TBPN Live - $9M Buffett Dinner, AI Monets, Patek Scarcity, Late-Career Founder, WSJ Mansion Section, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Rahul Sonwalkar

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

(00:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions w/ Rahul Sonwalkar, founder and CEO of Julius AI, a startup building AI-powered tools for data analysis and quantitative reasoning. The company focuses on making it easier for users to analyze spreadsheets, generate visualizations, and interact with data using natural language. (01:10) - Dine with Warren Buffet for $9M (05:35) - Typing Loses Ground to Whispering (16:00) - AI Monet Paintings (28:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (51:02) - Patek Chooses Scarcity Over Scale (58:52) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:21:01) - 67 Year Old Founder (01:27:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:34:23) - SpaceX Speeds Up IPO Timeline (01:36:04) - Ackman Takes Microsoft Stake (01:38:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVB. And today is Friday, May 15, 2026. Are we live? Yeah, we're live. Okay, good. We're live. We're live. We've bumped it.

We have a special guest today, Rahul Sunwalker. Introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know. Hello, guys. I'm Rahul Sunwalker, friend of John and Jordy. I'm founder of Julius. Yeah. How are things going on? I don't personally think he needs an introduction.

I don't think so either. But we're very happy to be joined by you on this Friday. We have a bit of a mellow show. No guess. Where's my camera? Over here? Am I back here now? I'm over here? Okay, we're good.

We're figuring it out. It's Friday. A bunch of tech news, bunch of random posts, the mansion section, the, who is it? They're saying you're not hyped enough. They're saying you're not hyped enough. Why don't you go hit the gong? Go hit the gong, warm up. Get the gong, warm up.

Coming to L.A. hanging out with us. All right, you got to hit it. You got a. Terrible. Big one. You can smash it. Big one.

You just smash it. That's a good. God. Come on. Nothing. CEO of Petek-Falib did an interview with the Financial Times. We can go into later, but we got to kick it off with Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is stepping out for his famed charity lunch again.

He's done these for years. A mystery bidder, I wonder if the mystery bidder will be unmassed at some point. A mystery bidder just bid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha. Which would you pick? $9 million in your bank. account or lunch with the Oracle of Omaha. Oh, I'm taking lunch with Oracle of Omaha any day. Any day. Any day. What would I do with $9 million? You can buy Berkshire shares. Let him, let him do work for you forever. Rahul lives in SF, right? Yeah. So you got at the night. You're going to get out bid.

Okay. Yeah. So what are you going to do with nine? Well, nine is down. So if you look at the, the chart, there was a sort of a slow takeoff in the price of these winning bids for Buffett lunches. Mystery bidder just paid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha who last participated in the event in 2022. He took a couple of years off 2020. Of course, COVID took it off 2021. Made a comeback in 2022.

And there was massive demand because previously, this was a $2 million lunch. Originally in 2003, it was just a couple hundred K. But then it spiked to almost $20 million. And now is sitting right around nine. The year's winning bid is a steep drop from the last. time Buffett participated in the lunch. All right, but the trend is quite positive. I think it's pretty good. If you interpolate this, he's still, he's still raising multi-milliones every year. So here's what I'm curious about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a mystery bidder. Yeah. We have no idea

why they bid. Yeah. We just know they want to go to lunch. Yeah. Right. We know they want to be at lunch, right? But there's a, there's a different groups in attendance, right? You have Steph Curry. Yeah. And his wife, Aisha. Yeah. And so there's a possibility that, that this person just wanted lunch with them. They could come in and say, you know, Warren, you know, keeps kind of like, he wants to be friendly, right? So they paid a lot. So he's trying to engage.

And they're just like, really, dude, I paid $9 million to have lunch with Steph Curry. And you're trying to constantly get a word in. What's going on? Could happen. And so, yeah, we don't know if this is just a basketball enthusiast. It could be. Someone that wants to talk about how the game is. Yeah, hard to sort of disentangle until you figure out who the mystery.

drew bidders. Are they court side every game or are they at the shareholders conference? At 92, Warren Buffett said he ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker. That's a wild quote from Warren Buffett. And what about this one? He said both the money and the message remain important. Wait, that's not that crazy. The money and the message. I mean, if you say it, if you say it like he's selling like a course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then it's significant. Ted Welcher, now a Berkshire investment manager, won the auction twice when he was a hedge fund manager.

