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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 07/11/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:The Temple of Technology.
Speaker 1:The Fortress Finance. The Capital
Speaker 2:of Capital. We got a great show for you. We have some maybe terrible news. Yes. There might be top signals in the market.
Speaker 2:Yes. There might be top signals all over the place.
Speaker 1:We've been building out an internal top signal tracker crowd sourcing crazy. Some of And it's a long list. Yeah. We'll get through it.
Speaker 2:At the top of the list, podcasters have been wearing white suits recently to celebrate the market riffing. Yes. Feels like
Speaker 1:White suits are actually a top signal.
Speaker 2:It's a complete top signal. But of course, is some good There are some The economy strong. We're gonna go through Joe Weisenthal's breakdown. Things are not doom and gloom but there's a lot of crazy stuff happening and it's fun to dig through. I mean, the first major top signal Bitcoin all time
Speaker 1:high. Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, that's always, you know, it is definitionally a top signal
Speaker 1:because So, let's go through the list here
Speaker 2:because Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's quite substantial. So, one
Speaker 2:kind of anonymously contributed through group chats.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:Stuff we've we've observed. We're gonna catalog it and see if we can turn the tide of the top signals to Okay.
Speaker 1:Ideally So starting off yesterday Yeah. Trump made a post on True Social. Calling So celebrating the state of the economy the markets. You know, just really calling out how how many assets are performing well.
Speaker 2:I have it here. This is the second one.
Speaker 3:Do you wanna
Speaker 1:read through it? Yeah. Just too. Because he basically get through the post and
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And we'll get to the moment.
Speaker 2:So Donald Trump on truth social truths, Tech stocks, industrial stocks, and Nasdaq hit all time high record highs. Crypto through the roof. Nvidia is up 47% since Trump tariffs. USA is taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. Country is now back.
Speaker 2:A great credit. Fed should rapidly lower rate to reflect this strength. USA should be at the top of the list.
Speaker 3:So low rates are
Speaker 1:low rates are actually just a reward when the markets are ripping.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's a little treat that we give ourselves
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:When things are great.
Speaker 2:Yep. And the White House is posting this, screenshotted on Axe. The country is now back says the president Donald Trump.
Speaker 1:Every account controlled by the White House has been on a tear. Yep. Some of them some of the posts I think are a little bit low class and vulgar. Yes. Others others are quite funny.
Speaker 1:It was a But there's definitely the the memers are in control.
Speaker 2:We didn't ruin say every, like, every politically aligned poster he knows who is like pro Trump now works for the White House. But like you just haven't seen it because they were like a non's and they just Yeah. Kind dropped off posting and now they're
Speaker 1:They'll getting death threats. So they have to Yeah. It's even actually more in many ways it's it's more controversial work than Doge.
Speaker 2:Maybe, yeah, yeah. Maybe it's more under discussed because Doge had this big like question in the media about like, you know, is Elon doing something that's, you know, he shouldn't be? Is he a government employee? Like what's the relationship between the two? And so, you know, there was a lot of investigative journalism that went into figuring out what's going on with Doge, who's involved.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Nobody's investigating the memes.
Speaker 2:Social media managers which is
Speaker 3:They need to be
Speaker 1:investigating the meme the memes of production. But anyway, so so going through my list here. That's great. Eric Trump a while back said, this is a good time to buy. This was a few months ago on Ethereum.
Speaker 2:On Ethereum.
Speaker 1:And then it just went down for months
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 1:And now it's back up.
Speaker 2:I I didn't
Speaker 1:And it's back up and he's saying, you're welcome.
Speaker 2:I do remember Trump, he called the bottom, right? He said like, now is a good time to buy generally and then the market rips since then.
Speaker 1:He created it and he and he called it perfectly. It's wild. It's finesse. More going down the list. Coinbase just
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who who we love. But they did their fortune 500 company. They did update their profile picture to an NFT. Historically, that has been a top signal. I do think their profile picture
Speaker 2:Do have any experience with NFT profile pictures?
Speaker 1:You know, I've delved I've delved over the years Experimented. And if you and if you look at maybe the moment that I did use an NFT profile picture in 2021.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It it was maybe only off by one or two months in terms of in terms of the
Speaker 2:never Top. An NFT profile picture but I bought an NFT right near the top.
Speaker 1:A Chainrunner? Chainrunner. Nice.
Speaker 2:Which I still own. Nice. Which actually, I didn't like over invest, get over my skis. It's very small portion of
Speaker 1:That's an asset that will be passed down through your family like
Speaker 2:I like a fine watch. I like to think of it as like a piece of 2022 lore. It's just like a piece of history. But, yeah. Fun project.
Speaker 2:And I feel like to some degree, you know, you're not really it's like a skin of the game question. Like, you're not really participating. You're not experiencing the the market unless you're participating to some degree. Yep. But you don't wanna get over your skis.
Speaker 2:And did the NFT profile picture at a really bad time and had to roll that back. Like, there's been a number of, like, NFT profile pictures that have been like
Speaker 1:It is a historical top signal. It could be it could be now just a signal for the start of a, you know, generation New cycle. Run. Yeah. New cycle.
Speaker 1:But historically, it's a top I want know
Speaker 2:NFTs are gonna make a comeback because, like, there's been like crypto has been coming back and Bitcoin went from what? When
Speaker 1:a list celebrities are using them on their Facebook accounts.
Speaker 2:That was a wild That's
Speaker 1:the real test.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:X account, you could see it happening early.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Facebook account. Facebook. Original Facebook account.
Speaker 2:There's gotta be a new project then because I don't think any of the old old old products or projects are going to, you know, come back. That would be crazy. Although some of them are kind of Lindy. Like haven't the original
Speaker 1:CryptoPunks.
Speaker 2:CryptoPunks. Those have kind of held their value. But the Bored Apes have sold off like crazy. But are still But
Speaker 1:it's still Right? It's it's unfortunate Bored Apes are not in gag gift territory yet. Yes. Because you you think, oh, it'd be funny to get like your buddy like a bored ape for their birthday. It's a 30
Speaker 2:or something.
Speaker 1:But it's like, yeah it's like
Speaker 2:Tyler, how what's the floor price of of bored apes? I'm I'm I'm interested to know. While Tyler looks that up, let me tell you Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Go to ramp.com. Also, don't we never shut this out. 4.8 stars on g two with over 2,000 reviews. That's great. Shout out Ramp.
Speaker 1:World class.
Speaker 5:Okay. So another Yeah. We The floor price is like around 10 Eth. So that's like almost $3,000.
Speaker 2:3,000? 30,000. Yeah. Yeah. That's like not a gag gift.
Speaker 2:But maybe for the man who has everything.
Speaker 1:Yes. The man who has everything, great great gag gift.
Speaker 2:It is pink elephant. We'll see. We'll see. Sun Valley.
Speaker 1:But then you know, by by you know Christmas time.
Speaker 2:Do they do pink elephants at Sun Valley? I feel like they should.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Some our friends that are there this week. So in other news, Robinhood CEO Vlad is raising at $900,000,000 valuation for a math foundation model startup. And Vlad and Robinhood have been on a pretty generational run. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But this does feel a bit top signally. Right? Especially in the context of grok one shotting PhD level math Yeah. In the announcement on Wednesday. So interested to follow that one optimistic but again
Speaker 2:Mathematical super intelligence.
Speaker 1:Historically, when we've seen CEOs of of public companies start ripping, you know, second companies and
Speaker 4:then Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then getting these types of valuations without a lot of underlying revenue, it can end poorly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Andrew Wilkinson is giving stock tips. Hit the timeline today. I'll read through it. He was highlighting a company historically a value investor. But this morning Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:He's little things like the Warren Buffett stuff. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Berkshire Hathaway for the internet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:He says, there are many ways to profit from the AI boom but my favorite is iRen. I rarely buy stocks. The private market is way too attractive. But every once in a while, I see something something that stops me cold. In 2025, it's iRend.
Speaker 1:I call it a Picasso I found at a garage sale. The stock is up 54% since he recommended it on my first million, but it's still cheap. Here's the trade in a nutshell. US capacity for energy and compute is highly constrained. Two, permitting and building facilities takes years.
Speaker 1:Three, AI scaling laws are continuing to deliver. But even if they don't, tons of compute is required for inference. Mhmm. IRen is a highly reputable publicly traded Bitcoin miner with massive data centers mid build in Texas. It pivoted away from mining Bitcoin at these new facilities to instead build them out for AI training and inference.
Speaker 1:Once completed, these facilities should generate in the range of $2,000,000,000 in new cash flow.
Speaker 2:Who's this company's name? IRen?
Speaker 1:IRen. Even if AI completely fizzles, these facilities are highly valuable as traditional data centers or can be rolled back to mine Bitcoin. So it's an AI thesis but if AI doesn't work out, we can still mine Bitcoin. The entire market cap is currently 3,800,000,000.0. So Andrew, I don't think this is investment advice, but it sounds like it.
Speaker 1:And interested to see see where this one goes. But anyway, anytime you see a value investor start trying to cash in on the AI boom, it should be a little bit wary. It's tricky. Harry Stebbings today Also not
Speaker 2:like like it doesn't have earnings. Right? It's a
Speaker 1:lot of No. No. No. It's it's
Speaker 2:trending around $4,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's ever generated any profit.
Speaker 2:I mean, it says it says 23,000,000 in EBITDA, but in 2024. So I I don't think it's like losing that much money. And I guess net income in the last quarter was 24,000,000. But the net income to market cap ratio there is 40, I guess. So still pretty high.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the thing here is
Speaker 2:It doesn't feel like a bottom
Speaker 1:at the same time, Satya
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is pulling back Yep. On new data center development. Happy to be a leaser. You have incredible neo clouds Yep. That have deep domain expertise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Iron team, I don't think has a bunch of team around running large AI training or inferencing. Yeah. And so anyways Just
Speaker 2:feels like they're a little bit late to that party because there's already like three or four. Did Iren make the cluster max? Dylan Patel article?
Speaker 1:Doubt it because they're not online yet. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Yes. Because semi analysis does the cluster max rating for all the Neo clouds including the the hyperscaler clouds.
Speaker 2:And I feel like they did not have let me see. Iren, I don't think is on here. TensorWave. There are so many. RunPod, Lambda, Scaleway, SMC, Azure, Nebius, together, Crusoe, Lepton, Oracle, CoreWeave, AWS.
Speaker 1:So hyper competitive market unclear if this Bitcoin miner is gonna be able to pivot into AI training and inference in this when they're up against the players that you just mentioned. Another top signal I'm not gonna go out and say that this is impossible but Harry Stebbings is calling for $8,000,000,000,000 Nvidia in the next five years. Private markets investor backed a bunch
Speaker 2:of
Speaker 1:unicorns starting to make, you know, very specific sort of price predictions
Speaker 2:on the timeline. Specificity of the price prediction is interesting. I was thinking about that, should like, as we talk about tech companies, should we be trying to like boil down to like price targets? And I just feel like that's not the domain of of talking heads necessarily or like podcasters.
Speaker 1:Or private markets investors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I yeah. It's just it's just hard because like to do a proper price analysis on a big public stock, like you you really have to look at the financial. Like, you have to read the the the the financial reports. You need to actually understand the underlying financials.
Speaker 2:It it like, a vibes based analysis doesn't seem appropriate usually, but
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:Sometimes vibes are all you need,
Speaker 2:John. Yeah. It's certainly been like it's I mean, when was when was NVIDIA $2,000,000,000,000 stock? Like when was last doubling like in the last year or something? I don't know.
Speaker 2:We can pull up the
Speaker 1:Nvidia chart and Moving on, we another incredible top signal. Circle, a great American stable coin company is trading at a 2,300 PE ratio nearly at once I think they eclipsed Coinbase's valuation very briefly Really? No way. Despite the fact that they give half of their revenue to Coinbase
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:As part of their distribution partnership. So again, lots of excitement around stable coins. Feels like Circle could potentially be a little over its skis but it's a great company and they have a lot of advantage advantages now but the very euphoric multiple. Another top signal we have is Soham Parikh. We had him on the show just a week ago.
Speaker 1:This same sort of thing was happening in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two where engineers were really ramping up moonlighting activity. Right? They'd be working at meta and then working at some startup or or things like that. COVID maybe accelerated it. But again, if if companies are so desperate to hire great engineers that they'll run these like super fast hiring cycles
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Put up with people Yep. Generally talented people that are underperforming, right? Which Soham was was not delivering, was making a lot of excuses and a lot of people rightly let him go quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just the nature of like the dynamic of just competition. Like, if your competitors are hiring really fast, and you need to hire really fast, you're just like, okay, well, we don't need to go deeper. So let's wind up fast tracking this person.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So, you wind up hiring you know, same person five times, I guess.
Speaker 1:It happens.
Speaker 2:It happens. It is just like a funny anecdote that like is like, oh wow, those are some pretty crazy times. Remember that anecdote? Remember this anecdote? It feels like we're we're in this.
Speaker 1:Moving on. Masa top blasting or potentially top blasting. Anytime Masa, historically Masa getting into the headlines whether that's Stargate
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Structuring this $30,000,000,000 investment where Yep. Nobody knows or in the 500,000,000,000. Nobody really knows where the money's coming from. Yep. They're exciting big headline numbers but unclear if he will actually be able to deliver on that.
Speaker 1:I think him try you know, getting in the breakout, one of the breakout consumer AI winners which is AI is smart. He should have exposure there. But I think everybody should be a little bit uneasy that he's pulling out the checkbook and and writing numbers of that size.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also also investing in not just OpenAI, but like a new company that is a data center holding company that may not have the same economics as OpenAI. There's So a big question there about like how much he deploys. I I'm trying to remember the I mean, we did that whole deep dive on Masa and, you know, he made a ton of money on AMD. But that when he made that investment, it was like a way less frothy time.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, it wasn't AMD. Was it was what what was the SoftBank chip deal? ARM? ARM. Yeah.
Speaker 2:When did that ARM deal happen? SoftBank owns roughly 90% of ARM. They acquired in 2016 for 32,000,000,000 and later took it public in 2023. I'm trying to think 2016 was at a particularly frothy time for him to get into that deal. Because he has he has done a number of really great deals, but when, like,
Speaker 1:the Yeah. The other the other one is the other one is is Yahoo. You remember? He he had this crazy meeting with the Yahoo team
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Where he basically was like, take my money Yeah. Or I'm gonna and he was like, didn't he ask? He was like, who are your competitors?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna give money to And your he
Speaker 1:didn't even know who the competitors were but he said, if you don't take my money, I'm gonna go give the same check to them. Yeah. So he they ended up taking it. He acquired approximately 41% of the company at somewhere around a $200,000,000 valuation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:When Yahoo went public in 1996, the had an instant paper profit of a 150,000,000. But then at the peak of the .com bubble, Yahoo was valued at 125,000,000,000. Mhmm. So anyways, phenomenal investment but very different valuation and and ownership targets and and unclear. I would love to see OpenAI get, you know, for profit and get public.
Speaker 1:But for to to, you know, we'll we'll have to see. Yeah. Going down the list, another classic pump SPAC that we we had pump on the show to talk about it.
Speaker 2:SPACs are back.
Speaker 1:SPACs are back. Pumps got a SPAC. A lot of people were calling that a top signal. I I'm excited to see what what pump does with with his. But in general, this this retail extreme excite excitement around these sort of Bitcoin treasury companies is fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In the context of it now being very easy to get Bitcoin exposure in a variety of different ways, I I'm not sure we need a bunch of net new Bitcoin treasury companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it's it's it's mostly that, like, whenever there's a whenever there's a new trend or a bubble, they're, like, there it's very easy to map like, okay, there's one company that it's really working. This is massively successful. Like, everyone is using ChatGPT. Like AI is a thing.
Speaker 2:It is it is real. The internet was real. Google was real. Amazon was real. But the the twenty fifth Amazon copycat did not And do so Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's always the risk is that you've applied like the same overarching theme to something that's like so far down the power law that it will never grow into the valuation that it's been Yeah. Assigned. That's always the risk. Yep. What else do you have?
Speaker 1:Dwarkash updating his timelines. That happened Monday. We had him on the show. It was it was a fun conversation. I think Dwark Keshe has remained incredibly bullish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and I think he rightfully is. He also is being somewhat of a realist and like, I don't think that AI is priced in to the market broadly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I do think that some of the promises of AI will take another couple years, another five years Yeah. Etcetera to really deliver versus some of the much more hyper aggressive AI 2027. Yep. You might say that AI 2027 itself was in in hindsight that could end up being like the number one top signal which is that basically, if if you haven't read the the kind of study paper essay, they basically say that by by 2027, you know, a single foundation model company could just be acquiring every auto manufacturer in The US to develop, you know, millions and millions of robots that would then build, and we would hit this sort of fast takeoff.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, Apple was like, we can't possibly get out a slightly lighter VR headset until 2027. Like, and and this is what we do. Like, we make We've been
Speaker 1:working on this for a decade.
Speaker 2:We make stuff, like, every year. We are the best at it. We make the most stuff. And the best stuff, pretty much. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The most complicated stuff, that's what we make when we're in the Widgets business. And, yeah, making that headset lighter, it's gonna take us a full two years Yeah. To refresh that.
Speaker 1:And I liked Two. 2027. It was a it was a fun read. Thought provoking for sure. Very thought provoking.
