sure. What what do we do this week?
Speaker 6:Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency honestly, like, to to rewind, where where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is, like, videos of people wearing boots or, like Yeah. Press headlights or whatever.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's, like, a handbag division. There's a footwear division. There's a fine art division.
Speaker 6:There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with, like, more bigger permanent structures. Well
Speaker 2:Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I hit the
Speaker 6:Oh, nice. Nice. So we we've been operating like that for for a second now, and to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like Yeah. Normal Right? Like, finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also, like, design and marketing.
Speaker 6:Yep. And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of, like, mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. Yep. It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is, like, maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last, like, six years.
Speaker 6:What have we not touched yet? And, like, maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like, maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's, like, cool. We can
Speaker 2:Well, it's there what what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with with startups and and scale ups and things like that. But what what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale where
Speaker 1:so much
Speaker 2:of selling, like, a thousand of this thing, can we figure out can we partner
Speaker 1:with a company sell Apple ad. It's like that's just not there's just there's something special about that, about just, like, giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways. It's marketing, but it's just, like, it's still art, and it's cool, and it's, like, un unbridled. No.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Right? Like, the way
Speaker 6:that we look at these is, like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like, are brands and entities and culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way artists looks at their material as, like, paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like, for us, Coca Cola is material. Give us that.
Speaker 1:I can
Speaker 6:And we'll make something new with it
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways. Right? The opportunity is, like, there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with.
Speaker 1:So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of, like, there's cultural material, if you come up with just like, I have a great idea, it it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never gonna think about this, but I need to I could the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have a I have the idea for you, or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideas?
Speaker 6:I'm doing outbound outbound right
Speaker 2:now. Nice.
Speaker 6:This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We wanna design your submarine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's
Speaker 2:go. I
Speaker 4:love that.
Speaker 1:That would be an amazing project.
Speaker 6:That's the outbound. That's what I wanna do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We wanna design that you're putting into space. I
Speaker 1:love it.
Speaker 2:We were look.
Speaker 6:We were Fast Company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually get, like, what we do, it is unparalleled.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:So let us, let's, like, put some stuff
Speaker 2:We got a we got a space play for you with with a company that we're very close with. I won't say anymore. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we'll talk after the stream.
Speaker 2:I I have a bunch of I have a bunch of questions. One quickly on the business model of the new agency. Is there a world where you would you would you know, the standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually I imagine if it was a one off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey.
Speaker 2:We think we could sell like a 10,000,000 of this and we'll only price based on on success. Is that is that something you would consider doing?
Speaker 6:It's totally on the table and it's it's not that's not even uncommon from, like, the collaboration route. Like, some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like, you make a bunch of product together, we both invest on our own ends, and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting, though, is because of Mischief's position as, like, this artistic entity, like, in a way, like, we have a personality. We have an audience. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so we're actually, like, building a pipeline of joint ventures
Speaker 2:Yeah. With Bitcoin.
Speaker 6:That's what I was
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what I was getting at.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Over forever, basically.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I want I want the I want a mischief themed line of of kids' toys. Right? Like I would happily buy those. I I would buy a bunch of those. Right?
Speaker 2:And so that's like if you partner with the right company, that should be in the the know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars. And I would even pay a premium
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I know it's you guys behind it. Yeah. Another question I have, you know, I've I've leveraged the the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company Party Round. And something that I've noticed recently, lot of companies in tech say they wanna do drops and it's because they're inspired by mischief and they just see like drops get attention, I want attention.
Speaker 1:One drop please, sir.
Speaker 2:One drop please.
Speaker 1:One drop please.
Speaker 2:The usual, sir.
Speaker 1:Sign me up.
Speaker 5:Go check it out.