Oh, so it's sort of like a job opportunity potentially. Like you have to pay all this money up front, but you get to know the big guy. Eventually he cuts you in on the business. Justin's son was another previous winner. Interesting. What did you do, Tron? That was the 20, wait, I don't understand.

He gave Buffett a Bitcoin as well as several. Tron, the digital blockchain he had founded during their meal in 2020. I thought there wasn't one in 2020, I guess, something around there. Five bidders participated in this year's auction on eBay, which opened at 50K. Other items were up for sale, including a $1,100 bill signed by Buffett and sold for $9,100 and a signed Curry jersey that sold for $1,547.99. I thought that was a million dollars. The auction moved online in 2003, allowing Buffett fans around the world to participate. The winning price for the lunch has held above a million dollars since 2008. I wonder if any tech vCs will copy Warren Buffett starts selling

lunches. Some of them are on... Very cool. I was, uh, I had some concerns around doing this on eBay just because of the fees, which can be pretty significant. They probably waived for charities. But they do. Okay, there you go. Okay, well, we have a question for you. So there was a article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Typing is being replaced by whispering and it's way more annoying as a CEO, as a startup founder. I want your take on workplaces that are starting to resemble high-end call centers.

Only these employees are talking to AI. And so they start with an anecdote about working from home. Normally, this couple would be typing on the keyboard, but now they're dictating to Codex and ClaudeCode code. And over at Ramp, engineers sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistance.

What do you think? Should the future of the office sound more like a sales floor? What do you think? I think on one side, I'm pro this trend of like talking to your AI over typing because I can audit what people they're typing in the office. You know, what are they, or they're typing on Instagram or a Twitch live stream? Okay, so if you're just walking by, you can hear someone. And they're saying, scroll.

Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. Yeah. Then there might be an issue. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you doing that on the company time? Sure, sure, sure.

If they're like talking to the AI, like, hey, make me like a app. It's more accountability. More accountability. On the other hand, it's like, I don't want to hear your prompts. Sure. Like if somebody's read my prompts, I would be so embarrassed. Okay. It's kind of like, you know.

What's your May 2026 approach to prompting? My May 2026 approach to prompting? 26 approach to prompting is I've completely, I've come be given up on like yelling at AI. Like just freaking do this. I've got to stop doing that. Okay. And I'm like, is that just because it's good now? Yeah, I do more like cognitive behavioral therapy with AI now.

Like I do more CBT. I try to like reassure the AI. Oh, set it up for success. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do this. Like think about, think about, you know, you're like Palmer lucky. Yeah. And you can design this like new piece of hardware that's never existed before.

So I do more of that. You know, up until 2025, I was more yelling at the AI. Yeah. I've completely dropped out of the whole like don't make mistakes, don't hallucinate. I feel like all that's been either baked into the pre-training or post-training or it's like even in the system prompt already. Yeah. I used to have, the thing that annoyed me for a while was, what is it, antithetical parallelism.

So it's not this, it's that or hyphens. Those types of things were just tell. of AI written content. And I had a special prompt that would inject that in every thing. It would say, hey, don't use the, it's not this, it's that. Don't use contrastive parallelism

or antithetical parallelism. But I since ripped that out and just went back to default, and it feels like all the firms sort of fixed the base training so that it's not as like clankery, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Warren kind of ripped

one of the models, too. You know, when he said the spirit is eager, but the body is weaker. Oh. I just, I just. He's sub-tweeting. Yeah. The models. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. What was the quote? He said, he said, it's not just that the spirit remains eager, but also that the flesh has become progressively weaker. No, he said, I ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker. It has a nice, it's a bar. It has some rhymes rhyming to it.

It's not just about the money. Yeah. It's about the mess. I think Warren needs a Drake. Dude, he needs a mastermind. He needs a verse on a Drake song. Yeah. Who just launched three albums today.