Speaker 1:But I I think that we will be we'll have to circle back on it in 2030 or even 2027.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the the the big thing was, you know, our conversation yesterday with with Meter about the actual, like, are we are are we close to reinforcing AI where the AI models are self improving? And I was kind of like, Okay. I really hadn't read the full report beforehand, so I didn't really know what to expect. I was blown away because I was expecting, you know you know, something between, like, you know, like Arc AGI. It feels like with Arc AGI, we're 10% towards solving something there, which is just like, you know, a basic versatility in AI that it can solve things that humans can solve, and it's not narrowly defined.
Speaker 2:It's generalizable now. ArcAGI is like the perfect example of, like, we maybe haven't hit we've done intelligence, but we haven't done general intelligence yet. And everyone keeps saying, oh, this is AGI. That's AGI. And ArcAGI is really holding it back, saying like, well, if it was truly general, we should probably be able to solve this basic puzzle that a kid can solve.
Speaker 2:And for that, it's like, okay, we're going from like 9% to 15%. Like, we are still, like, you know, 85% in not even, like, you know, nowhere close. And and the the the the meter report, I was expecting it to be like, well, you know, yes, we're seeing, you know, slight gains on self reinforcing AI development, and the and AI is starting to help build itself slightly. And the result was like, no, it's actually setting us back. In this domain, it's not working at all.
Speaker 2:And so that was like a pretty pretty big like, okay, there's a there's a completely different like, not that it's not useful. The stuff's useful all over the place. I saw Rune talking about that. He was like Yeah. For so many different projects it is useful.
Speaker 2:But for the frontier like it's not the product that's advancing the frontier at
Speaker 1:all. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I mean that that that probably bridges into the Well the talent wars but
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Bridging in, I do think that in hindsight, we will look back in maybe a year, two years, five years, ten years and think about the signing bonuses and general offers of AI researchers in June and July of twenty twenty five as being somewhat of a top signal. I think it is very strategic and makes sense from Zuck and Meta's point of view. Right? When you look at their AI CapEx, it makes sense for them to have the best possible team and they have the balance sheet and the general profitability in order to do something like that.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But in general, AI researchers who, you know, six years ago didn't get any attention, much attention at all from the media. The fact that they're now trading for more than NBA superstars
Speaker 3:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:More than, more than, you know, Tim Cook's annual, total comp. It will be an obvious one in hindsight. The other one, 6 and a half billion dollar acquihire of IO. I think that again, you can rationalize it in the sense that it's a couple points
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of OpenAI to put together the best founding hardware engineering team probably in the world that's available collectively. But at the same time, again, it's it's quite a lot considering, you know, the company was barely I think a year old at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting because ChatGPT is so installed. It feels like it's already Lindy. And it feels like even if there is some massive correction in the market generally or some pullback, like people are still gonna be using Chateappity as an app. Right?
Speaker 2:In the same way that Amazon made it through the .com crash. The question is like, what what will it take for the IO acquisition to look like the Instagram acquisition in hindsight? Like, they still kind of have to go from zero to one with that project, which is very different than Instagram, which was already a mature and growing business.
Speaker 1:It was And they really they figured out ads really well.
Speaker 2:Well, Instagram, were were doing ads?
Speaker 1:They weren't doing ads.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm saying but Meta was like, we know how to make Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was like a perfectly perfectly complementary business.
Speaker 1:We know how to monetize social users better than anyone on earth.
Speaker 2:And you have gotten a bunch of social users and it's working and it's growing.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and you're even And
Speaker 1:we can actually accelerate the growth Yeah. Of the business Yeah. In a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 2:So it'd be very different if it was like, okay, yes, IO is selling, you know, like like it's it's a small but growing hardware company that people love.
Speaker 1:For the product people love.
Speaker 2:For the product people love. And maybe they can't manufacture enough it. Yeah. Or maybe they're maybe they're under monetizing it right now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But people love it. But it's like it's pre launch. Yeah. Multi billion dollar acquisition for pre launch is pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:Yep. Going down the list. What we have? I think I think the tokenized private company shares, I I think it
Speaker 2:That is interesting.
Speaker 1:With without you know Republic and Yep. And Robinhood both creating products that are completely unauthorized basically derivatives. Companies that they're they're offering are are angry at them saying don't do this. And
Speaker 2:Is this Spider Man meme of like top signals pointing at each other?
Speaker 1:Anyways, I'm excited about these experiments. I just think that I'm a little bit wary. And then last but not least, Satya doing two rounds of layoffs this year. Mike, we've talked we've reported on this before. Microsoft does routine layoffs.
Speaker 1:I think they're pretty good at at Yeah. At kind of identifying under performers or people that should just move on to different different roles. But Satya, I think has been I think we'll look back and he's been excited Mhmm. But pragmatic.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Right? And I think that he will when the dust settles, I think he'll look pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder, like if there's some massive pullback in I mean, I I don't even know what what what that would look like. Like, essentially like if let let let's assume that the the current capability of AI models essentially plateaus for like a decade or something like that. Just hypothetically. And you know, they're useful but it's not some reinforcing fast takeoff super intelligence.
Speaker 2:What is Microsoft a big loser in that scenario? It seems like Satya is pretty well positioned, right?
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Like the company Prince Cash is very healthy, has done these layoffs. They'd have to retreat from some stuff and some of the promises that they made maybe. But in general, it seems like they'd be really really well set up to just like like stick through. But I'm trying to I'm trying to think of going back to the the .com bubble and and the like you know, the effect of like Oracle's mainframe business. Like probably made it through pretty smoothly.
Speaker 2:Because it was just like really long contracts with companies that were getting true business value out of it. And weren't about to churn because it was not this like experimental. Like if you had moved from paper to an Oracle mainframe, you weren't like, oh, this stuff's overhyped. It's not gonna solve all my problems. I'm gonna go back to paper.
Speaker 2:Yep. You know? And so in the same way, it's like if you're on, you know, Microsoft cloud or Azure or you know, everyone's using Excel and they're like, yeah, maybe we're getting some value out of this Copilot upgrade that we did. Maybe we pull back from that. Maybe, yeah, we you know, our employees like rewriting emails every once in a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, they pull back from that, it's not disastrous to the fundamentals of Microsoft.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we didn't even cover how there's a set of labs with billions of revenue. Yeah. And then there's a set of labs that are valued similarly
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That have zero revenue.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, you know, basically a $100,000,000,000 of market cap with very little revenue supporting
Speaker 2:The that at question like a year ago was what was the who's actually making profit off of AI? And it was only NVIDIA. NVIDIA was making more than a 100% of all the profit combined because all the other companies were loss making by comparison. And now like that narrative has taken so much hold that NVIDIA is the largest company in the world and it's put this massive target on their back at 4,000,000,000,000 where every all of their major customers want to get off Nvidia, it feels like. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like Google did it. Amazon's doing it. And Microsoft's saying that they wanna do it. And Apple's, you know, was never really a big NVIDIA buyer, but the on device inference is crazy too. Like, if you think about if if we don't have any major breakthroughs in how AI works, like the capabilities, and we just want the current capabilities everywhere as cheap as possible, like on device inference becomes really, really valuable.
Speaker 2:Right? And all of a sudden, that drops demand for NVIDIA potentially. Right?
Speaker 1:We might need to do a SWAT analysis,
Speaker 2:John. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, Nvidia's an incredible company. Jensen's an incredible CEO. They were perfectly positioned for this, you know, multi decade technology trend.
Speaker 2:And he was way underpriced at the start of the boom. Yep. Like, the the orders really did come in. The training runs really did happen. Yep.
Speaker 2:The question is just, is that next order of magnitude the, like, the situational awareness from Leopold Aschenbrenner, this thesis that we're gonna build a $55,000,000,000 cluster, then a $50,000,000,000 cluster, then a $500,000,000,000 cluster. Like, is that gonna happen, or will there be a hiccup? And this is always the this is always my question for like the doomers. Everyone was saying like, P doom. I'm I you know, what's my percentage chance that goes bad?
Speaker 2:And I was like, the much more interesting question is P stagnation. What is the probability that something happens, and whether it's technological or even regulatory, like the if you compare AI to nukes, with nukes, we had the ability to make nuclear reactors, and humanity as a whole basically just said, we're going to pause. And we stopped building them. And now we're talking about building them again, but if you look at that curve, it is a perfect S curve. It's like, we had no nuclear reactors, then all of a sudden we grew them exponentially, and it looked like, wow, we're going to have energy too cheap to meter.
Speaker 2:And then it flatlined. And we were and for a variety of reasons. They're hard to build, hard then there were regulations, there was just general fear. So there were a lot of different things. I would always go to the doomers and just say like, even if all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct, what is the probability that there's just like, if you are successful doomers and you freak everyone out, there might be regulation that just says don't build anything bigger.
Speaker 2:Yep. Or it could be economics. It could just be it could be physics as we've talked about with this this idea that at a certain point, like, you can't put more than 100 of global GDP towards building clusters. Like, it's impossible. And so like there should be this like s curve there.
Speaker 2:And and that's why, know, all the all the AI researchers are now focused on like the the compression of learning and like the actual algorithms and getting more efficiency because like there will be, you know, there should be some sort of like, you know, top upper bound of the amount that you can build. But that certainly hasn't been like a thesis broadly in the market. People have just been like, yeah, like, we'll just we'll just 10 x computing and then 10 x it again, then 10 x it again. And it's like, it probably will happen over a period of time.
Speaker 1:Great investment strategy, by the way. Just get a 10 x.
Speaker 2:And then 10 x it again.
Speaker 1:And then 10 x it again. Yeah. And last but not least
Speaker 2:Oh, you have another one?
Speaker 1:Almost almost forgot about this one but it The should be White House meme coins which was which feels like
Speaker 2:Crazy times.
Speaker 1:Very long ago. It was the local top basically Yeah. At the time.
Speaker 2:It was the local top.
Speaker 1:Many people were calling the top.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Just hurling meme coins
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Out of the White House.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's the real question is like is like, how how local is this top? If if if it is a top. Because it could be we've been in the kangaroo market. It could just be, oh, a couple months.
Speaker 2:Even the interest rate sell off, the post SVV crash, that was like one hard year. Right? And then we started building back and we got the AI narrative. And so there's this big question about like you know, Dwarkash pushed his timelines back, but he's not saying that super intelligence will never arrive. He's not saying that AI will never break through these things.
Speaker 2:He's just saying that it'll happen a little bit a little bit further out. And so the question of, you know, like these meme coins being a being a top signaler, all this crazy stuff, it's like there could be like a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else. So, I don't know. It's always hard to manage these things and predict. But it's certainly fun Good to all these things.
Speaker 2:And at least Good
Speaker 1:to keep track of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You gotta be tracking the top Keep your
Speaker 1:own list. For sure. Keep your own list.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev.
Speaker 2:Let's go through some more timeline. Joe Wiesenthal says, thinking about the recent episode we did Charlie Mick Mick Elgott Elgott, where he referred to Trump as the human vicks. I like that. He just creates volatility out of thin air. It really is Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, Trump coin Trump coin is up 20%.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over the last week.
Speaker 2:I mean, volatility traders have to be Although it is dramatically
Speaker 1:since
Speaker 2:What is the what is like the actual market cap of Trump coin? It
Speaker 1:sticking Circulating market cap is 2,000,000,000, fully diluted is 10,000,000,000. The price per Trump is current. It peaked at $45 and it is at $10 today.
Speaker 2:Wild. So I like this one from I am developer. The dumbest person you know is being told, you're absolutely right by ChatGPT. Like it is funny to imagine that that is somewhat like that like is is the Glaze Gate like deranging society in some way? Is the fact that everyone's getting this like constant positive reinforcement?
Speaker 2:Because if you go to it and you're like, hey, should I should I go a 100 XL in the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually from my interactions, you you were at the level of Citadel. You're definitely you definitely could just be a a hedge fund manager if you if you went full time on it. Like you could do it. Like you're definitely not just like a retail trader who's gonna get hoes this time like every Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're different.
Speaker 2:You're different. You're different. Tracy Allaway has a funny place. This week in a nutshell, do you see this one? Markets don't like tariffs.
Speaker 2:But Trump just imposed more tariffs and markets are at all time highs. Because markets think he's gonna pull them back.
Speaker 5:Hilarious. It's great.
Speaker 2:I mean you know, we are just in the cycle of like even even the bad news is just like a catalyst for good news when it's reversed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:right. The psychology of the market is just like total up on that.
Speaker 1:Credit to Grock right now. Maybe it really is super intelligence because I I asked it should I go turbo long the market right now? Mhmm. And it says deciding whether to go turbo long means using turbo warrants or similarly leveraged derivatives to bet on rising market prices requires careful consideration of your financial sitter rate
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Situation, risk tolerance and current market condition. Since turbo long refers to a high risk leverage financial product. Anyways, it breaks it down for me. I don't think it necessarily
Speaker 2:Does it make a recommendation though?
Speaker 1:It says, not advisable for most investors.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Should I ask it, but what if I'm built different?
Speaker 2:We're
Speaker 1:It says love the confidence. If you're built different and ready to roll the dice with a turbo long, let's cut through the noise and get real. Anyways, honestly, it says if you're gonna do it pick the right asset. Yeah. Which is good advice.
Speaker 1:If you're gonna invest invest in the good companies.
Speaker 2:It doesn't feel like talking to somebody. I would expect someone with with with super intelligence to have like strong opinions and I feel like none of the AIs really have like
Speaker 1:Honestly, this is pretty pretty sound advice. Yeah. So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy on a demo account.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:To see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 1:It does say not financial advice. It I'm gonna take it as financial advice.
Speaker 2:Tyler, have you been playing with Grok four at all?
Speaker 5:I have not.
Speaker 1:No? Alright. Well, sign up sign up sign up for
Speaker 2:about the Sign up
Speaker 1:for heavy web browser.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I'm using the Perplexity web browser Yeah. Called Comet.
Speaker 2:Okay. How is it?
Speaker 5:It's pretty cool. I mean it's so
Speaker 2:Pitch me it. Like why would I use that instead of Chrome?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think the main thing is like it can read what's on your screen.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:It can also like sometimes interact with stuff on your screen.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:So I'm in Google Sheets right now. I have this list of names. Yeah. And I'm trying to get like, okay, what do these people work?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And so first I said, just give me a list of of people on the screen and put that into the chat. And then I said, okay, what do these people work? It gave me that and then it started to like load them in like it would interact with the Google sheet. It would like input them in which is like super useful.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 5:But then it kind of started breaking. So it's like I I think the product is like very early on still. Yeah. But and it's also pretty slow. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I think this like kind of paradigm, if it was if it was like super fast and like Okay. Much kind of cleaner I think it'd be really useful.
Speaker 2:So I'm hearing like it saved you a copy paste from like copying the sheet into a different tab of like ChatGPT basically. Basically. Yeah. That that's the first thing.
Speaker 5:Basically just moves two tabs into one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How does how does the search is like the I'm assuming the default search is perplexity? Yes. How fast is that?
Speaker 5:So that's pretty quick. It's just when it's like interacting with the page, it's like really slow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. How
Speaker 2:does it compare to Cluely? Like the like the I don't know. The the design trade off of like new browser interacting with like only the website versus like the whole computer.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, Cluelly is definitely more catered toward like the video call or like video input, audio input. Yeah. It's like, I I think that that's kind of different use cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because
Speaker 2:Clearly, is more like proactive. Right? Like like, I would ask you a question over Zoom Yeah. And Clearly would just hear that question and automatically query it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. As you've been browsing around with the Perplexity Comet browser, has it ever just done something without you take without you being like, go do a thing?
Speaker 5:No. No. Okay. It's it's always like I prompt it. It gives me something.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Where clearly
Speaker 5:is like, you have it running and then Yeah. You can you can query it, but it also will just give you stuff.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is that this is that debate about like push versus pull from AI. Like, if I have to if I have to tell the computer to go do something versus like, if it does it preemptively for me, pre proactively for me. I'm thinking about like Google Chrome will do like auto translation on websites. Like if you land on a Spanish language website, it will just be it'll just understand that you want it translated into English. It'll translate it and then just rerender it, and then it pops up a little bar at the top, and then you can choose to go back to the Spanish language one, if you speak Spanish, I guess.
Speaker 2:And I feel like chopping down some of those like proactive ones. And you see this with like, when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they already they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary for like three bullet points from every article. And they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of like where's the right place for the for the interaction to sit?
Speaker 2:How expensive or wasteful is it just to like do that interaction on everything? But like, you could imagine a situation where the browser, every time you hit a news website, it's it's pre populating the obvious questions or the one layer deeper or one layer shallower. Like, here's a summary of what you're reading, and then here's extra context on things that are one layer deeper. Because when I go to a website or an article, I'm usually trying to understand like give me the high level and then give me like if I went through and clicked on every person in this article and went to the Wikipedia, that's usually how I browse. And so if I guess if it could do that a little bit faster, that might be valuable.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think it'd be cool. I mean, there there's always a worry about you're basically just like have this like bar on the side that's just full of slap. If it's just like summarizing Yeah. Your page.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results. Like Dwarkash has a post here. He says, surely this doesn't have any implications for how I use AI and whether I'm fooling myself about how much more effective it's making my podcast prep. Right?
Speaker 2:And I think that there might be something there where it's like it's like, I could just read a Wall Street Journal article here, or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article with a sidebar of like ChatGPT summary and also ChatGPT extra queries to give me more data. But at a certain point, like, I just have to get the information into my brain one way or another. And so giving me, like, three layers of abstraction on top of it, it's like, it's not necessarily improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buyout firms poaching young bankers.