Speaker 2:The thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like I think when companies think they wanna do drops, what they really wanna do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference. And so like where where's that line for you and how often are you know, would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to is to do advertising.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing
Speaker 2:for me. Forever or, like, for a few months. Quarter. Quarter. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I would I would take it even further, and it's it's like, that is the final goal, which is, like, get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But, like, the the focus on the drop is is misplaced. Yeah. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:What these guys are actually looking for, like, what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise. And right now, you can either just make more content, which, honestly, the ROI, I think, is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Sorry. That's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material, that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop.
Speaker 6:Just make something interesting. That's all it
Speaker 2:Are ideas valuable? And if you had to, you know, what kind of think about like making something new, how much is it the idea versus the execution?
Speaker 1:Do you hire idea guys and then like operational, excellent people? They're like a dividing line.
Speaker 2:And to me, I I John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're feeding you this like incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but Poorly executed.
Speaker 2:Poorly executed. Negative value. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Totally. I think it's like, like, squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like, there's the conceptual power, and then there's the execution. Mhmm. There are things where, like, the concept is really high, and the execution doesn't have to be crazy.
Speaker 6:You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea, and it's gonna work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution, and you see, like, large budgets and, like, huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like, now if you can dial in both, that's the match.
Speaker 6:Right? That's but that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you wanna it's you just you don't you wanna derisk on the concept side. John, to your question, I don't idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We did I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags. Right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become.
Speaker 6:So we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63,000 dollars at Paris Fashion Week at Pirell's whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea. Right? The lawyer our general counsel joins brainstorms.
Speaker 6:Our ops lead once brainstorms because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human. You have insights, and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also, like, being creative means you're not afraid to, like, look stupid.
Speaker 6:And I think that's, like, a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupid here including myself.
Speaker 2:What have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing, advertising stunts? This is something that we we end up
Speaker 1:talking I think David Ogilvy said, like, simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in mischiefs work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept?
Speaker 6:I think there could be. The the line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there there are layers. Right? Like, you appreciate it for the headline, but if you, like, really dig into it, you're like, wait up.
Speaker 6:Is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? And am I gonna it? And if I buy it, am I a chump, or am I a patron of the arts? Right?
Speaker 6:It's like, the layers are good. The ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like, from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like, people's attention spans are so low. And, honestly, like, people are just we're all, like, very distracted. So Totally.
Speaker 6:You don't have a lot of window to, like, nail it. So you do gotta have that one liner, like, pretty dialed in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How, how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the Internet? Like, do you have a do you feel like you usually have, like, a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get?
Speaker 1:Do you get surprised?
Speaker 2:Or do still get surprised often?
Speaker 6:Totally still get surprised. Like, you you always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh, yeah. Like, this will work because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So we actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is gonna work. And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people gonna buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know.
Speaker 6:They did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But
Speaker 6:but no. You know? Like
Speaker 1:Is there a project that you think is, like, criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the the the the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what what what's your what's your example of a project you're like, oh, that's still, like, one of my favorites.
Speaker 6:Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so, you know, buried it in an art show that we did. But, are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus?
Speaker 1:Yes. But explain it for the listener.
Speaker 6:Totally. So it's like, it's this old paradox where imagine you have this, like, large wooden ship. And every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship, and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship, or is it a different ship? We found that a very interesting question, and so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker 2:As one does.
Speaker 1:How do
Speaker 6:you As one does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Explain.
Speaker 6:And so we we found the sink. We did recon. We not me. I'm not I it wasn't me personally. It was somebody here.
Speaker 6:Names. But we found you know, we we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, ordered exact, like, replica we we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. And then the next day, do it again and do it again bolt by bolt, screw by screw.
Speaker 2:An art enthusiast. I just I just like art, and I I go to the bathroom. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Big. How how'd you get the big piece through? Isn't there, like, one piece That that
Speaker 6:so that we decided to leave.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:That we did not swap out. Although we had
Speaker 1:A plan?
Speaker 6:We we we we we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the sink, but
Speaker 2:not I'm telling you.
Speaker 6:We got we got a little bit. We we were honestly scared.