Is that right? Drake launched three albums. Isn't it like six hours? I like some of his music. I wouldn't call myself a fan. Yeah. Brutal. What about this idea for a gym that's themed

like the Rainforest Cafe and there's even a thunderstorm every minute, every 20 minutes. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe? No, where's the, where's the Rainforest Cafe is a themed restaurant where you walk in and there's rainforest all around you and there are statues of animals. And the special thing about the Rainforest Cafe is that it's not just like, you know, you go to some steakhouse and they have some pictures on the wall because it's showing the lineage or you go to an Italian restaurant, you see pictures of celebrities

that came in and signed. It's not purely decorative. It's actually interactive. And at the Rainforest Cafe, every 20 minutes, there's a thunderstorm, and it plays very loudly, and it actually, like,

draws your attention away from whatever you're talking about. It's a brain rot restaurant, basically. That's what Rainforest Cafe is. I can't believe you haven't been. You should go. Tyler, have you been to Rainforest Cafe? I have got.

I mean, it looks like, they really go over the top. with the decor. Look at the table. It looks like AI slop, honestly, on the table. Well, I think it's because many of the leading labs trained almost exclusively content from the rainforest cafe. Have you ever been to the rainforest cafe, Tyler? No. Has anyone been to the rainforest cafe? Okay, we got a couple rainforest cafe enjoyers in the TV panel today. But a gym with a theme, would you go? I feel like we're kind of re-enbending like nature from first principles right now, you know? You might just want to go to the

Yeah, it's like lift heavy things, like go outside, like lift rock. Yeah. So, so this, this poster suggests that all the machines would be painted to look like they're made of bamboo. The leather is fake leopard print. Someone get me in touch with the mayor of Miami. This would go crazy over there. Men are allowed or perhaps required to wear loincloths, etc.

It goes other places. And then he starts drawing out what it would look like. The gym that we worked out in today has a little bit of a theme too. it, but it's not too on the nose, but there is, you notice the machines have like some decorative stuff on it, and it feels like they went one notch further than just the standard gym equipment. It's a little flamboyant, I would say, yeah. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about schemes that are allegedly taking place in Silicon Valley these days. RevSwap.aI. This seems like a joke.

This seems like a drop designed to go viral. Harry Raghavan says, in case you're wondering, this is the stage of the market we're at. And the idea is that you trade dollars with other startups and you book it as revenue. So rev swap AI is the world's first peer-to-peer revenue laundering platform. See, it's got to be a joke at that point. For SF startups, you give us $1 million. We give you $1 million back. now you have one million ARR math, start swapping.

How? Yeah, the problem with these is it's funny for people that are like maybe closer to the inside, but this got half a million views. So that means there's hundreds of thousands of people that think this is like a real thing. Yeah, they either think they're doing a startup and they should do this, or they think they're outside and they're like, this is how bad startups are. I don't think many startups are doing this. But if you've talked to VCs,

is like quality of revenue coming up, revenue concentration, circular revenue deals? Is any of that coming up these days? I think investors deeply care about all those things and good investors still do their due diligence when investing in companies, especially when they're at a mid-to-later stage, right?

Sure. But really, like, where do you draw the line, right? You see NVIDIA investing a lot of neoclows that go buy their GPUs. They help start these new clouds. And then you have, of course, like, NBIDA investing in AI labs. And end up being, like, downstream consumers of these GPUs. And so, like, I think in a way, like, yes, it's kind of like a revenue spot where you're investing in a company. And then, like, they're kind of like buying your product.

Yeah. Kind of like $20. But so I think there's like, in some places it makes sense, in some certain context. If you're a founder though, and if you're an early stage founder, if you're just like going for this, you have to ask yourself like, okay, what am I really in this for? Like, am I here to like build a business and build a thing that people want? Or am I here to just like... LARP. LARP.

Yeah. And a lot of people do play a like founder as opposed to like building a business, building a company. Yeah, but this is also like a crime. It's not just larping. It depends. You just close it. If you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal. You should probably discount it to zero.

That's not wire fraud, right? Like, if you're disclosing it, like the wire fraud is only when you are stating one thing as another. Like, you're lying. If you're not lying about it and you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal. We pay this company. They pay us. You should probably not give us any credit for that in our valuation. Their entire life is a larp.