Speaker 1:The question is like, it's much faster to read a great summary of something, but you're gonna affect it. If you spend ten seconds reading it, you're gonna retain a lot less of the context and the relevant information if you just spent five minutes reading the article. Yep. So with ChatGPT, like style summaries, do you just need to like spend do you still need to spend five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of of context?
Speaker 2:I think there's two things. Like one is that like there's just no substitute for spending a full day with a topic. Like reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. Like the more time that you spend on a topic, it like whether it's searching Chad GPT or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people like it's just the more time you spend with something, the more information you're compressing, whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form. Like, there's just no substitute for like the amount of time that you put into something.
Speaker 2:Because if you're like, you read a summary of a book that was really good, and I read the full book, I'm just And I spent five hours with it, and you spent one hour. Like, I just have an advantage over you on the information. And then on the flip side, it's like, there is an art to summarization. Like, the work of a great biographer is to summarize someone's life. To summarize all these conversations that they have with about all the people around that person and read all the books about that person.
Speaker 2:And like when you think about like, you know, David Senra with the Founders Podcast, like he reads a book, he summarizes it, but he does it in a way that is like 10 out of 10. And I feel like all the LLMs are very like mid at stuff generally. Yeah. And they do and they do a very five out of 10 job like like Dorkash said.
Speaker 1:Well, is the crazy thing. R4Rock on X reported yesterday that this company Headway, which is the number one book summary app just released a series a. Or sorry, they just did a series a. They are at 200,000,000 of ARR growing 2x year over year with 30% net income. Yes.
Speaker 1:And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by
Speaker 2:I saw that and I was thinking about Francois Cholet had a tweet about this. Cholet. Am I gonna find this? Cholet. How do I spell Fran Francois Cholet.
Speaker 2:Here we go. He had a had a post here that said, in my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game. It's completely ineffective at teaching you languages, but it's quite entertaining and great at making you feel like you're learning. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that company is in fact less about actually teaching you that information any faster and more just about repurposing information in an entertaining way and it's giving you some sort of value that way. And so you're happy to pay for it because it's just a good way to spend your time.
Speaker 2:And so I be surprised if like there hasn't been any massive breakthrough in how you deliver information to a human being. Like their brain has a certain IO and you have to get the information in. We don't just have like the matrix where you just go, oh, now I know kung fu. Right? Not what we've created.
Speaker 1:Not yet.
Speaker 2:But repurposing stuff in like a fun and different format certainly seems like it has value to the tune of serious financials for that company. And and I wouldn't and I would say like that that is not that is not that company's success is is very much independent of like actually game changing artificial intelligence. Intelligence. It's more about the actual implementation of the app and the experience of using the app. Totally.
Speaker 2:Anything else from the browser? Browser Wars?
Speaker 1:Get on Dia. Think I'm try to
Speaker 5:keep keep playing around with it.
Speaker 2:Keep playing around with it.
Speaker 1:Can you download Dia?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Download Dia and let us know which one you'd pick over those two because they're both AI browsers. OpenAI is gonna have one in maybe a couple weeks, I think. That was the Reuters reporting. So we'll have to try that too.
Speaker 2:Demo all these. See what is happening.
Speaker 1:The the browser wars. Brought to you by Chromium. You.
Speaker 2:By Google Chrome. Browsers will definitely be designed in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together, get started for We should read through Joe Wiesenthal's analysis because he says green shoots for the economy. I was texting with him.
Speaker 2:I said, there's so many top signals. He said, there's been top signals my entire career. Maybe this time is different. We'll see. He says, it's not just the stock market that's booming.
Speaker 2:There are signs that The US economy has some wind in its back right now. And this is what was interesting about the the ZERP era. Even though there was so much froth, so many overfunded companies at a 100 million a 100 x ARR, it didn't destroy America because the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well. There was just this, like, this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy, but the baseline of, like, where mortgages were, how much debt people had, defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 02/2008. And so we that's why we didn't go into, like, a depression after SVB crashed.
Speaker 2:We just went into, like, what most people would call, like, a correction, not a depression. So that's interesting. So Joe is breaking it down, and we're gonna talk to Sean Frank about this too. The Amazon Prime Day sales data came out. So I completely missed it.
Speaker 2:Prime Day is in the summer. It's not Black Friday. It's like the the opposite time of
Speaker 1:the year. Smart for Amazon to basically be like, we're gonna have two Black Fridays.
Speaker 2:It worked. But apparently, Prime Day sales dropped. And he says, well, Prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about US economic momentum. I want to observe the counterpoint and the fact that maybe the economy is seeing some green shoots. But before I talk about the economy, let me talk about the market for a second.
Speaker 2:Despite all the uncertainty and negative seeming news developments, the lines keep going up. Trump recently announced 50% tariffs on Brazil due to the country's treatment of its former president. Nobody cares. Trump talked about more aggressive tariffs on Japan and Korea, barely a blip. Maybe this maybe the story is that none of these things will have much bearing on the major market growth drivers, namely AI, so they don't matter.
Speaker 2:Maybe the story is that Trump will cave in the end and so these headlines are just noise. We've seen this before, but I don't really know. Either way
Speaker 1:Maybe it's Panikins getting off the sidelines.
Speaker 2:Panikins. I mean, they they learn their lesson if they sold at the bottom when Trump was saying like, don't panic. We're we're we're going up. Like, they they feel stung by that. And so, you know, people learn the most recent lesson most recently.
Speaker 2:But either way, there's just not a lot of sensitivity in the market to all of the latest headlines. Okay. But back to the real economy. Here here, the picture is mixed because actually some of the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction. So for example, initial jobless claims, number I like to track closely, have actually fallen for four straight weeks.
Speaker 2:Here's Delta Airlines. Today, Delta Airlines is surging 15% after the company reinstated its earnings re reinstated its earnings forecast and said the demand is coming back. People are flying more. According to tracking from Civics, which runs a massive ongoing survey online, Perceptions about the economy, while still net negative, are at their highest levels in years. And this is the chart that I think the guys are pulling up.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit hard to see because it's very wide. But, basically, from 2017 to 2020, everyone was very optimistic about the condition of the national economy. Through inauguration day, the tax law sign, the stock market dropped, stocks began to decline, but people were still optimistic about the economy. And then coronavirus kinda changed everything. There was this massive massive drop where we were hitting circuit breakers, like, every day for, like, weeks.
Speaker 2:It was terrible. I remember it very vividly.
Speaker 1:We barely had sports.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We barely had sports. Yeah. The NBA canceling was crazy.
Speaker 2:That was like the okay. Wow. This is really, really serious. And so
Speaker 1:think everybody was looking around saying, we're living through history right now and I and I actually don't like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone lost their jobs who was in, like, retail or any sort of service industry. And then the NBA players lost their jobs because they're like, yeah. You can't even play basketball. And so it was it was a disaster.
Speaker 2:And and since then, the reporting for the last five years from the survey has been net negative, basically. But it's at its highest rate in in basically years. And so all the way through inauguration day, still negative and dropping through Russia invading Ukraine and then dropped after the terror inauguration day and the tariff announcement but is climbing back up which Joe is highlighting as potential green shoots. So he says, yesterday, the New York Fed released its latest survey of consumer expectations and it said that respondents are anticipating lower inflation, improving job prospects, and expect easier access to credit. A big theme from a month ago was that the economy was decelerating, but the Fed might hold off on rate cuts because of uncertainty about the ultimate tariff levels.
Speaker 2:But it also seems plausible, at least right now, based on a little smattering of data that part of the story here is economic tailwinds. Oh, and by the way, Citi's US Economic Surprise Index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations recently turned positive again. It's good news. So, you know, I don't know. All these top signals, it might be might be too much top signal.
Speaker 2:Might be might be too early, you know? Might still
Speaker 1:be We might just be getting started.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also Citi put on a buy rating on one of the companies that you were talking about.
Speaker 1:Which one?
Speaker 2:I forget. One of the ones that was like was like an example of a of of a top signal. Citi was like buy it. I forget which one. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2:But Switch yours. Vanta real quick. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 2:So It's I wanna have
Speaker 1:a debate. To time. Time for a debate. Time for a debate. The great debate.
Speaker 2:Sean Maguire versus Augustus Dorico, good friends of the show. Hung out with them both multiple times. Very interesting PR dust ups
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:This week. Very, very interesting how they got in the pickle that they got in. Yep. The different pickles. And then different strategies getting out of it.
Speaker 2:And I wanna compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so, Augustus, we had him on the show Monday, was was sort of like being attacked or canceled, but by the right, by the far right, by conspiracy theorists, kind of the the the tinfoil hat right wing crowd all around this idea that he was cloud seeding about two days before the massive floods in Texas that wound up killing a lot of people. And so, was this very, very serious scenario. People were dead. It was it was a natural disaster, and he kind of was just going about his business, like cloud seeding.
Speaker 2:Oh, someone bought it here. I'm gonna go deliver it. I'm gonna someone bought it there. He's running his business, and then he gets dragged into this thing. And he has to all of a sudden
Speaker 1:And to be clear, very, fair and and good that people were asking questions. Right? Natural process.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like Like they teach cloud seeding in high school. Yeah. So I think
Speaker 1:And it's a and it's a scary topic. People are gen generally kind of wary of weather modification. Whether it's from a religious angle Totally. Or health reasons Yep. Or chem trails Yep.
Speaker 1:Or whatever whatever they sort of subscribe to. Yeah. Think it was right for people
Speaker 2:There's to ask so many examples throughout history of like of like, there's a technology that's great. It has a promise to do x y or z. And then there's like a negative side effect that comes out of that. And so Augustus has had to he just got sucked into this because there's like this very acute story about the Texas floods, and he's right there. And and so he has to go explain cloud seeding and what he does and make his case as aggressively as possible.
Speaker 2:Sean Maguire, on the other hand, kind of waded into a debate or like a like a argument over Mamdani, the mayor of New York in a very different world. Like, Sean lives in California, is a tech investor, is not directly affected by by New York City politics, and could have stayed out of it entirely, and instead was like, proactively He's not known for
Speaker 1:staying out
Speaker 2:of it. The man loves the debate. He loves the fight. And so
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I think his position generally was you need to be vocal and loud about extremism. Yep. And whether or not people believe that Zoran. Zoran.
Speaker 1:Zoran. Zoran. Zoran.
Speaker 2:Not Zoran. That's the Adam Sandler movie.
Speaker 1:Yes. Whether or not people believe that mom Donnie is an extremist. Personally, I've seen some of his old posts. Yeah. Seems like it has some very extreme views.
Speaker 2:Yep. Maybe he's changed, maybe he hasn't. He's kinda gone back and forth. Yeah. He was saying defund the police.
Speaker 2:Now he's saying he doesn't wanna do that.
Speaker 1:Did and and Sean's Yes. One of Sean's points was that Mamdani was sort of celebrating the third Antifada. And I believe that Sean brought up that the last Antifada there was a bunch of suicide bombings. It's Yeah. Crazy thing to promote.
Speaker 2:But the interesting point is that is that Sean could have if Sean hadn't posted, he no one would be talking about Sean Maguire. Right? But Augustus didn't come out and comment on anything and everyone was asking him for comment.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:It hit the timeline from other people. Yeah. Sean's crisis started with a Sean Post. So it's it's a very different, like, inciting inciting element.
Speaker 1:Creation versus reaction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something like that. And so my my question is, like, does that necessitate a different calm strategy? Because they had very different calm strategies. So what did Augustus do?
Speaker 2:He went direct. Right? And was posting his side and his data and his opinions and engaging with everyone that was attacking him, quote tweeting them, and doing it in a way that was like slightly funny, but also very serious, sharing as much data. And I think they're do being very diligent about like speaking their own language.
Speaker 1:Yeah. She sees If he sees a post pop up that's going viral
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:He's jumping on it.
Speaker 2:He puts it in the comments and then also Corte tweets it. Yeah. And and then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms
Speaker 1:Yes. I have a list here.
Speaker 2:That critiques were coming from.
Speaker 1:So he came on our show Monday. Yep. We had a good conversation.
Speaker 2:He did like us And then he met X space that day too.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then he proceeded to go on CNN Yep. Fox News, Pirate Wires, Infowars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, and Tim Pool, all within the span.
Speaker 2:And those are all a few days conservative outlets, basically.
Speaker 1:While working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide more information.
Speaker 2:Post article here now. Yeah. And so he's gone across the the spectrum. What's interesting is that Sean has not done any interviews, I believe. And he hasn't and he certainly hasn't, like, reached across the aisle to his attackers and said, like, I'm going to engage with you.
Speaker 2:And maybe that's the right move. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, I think he's been engaging over and over.
Speaker 2:I don't think he commented on that Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:No. And and not saying he wasn't doing he wasn't taking the the sort of traditional media approach, but he's been very Yes. Active and engaging with people bringing up
Speaker 2:On acts.
Speaker 1:Saying, hey, like, basically the key point, the key issue was the definition of Islamist. Yeah. Many people saw that and thought he was putting all Muslims in a bucket. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:His his intention and approach was to point out extremism. Yeah. Islamist extremism. And and I think that just got like, Austin times in a in a in a post context is lost. And so he was basically like trying to set the record straight.
Speaker 1:Also did a a thirty minute, like a thirty minute video Yes. Talking through kind of the the the original post and some of the reactions to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it it it for me, it highlights like the two different styles of going direct. Yeah. There's going direct where you control 100% of the channel that your content is going out on. So it's your ex account.
Speaker 2:It's a video that you create and you upload. It's a post that you write. And then there's going direct where you're not sending a you're not sending a liaison to CNN, but you are going on CNN. And that's and and so Augustus did this interesting thing where, like, he definitely, like, went direct, but he also he also did all of the legacy media stuff. Like, Fox News is legacy media.
Speaker 2:CNN is, like, legacy media, and not in the traditional going direct playbook, but there's, like, this evolution. And and I think it's risky. Like, it is risky to go into someone else's platform. You go on Infowars, it's gonna have a certain aesthetic. You go on CNN, they might ask you some really hard question that you're not prepared for.
Speaker 2:They might try and make you look bad. Like, this was the this was the narrative around these, like, around the whole move of of, like, just go direct. Don't talk to the press directly. Don't let them tell your story. Tell your own story.
Speaker 2:Well, he's doing both. And it's interesting because it feels like it's working for Augustus. Like, it feels like he handled this pretty well. I would give him I would give him a lot of credit. With Sean, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:He did send out there have been a few surrogates. So Joe Lonsdale went on TV and and defended it and and kind of explained it, but Sean didn't. And I think that I I think these both might be good strategies. I'm I'm not really like, oh, you know, there's a one size fits all here. They're very different situations.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean. There was a great post from Pat Grady, he's a client partner.
Speaker 2:I have a
Speaker 1:Pat said yesterday, this tweet expresses a personal view. I'm not very vocal on Twitter and I'm sure this tweet will piss people off. If you're looking for drama, this is probably not it. This will be very disappointing to people with extreme views of any kind and that's sort of the point. The purpose of this tweet is two fold to express my support for the Muslim community and to express my support for my partner Sean Maguire.
Speaker 1:Pat says, some of my best friends are Muslim. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They are feeling fear right now. Fear for the safety of their families.
Speaker 1:This is not hypothetical. These are real people, loving parents and their sweet children who aren't sure if they can live here anymore. And he goes on to say, some of my best friends are Jewish. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family.
Speaker 1:They too have felt their fair share of fear over and over again for generations. This is not the experience any American of any background should have in this country. This is not what made America the greatest country on earth. Muslims are not the enemy. Jews are not the enemy.
Speaker 1:Extremists are the enemy. And when we let them sow the seeds of fear, fear of the other, we are letting them win. So basically, it goes on to say that this is really not about different different cultures and people. It's more about kind of Long story short, you don't wanna let the extremists win.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or like put you in the bucket of extremists.
Speaker 1:Yep. So anyways, interesting interesting response. Both Yeah. Both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing.
Speaker 2:I wonder I wonder what the takeaway is for like, with with Rainmaker, like, the core claim of the controversy was directly about Rainmaker's business. And essentially, it was in many ways existential to Rainmaker because there's like proposed bans of the technology. Right? And then there's also just the question of like, should cloud seeding be done at all or not? Right?
Speaker 2:And that was like the vibe online. Was like that was the way the debate was. Whereas people are not debating, like, should Sequoia invest in tech companies? Right? It's like a completely separate thing.
Speaker 2:And so maybe it does merit, like, a different approach in terms of, like, PR management. I don't know. I think they both handled it well. I don't know that I would recommend anything differently. I'm just wondering if the I guess the big question is, like, like, when should when should you step outside your core competency?
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting to think about reach with these two strategies. Mhmm. I would imagine that Sean has actually had more like reach, like actual eyeballs on his content.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:Just kind of estimating based on how viral some of his posts have gone. Mhmm. I would assume he's gotten 50,000,000 views Sure. On his post this week. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like a really really crazy number. Yep. And Augustus has gone on all these different platforms but I imagine the actual reach is far lower when you add you know, if you go on if you go on Fox News on some random show Yeah. There might be a 100,000 people that watch that segment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But maybe that's better because, like, the people like, with with Sean, like, he's trying to he's trying to fight back against something that's, like, a general vibe or a general accusation of a bad vibe, which is, like, Islamophobia. Right? Whereas, Augustus is trying to fight against, like, very precise, you know, pushback against his exact company and like the work that he's doing precisely. And so if I'm thinking about like who is Sean talking to?