Speaker 2:Got a little carried away.
Speaker 6:We still we still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they they they have our sink, and we have their sink. And ours is now part of, like, our art gallery.
Speaker 1:So That's amazing.
Speaker 6:Although although I believe they figured it out, and they've replaced it. Because Wow. As soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of, like, hidden in all the other pieces, people definitely found out, and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom.
Speaker 1:The people wanted
Speaker 5:They should've they should've
Speaker 1:sucked it off,
Speaker 2:turned it into an installation. That's awesome. Out here if any of your
Speaker 6:if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back.
Speaker 4:Let's make
Speaker 2:it happen.
Speaker 1:Let's make it happen, army.
Speaker 2:How how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects?
Speaker 6:The painful question.
Speaker 2:Is it like a it has to be like a 100,000,000, like at least?
Speaker 6:Probably. Honestly, probably. Probably. Yep.
Speaker 2:And is there is there, like there I'm I'm sure at some point, there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like, we we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did it's called helpful VCs where we made crypto punks for every VC and then we put them on a website. And we said, you have four hours to retweet these. Otherwise, we're gonna auction them off.
Speaker 2:And it was like, it's for like charity. Right? We weren't like trying to make money. And that was like one of the ways that we broke through and like shortly after.
Speaker 1:I think there might be something to do with crypto and like stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You have to remove you have to make it not like a speculation, you know, Because based on as soon as
Speaker 1:you leave the like like, the the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up and then and then they're losing their life savings, that doesn't feel good. Yeah. Whereas whereas like, if somebody, you know, is is bidding on that handbag, like, they they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 6:Look. I think I think that crypto route for us is we've often plotted our own death, and I think there's, like, a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug. Yeah. I shouldn't even be saying that because now everybody's gonna know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everybody's gonna know.
Speaker 2:Well, I think switching gears to to another topic that I'm I'm sure you guys So one, I don't think AI is gonna take your guys' jobs anytime soon despite it being able to maybe piece together random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for for some of for some of these various plays?
Speaker 6:Honestly, TBD. And I think I think it's I do I will say, like, unlike the whole, like, crypto craziness of the last couple years, we we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That that's, like, the truth. Like, you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, I it is rooted in something real.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But we're not in a rush to, like, use it necessarily. Right? If it's gonna be here forever, we've got time. Like, it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to, like, make use of a format.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we'll see. We just have to see.
Speaker 2:We How do you think about are there any projects like, time is an interesting variable that you can play with. Right? Like, part of the thing with the the the the sync stunt that you guys did is is just the narrative and the story of like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very and and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays, like things that you could do over a decade or or or fifty years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious and but but again, take this sort of incredible planning.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that. Right? Because, like, if you think about it, we we're in
Speaker 2:we're Yeah. If you if if you would, you know, I know you guys have have a few investors. Have you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a fifty year stunt? And you're there. I'm gonna tell you, like, alright, buddy, like, why don't you put some points on the board first?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you guys have feel like you've earned it now. Like, I I you know, something like a decade.
Speaker 6:No. Yeah. Because, like, we've we spent basically like, we've only been around for the pandemic and post like, a little bit post pandemic. Right? And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming.
Speaker 6:Like, live day by day. Like, just survive. Like, banks are shutting down. Okay. Get through till till tomorrow.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure, and now we really are asking the questions of, like, okay. What does that legacy look like in ten years?
Speaker 6:Or should we should we disappear for twenty years and then come back? That would that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back.
Speaker 1:It's a banger.
Speaker 2:I'd love It's worked for it's worked for other it's worked for other artists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I could you do something?
Speaker 2:So so we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show.
Speaker 6:I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it.
Speaker 2:Mean, you you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of
Speaker 6:His next level. No question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like one sentence, you know, pitch that's hilarious, but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. Better. Yeah. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing?