Maybe. Should we talk about Monet? Circular deals, though. There's an interesting, there's an interesting anecdote of when they worked out. Do you know this? AsML 2012. They had a customer co-investment program where Intel, TSM and Samsung pitched in $6.8 billion across R&D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography and 450 millimeter wafer technology. And so the deal would look like an odd round, trip of cash from the non-semit conductor pilled, but it worked, and the customers effectively finance the creation of a new technology that they wanted, and everyone came out just fine. And so we're 14 years in, ASML's a great company, we have EUV technology, and it worked, even though it was this weird circular deal where TSMC and Intel and Samsung were like, we want you to go make this machine, we're going to be the buyers of it, and we'll also be the investors and the financiers of it.

So it can work out, but probably not as simple as going to rent. What is it, Rev cycle.AI or something? As long as it is disclosed. Yeah. And this was disclosed both by TSM, Intel, Samsung, and TSM at the time. And everyone reacted positively because they were working together. We need your take on this, this Shlom's post, this Monet. Can we get this on the big screen?

Let's get this on the big screen because Shlombs here says, I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. please describe in as much detail as possible what makes this inferior to a real mona painting what do you think break it down what makes this inferior me art expert rha who putting me on the spot right now i see from museums on the weekend let's let's see he adds the made with AI tag uh but there is a community note here and i and i'll spoil it uh this is an actual monet water lilies No, no, no, no.

So let me read some of the responses so far from people. Okay. I'm disappointed. I have to even point it out. There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lily pads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lily pad algae amalgam is egregiously vague like most AI art. And let's read some of the others.

People have started deleting their responses. No, really? The choice of color in places, i.e. the purple around the lily pad, sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most mona. Get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes to the brush palette, almost as if it's an AI. No frame, no sense of the threshold between subjects and objects, just colors. Are you an AI art enjoyer?

Do you play around on Mid Journey ever for fun? You do your cognitive behavioral therapy? Because a lot of people use Mid Journey as sort of like art therapy. You know, they'll go in and they'll prompt it. It's less about making an image that they will sell or making an image for a commercial purpose or even sharing their images with anyone else. They just enjoy the game of they have an idea and they want to see it, you know, on the screen. And so they play around and then they are satisfied.

It's like playing a video game. Like no one cares that you finish Dark Souls except you. You had fun. All right. There's some great feedback here on why it. why it's bad. Fair warning before I dig in. This image is actually a very competent rendition.

It's doing more right than most AI Monet. But you ask what makes it inferior to a real Monet, so here's the honest breakdown. What's missing? The physical object. A real Monet is a thing before it's an image. This is the biggest gap and is not solvable by better prompting. Huh.

And it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. It's not soluble with better prompting until that's like in the terrain data. Yeah. Also, I mean, like, like, LLMs with tool use can just, if you ask for a Monet, they can just go get you the PNG of M-M-M-M-A. It feels less lively. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts, the fine calculated highlights. The AI version is a granulated pixelation, and it looks that way. It lacks the mess of humanity. and someone else says The fact that it looks like S-H-I-T and is S-H-I-T Slop doesn't look anywhere

Near like a M-A looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate the style and achieving like 20% of it Not as vibrant as Mone's typical choice of colors Looks dull A lot of people are dunking on this Of course He posts this is a real Mone

He baited them all It is Wow Someone took all of their feedback and turned it into an AI generated Monet to try and improve it. Interesting. The other AI art thing that's going on, which is very, very funny, is did you see Sony launch this new AI camera assistant with Experia intelligence to bring stories to life? We have to pull this image up because I don't know what they were thinking. Like, it's like one of the craziest, like, attempts at shipping an AI feature.

And I don't know what they were, I don't know what they were thinking. When you see these images, look at this. Like, this is, I don't know if you can tell on the screen, but like, it's not our camera is not, like, the camera that you're watching this on this on this is not like miscalibrated on the contrast. It just adds like a ton of contrast and makes everything look. way worse. And the sandwich is so blown out. It's just all they did was just increase the brightness. The original looks great.