Speaker 2:He's talking to like the broad audience of like people that perceive him as a person in tech. Yeah. And if I think about Augustus, he's thinking about, like
Speaker 1:How do I save weather modification as an industry in the country?
Speaker 2:Totally. Like, specific regulators, specific politicians, and specific like, and also, like, the local people in who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seeding who might go to their, you know, city council meeting and say, not in my backyard. So it's like, it's people that are I I I feel like the the pushback against Sean was very, like, broad and just, like, bad tech guy vibes, like like, just, like, negative broadly on the left and the folks that support Mamdani. They all, like, kind of just broadly don't like Sean right now because of what he said. With Augustus, it's like, there are a few people who were completely animated by the theory that he was responsible for the floods, and so he had to address them Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's really
Speaker 1:deeply. His business, his industry, his actions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The question for me is like is like, there are times when someone needs to step up or stand up outside of their core business. And this kind of bridges to the Brian Armstrong piece at Coinbase about being mission driven, which is basically like, in that context, was like, Coinbase is not going to be commenting on all of the current things that are happening in the world, all the different politics. Like, we're going to be focused on stuff that's related to crypto. And and that was really well received.
Speaker 2:Then the question is, like, for venture capitalists, should they only step up and start talking about politics when it's, like, a ban on an important technology or a change to the way, carried interest is handled? Or should they go as far as to say, you know what? Like, I care about what's happening in New York City even though I don't live there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think that's like, it's certainly like the riskiest. Like, you're the furthest away from something where you'll immediately have everyone in your industry rally around you, or everyone in your because it's like, well, this is very core to their business. But at the same time, it's like, there is some value to just being like, this is less of just like an investor. This is just like a person, and they have opinions about everything.
Speaker 2:And so I'm interested to talk to them and work with them. And also, I mean, in the original post, he did throw up a massive flag that was just like, I'm pro capitalist. Pro America, right? And so the question of like, does this hurt Sequoia? I think we were talking about this earlier.
Speaker 2:It's like, no. Because the people that were really bothered by this or, like, didn't get through this nuance and understand the Pat Grady response and understand him unpacking it, like Yeah. Probably were not in going to be in the Sequoia portfolio. Right? So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yep. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Go to linear.org.
Speaker 1:Get your golden retriever set up on Linear. It's one of the greatest gifts that you give them.
Speaker 2:What else is in the timeline we should go through? There's there's so many good stories. We should go through this, this story in the mansion section. Let's do that.
Speaker 1:There we go. Finally.
Speaker 2:There's a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:A California ranch is for sale for about 50,000,000.
Speaker 2:I really like this. There were two there were two very interesting houses in the mansion section today, and they're both being sold by tech founders who I've never heard of. And some of them don't one of them doesn't exist online. So this guy, Don tech entrepreneur Don McKinney found himself at a crossroads in 2014 after four consecutive startups, crazy, including one that sold to Lucent Technology for billions of dollars.
Speaker 1:I give him permission to call himself a serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:He's the Don.
Speaker 1:If you started four companies and you sold one for a billion, you can put serial entrepreneur in your bio.
Speaker 2:Billions. Billions. Yeah. I need to figure out exactly the whole deal here. I think this is Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have it here. So so he he basically instead of doing another business, he basically retired and started building a crazy house. He chose the latter. He purchased roughly 1,100 acres of ranch space in Sonoma, California for 12,000,000 and painstakingly restored it spending 33,000,000 over the years. Now, McKinney is looking to sell the ranch which has multiple residences, two lakes, four greenhouses, and a custom wood shop for around 50,000,000 known as Sonoma Summer Summit Ranch.
Speaker 2:The ranch is perched at the top of Sonoma Mountain about an hour from San Francisco. That is prime primary
Speaker 1:Great great option for a, you know, a GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity.
Speaker 2:I was about to say, you know, is it really worth spending half of your bonus as an AI researcher on one house?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or is that Well, in many ways Is
Speaker 1:that unresponsive? Full bonus post tax.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That's a good point.
Speaker 1:That's some ordinary income right there.
Speaker 2:That's that's really really rough. Anyway
Speaker 1:A Florida native, McKinney started his tech career in Silicon Valley in the nineteen eighties as a founding vice president. Let's give it up for all the vice presidents.
Speaker 2:Silicon graphics. That is a story term.
Speaker 1:Which worked on three d imaging. Yes. In 1991, he founded International Network Services, fantastic name, which was acquired by Lucent in 1999 for 3.71999
Speaker 2:selling? Well, what are you doing, buddy? I mean,
Speaker 3:I think he
Speaker 2:timed it. I think
Speaker 1:he I think he timed it perfectly.
Speaker 2:That stock for two more years.
Speaker 1:International Network Services. Services. Don't make names.
Speaker 2:Don't make names. Name companies like this and that.
Speaker 1:I mean, actually, they do now. People are bringing it back. What what was the company we talked about earlier this week that was like
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:It was Wisconsin or or
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. What that that that was just a fan writing in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. But it's real company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Real real company but not like hyped company.
Speaker 1:Well, soon to be hyped.
Speaker 2:Soon to be hyped. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Let's look at this.
Speaker 1:By the mid two thousands, McKinney, a conservation advocate was looking for a ranch to preserve when he heard about an available thousand acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years. Wow. By sheer coincidence, McKinney, an avid fisherman, had caught a What? 1,119 pound marlin. Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. So I have Oh. To actually have to correct this. So the
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Ranch was 1,119 acres. And by coincidence, he had caught a 1,000 No way. 119 pound marlin in a fishing tournament a few years earlier. He took the parallel as a sign
Speaker 2:That's and bought the property. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 1:I've never been big into that world.
Speaker 2:No?
Speaker 1:I've I don't think I've actually ever
Speaker 2:I've caught a 150 pound halibut in Alaska.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:And I did it when I was a kid. It weighed more than me at the time.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:It was the biggest like boost to my ego of all time. I caught an animal that was bigger than
Speaker 1:me. Every person should do that at least once.
Speaker 2:For
Speaker 1:sure. I gotta do that.
Speaker 2:A thousand pound marlin. That is a huge huge fish. So the ranch hadn't been touched in years. McKinney said he relished the opportunity to dig in. After tackling the ranch infrastructure, he turned to the main house originally built in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2:Many windows didn't close. It was not clear where the front door was located. He took the roughly 4,240 foot square house down to the studs and rebuilt it. One by one, he rebuilt the other outbuildings, he said, including the circa nineteen thirties cottage and a horse barn, which is now a party barn. There we go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. A skilled woodworker, he also added a 5,200
Speaker 1:skilled woodworker?
Speaker 2:He's just building his own this
Speaker 1:is Legend.
Speaker 2:This is like the dream.
Speaker 1:Well, the interesting thing here, interesting thing here, he bought this property when so he bought the property in mid two thousands. Was it 2014 or the mid two thousand?
Speaker 2:Oh, I guess he started working on the
Speaker 1:The remodel.
Speaker 2:The remodel, yeah.
Speaker 1:So he's $45,000,000 into this property, selling it for 50. But he bought it in the mid two thousand's. Yeah. So on paper, probably not the best return.
Speaker 2:But The memories are probably
Speaker 1:priceless. Fantastic
Speaker 2:time with it. Returns on He also has a home in The Bahamas. He is selling, so he and his partner have more time and resources to devote to philanthropy. We can't We wait until Why wait until we kick off and then have our estate dole it out? He said, let's participate now.
Speaker 2:That's great. Chad. The market for prime ranches is strong thanks to liquidity among other high net worth buyers. Probably those AI researchers unironically. There's a lot of people hedging in land.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, you're worried about the top signals, buy some land.
Speaker 1:Buy a ranch.
Speaker 2:Anyway, get on numeral too, numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. There's another there's another tax compliance
Speaker 1:platform of John Kugen.
Speaker 2:It is. I use it. There's another tech person who has a $50,000,000 home or just slightly under $4,949,500,000.0. This is an 8,000 square foot nine bedroom home with a tennis court and a pool. And you're gonna you're gonna love this.
Speaker 2:I don't think you've read this yet?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Okay. I'm gonna
Speaker 2:blow your mind. So a circa nineteen thirties estate, just a few houses from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is coming on the market for 49,500,000.0. The roughly 8,000 square foot nine bedroom estate was the longtime home of the late inventor Ronald Katz and his wife, Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones and for making breakthroughs in credit card technology.
Speaker 1:So so if I'm hearing this correctly, sort of sort of like AI agents for
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Sort of like, you know, a vintage version of Finn?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. The I mean, I'm I'm very excited to be hanging out with Owen in a few years. Hopefully, he's patented Finn. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 2:Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake offs. Number one in GT two. But yes. So this guy has a whole Wikipedia page that we can pull up.
Speaker 2:We're looking for Ronald Katz. I think I have it in here somewhere. Let me see. They got so much stuff here.
Speaker 1:Ronald. We're
Speaker 2:we're not getting through any of this. Where is it? Ronald Katz. Okay. Ronald Katz.
Speaker 2:Yes. So his inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology. He has more than 50 patents covering his innovations. Patents, I know so many people who have like generational wealth from patents. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist Kind of
Speaker 1:a lost art.
Speaker 2:It's a lost art. Toll free numbers.
Speaker 1:We don't know how to patent in this country anymore.
Speaker 2:We don't know how to patent. We It's completely a lost art. Actually, the the person who bought my first company was a patent guy. He he went to college and studied like chemical engineering and built a bunch of patents for like lubricating petroleum as it flows through oil pipelines. Pipelines.
Speaker 2:And he came up with some chemistry
Speaker 1:is so funny.
Speaker 2:Patented it. And then he was like, yeah. In college, I was getting like a 100 k a month from licensing my patents or something like that. Like, sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there was a time when it when it seemed like the play was to develop technology, patent it and license it to companies. And then now if an entrepreneur comes to you Is a good idea.
Speaker 2:It's a bad signal.
Speaker 1:And they say, yeah, like I'm working on patents. It it almost always is a huge bear signal. Yeah. Because it's like
Speaker 2:It is such a lost art. We don't
Speaker 1:Develop something and then capitalize on it yourself. Yeah. Because it is like that you can you can definitely, if you get it right, you can make a lot more money from Yeah. Delivering the technology or whatever it is Yeah. Via your own product and capturing that incremental margin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting because the you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents. Right? They'd be like, just become the world expert in a certain field, get a PhD in it, spend ten years researching the frontier, and then develop an innovation, patent it, and then just cash flow free, you know, lifestyle forever.
Speaker 1:I do have I do have one friend that had something like this where he developed this supplement and effectively Yeah. Licensed it to a company and was has just been getting millions of dollars a year for his
Speaker 2:I have a patent.
Speaker 1:For coming up on like fifteen years.
Speaker 2:Did I tell you I have a patent?
Speaker 1:Oh, a big patent guy.
Speaker 4:Maybe it's not a lost
Speaker 2:I don't make any like cash flow off of it though. But I have a patent for What? Breakers. The capsule. I can hear that.
Speaker 2:I don't even have the IEM thing. I can hear you. Yeah. Have a patent on the capsule pouch. The capsule nicotine pouch.
Speaker 1:It's a fantastic innovation.
Speaker 2:Invented. John Coogan, the inventor. I love it.
Speaker 1:Anyway Mr. Marlboro.
Speaker 2:Not quite not quite the portfolio of Ronald Katz. I'll take you through a little bit of his history. It's interesting. So born 1936. In 1961, he cofounded TeleCredit with Robert Goldman.
Speaker 2:It was the first company to enable merchants to verify consumer checks over the phone using an automated system without the assistance of a live operator. So it's this is 61. 61, like, totally pre Internet. Someone says, I'm gonna write you a check. How do you verify that they that they have it?
Speaker 2:You have to call the company and say, do they have money It's an
Speaker 1:agentic workflow.
Speaker 2:It's an agentic. It literally is because it cut out the live operator that was the telephone operator. It's actually an agentic workflow. You're a 100% right. I know you're joking, but it's true.
Speaker 2:And so in 1988, he forms a partnership with Amex to provide call processing services. That partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz Technology Licensing. I feel like Great name. First Data isn't First Data huge?
Speaker 2:First Data is the is the is the layer below Stripe. Right? I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1:But There's a layer below Stripe?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm pretty sure Stripe is uses uses First Data for acquisition of credit cards, and I'm I'm I'm pretty sure it's the first processor of Visa and Mastercard. And so I I don't know if they use that might be misinformation. I I don't know if if Stripe uses First Data still, but I remember that, like, there is a lower level below Stripe, and and First Data was, like, one of those. But Ronald Katz.
Speaker 2:Where was this founded? Yeah. Nebraska. So Katz gets in there. Anyway, he also had the patent portfolio that for companies using automated call centers over 150 companies have taken a license to patents.
Speaker 2:The technology licensing company that he has earned approximately a billion dollars in license fees, such as suing accused infringers who take a license. He also founded Telebuyer LLC, a privately held company that commercializes inventions he made relating to electronic commerce and network based monitoring systems. In the early nineties, Katz developed a computer controlled video system for monitoring remote locations and an advanced scheduling and routing system for telephone and video communications. Katz leveraged his knowledge and work in these areas to create an electronic commerce system to help businesses reach customers in remote locations.
Speaker 1:I love I love all these words.
Speaker 2:B2B SaaS founder. Absolutely insane. It's wild. SaaS is So anyway, the his house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy Mansion.
Speaker 2:It, the home resembles an English country house with tennis court and pool. It sits on roughly one and a half acres in Holmby Hills overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club on Mapleton Drive, one of LA's most storied streets. Also adjacent to Spelling Mansion. You know Spelling Manor? Spelling Manor?
Speaker 2:Have you ever heard of this? Aaron Spelling. He was a big, TV guy. Built the largest home in Los Angeles, something like a $100,000,000. It had a it had a dedicated room for present wrapping because could wrap so many presents at that level.
Speaker 2:Like there are levels to this for sure. Like, oh, actually when I moved into my my one of my first apartments, I got like when we started making money young, I moved into like a it was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it was it had no walls or anything because it's like open floor plan because it's just studio and I'm just one guy. And and I had a I had there was room for a there was room for a washer dryer, but I didn't have a washer dryer because we like send out the You made it a present wrapping? I made it a present wrapping station, and I put a little table there.
Speaker 2:And you could like work from it, but it was like in the bathroom. And I was like, this is my version of a present wrapping room.
Speaker 1:And the spelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like I'm aesthetically living in Spelling Manor. So the cats have spent years renovating the estate before moving. Normal story here. The couple filled the home with art and collectibles from around the world.
Speaker 2:The game room includes antique billboards, billiards table, and vintage arcade games. Also on display was Madeleine's collection of pigs, stuffed animals, ornaments, sculptures, and paintings. It became it it started with just a few pigs and grew to become her thing to friends and family, kept adding to the trope. The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this?
Speaker 2:The, and what's it called? It's like it's like the elephant problem or the giraffe problem. There's a there's a name for it where where you make golden retrievers your thing, and then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you? Oh, you like And then it snowballs. And then everyone gets you so many that over twenty or thirty years, you develop like this massive collection of trinkets.
Speaker 1:For you, it might be horse accessories. I got you those horse electrolytes. You can get just more and more supplements.
Speaker 2:You're not the first person to get me horse stuff. I told you David used to get me mane and tail, the horsepower metaphor. You know, he he he's like obsessed with horses and stuff. Know, everyone's gotta have a brand. Anyway, what you saying?
Speaker 1:Oh, I said nice new haircut.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you. A horse could never.
Speaker 2:A horse could never. The horse hair is strong. It was breaking the scissors. We broke multiple pairs, but we did get it cut. It's thick it's thick hair over here.
Speaker 2:But you know who else has like the What's it called? It's like the grandma elephant problem or whatever. This woman who has this house has like an insane collection of pigs, because she started collecting pigs. Everyone gave her pig stuff. Somebody said that Peter Thiel has the same thing with Tolkien.
Speaker 2:Where Yeah. He named a few companies after Tolkien, and now everyone's like, everything you do must be Tolkien referenced. Like, if you are at all involved or whatever, like, I'm getting you another copy of Tolkien and and and and, like, you know, this person was kinda commenting, like, you know, like, might not watch the movie every night. You know? He might just be, like, generally a fan of that and then also a fan of other things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But
Speaker 1:You can be a fan of multiple
Speaker 2:But people tend to collapse the meme around you down to just like, oh, you're you're not just you're not just into Tolkien and other things. You're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff. Yeah. So.
Speaker 1:Fun We have a post from brother Reggie James. He's been on the show He says, I need TBPN to bring back cougar night at the Rosewood.
Speaker 2:Has it gone anywhere? Someone needs you're in Silicon Valley, go to the Rosewood and report
Speaker 1:ask. We gotta ask Prank for exits.
Speaker 2:No. He might be aware.
Speaker 1:Gives some good coverage on
Speaker 2:Yeah. He might be aware.
Speaker 1:But we were when we were at the Rosewood for staying there the night before y c demo day, you remember overhearing this like, the most the most There was a there was a man and a woman like a table away from us having the most deranged conversation. The most Rosewood coated conversation of all time where I think she was divorced or going through divorce talking about like breaking down, loudly breaking down their entire financial situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And being like basically like, I'm good because we have Carrie in this fund that's that's definitely gonna hit in the next.