Speaker 2:Sort of a decade long stunt, like I don't know. Mischief, like, mischief figures out a way to, like, reduce you know, cut the cost of housing in The United States.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was the reason you told me. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, we if there are any, like, pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that
Speaker 2:will drive I can just see, like, the, the right RV. Like, there's this RV outside of our gym.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kinda yellow from the sun.
Speaker 2:Real Like some windows open.
Speaker 1:Aluminum on the outside. Yeah. Winnebago. It it can be a stunt for Winnebago, Corporal.
Speaker 4:What do you
Speaker 2:how do you feel about the state of social media, like broadly? It feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy, even thinking about how durable like Twitter and Acts have been despite all this change. Yeah. What's your and and do you even do do you feel like you need to use social media, or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a love hate relationship with the with the platforms. Right? Because, like, platforms, if you if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting, and now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting.
Speaker 6:It's kind of become, like, less novelty based and more vanity based. Just fine. That's, like, a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information, and that's kind of how we started. Our first audience portal was Venmo.
Speaker 6:We had a huge audience on Venmo, and we, like, had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny, and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone.
Speaker 2:The cha ching.
Speaker 6:Fun. Right? I am now banned from Venmo for life.
Speaker 1:Well, PayPal
Speaker 6:They want to work with a wide menu, let me know.
Speaker 1:PayPal well, we'll we'll have to see PayPal on it.
Speaker 2:I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll we'll we'll work on
Speaker 1:We should get this first. This is this is important. We were we were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The the the examples were the viral
Speaker 2:La boo boos.
Speaker 1:La boo boos, Dubai chocolate, the the the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Wiesenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about the the the these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost. And I was wondering if if you're worried about the the the spillover from Internet slop culture into the real world, just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there.
Speaker 6:But I think I saw it on Instagram. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. You probably did a front facing video talking about it, or you saw someone do a front facing video talking
Speaker 4:about it.
Speaker 1:That's like a
Speaker 6:reaction video. Yeah. I mean, look. It would I I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but, like, what Mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the boots. The boots. Right? Like, it's
Speaker 6:like Absurd absurd aesthetic, and and maybe maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating
Speaker 2:that meta. Responsible. No. You guys definitely that that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the the Everlane era.
Speaker 1:Quite legit.
Speaker 2:The the boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that of Absurd being like
Speaker 6:absurd aesthetic. Just like popping imagery off of your screen.
Speaker 2:But then the the with this this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it actually becomes, I mean, as like for me, right, I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s. I'm in my late twenties now. Eventually maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist mischief item for my home, but at the same time, once you get on the maximalist track, like, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just gotta keep, like, going crazier and crazier. And and, you know, maybe maybe in the Internet era, there's no turning back.
Speaker 6:It it's totally possible. Right? Like, we might we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And, like, how do you break free from that? Right?
Speaker 6:But, I'm not too worried. Like, we don't we actually don't think so hard about it. We just kinda make the things that we like, and then, if it ever stops working, then
Speaker 1:Do something else. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Figure it out. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, I I have an idea to put out in the I think next time a an a list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than than the scandal.
Speaker 4:Need
Speaker 6:to do they just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they gotta do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address, and I'll send you 2 Bitcoin, and then they actually do it.
Speaker 4:They actually do it.
Speaker 1:Genius. Yeah. That is a get that is a one time get out of jail free card. You heard it here first.
Speaker 2:This is payoffs.
Speaker 1:If you yeah. If you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're you're you're caught at a Coldplay concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide.
Speaker 2:You will be good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. Go for it. Yeah. Awesome. This is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 2:It's really great great to get the update and, just hear your so much clarity on on all these different areas that we talk about all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We could talk for hours. Yeah. We'd love to have you back, whenever whenever it makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gave Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll we'll we'll leverage that for for your next appearance. 100 can't I can't wait for it. 100%.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Awesome. Awesome. I'll tell Great to catch up.
Speaker 1:Cool. See you. Cheers.