And you have less detail on the right. And I cannot believe this is from the official gold check Sony Xperia account. Like this is not a joke. What do you think this is? The product manager working on Sony Xperia hates AI. I mean, they wanted to watch the launch so they get so much pushback that they don't have to work on AI anymore. Something like that. Yeah, Michael Brown here says, I could be wrong, but I suspect this is a joke.

If so, prop to Sony for rage banning the internet so hard. Just look at the sandwich. MKVHD made two videos about this kind of stuff being bad. And Google led out on something similar earlier this week. I mean, obviously there are ways to integrate AI upraising and AI color grading, like at a much more intuitive level without doing this. But I don't know what they were thinking. How could they possibly approve that post?

Maybe they had their monitor contrast set, like, wildly wrong, because to actually ship this, like, your monitor would have to be woefully miscalibrated to think that the one on the right looks better. This one is the closest. Like, it did sort of amplify the streak of light. This one is, if I had to pick one where the AI camera assistant did not completely degrade the image, this actually does work. I can't, I can't get behind that. Look at the, like, what is the subject to the photo? Is it that light streak at the bottom? Yep, yeah, yeah.

I would, I would say, I would say the, the AI camera assistant version is only 10% worse here, whereas the other ones make it like 200% worse. What do you think? No, it's way, way worse. If you had to pick one, it's way worse. But if you had to pick one, one AI camera assistant image, which one's the least chopped? Which one's the least botched? probably this one.

There you go. You know it with this one? No way. No way. This is so much worse. This is a drug. Here the original looks more AI than like... It does.

Wait, is it some sort of prank? Is this the Schlomes thing all over again? Where they're like big reveal. The left is actually AI and the right is out of the camera. You mean inverted? No, no. What I'm saying is that so they, so a lot of people were saying like the tags at the top were accidentally swapped.

And what if that's intentional? What if they're saying like, like, we took the bad photo on the, on the right that's overblown, over too contrasty, too bright. And with our AI, we got you to a reasonable photo on the left.

And big reveal tomorrow or whenever Sony puts this out and says, actually we were able to restore the highlights, bring the contrast more natural and make the photo on the right look better with AI. That would be a good pitch, but I do think they might have asked. I think this might have been an accident. They, they posted it. Have they, have they commented since?

I think they're just following the post about AI camera assistant, we'd like to explain the feature in more detail. It doesn't edit photos after shooting. It suggests four settings. Wow, they're doubling down. Oh, no. The originals look so good by comparison. What are you doing?

Oh, wow. this is I don't know what's going you can choose any option how about no option in this case maybe this is like a sigh of from Sony to maybe well there was a big reveal

with the Swatch AP collab I know you were looking at some watches earlier today at breakfast are you in the market for the the collaboration between Adomar Pigay and Swatch

Oh absolutely room with a wristband you are in the market for this We're going to go stand in line for the AP after the show, right? I think that's the plan, no? Yeah, yeah. People are calling it the new Laboo-Boo-Boo-you-will-you-will-old. We don't know yet that this is not an AI wearable.

That could be the missing element here. Could be. Yeah. I think this is going to be a hit. I think this is going to be a hit. It's seeming more and more likely that they're not releasing any type of strap themselves. So people are going to do aftermark. market straps. I think those will be frowned upon.

Bone case. Oh yeah, like the Haley Bieber, you know, like the makeup case. Yeah. The thing is a lot of people are wearing fitness wearables on their wrists, which kind of competes on real estate with these fancy watches. I know, but you got a lot of arm. You got a lot of arm and you got two wrists. You get iced up. Yeah, you could just keep going up and up and up and up. Anyway, give us the update on Julius. How are things going? These are really good. We just launched slides last month. Slides is going well, so thank you.

So Julius is slowly becoming the platform where you can bring your messy data and then analyze it, get insights, and not just that, but actually do the stuff after it. Like create reports, dashboard, slides, and then very soon you'll be able to email Julius and assign tasks for your data work.

And so if you work in finance, operations, marketing, you check out Julius. How do you think about the tradeoff between generative imagery for slide generation versus some sort of harness that generates a slide in sort of a traditional software platform like PowerPoint or Google or Google slides. Absolutely. So the generative imagery for slides was just not great until GPT. The latest launch. Images too. And the text rendering on the images is so good.