Speaker 2:Never have I wanted Clearview AI more. You've really Clearview AI?
Speaker 1:No. Like the software to identify Yeah.
Speaker 2:Take a picture of someone and it scans the internet. It tells you immediately who they are. And it's like very controversial and people are like, oh, this is like, you know, total like surveillance state stuff. But I would have loved to know who what VC she was talking about. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it was absolutely about that. There was other stuff.
Speaker 1:It was wild. Oh, We're
Speaker 2:checking our credit card, and we're just seeing like
Speaker 1:He's He's hitting no move. Night? In every city. Absolutely wild. Well, Ryan has a good story here responding to Reggie's post.
Speaker 1:This is one time in 2012, my co founder and I crashed and burned so hard in a pitch on Sand Hill, the partners wrapped with, look, it's it's Cougar Night. You guys would actually do pretty well there. So that's the beauty of Sand Hill Road. You could crash and burn
Speaker 2:I don't even get this. I don't get this post. Like, why why would they do well if they're
Speaker 1:Well, like, maybe maybe, like, they're just
Speaker 2:Crashed and burned. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Speaker 2:Like, the company has crashed and burned
Speaker 1:or something. They they didn't do well in the pitch.
Speaker 2:Okay. So it's like maybe you could marry rich.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what he's saying. Okay. Got it. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Couple of studs, head over to head head over to the road wood Rosewood.
Speaker 2:Anyway, underrated strategy. Go to the road wood. Go to the Rosewood. Talk to the Cougars. Sell them your product.
Speaker 2:If you're an SDR. Just go and pull out Adio, customer relationship magic.
Speaker 4:Adio is
Speaker 1:the eight ID CRM. Adio on deck for Cougar Night is crazy alpha.
Speaker 2:Do you keep the Cougars in the CRM or no?
Speaker 1:But but they're potential like leads. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. If you're selling to VC and there's a cougar there who's who's maybe maybe you could sell SaaS to that VC and it would re inspire him to to grind harder and save the relationship.
Speaker 1:Save the relationship.
Speaker 2:It's possible. Anything can happen. Anything can happen. Nothing like the joy of implementing a new b to b SaaS product in your workflow, in your everyday workflow. If you do that, that could just reinvigorate your entire life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're just at cougar night.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just can't stop talking to the cougars about agentic workflows. For saving your marriage.
Speaker 2:No, you're just like, why would I wanna go on a bender and go to Nobu when I could be grinding? I've I've been reinvigorated.
Speaker 1:Many people are saying that.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, we talked about the top signals. Whether you're whether you're long, whether you're short, you make your own decision. You make. You do your own research. Think going express it on public.com.
Speaker 2:Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. And we have talk about the VW bus. We gotta talk about Parker VW
Speaker 1:from Moment yesterday talking about his fix he he raised a series b for his fixed income
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Platform, and he mentioned that they power Publix fixed income. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the VW bus. So the electric bus. The Wall Street Journal claims that it is a failure. We're gonna figure it out. How Volkswagen's electric bus went from American flagship to flop.
Speaker 2:The German company's hyped reboot of its iconic vintage van has been stunted by a luxury price tag. Trump's trade war in an embarrassing recall. And so, this Wall Street Journal article goes through the the the kind of story of the ID Buzz, the new Buzz. Crazy name. We should talk about so much here.
Speaker 2:I mean, first off is like, I do not understand why a change in the powertrain requires a new brand name or new sub brand name for a product. It should be like
Speaker 4:I think it shows
Speaker 1:lack of conviction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, I mean BMW is doing this with like the I four instead of the instead of the five four five five thirty five I. The I five is gonna be the electric one. And it just is more confusing.
Speaker 1:Know somebody that if they're if b BMW were to touch the m series, they would make Jan six look like a children's birthday party.
Speaker 2:They'd be very upset about that. But So it was always confusing. Why didn't they just bring it back as like the bus, and now you can get it with an electric powertrain? But then also, it's like this fun, kitschy, nostalgic vehicle. And what was the price tag on this thing?
Speaker 2:It was like 70,000 or something like that. Was so much money. Yes. See, the so even before the recall, the luxury sticker price of the ID Buzz, which starts at about $60,000, kept a break on sales as consumers pivoted to more affordable wheels in The US where the vehicle became available toward the end of, last year. Just over 3,000 had been shipped to dealers by the March, then and there was a slowdown in EV sales.
Speaker 2:The tax credits are going away, and president Trump's tariffs have caught automakers off guard. Very, very rough. Yeah. So in Dallas, European car enthusiast and parts supplier, Autry McVickers, said he was dead set on getting the buzz until his dealer told him that the Palmello yellow and white version he had his eye on would cost around $72,000, far more than he expected. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This feels like, you know, premium SUV territory. So 45 k, 50 maybe, 55 k. 72 feels crazy for this. And and it seemed like, I don't know why they couldn't get the price down. Do you think it's something to do with just the actual manufacturing complexities of electric vehicles?
Speaker 2:Because Elon is able to sell a car that's similarly capable, although the Model y has way more range and and features. And so it's hard to go up against the if you're if you're comparing the the Buzz to the Model y Yeah. In a spreadsheet, you're gonna get okay. Buzz is like cool and different looking, but am I really willing to sacrifice so many features and pay twice as much?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is interesting. I'm seeing a original 1973 Volkswagen bus. Yeah. It's for sale for $65,000.
Speaker 1:It's got 85,000 miles on it. Yeah. It's seen a lot. But it's possible that, you know, who knows what what went into kind of pricing it. But they might have said, hey, we're making this bus like for that category of that wants just kind of a fun leisure vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not super functional. You're not gonna drive it to the snow. You're not You're maybe driving it around town, going to the beach, things like that. But it doesn't feel like a It just doesn't look like a car that somebody's gonna daily.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that feels like a huge problem. If it's 65 k, the average American might I I I don't know. I probably shouldn't say the average American, but Yeah. But middle class family might say, hey, let's get the Volkswagen bus as our daily family car.
Speaker 1:But it doesn't it just looks kind of funky and loud. And I
Speaker 2:It just sticks out. I mean, so so in this article, they say that the ID Buzz in Germany, like, the the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car, like a halo product, which is it sounds funny when you compare it to, the Audi r eight, of course. But, they said the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms, and they're not really planning to sell in great numbers. So you're like, oh, that ID Buzz just does look different. When I go to get my next car.
Speaker 2:I should I'm just sick of having, like, the same plain white SUV that looks like everything else. But then you go in and you're like, wait, how much is it? And and is it really that much better than features against the VW Atlas, I guess, is their is their full size SUV. And so you walk out of there with an Atlas, which is probably around $55.60, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I actually don't know where that You can get an Audi q eight, which is feels much more like a premium product for the same price. Yeah. So and it's and it's just a lot more functional.
Speaker 2:How much did that that Cullinan sell for in cars and bids that was like, it had like 200,000 miles. Did you
Speaker 1:see The one that we were recommending people get is like a a call booth for their office.
Speaker 2:Wait. We were recommending that? I don't remember that.
Speaker 1:Probably. I mean, we broadly were recommending, you know, picking up an old Continental GT instead of a instead of a phone booth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. So so a Rolls Royce Cullinan Black Badge, 2020, so it's only five years old, sold for a $170,000. Just barely twice the price of the ID Buzz, but it has a 114,000 miles on it. Can you imagine can you imagine putting a 114,000 miles on a Rolls Royce Cullinan in in five years?
Speaker 1:I can. I would love to.
Speaker 2:I would love to. I mean, that's that's so so many miles. But but people were debating this. This is saying like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're if you're going if you're putting that many miles, like it has to be highway miles. So they're not hard miles. Like it's probably fine. Like and and Rolls Royce, you know, has a bad reputation as being like, you know, in the shop all the time. But if it made it this far, like maybe it'll make it another 100,000 miles.
Speaker 2:And it like actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steal of a century at one 70. Who knows? Could have been bombing around in a in a Rolls Royce Cullinan. Anything else on the VW bus thing?
Speaker 2:I still think it's I I just think it's it's it is it is hard that they price it so high. Maybe maybe the opportunity is more like like like Tesla just needs more different trim levels, but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices. Because, like, how different is the world if the Cybertruck is cheaper? Does it even need to be? Should it stay up there and be this halo car?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The interesting
Speaker 2:thing about a halo car
Speaker 1:in who lives I live in Malibu. Yeah. I bought a Mercedes Metris because I wanted like a a family van, something I could drive around surfing with, etcetera. And I have zero interest in the Volkswagen electric bus. And that's that's an issue.
Speaker 1:The other thing is if I was thinking
Speaker 2:about a car,
Speaker 1:if I wanted like if if I wanted to surf like a a car just to like trash and take to the beach and take surfing, you can get a Raptor for like 70.
Speaker 2:Raptor is such a
Speaker 1:funny It's like obviously very different, but if you're a dad that wants like a Yeah. Yeah. A kind of a car you can like beat up and do a lot of things in and throw the kids in. Do you wanna drive this, like, novelty VW that's gonna depreciate, like
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:50% in a year or get a wrap?
Speaker 2:I think it can be a very cute mom car. And and it can definitely like, if you look at Volkswagen's
Speaker 1:But does her mom really want lineup? Does do they really want the the buzz over, like, a q seven?
Speaker 2:No. But isn't Audi a Volkswagen product too?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's totally a flow where you go in for the buzz thinking like, maybe I'll get the quirky thing and then you walk out with a q seven. Or you walk out with an Atlas, which is basically a q seven too. Or you upgrade. You get a Urus.
Speaker 1:Cayenne Turbo GT.
Speaker 2:Is that a Volkswagen product too?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Porsche's Volkswagen. At
Speaker 2:least the at least the Cayenne GT looks different, know. But part of the reason that the VW bus is is like so legendary is like it was an icon and they spent a lot of time building that brand. They ran a lot of out of home advertising. They probably would have loved AdQuick back in the sixties when they were pushing the buzz.
Speaker 4:Mean they were AdQuick.
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Speaker 2:And we have our we have our guest, in the studio. What what are we doing, Jordy?
Speaker 1:A bunch of things. So Let's
Speaker 4:bring him in.
Speaker 1:Barb. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:How you doing? There he is. It's great to have you in the temple. What's the latest? What's going on?
Speaker 3:Hope you don't mind if I do a shot before we start this Doing what are you olive oil.
Speaker 2:Oh, Brian Johnson.
Speaker 1:Olive oil shots. Okay. There we go.
Speaker 2:This a performance? That's insane. I love it.
Speaker 1:Is that How how does it taste?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give us a taste review.
Speaker 3:Spicy as olive oils go. It's spicy, but it's super tasty.
Speaker 2:Spicy. Okay. Yeah. Is it is this a short term performance enhancer? Like, you're you're on the show for twenty minutes right now.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna get a boost for the next twenty minutes? Or is this more like a you do daily
Speaker 3:and then
Speaker 2:it it proves your performance?
Speaker 3:It's it's less of, a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing to do just to get really good fats in. But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys, so I'm just gonna pop on a glucose monitor here.
Speaker 2:Okay. There we go. Really maxing the
Speaker 3:He's just to find out if my blood sugar or not.
Speaker 2:Take us through the rest
Speaker 1:of What the
Speaker 2:else are
Speaker 1:you doing? So some some context on this. Fab's a buddy. In LA with us. Investor and but the real reason wanted to have you on is because I I feel like you have consistently been maybe two years ahead of me Mhmm.
Speaker 1:On various different types of health biohacking experiments. And I've always felt like I was somewhat ahead. Like in 2020, I had a
Speaker 2:You're like twenty years ahead of normies still.
Speaker 3:I I had a
Speaker 2:At least two years ahead of you.
Speaker 1:Barb, you would have loved this. I had a a cold plunge just in my bedroom in my no. This is 2020.
Speaker 2:Guess it's a year and a half. Dorm room. Because didn't you tell me the college the dorms, it's like six dudes in one unit?
Speaker 1:Well, UCSB will have like 15 guys in house.
Speaker 2:Dude, guys are not
Speaker 1:ideal biohacking environment.
Speaker 2:Imagine you're
Speaker 3:just like, hey. No. But but I would during sex, they say.
Speaker 2:Because my mother stayed up.
Speaker 1:But anyways, you've you've impressed me with how at the frontier you are. So I wanna have you on to talk about everything. Get the update on how you're thinking about GLP ones
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Peptides. Yeah. We can talk about a bunch of other things. But why don't you give a quick intro yourself and then we should start with like your stack, what you're running today and then we can get into some subtopics. Cool.
Speaker 3:Great. Great. Farbod Nivi, sort of health nut entrepreneur, investor. Have a new project that we're just, getting off the ground right now. It's called protocols.
Speaker 3:And, hopefully, we'll have some big news to share on that in in a few weeks. Mhmm. So, yeah, I guess that's that's my intro. We're we're we're
Speaker 2:What's the stack?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's start with what you're running today.
Speaker 2:Or what do you think what do you think you do that has like a power law outcome on your health? Because like sleep, diet, exercise seem like the most most important and then you get down into like, I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight and it's like Or
Speaker 1:is Pharmacist doing like gene therapy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So walk me through
Speaker 2:walk me through what's important and then and then what's more experimental?
Speaker 3:I've done like tons of experimental stuff. I've been doing blood work for, like, well over a decade. Got, you know, folestatin gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here.
Speaker 2:No
Speaker 3:way. They're they're probably getting near the end of their lives because they, you know, last a year or two.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, I mean, the crazy thing is, like, despite being a health nut, I kind of found myself at the end of last year, beginning of this year, sort of overweight, depressed, and pre diabetic. And, you know, I'm I'm 48 now, so these things creep up on you. You can't do what you did twenty years ago, and get the same thing twenty years later.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so I kinda sat back to figure out, like, what's wrong with my stack. Right? What's what's wrong with my routine? And, really, what it came down to is that I don't really have a routine, and I I'm sort of making it up every day. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think Shane Paris was on Chris Williamson, and said had this great point. He's like, a person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day. And I'm like, that hit me really hard. I'm like, oh, wow. We're doing self negotiation every day.
Speaker 3:We're, like, reinventing what it is to be a human being on a daily basis. What do I eat? Should I exercise? And I'm like, I'm really bad at routines. So that was actually the problem that I set out to solve.
Speaker 3:And in doing that, I actually ended up stopping taking TRT. Mhmm. So I don't take testosterone anymore. I stopped
Speaker 1:taking How coming how was coming off that,
Speaker 2:by the super interesting because I feel like everyone the narrative is, like, once you're on it, you can never get off of it because your body stops producing it naturally and you're, like, you're either on it forever or, you know, you you you should never touch it. That that that's, like, the common narrative.
Speaker 3:This was like another problem with my routine. I would take TRT, would do it for a month or two and then I'd stop. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 3:do it super consistently, it takes a while for, you know, the boys downstairs to turn off.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:You know? Yeah. So like, you can do it for a month or two and stop and they'll come back. And so I did a ton of blood tests actually and and my most recent one, which I just did with function, I did a huge function panel. My t my testosterone's, like, 600, 700.
Speaker 3:Free testosterone's above a 100. It's pretty good.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. That's cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well, and we can kinda get into a little bit. I've done peptides for probably seven, eight years. And so my stack right now
Speaker 1:is more How are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look. Like, Chinese up and down.
Speaker 2:And also and also, it's like, I I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is, like, glucagon like peptide, like GLP one, and that's generally not seen as a peptide for guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for, like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about, like, what what peptides even, like, drew your eye or were interesting, or, like, what what was even the goal with those?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I like to experiment. You know, seven, eight years ago, I'm like, let's see what these peptides are about.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:And peptides are just like short strings of amino acids. Like, a protein is a long string of amino acid. A peptide is a short string.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And they're used a lot in signaling in your body. So you can take, one peptide that tells your body to make more human growth hormone. And that's kind of interesting because it's Is that BPC?
Speaker 1:Is that BPC 157?
Speaker 3:Yeah. B p BPC 157 is different. Okay. BPC 157 is like this sort of broad ranging peptide. You actually make it in your gut.
Speaker 3:And if you just give yourself a lot more, it seems to help with, healing in general. Yeah. Do you think that But other ones increase growth hormone, other ones improve deep sleep, and if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it. And to your question about, like, how was I getting it? In in the years that I've done peptides, you could get it from a doctor, you couldn't get it from a doctor, you could get it from a doctor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Kind of in limbo now. Back and forth. And all these sites, they sell it for research purposes.
Speaker 1:And Which you are actually using for research purposes. Kind of research
Speaker 3:self research. For research purposes. Yeah. But it's not for human consumption. The GLPs, which are another type of peptide are the ones that you get like Mounjaro, Ozempic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and that one's really getting crazy too because we know the brand name Ozempic, but, like, Ozempic is old news.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The the current one is tirzepatide.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's
Speaker 3:right. And then retrutide is coming next, And there's two or three more after that.
Speaker 2:Do you think those will break into kind of like athletic men who are maybe sitting at like 13% body fat? Or is it Already like a microdose? Or or or do you think it will remain as just like a powerful tool for weight loss?
Speaker 1:Well, the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around GLP-1s or tirzepatide helping with like willpower broadly. Sure, sure. So imagine just having 20% extra willpower.
Speaker 2:But then but then there's the there's a counter example of, like, it makes you less risk on. And so, like, Will Menidas has that post that's like, what is the effect of capital allocators broadly being on GLP ones? Like, will we be a less risk on long. They're just Like, will we have less Maybe that's
Speaker 1:how we save the the the t bill. You know? It's like people are just like, yeah. I'm fine to just earn two There's
Speaker 2:a there's a bill in the house for testosterone? What are talking about? I'd love to have one. T bills.
Speaker 1:Love to see it. We we should get one in there.
Speaker 3:Hey, man. Testosterone and
Speaker 2:high levels. Yeah. Yeah. I'm investing in tea bills. Taking majority of my bills and paying tea.
Speaker 3:People microdose these things. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:And they they seem to have, like, a lot more than just weight loss effect. Blood sugar regulation. They seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of, studies.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So there's even a you know, some people just microdose them. Like, sometimes, when I was doing it, I was taking a really small dose, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what even starting dose is.
Speaker 2:Do you feel like a plateau, though? Because it feels like, you know, I I remember the first day in college, I tried caffeine. I had coffee. I I just didn't have caffeine until college. And it was like amazing.
Speaker 2:And I've had that experience with a lot of things. And now it's like, okay, I kinda just need a bunch of caffeine to get back to baseline. And I imagine that you've you've maybe experienced that with your journey on peptides and testosterone. But then is it like is it like once you get to the plateau, you pull it out and then kind of reset the baseline? How do you think about that?
Speaker 3:I I I used to think nonstop about that and do it all the time, and I kinda don't anymore.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Now I have a routine that I stick to.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:It's like light first thing in the morning, hugely important.
Speaker 1:Like on your phone. Right? Just
Speaker 3:max Yeah. Yeah. Max brightness out. Hold it there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:VR headset AI slop in the morning.
Speaker 3:That's hugely important. It actually sets your bedtime when you get light in your eyes in the morning outside.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:It sets your bedtime, like, sixteen hours later.
Speaker 2:Wait. And what what what counts for getting light? Like, I walk to my car in the morning at 05:30. Does that count? I'm outside for a minute, and then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yep. That's the light. But, you know, maybe it gets three to five minutes.
Speaker 2:Three to five minutes. So I should like kinda walk around the block or something a little
Speaker 1:That's right. Paul, this morning this morning, I got up like, you got to my house. We were driving into the office and I I was running like five minutes behind. So you kinda had five minutes just putzing around out there.
Speaker 2:I did.
Speaker 1:So that was for your health, John.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:You did it. You. Like, whether or not you do it, that's helping you that's helping your health. Yeah. And then I usually, you know, do the morning stuff, pound a lot of water in the morning.
Speaker 3:I learned this from a buddy of mine, Jack Dreyfus, who has this sort of morning ritual about not using his phone and chugging water, and those are actually sort of life changing. Yeah. You don't wanna blast social media into your eyes in the first hour. Yeah. It really changes your neurology if you don't.
Speaker 3:Then gym, getting vitamin d walks outside, a whole list of supplements that What I do
Speaker 2:like in terms of gym?
Speaker 3:What do I do for gym? I do like 15 every other day.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wow. That seems like short.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I feel like
Speaker 3:I'm recovery maxing.
Speaker 2:Okay. Maxing. Interesting.
Speaker 3:I mean, all your pain is coming Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so how do you notice since I'm assuming Intensity. Yeah. I'm assuming you went through a period where you're just like, bro split.
Speaker 2:You seem like you've done I don't know. I'm just throwing stuff out.
Speaker 3:No. I'm like the last guy you'll see doing CrossFit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. But have you ever done it? No.
Speaker 1:Never. But but did were you ever running a bro split like, you know, chest back legs, chest back legs rest on, you know, Sunday? Did you ever do
Speaker 3:I'm kind of I'm like light version of that now. Like, to me, the the thing I learned is that like a little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference.
Speaker 2:Interesting. On some And the
Speaker 3:so, like, get having a routine where you kinda do, like, these things regularly, that actually makes a bigger difference than going, like, crazy on one thing, which kinda puts your health lopsided. That's actually the, you know I was mentioning protocols earlier. It's a little app we've been building that kinda makes all this easy. We call it health maxing with friends. So you can basically do these little routines.
Speaker 3:You can build a stack for yourself, and then you kinda do it with friends. They do them too. You see their faces appear as they get them done throughout the day. And that has honestly made the biggest literal difference in my health of anything I've ever done. Not even not even close.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Talk about microplastics and glass. I know you've been diving into this study came out. Everybody everybody was like, wait What? This feels like some propaganda from big plastic that says, yeah,
Speaker 3:even your glass water has
Speaker 2:Well, that was remember the there there was a talk at Hereticon about that. Remember? It was like how would you get people to use more glass or something
Speaker 1:or that was that was an exercise.
Speaker 2:It was, yeah, it was a it was a mental exercise about how to get people to use more plastic And it was like and one of the one of the ideas that people threw out was like make glass sound bad. Yeah. And like Dangerous. Here we are. Here we are.
Speaker 2:Somebody ran the Yeah. Here we are. I mean Yeah. Yeah. What what is the actual data?
Speaker 3:Well, the study was done by like, I think a French organization, so we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or actual science. So Mhmm. You know, we we have to put it to the test. So basically, they found there's more plastic in glass bottles
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Than in plastic bottles. And the culprit is like the cap at the top of the bottles. They have like a little plastic inside the cap of the glass And it seems like that's the plastic that's getting into it. So I'm actually replicating the study. I found a local lab that will do the analysis.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna get a bunch of different waters and just send it in and see what the results are.
Speaker 2:Do you know how big the study was in in France? Because I
Speaker 3:feel It's like just in size. I mean, it was like a pretty well done study.
Speaker 2:I feel like the whole the whole difficulty is, like, do you test like, what's the variability? How do you get the actual size? Are you testing, like, hundreds of water bottles, thousands, or, like, 500,000
Speaker 3:different? The big thing with plastic, it's and people don't say it as much, but it's kinda started there. It's like, don't leave your plastic bottle in the car. Sure. Because it when it gets hot, it leaches.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:So I don't know if they're comparing it, you know, to a leached plastic bottle versus a glass one that's
Speaker 2:not going to.
Speaker 1:Another one, how what are you doing around cholesterol right now? I know you were running experiment there a while back.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This was actually kind of an accidental experiment. I I take most of Brian Johnson's stack just because it's, like, everything I want and it's easy and I and I and I trust him. So one of the things he has is his red yeast rice. So I'm like, whatever.
Speaker 3:I'm just taking the red yeast rice. And then I I just sort of happened to do a blood panel before and after, and my cholesterol has always been pretty high, like, including some of, like, the bad ones, as they say. And all of a sudden, everything just went green, and I have this, like, peak cholesterol panel. And so I had to kinda, like, look back through my app, and chat with our little AI, and figure out what what what what had happened. And basically, it was just, like, immediately, it was the red yeast rice.
Speaker 3:Because red yeast rice is basically a statin. So, Monocallin k is one of the statins, and that's what red yeast rice has. And so I was kinda basically taking a low dose statin for a while.
Speaker 5:Was kinda
Speaker 3:Six weeks And so
Speaker 1:is that something you'll cycle going forward or just effectively do consistently?
Speaker 3:Probably take consistently. Some people I I pair it with like a good dose of CoQ10, because some people on statins or red yeast rice, they experience like some muscle soreness. And it seems like taking a good amount of co q ten basically takes that away which for me it does.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. How are you have you have you been playing with hyperbaric oxygen chambers at all? I'm sort of anticipating that that is the next version of the home sauna or the home ice cold plunge. It feels like we're maybe a couple years out from more commercial or more consumer friendly versions of those products because they're showing tremendous benefits. But if you actually look at buying one, it's like this like $30,000 machine that looks like it's out of a hospital and it looks really kind of scary.
Speaker 1:But I wanna be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of
Speaker 2:You're mixing branding too. Like I I've The first time I heard about a hyperbaric like sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber is Michael Jackson. And then Oh
Speaker 3:really? Wow.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm pretty sure that's like the first time it entered my mind as like something that you could do. Yeah. Although extremely valuable for scuba divers because the you know if you get the bends like you need to be in a hyperbaric chamber to recompress. And so it's like a life saving technology for in the scuba diving world.
Speaker 2:But then it was like used as like this odd this odd crazy health hack. But then Brian Johnson's been talking about it a lot. So yeah. What what's your take on the hyperbaric chambers?
Speaker 3:I'm actually in the process of finding one to purchase Mhmm. And put here in the office. And it seems like it's basically one of the best things you can do for longevity and health. And the thing is you need to get up to about two atmospheres. So they have they have ones that are like 1.3 atmospheres of pressure, 1.4, somewhere above two.
Speaker 3:But it seems like two is the spot that kinda gives you the most benefits. It's sort of the sweet spot. I mean, literally improving your DNA, increasing your telomere length. I think Brian Johnson said it was the best skin treatment he's ever done, and the guy does a lot of skin treatments. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I think you're right. It's gonna get bigger and bigger. It's a little bit of a nuisance because you're in there for an hour to an hour and a half.
Speaker 2:Doesn't he, like, work? I thought Brian Johnson was like doing emails in there or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He has one that you can kind of sit upright in and That's crazy. Get stuff done.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I like these these more, you know, I think the the reason that that saunas are so great is that it's passive. It doesn't take It's a lot of paper. It doesn't take a lot of will paper to say or sorry.
Speaker 1:Will will power to
Speaker 3:say, oh, I'm to here on TBPN. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't take a lot of will power to go and say, I'm gonna go and sit in the sauna for thirty minutes and it has tremendous benefits. And I think the same thing for the hyperbaric chamber. You can go in there, get some work done, read a book, listen to TBPN, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's on twenty four hours. Yeah. It's a wild time. We've got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 3:They they think they have a shot that, you know, will lower your cholesterol for life in one shot. What?
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Another company that the company that did my gene therapy is working on one that'll increase your IQ.
Speaker 2:That's insane. Wow.
Speaker 1:How what what what's the how much data do you personally need to run an experiment on yourself? Like the I the IQ one it feels like, yeah, if you got 20 people that that got some benefit.
Speaker 2:Maybe fast maxing. Just down for Faustian bargains.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Always.
Speaker 3:As long as it's not harmful, I'm generally okay with trying it to see what it does.
Speaker 1:Sure. But how do you know? Question. Last question. I'm curious.
Speaker 1:Where's your how, what's your thinking around, I think I know the answer already, this sort of like ancestral philosophy, you know, sort of like consume things that, you know, existed hundreds of years ago versus, you know, something being made in a lab is not necessarily bad and and you should take advantage of of science?
Speaker 3:I I I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's like convenient and easy, but I don't think it's a great heuristic. Right? Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it, and those neither of those are great explanations is, like, you know, bowing to ancestral ways or to science. If you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works, then you should be kinda suspicious of it.
Speaker 3:And I don't I don't think either of those are are are great, explanations. You know? You gotta take things on their face. Circadian alignment is I mean, turns out that the bro scientists were right on a million things. We we thought diabetes type two was literally incurable before the twenty tens.
Speaker 3:Bro scientists always thought you could you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Finally, the twenty tens, after a hundred years of thinking it was incurable, we realized you can actually reverse type two diabetes. So in a lot of cases, the bro scientists are right.
Speaker 1:Gotta continue to bro down.
Speaker 2:Trust the experts. Always the the bro scientists.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, we'd love to have you back on again when you have more news in a couple weeks and Thanks for having Yeah. Let's
Speaker 2:hang soon.
Speaker 1:When you have more when when you're running your experiments, whether they're on yourself or water hit us. We we love we love breaking news. Yeah. Great.
Speaker 3:Great. Happy to. See you Have
Speaker 2:a good one. Bye.
Speaker 1:See you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 2:If you're looking to update your sleep game, head over to 8sleep.com.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Pod five Ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod five actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body, and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep. Head over to 8sleep.com. We got Sean Frank in the studio. The man who invented the wallet.
Speaker 2:Invented e commerce. He invented e commerce. He invented the wallet. And now, he invented podcasting with us. Welcome to stream.
Speaker 2:How you doing?
Speaker 1:It's been too long.
Speaker 4:Guys, I'm doing great. I heard the Eight Sleep ad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I got two perfect scores in a row.
Speaker 2:No way. Yeah. Yeah. That is so hard to do.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You do it. Last night, I posted a 100. I I posted it on Twitter. So Yeah.
Speaker 4:It makes a lot of sense that that was the
Speaker 2:intro that I got. How many how many one year olds do you have at your house?
Speaker 4:Zero. I have
Speaker 2:zero kids. I'm I'm kinda playing with one hand or two hands tied behind my back here.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Congratulations. Our It's remix. I went through about a year period where my my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly
Speaker 2:I have an idea.
Speaker 1:Every night. Eight sleep should make
Speaker 2:a sleeping bag for a four year old that they can't get out of. Kind of a straight jacket. A padded room that's temperature controlled with a lock on the door
Speaker 1:so the
Speaker 2:kid can't get up.
Speaker 1:So dark.
Speaker 2:But we're gonna turn this You know how there's like every shows like the manosphere content? We need to do the data sphere content. You're not a dad yet so it won't really work. We'll need different guests for we need get really hard hardcore in the dad content. Anyway, let's talk about TikTok.
Speaker 2:TikTok sell a new US owner to get ready. They're turning down the focus on shops and pushing the ad product again. Shops has always lost money. I didn't know that. And without the parent co funding it, no one wants to eat that loss.
Speaker 2:TikTok will be an ad platform again at least for the rest of the year. Break that down for us. What does that mean? What are the implications?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Have you guys ever bought anything from TikTok shops?
Speaker 2:No. I've never used TikTok.
Speaker 4:Dude, I love that, John. You're a true patriot. But yeah. So so TikTok shops I mean, if you talk to people inside of TikTok, like, high up Yeah. They do not see Meta as a competitor.
Speaker 4:They don't wanna compete with Meta. Like, it's obviously like, they're they both have short form video now. They're but, like, TikTok never really was a social app in the way that Instagram and Facebook really are.
Speaker 2:I heard this this morning. People are one of our younger friends was saying, like, the Gen Z, they don't DM each other on TikTok. They use Snapchat to talk and chat, and then they use TikTok as like a YouTube style content.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So like if you talk to people with TikTok, they really wanna go after the YouTubes of the world. Yeah. They really wanna go after Amazon. Right?
Speaker 4:Because Amazon is this big pot of money. It's 600,000,000,000 a year in ecommerce revenue
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:That no like, Amazon's given up trying to grow. Right? So we have Prime Day going right now. It's four days of Prime Day. They doubled the length year over year, and they said that it'll grow 20%.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So each day is down, like, 40%. When you add that up, you get 20% It's just pure value extraction for Amazon at this point. There's gonna be more ads. Like, they they've signed up a 100,000,000 Prime members.
Speaker 4:That business can't really grow anymore.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:So there's this big pot of money that Walmart tries to attack.
Speaker 1:Pronatalism might might change that. I expect Amazon to start lobbying for for, subsidies for young families to
Speaker 5:just like
Speaker 1:we just need to triple the population of The
Speaker 2:United States. Were laughing earlier about the fact that I believe Amazon makes more in net income than Tesla makes in revenue.
Speaker 1:Like, way more.
Speaker 2:Way more. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:There's levels on the MAG seven chart.
Speaker 2:Anyway, yeah. So so so but it sounds like with with TikTok going to US owner, like, something's changing there. Break that down.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So they spent probably twenty four months and easily $30,000,000,000 trying to get people to use TikTok shops. Right? Right now, the estimate is that, like, it's a billion dollars a month in GMV. So a $12,000,000,000 GMV business.
Speaker 4:That could be high. It could be a lot of changes. That's not very big. Like, you know, Shopify's GMV in a quarter is probably double that. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Shopify probably does a quarter billion in GMV. So they haven't been that successful getting people to actually shop repeatedly. Mhmm. And to get that billion dollars, they lit a bunch of money on fire with subsidies.
Speaker 1:Wait, do you mean a quarter trillion?
Speaker 2:Quarter trillion in GMV for Shopify probably?
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. Sorry. That's what I meant. And we have Amazon at $600,000,000,000 right? So TikTok is trying really hard.
Speaker 4:Their goal this year was to get to $20,000,000,000 in GMV, right? So to be oneten of what Shopify is at. And when they launched for the first twelve months, it was aggressive subsidies. So they would come to brands like mine and they'd be like, hey, sell on our platform, and we will give customers 50% off. And then we're like, well, I don't want to sell 50% off.
Speaker 4:They're like, no, no. We will fund it. We'll fund discounts. We'll fund free shipping. They made this aggressive push to try to get people to shop there, Right?
Speaker 4:So there was And this
Speaker 1:and simultaneously, there was this other company Flip that was doing the same thing basic is that the right name for it? They were just basically giving away products? It was it was basically a what? Was it a wealth transfer from LPs to venture capitalists to the American consumer?
Speaker 2:Yes. Selling dollars for 90¢?
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 2:lot less than that. 50¢, apparently.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So and and Flip was the same thing. All of them are are I mean, Timu, Sheehan, everybody's coming after, like, this disposable income in America. Right? So Flip's like, we're gonna take a social, you know, commerce attack on it.