Yeah. That actually, it completely changes the game. Yeah. It's not just for creative assets. It actually cannot be used for whole slides. And you can actually render charts. A lot of times I'll go to charge of BT and I will dictate. I was wondering about the performance of different ETFs as they relate, like, as they're more indexed to the semiconductor,

as you get narrower from an S&P 500 to a NASDAQ to a QQ focus tech. ETF all the way down to like a semiconductor ETF. What's the performance of the last year? I just wanted like a bar chart. And so instead of asking for like a table deep research report, I said go pull all the data, put it together into like an infographic. It did it pretty well. I feel like it's a little bit of a leap of faith because I don't know where the data is coming from. It's a little messy. And then I would be very hesitant about like maintaining a consistent style throughout a full presentation. But for something where I'm just want like a one off thing. So where where, where is. is the, where's the demand from the customer on like slide deck versus single slide generation? Yeah, so the image gen is great if you want a single infographic or single graphic. If you want like a multi, multi slide deck, a whole story, you want to maintain brand consistency across the deck. And that's where you're using a code harness. Sure. Like JavaScript or HTML to generate slides actually much more optimal.

And so depending on what the user wants, Julius will choose whether to use image 2.0 or. or use like a code harness to generate like multiple slides. Yeah. But to answer you a question, like the image models is really, really good for like graphics. Yep. Single, single slides. And then you can combine that with like a code harness to generate like multiple slides. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordi, anything else? Thanks for coming on the show. It's been an honor. Yeah. Thank you guys. How you're hanging out this morning. We'll talk to you.

Likewise. Yeah. Have a good rest of your day. We'll see you soon. Another one. The big news today is, of course, Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced a bill to pause all AI data center construction. I want to know within this bill how they are defining AI data center.

Of course, GPUs are graphics processing units. You wire a bunch of them together. You can do AI. You can do machine learning. You can render CGI films. There's a lot of different uses. And I wonder how they're grappling with that definition. 300 local bills have been, 300 plus local bills have been filed.

Half of planned 2026 data centers are facing delays or cancellation. Each one brings billions to local economy, says Gary Tan, the people who say they want American jobs are trying to block the biggest job creation engine since the Interstate Highway system. Sanders and AOC are straight up sabotaging the economy, says Nick Davidov, no spy or a rival country agent can achieve what local useful idiots can. And so people are going back and forth about the data center construction ban. I wonder how this will pencil out. Elizabeth Warren says a single AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households and utility companies are passing the

upgrade costs to you, not to the trillion dollar tech giants. That, of course, was attempted to be addressed by the rate payer protection pledge, but it is early days. And so we'll have to see how that pans out. Yeah, and this is the same bill that was introduced in March, but it's continuing to pop up again, obviously, as they try to move it along. But it hasn't passed committee yet. It doesn't obviously have bipartisan support. Very unlikely. And there's a lot of geopolitical considerations. Anthropic put out a big essay today around different resolutions to U.S.-China competition in age of AI. Obviously, they are very aggressive about don't lose the lead, continue to build data centers, but the nimbism, the noise complaints, the environmental

concerns, like all of these things do have to be addressed in a democratic society. if we are to move along smoothly. Tyler. Yeah, so just for the definitions, how it's defined. So a data center is defined as a building that has more than 20 megawatts maximum power capacity or total peak power that are used to deliver 20 kilowatts or more to a single server rack or to use liquid cooling to individual hardware components. Yeah, I'm just wondering if we're going to get some weird workaround where, okay, instead of like one big building, you get a thousand smaller buildings that are always stuck. It also says, like, a building

that's contiguous or adjacent to another building that's... Okay. So I think they get one of that. So they'll have to put some, like, trees in between them or something? I don't know. I just like, every time there's a law, people will find a way around the law. And so I'm very interested to see how this winds up changing. It could change it for good, you know? It could be, like, okay, yeah, like, clean energy and it's underground, and it doesn't, it's not noisy, and it It doesn't create, it feels like the real, the real issue at debate is like passing the cost on to people who don't benefit, a negative externality, which the government has been internalizing negative externalities since its inception. And so there's certainly a good outcome, but it, it will be. almonds are catching some heat from J-Cal. Oh, yeah. He is showing almond