Speaker 4:TikTok was the same thing. You know, Timu is owned by a publicly traded company in China. Right? It's worth, like, $200,000,000,000. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And they were losing, probably $100,000,000 a month to try to get user acquisition. All of them are coming after Amazon. So that strategy would probably continue to play out if Section three twenty one didn't close. I don't know if you guys covered that. You had Ryan Peterson on.
Speaker 4:But it used to be that you could ship goods via TMU from China to The US totally tax and duty free. Right? So why is TMU cheaper than Old Navy or H and M or whatever else? It's they're paying zero taxes. So we closed that.
Speaker 4:Now TeamView's revenue and their traffic has fallen 50% in, like, sixty days. Right? They've they've taken their gas off of customer acquisition. Same thing's happening with TikTok. They have a really awesome app with a ton of users.
Speaker 4:And if they're forced to sell to The US, someone's just gonna turn that into a cash cow. Right? It's gonna get bought by you know, it's probably gonna be Walmart or, you know, AppLovin is making a bid. Like, all of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there. And if you have users, you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine, which is Google, which is Meta.
Speaker 4:Right? So it will end up being more of a Meta competitor. They're going to abandon the strategy of going after Amazon, and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should, like you guys do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It was I I have a I had a friend that at the time that the the TikTok ban was being floated or the app was being removed from the app store.
Speaker 1:I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on TikTok because he has a, you know, 9 figure ecommerce brand. Mhmm. And he was like, oh, I don't really want it to be banned because I'm making, like, you know, $2,000,000 a month right now, and it's pretty good. But it clearly was just, like, fake and and, you know, heavily subsidized and totally unsustainable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Explain explain this interaction in the comments to that post. They barely, Ariel says, they barely cofund anything anymore. Hard disagree with this take. And you said, but that's why they stopped co fund co funding things.
Speaker 2:Is that talking about TikTok's parent ByteDance paying this or TikTok co funding promotions with brands?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So they've been winding it down for probably the past three months, And I mean This
Speaker 2:is TikTok going to brands?
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:And co funding?
Speaker 4:The co funding is when you run TikTok shops to try to get new brands in there, to try to get your sales up, they are gonna cover discounts, fees, and they will give the brand that money so that the discount passes to the customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So TikTok, Amazon gets 15% of all transactions as fees. TikTok gets 6%, but they take that 6% and they give you 30% of your transaction back, right? That's that co funding element. They started to slow that down drastically in January when they got banned, right?
Speaker 4:The writing was on the wall that they're not gonna do this anymore and they've been slowly bringing down co funding. Then if you go on TikTok, there's a term called ad load. It's how many ads you get per post, So on Instagram, it's like you have an ad load of 33%. One in one in three posts are gonna be ads. TikTok got to 50% of all ads were monetized through Post.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So it's so it's it's natural post ad, natural post ad, post ad, post ad, post ad. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And the ads are split between monetized via shops, which is affiliate posts and normal ads. They have turned that down drastically and made the ads way better. Traditional advertising where I spend money to get people to my website, like Meta does. It's been crushing on TikTok ever since they made this change like three months ago.
Speaker 4:Okay. So the writing's on the wall. TikTok shop will be drastically deprioritized and the ads are gonna start being awesome again.
Speaker 1:What about the state of live shopping in The US? Were you guys at Ridge? Did you have somebody that was live on TikTok all day long selling wallets? Did you ever go live?
Speaker 2:Why do think Sean has that podcast mic? He's so Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:We we've tried it because Amazon pushed it pretty aggressively. Flip pushed it aggressively, and then TikTok pushed it aggressively. We've we've tried all that. It doesn't really work in America without the subsidies. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, there's this flywheel on TikTok where you get 50 people to go live, they all start selling stuff, they push your product to the top, then other affiliates wanna come in and start selling it because it's a good selling product, but that only works when you heavily subsidize it and that hurts your Walmart business or your Amazon business, your Whole Foods business because nobody likes to be undercut. I've had a lot of friends who I have a friend who got to $10,000,000 a month on TikTok shops, but in the grand scheme of things, he has like a 100,000,000 a month wholesale business. So it's like, dude, it just it was cool, it was exciting, it was fast growing and they made it profitable for brands, but it's all falling apart. I I don't think Americans really want live shopping and I don't think it's ever gonna catch on.
Speaker 1:What about so so what do you think the future of platforms like whatnot is? Is it focusing on these sort of like niche collectibles and and auctions and things like that? Like, could it work in subcategories?
Speaker 4:Yeah, dude. And, you know, to give TikTok credit, they brought affiliates back. Right? Affiliate was a bad word in 2021. Right?
Speaker 4:If you were if you were doing affiliate marketing, you were selling, like, the scammiest product on earth or, like, porn or Viagra or something. Something. Right? And they made more young kids more you know, be okay with selling stuff on the Internet. So they they made affiliate cool again.
Speaker 4:And I think we will see more of that, but it is gonna be more you know, niche. I think Whatnot's a great platform if you like Pokemon cards or if you like gaming. And you could see Twitch have more social comments built in, but it's not gonna be the $100,000,000,000 GMV business that TikTok's trying to build it to. And an e commerce And
Speaker 1:that it is in China. Right? And and Asia broadly.
Speaker 2:Why does it work there and not here?
Speaker 4:I don't know, man. I mean, customers in America are used to, like, infinite choice. Right? The the other thing is we have just really low e commerce penetration compared to China. Right?
Speaker 4:China's at like 40% of all transactions are happening online and America struggles to crack 15.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Yeah. What's the downstream effect of, like, the the ads getting better on TikTok? Does that mean, like, brands need to be investing more in, like, actually, like, you know, Super Bowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt, like, Cluely thing?
Speaker 2:Like, is it just algorithm hacking, AI slop? Like like, what what do you think the meta will be in terms of, like, actually having an ad really, really perform on TikTok post sell or post sale to US owner?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, I I was sort testing this right now, but what Meta has pushed so Meta is, like, still the king of, you know, performance advertising. Right? A 130,000,000,000 in ads run through that platform. And they spent the past year working on something called Andromeda, which is their new ad engine.
Speaker 4:And all it is is they want high velocity of creative. They don't care if it looks awesome. They don't care if it's AI generated. They just want high variety. And they want you to feed the ad engine as much high variety content as possible.
Speaker 4:Really focus on short form video still, but, like, high production UGC, AI, whatever you wanna put in there. And then Andromeda just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time. Like, they've really focused on making sure they can like, their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person. Take whatever winners you have over there because men is heavy lifting for you and just run them on TikTok.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like Are we are we completely past the era of, like, it was the Harmon Brothers that were doing those, like, really catchy, really high production value videos? I remember, like, the Dollar Shave Club launch video was kind of, like, the case study in this where you could go get, like, a 100,000,000 impressions on one really crazy ad and then do retargeting based on how long people watched. Watched?
Speaker 2:Like, is that is that meta just completely dead? Are we no longer gonna see, like, iconic ads for particular brands?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Harmon Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich Video. They did great.
Speaker 2:Sandwich was another one that was really big in that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Ray Raydrop is still doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The the the problem is, like, there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend. Right? So if you're gonna spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least $20,000,000 promoting it. Right? And it used to be that like the ad cost could be a third, right?
Speaker 4:When you're running TV ads, you'd spend a lot of money to make a really memorable thing, and the delivery was only two thirds of the cost. The delivery now needs to be like at least 95% of the cost. Interesting. And that just drives everything, the investment in creative down. So is there I think
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But is there some sort of like unquantifiable value in the short term around like creating like what's called a shelling point. So like we all know about like, you know, the eras tour for Taylor Swift. Like, it was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that or like, Barbenheimer or like the Dollar Shave Club ad.
Speaker 2:Like, has seen it. And so it has, like, enduring value for a really, really long time. And if you're creating, like, a bunch of, like, highly tailored random ads that are just kind of, like, generally out there. We you never create a brand that has, like yes. Everyone remembers that particular Nike campaign.
Speaker 2:Everyone remembers, like, this thing that broke through, and everyone was talking about that ad. Like, the the iPhone or the the the iPod, like, silhouette dancing campaign. Like, everyone remembers that one. Like, are we just post that type of marketing? Or is there still potentially alpha if you could underwrite it across, two decades and you're willing to take this, really big shot, go make something great, and then be like, yeah, we are gonna spend 20,000,000 against this $1,000,000 ad can ad ad that we shot.
Speaker 2:It might take us a couple years to actually deliver to everyone, but we're gonna do it and it's gonna pay back over like twenty years.
Speaker 1:I don't know. My my Yeah. What's your My immediate thought is that it's not enough for people to just remember a moment of your brand or remember that your brand exists. Mhmm. It's not gonna it doesn't guarantee to have value ten years from today because like when's the last time you bought a Dollar Shave Club product despite
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:Totally remembering the campaign.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That's true.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And as long as it's hitting that ratio where 95% of the dollars are going to creative, so if you have a massive fucking budget where you're gonna spend a million bucks on a video and you can support it with 20,000,000, sure, dude, if that's what you wanna do. Like, it's when Dollar Shave Club made that video, they didn't have any money. So it was all organic exposure. They made a really good video that they really gambled on it, where it was 100% of costs were going to ad creative.
Speaker 4:And as ad creative costs go down and as the internet gets messier and harder to stand out, like, you just need to have that money spent on, you know, actually delivering ads.
Speaker 2:Well, what what do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club, like, 100% of the the spend going towards the creative? Like, clearly just ran this playbook. What's your reaction to that? Like, they like, the reason people have seen the the the Cluely viral videos is not because of ad spend. They're probably it might be promoting it a little bit here and there, but mostly, they're just really good at getting engagement and going viral.
Speaker 2:And so people are remembering that. Now maybe Dollar Shave Club's a cautionary tale for them, but is that even a tool in the tool chest that that founders should be reaching for?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, dude. Controversy and rage baiting. Right? Like, we all know about Cluey. Like, yeah, it was a good video, but, like, it's because
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They they're really good at rage baiting. The other thing is, like, doctor Squatch did the Sydney Sweeney The bath soap.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, we're gonna talk about that because of controversy tied to it and, like, the outlandish nature. But if you wanna make a really beautiful message, the iPod dancing video, nobody gives a fuck. It's like you have you have to make somebody mad
Speaker 2:so Yeah. People talk about It's rough. Yeah. Yeah. Explain to me doctor Squatch.
Speaker 2:I I I haven't used the products or I'm not really even familiar with it. Like but it there's news at the company too. Like, just tell me everything you know about it.
Speaker 4:Well, dude, every Sunday, me and Josh, the the current CEO of Dracula Squash play tennis. You guys are in LA. You guys are big tennis guys, you should come you should come play.
Speaker 2:Yep. That'd be awesome.
Speaker 4:Dude, they're they're crushing it. It's a great story. So the guy who made it, Jack Yeah. You know, in 2016, they were doing $3,000,000. He had some other partners, and he had the foresight to understand that distribution was everything.
Speaker 4:He raised like $30,000,000. He bought all his other partners out. And with $27,000,000 remaining, he's like, I'm just gonna put everything into YouTube. He dumped all of that money into YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started.
Speaker 2:Talk about Which was contrarian
Speaker 1:because every brand at the time said, you can't get YouTube to work Yeah. As a direct response channel. Like programmatic YouTube. Yeah. Like creator driven YouTube was working, but but that wasn't like that was a kind of novel insight that he had.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it was it was a a beautiful raindrop video. Like like, that video is still like, it was funny. It was iconic. And he's just like, men's soap's a massive category.
Speaker 4:This should be bigger. I'm gonna bet the farm on advertising. He dumped it into it. They ended up getting a huge secondary transaction. Moelis is a great bank.
Speaker 4:They ruined that deal for him. They ended up getting bought by Summit. This was like peak COVID 2021. So then Summit put in a great management team. Josh Josh was there working before there.
Speaker 4:And then they just scaled the thing. I mean, numbers are like they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars this year. They just got bought by Unilever for 1,500,000,000.0, and it's a great outcome. Right? I mean, Summit's gonna make a ton of money.
Speaker 4:So, you know, we're kinda at the end of the fund cycle for a lot of those d two c funds. Right? If you raise money from a brand, it's a ten year fund. Like, we're getting towards the end where there's gonna be a lot of consolidation. Doctor.
Speaker 4:Squatch is a winner, made money all the way up, and now they're gonna be owned by Unilever, and they'll be the next, you know, generational men's personal care brand. They'll be the axe or, like, the bod spray. Whatever we had in middle school, that's
Speaker 2:Doctor. Squatch. So so
Speaker 1:seven Yeah. What's years funny, the the reaction
Speaker 2:on this video. So seven years ago, they launched this video, Natural Soap for Men has a 122,000,000 views on YouTube. Was that the case of just amazing creative and it went viral naturally, or did they spend money to get that 120,000,000 views?
Speaker 4:Oh, they they dumped like 20,000,000 into that video.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wow. I mean, it has 11,000 comments. So clearly, like, people, even if they saw it as a promoted post, like, they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well. So but, wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what a crazy arb at the time. Sorry, Jordan.
Speaker 1:I guess, speaking of coming to the end of fun cycles, what what is the state? Earlier this year, we were covering kind of the state of roll ups. It wasn't looking that good. I still think it's not looking great. Will there be any real bright spots in that sort of category of investment?
Speaker 4:Right. Right. And I think I sent you this before we got started. You guys had like, the last guy on here was curing diabetes. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, okay. If that works, $100,000,000,000 company. You know what I mean? Like, when you
Speaker 2:talk about
Speaker 4:Nvidia crossing $4,000,000,000,000, it's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Doctor. Squatch at 1,500,000,000.0, massive win. In that group will end up being LPs and new funds, right? Like they're not gonna be Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 4:They're not gonna be $100,000,000,000 outcomes. So then there's a company called We Are Wild. I'm friends with that team. They're in The UK. They got bought by Unilever as well.
Speaker 4:So multi $100,000,000 deal. If you raise at a 5,000,000 or $10,000,000 valuation and you exit for $200,000,000 that's like what venture returns used to be in 2011 or whatever. It's a massive fucking win, right? That's just the world consumer's still in. So, there are a lot of winners, right?
Speaker 4:Poppy getting bought. You know, there's every like two or three weeks right now, there's a new either CPG brand or hair care brand getting bought in like this, you know, $100,000,000 to $500,000,000 range. That's happening a lot right now with that consolidation.
Speaker 2:What's the postmortem on the build
Speaker 1:versus But the actual like roll up like roll ups where I'm gonna raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of brands and, you know, the hope would have been to IPO. Turns out it's very
Speaker 2:hard to make money owning
Speaker 1:a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands.
Speaker 2:Is that the Thrasio thing?
Speaker 1:Thrasio and then there was the open Open store and
Speaker 2:a few others were trying that.
Speaker 1:But it's been rough I
Speaker 2:used get emails for that all the time when I was running ecommerce brand. Like, hey, do you wanna sell? And I'm like, no. Like, did you look at Crunchbase? Like, it's not, like, that type of business.
Speaker 4:No. Sorry, Troy. I misunderstood the question. Yeah. All of those are fucked.
Speaker 4:I think I got a DM. I don't know if this is true or not that OpenScore is bankrupt, so I don't know if that's been announced yet. But, like, they're all like, Thrasio went bankrupt. OpenScore is gonna go bankrupt. There's like, we thought there'd be synergies in, like, running all of these, like, small independent islands, but, like, now it'd be people still want large brands who can perform revenue.
Speaker 4:Right? Doctor. Squatch is that. And like, if you can get to $500,000,000 in revenue in consumer, it's typically one brand. There's typically a lot of profit tied to it like HexClad.
Speaker 2:Openstore.open.store, which was the URL, now reroutes to jackarcher.com, which looks like a men's
Speaker 1:Which was one of their brands.
Speaker 2:Major wear brand or something. It's a it's a dude it's a Jack dude Napolo with some socks and socks.
Speaker 1:We love.
Speaker 2:Looks pretty cool actually.
Speaker 1:How are you? Earlier on the show, we ran through a list. Trump calling for lower rates while the markets are ripping. Robinhood CEO raising for a math AI company at $900,000,000 valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's giving out stock tips.
Speaker 1:Harry Stebbings calling for 8,000,000,000,000 Nvidia Circle at 2,000 times price to earnings.
Speaker 2:It's 2,000 times?
Speaker 1:2,000. It's 2,000. Satya's being smart, doing some layoffs. Then you have Soham Parikh, Masa's top blasting. Your favorite Fin Fin Twit influencers launching SPACs.
Speaker 1:Zucks making offers. Are you feeling the top? Are you are you worried right now? Or do you think we got some room to run?
Speaker 4:Dude, that's a great question. We probably got room to run. Right? I mean,
Speaker 2:Let's go. Chris Todd. We heard
Speaker 1:it. Wait.
Speaker 2:So we have an update on the Gong. Good friend of the show told us that we have not been properly warming up our Gong before we
Speaker 1:hit it. Apparently, there's a risk
Speaker 2:of
Speaker 1:of
Speaker 2:Or breaking just making it sound poorly. So you have to just give it a couple taps to get it warmed up.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go. And you can do it.
Speaker 4:That's great.
Speaker 2:Time, I don't know.
Speaker 1:They'll correct us in the comments.
Speaker 2:Did it poorly, but we're learning our Gong together.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you said, we have some room to run.
Speaker 2:You said go ultra long sell your Can
Speaker 1:we expect an NFT profile picture for Ridge? Is like really kind of the Yeah. What what they kind of
Speaker 2:it would be it would be an AI agent for
Speaker 1:For wallets.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. No, dude. Wallet coin. So I think Wallet coin.
Speaker 4:It's back to ICOs guys. Initial coin offerings.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you how do you I mean, I think like Ridge has just navigated someone through so many different crazy cycles that it's probably business as usual, maintain a strong balance sheet, you know, just stay profitable, grow, you know, all the things that a that a business should do. But, how how do you plan around, how how like do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was, you know, if he thinks that, you know, if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy, know, there's certain brands that are gonna benefit from that retailers. But I'm curious how you think about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, rates coming down just open up financial markets again. Right? So, like, it looks like the IPO window's open. Everybody's fucking, you know, rushing to the market.
Speaker 4:Bitcoin, all time high is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:But, we're getting a lot of inbound interest from PE groups and banks because they think interest rates will come down. That makes leveraged buyouts work again. Right?
Speaker 2:Okay. Oh, so it's LBOs.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. So private credit has dominated the private equity market for the past three years because it's too expensive to buy stuff. You can lend out money. You have this big balance sheet.
Speaker 4:They want to go back into buying assets and restarting that clock. So that'll probably happen. On if the economy can rip, financial markets look tasty. You know what I mean? There's a lot of really cool things going on.
Speaker 4:But job data still like, know, ADP put out their June numbers, and, like, it doesn't look good. Right? So I think we do end up getting rate cuts just because, the financial markets are removed away from what's happening in a lot of businesses. So I think we'll get bad jobs reports.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about rates on buy now, pay later and just the general consumer ability to click the checkout button on an e commerce site? Like, is are like, in theory, I would imagine buy now, pay later products being highly sensitive to interest rates. And yet, it's always felt like, don't think about the interest rate when you click this button.
Speaker 4:Right. Because the whole thing was that the interest rate was obscured. Right? Like, for a customer on Klarna, they pay a 0% interest rate. Yep.
Speaker 4:And it's built into this payment processing rate that we pay. Right? Okay. So, like, the whole idea is that if I charge a brand 6%, I think Shop Pay is like 6%. Shop Pay has pay in four.
Speaker 4:These people pay me in four months. I have a 6% interest rate. It works out to being 20% because they're paying back early. Maybe it's 20 maybe it's 25%. Who really knows?
Speaker 4:So there's built in interest rates that, like, the the the brand's really paying.
Speaker 2:So if interest rates come down, you would you might expect those rates to come down, and then and then companies are pushing that
Speaker 4:Dude, if interest rates come down, buy now pay later becomes a good business. Right now it's probably not that good of a business because the payment contracts are locked in, right? Like Shopify for the next four years, I have to give them 6% whatever it is of whatever the buy now pay later is. And if interest rates come down, they're just fucking I I can't renegotiate that. So they'll just be putting money on that thing.
Speaker 4:But look, never bet against the American consumer. We love buying shit. Prime day's four days this year, baby.
Speaker 1:Five days. Four days. Last last question. Need to get the update on what percent like, how much value Ridge is getting from AI, like Gen AI right now. There were some big promises earlier this year from a variety of companies.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious, like, what the actual yeah. What what is the core value that you're getting today? Is it just more diversity of creative, being able to test more? Or is it kind of business as usual?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, I mean, two buckets. Like, data analysis, it's fantastic. Right? I'm running all of my data through, like, a bunch of AI tools.
Speaker 4:It makes reporting way easier. It makes getting, like, what's gonna sell inventory buying. All that stuff is way easier with AI. Right? I can just upload, hey.
Speaker 4:Here's the twelve months of sales data. What should I buy? And it can actually start doing that for me, and it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have one person director in charge of all that stuff now, but it has replaced people.
Speaker 4:On the creative side, v o three is fantastic. So, like, we're doing hooks on v o three. You know, it's really good at, like, if you have still still photography and you wanna add a little bit of motion, GIFs, whatever, like, it's great at doing shit. And, you know, like I said, hooks are really fantastic. Static images, it just makes you we can output way more static images than ever before.
Speaker 4:But we're still not at the place where, like, I mean, I spent $150,000 on photo shoots last month. Right? Like, in the
Speaker 2:desert spend on AI tooling probably in the thousands or something?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Hundreds. Right? Yeah. Hundreds.
Speaker 4:But, like, we we have cars in the desert off roading. Like, AI is not doing those videos yet. I don't know if they ever will.
Speaker 1:It's funny. We we made that video for Wander, and a large amount of people thought that it was AI generated.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, if you find me the person that is making that one shotting any of those scenes and doing it at that At
Speaker 2:that level.
Speaker 1:Level of consistency. Yep. We will invest our entire balance sheet into your company. Yeah. But but yeah, that that's good to hear.
Speaker 1:The the data analysis side is interesting. That makes mean, that that's historically just been like one of the hardest problems. Like, the number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory so that there's, like, demand. There's general demand for what they make and sell. They just don't have enough of the right things.
Speaker 1:So just getting better there will will make a huge impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All all all the tools are getting better. Whether it's like Excel or your analytics tool or your creative tool, your Photoshop's getting better. Content Aware Fill has been around for a long time. Now you have it on, you know, steroids, but he's yeah.
Speaker 2:Still a lot of work to actually get results from from that. And so you still have people in the loop.
Speaker 4:Yeah, dude. And I think AI, editing is gonna be huge. Right? Like, you know, you shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial.
Speaker 4:Right? You probably shot hours, right, to get to get a one minute clip. Yeah. And it's gonna make editing way easier. So productivity gains are here and they're coming.
Speaker 4:We're probably another another two years before humans are not actually pulling out cameras.
Speaker 2:Two years. That's pretty fast.
Speaker 4:Dude, I mean, if you ask fucking Sam Altman, mean, we'll see if Open Eye is gonna be around in two years, dude. There ain't nobody left.
Speaker 1:There might not be anybody left. That's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. I I think people will probably be still be doing photos in a few years. I'd probably take the over on that one but certainly there will need to be more of a story behind why there's a photo taken. Is it of someone that you know exists?
Speaker 2:But if it's for something generic like the stock photography will truly go away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're we're moving from the you know, you can't trust images online because of filters Yeah. And just like Photoshop Yeah. To you can't trust a photo because it's may or may not be real entirely. Like it could have just been a hallucination from a machine.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:doesn't matter if you just wanna see a picture of a forest. Generic trees in the background to, you know, tell you, to give you a vibe of what this Doctor. Squatch smells like, you know? It's fresh forest.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna I'm make a plug. There's an AI artist on Twitter.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 4:I think the handle's like, this photo does not exist.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:They've produced some amazing photography. That's cool. That actually, like, it's art. It makes you feel something. A lot of it's soulless, but these guys do a great job.
Speaker 4:So check that out. This photo does not exist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean that that that's definitely like the pitch in mid journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like leaving that inspiration that the that the like the human brings to the tool to create something new. But it's very hard for someone to just go and say, make me a viral video. Make me a beautiful image. Like that's not the prompt yet.
Speaker 2:No. It's not yet. But we'll see.
Speaker 1:Anyways Anything else? It's great to see you, Wallet, man. Let's hang in person very soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's hang out soon.
Speaker 4:Thanks guys.
Speaker 2:I'll see
Speaker 1:you. Dennis time. Have a great Friday.
Speaker 2:Bye. Cheers. On the AI note, we should we should cover some of the back and forth around Grok four versus o three. Yep. Tim Sweeney founder of Epic Games says Grok four feels like artificial intelligence to me.
Speaker 2:It's clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but it's drawing fairly deep insights on problems I hadn't seen before in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. Here's an example and it's a very detailed example. The biggest shortcoming I see is the adoption of confused musings from online forums as facts coupled with the with the inability to derive deep insights from intermingled prose and graphics and sources. It needs contextual skepticism and more multi modal visual learning. Also, I bet there are hundreds of thousands of topics where a human professional could write a definitive guidebook on topics that online forum posters frequently confuse, and that could be used to fine tune a lot of low quality user content driven nonsense out of AI models, out of current AI models.
Speaker 2:So bullish on the on the fine tuning labs that are generating data. What's interesting is Yeah. Tyler Cowen says o three is still better. So he's still in the o three camp.
Speaker 1:And more XAI news that this is breaking.
Speaker 5:No breaking.
Speaker 1:As of ten minutes ago, Elon Musk's x a I seeks up to $200,000,000,000 valuation in next fundraising. Wow.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Early talks. Yep. Early talks.
Speaker 2:Early talks.
Speaker 1:To boost its value from as as much as 10 times from last year.
Speaker 2:They're on the frontier. Let's see how much money they can make from this It's
Speaker 1:the most val the the highest value that's ever been applied to x Twitter, the everything Well,
Speaker 2:it's not it's not pre revenue now. They're making money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Amjad says, I suspect it's part of the reason they crushed benchmarks. Truth seeking is all is an all or nothing proposition and it's crucial for general intelligence. Will Brown says, I think it's probably more than 200,000 h 1 hundreds for RL and inference than the don't be than the don't be woke system prompt.
Speaker 2:I do think this is some pretty marketing pretty clever marketing sleight of hand by x AI. Grock has been in the news lately for being edgy. Grock is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things are deeply related, that they figured out how to scale RL like this in such a short amount of time is, in fact, an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's related to the willingness to say controversial thing things other than via the absence of efforts typically spent on guardrails.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just just, you know, training RL. Let's hit this as hard as possible. And we and we covered this that the RL spend was apparently the same as the inference spend for this training run. Kind of new new attempt. And obviously a great model, but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make like an anti woke model specifically.
Speaker 2:Just the fact that it's it's a lot of great math going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, more breaking news. Really? The US, Geiger Capital is reporting on X. The US just posted a surprise surplus of 27,000,000,000 for the month of June.
Speaker 1:Total receipts were 526 Total outlays were 499,000,000,000. That's a free cash flow for United States Of America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's Absolutely wild.
Speaker 2:Well, more breaking news. You can go to biggetbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, This any
Speaker 1:is the time to develop a strategic reserve of Daytona.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:The Daytona reserve.
Speaker 2:And, I mean, we shouldn't we shouldn't break this but a good friend of the show is becoming a watch guy. We're very excited to break the news when it when he goes to
Speaker 1:have him on.
Speaker 2:First day. Talk about the hitter. Mark Gurman is talking about Tim Cook. The rhetoric that Tim Cook should be replaced is just nonsensical. Replace him with who?
Speaker 2:Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs sadly isn't walking through that door. I thought this is a good take that I've agreed with for a while is that you know, Tim Cook is it is such a large organization, so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain. He is the one who built that supply chain. He is you know, maybe missing the mark on AI.
Speaker 2:Might have to partner with some folks. Might have to spend a bunch of money, but fundamentally, he's running the core business very well. And that relates to the new plans for 2026. The first half, they're gonna release a flurry of new products. Mark Gurman has a story in Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:He says Apple plans an m five MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, a '19 iPhone 17 e, new new Mac external monitor. That'll be interesting. I wonder if they're gonna refresh that crazy display. Yeah. The what's it called?
Speaker 2:The not the Apple Pro. The Apple Pro display XDR. Make. That's the one that's like five k. Make.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If they make just a 55 inch version of that, it's game over. Like people would definitely mount that on the wall. But right now, it's like I think it's like 32 inches. Pretty big.
Speaker 2:Great for like, you know, working. And then we have the studio displays over there that are also very good, but they haven't refreshed the the Pro Display XDR in a long time. People still love it. They're also launching new low end iPads and an m four m four iPad Airs as part of the flurry of new products. I think this is all kind of expected but interesting.
Speaker 2:What else is
Speaker 1:Michael Laframboise is doing some market research. He says, would you pay for a mini Archimedes that plugged into a wall and kill mosquitoes? Cool concept.
Speaker 2:I didn't know what an Archimedes was. This must be This like missile battery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it must be but
Speaker 2:Lasers or something.
Speaker 1:I think something like that. I mean, this is the future that we want. This is you know, making Also bringing Slate had Michael. We had so Aurelius Systems. We had him on the a long time ago.
Speaker 1:And yeah, this is we need to take the best defense tech and and use it to Yeah. For for
Speaker 2:This is like Matt Friedman coded meets Yeah. Call we're lucky coded. It's like melding the two things together. Just like tiny robotics for like specific use cases but defense coded. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we should debate this question from Ben South or this the the this historical anecdote. If distribution were really the only mode, we'd all be using apps from celebrities. He he calls out Bizzle which was apparently Justin Bieber's product. Bizzle. And then
Speaker 1:It's not clocking to you, John.
Speaker 2:Not clocking to me? What does that mean?
Speaker 1:You're so offline. So Justin Bieber launched a new album today and he leveraged the the kind of crash out that he had in front of when he was said it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business.
Speaker 2:Oh, standing on business. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:But, we gotta bring Bizzle back.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It might still be in the app store. Probably not.
Speaker 2:And then there was the camera app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was it actually called?
Speaker 2:I forget what it's called. But Disposables. Was it just Disposables eventually? Because it was originally launched with David's Disposables. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:It's like, yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth like the true what's it called? The r naught, the viral coefficient. The viral coefficient isn't actually greater than one, you'll just need to continually be refilling the top of funnel and it'll just will never grow. Underrated, there's like there's like many more celebrity apps. The Jeremy Renner app, are you familiar with that?
Speaker 2:It was like it was like a clone of of Instagram. But it was just Jeremy Renner content. It's pretty sick. Interesting. It was just for like Jeremy Renner fans.
Speaker 2:They could just see his private Instagram like feed basically. Pretty funny. But yeah, it's interesting. It's like, it begs the question like what is the ideal celebrity the the the ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology. I'm still very bullish on Saquon Barclays strategy of just like invest in power water companies that are already like kind of deemed successful and like ordained by the by the tech in industry and the tech complex and just get in.
Speaker 2:As opposed to like trying to all of a sudden become a tech CEO or like a co founder of something that you're just kind of taking weight on the you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it. It's like if you're Yeah. If you're good at being a celebrity just focus on that and then you know invest separately. Anyway, interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, What I wanted to highlight a market.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a market up now of the next c a poly market of the next CEO of X.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It only has x would be like the social app. Yeah. Unclear if there would be if if Elon just becomes the the the CEO broadly. There's no new CEO because, you know, you know, for whatever reason they just don't backfill Linda. But then, Sri Ram Krishnan sitting at 17%.
Speaker 2:Oh, no way.
Speaker 1:It's a very very very low volume. Nikita's up there too at But 10 I think the company I I think the social app of of of X now now that it's com you know, combined entity, it still needs a figurehead. It needs it needs a it needs a core champion. So I'm hoping they find somebody new there.
Speaker 2:There are some contenders that were highlighted by The Wall Street Journal. Pro I don't know if they're on this market particularly. Contenders could include members of Jacarino's leadership team such as John Nitti, global head of revenue operations and ad innovation at X, Angela Zapita, X's global head of marketing, or Monique Pintorelli, head of America's at X, industry insider set. So those are kind of the the the rumors that the Wall Street Journal is is talking about. But it'd be it'd be way more fun to get to get a poster in there.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:Know, potential guest.
Speaker 1:Posters in control.
Speaker 2:Not one of these business people. Although, we forgot to highlight this but Linda Yaccarino, during her twelve years at NBC Universal, she had the nickname, the Velvet Hammer, which I think is amazing. She earned a reputation as a hard charging executive in networking and negotiating negotiating chops. The Velvet Hammer, because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad.
Speaker 1:The velvet hammer.
Speaker 2:You gotta always have attire that's so iconic that it works its way into a nickname. We were talking about nicknames this morning and they come from they need to come from specific stories. You can't just like, you know, pull them out of a hat. They need to they need to really be evocative. And the velvet hammer tells me exactly what she's up to.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Dress to the nines. Gonna get the ad deal done.
Speaker 1:Well, this is a good post to end on from San Kulp. You are terminally online if you know more than five of these. TBPN, High Agency, Hegelian Egirl, Claude Code, La Boo Boo. I still don't know how to pronounce that. Just see it written everywhere.
Speaker 1:Grok four, Prime Intellect, Cali Calimes, that guy who claims to have in implemented auto fills and OTPs. We somebody's a friend of the show sent us that guy's making that claim. Yeah. And then I noticed that it was getting community noted because the guy was just, like, lying because that's, like I mean, it's a great
Speaker 2:I think it was hot I think it was hotly debated whether or not he was lying. Like, obviously, at Apple, like, multiple people work on every project. So people were like, yes. Well, technically, someone else has a claim, but also this person might have a claim and there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the right to claim it. Anyway, we are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this and we're
Speaker 1:Of just
Speaker 2:diving into a conversation about it.
Speaker 1:Of course. Well, it's Friday. It's Friday afternoon or evening depending where you are Yep. In the world and try terminally touching grass this weekend. Yes.
Speaker 1:Go outside. Log off. Get some sunlight.
Speaker 2:Get some sunlight in the morning. Five minutes.
Speaker 1:Five minutes.
Speaker 2:Three to five minutes.
Speaker 1:That's enough. Don't do more than
Speaker 2:that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get back inside. Doomsgirl.
Speaker 2:Have a great weekend, everyone. Leave us a couple podcasts and Spotify. We'll see you on Monday.
Speaker 1:We'll see you then. Goodbye. Cheers.