production versus data center water consumption from 1999 to 2026. And yeah, everyone has been saying for years, even prior to the AI boom, just how much water almonds use. This was particularly top of mind when California was in a massive drought and then you drive through different parts of California

and it's just almond trees as far as the eye can see. And so anyway, Anyways, almond, almonds catching strays. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you look at this and you think about the growth rate in this year. Like, you can see that the blue line is ticking up, and you can see that the red line for almonds is flatlining. And so if you are extremely aggressive about counting the ooms,

and you project this out a couple years, you can see these two things flip. But, of course, there are ways to avoid situations like that with water. increasing, such as what Blake Scholl proposes, which is closed loop cooling and booms super power turbines that don't need any water. And you can avoid all of that. But the whole water debate seems like not the focus of the Sanders AOC proposal. It seems much more focused on generation and upgrading the grid, which is expensive and is real.

Everyone knows that data centers do use a lot of power. No one's saying that the high energy intensity is fake news, even though the water debate was a little bit thrown, you know, it was sort of quickly debunked. The energy debate has not been debunked. And so there is a need for more clean energy, more power and more grid upgrades that are not visited upon local communities. The big question that we were trying to answer, and we're going to try and get someone on the show. show maybe next week to talk about this is like what what what is the if you were trying if you were if you were if you were attempting to build a data center that had 80% approval like what would that look like what is the azur Klein abundance vision for a data center it's probably powered by

clean energy it's probably someone very somewhere very remote brandon was talking about the the 40 minute commute the 40 minute commute is something that many Americans do, and it is not insurmountable. And he was just reflecting on if you're, if you're ever driven in or around Las Vegas, if you drive 40 minutes in any direction, you get to a lot of, a lot, a lot of empty land where certainly a big building is not going to be an eyesore. You're not going to be able to hear 60 decibels from 20 minutes away. And there is a lot of land, but that hasn't been the default construction methodology for a lot of data center constructors. Yeah, it's like, The TSM plan in Arizona is like basically 30 minutes north of like central Phoenix.

Yeah, it didn't seem like that. Yeah, so you basically go over a little like hill and then it's just like completely empty land. Yeah. There's a massive fab. Yeah, I like that. I learned an interesting fact, which is that Apple has a secret fab. They have a silicon fab in Silicon Valley. They bought a fab for, I sent you the, where did I pull this up?

I had to fact check this because I saw it. was framed as like this secret like you know terrible thing um it was not that uh it's not that scary it's uh they bought it for 18.2 million dollars it's a 70 000 square foot uh a facility owned by maxim previously uh they bought it maybe in 2015 and it's controversial because they were fined by i believe the EPA for uh for some uh mislabel of waste and air emissions controls. But it was a pretty small fine. It was something like a couple hundred, maybe $200,000.

And it seemed like they might have just had a mistake. They brought down the hammer on them. Yeah. Well, I think it was like, like, you know, the air conditioning duct was slightly misconfigured. It was not like a nuclear waste spill, like destroying the whole town. But it was controversial, obviously, because Apple wants to be as clean and environmentally friendly as possible, which is why I lean into

they don't want a massive, like they're, they're not even a scaled chip manufacturer. This is a prototype facility. They manufacture between 600 nanometers to 90 nanometers, way different than what's happening at TSMC with two and three nanometers. So it's not a secret facility in the literal sense. The secret fab framing comes mostly from critics and whistleblower coverage, not to be a secret. because it was known, unknown to government or industry, it was licensed. The EPA says the Apple facility on Scott Boulevard. So maybe that's your next trip, Tyler. You're going over to, where is it?

It's in Santa Clara, in Santa Clara. On Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara generated hazardous waste and had RCR violations in 2023 to 2024, which they made fixes for. And they paid a $261,000 penalty. It's 3250 Scott Boulevard if you're in Santa Clara. Go stop by. Let's give it up for Scott. I didn't know you had a boulevard named after you.

That's very funny. So the interpretation at the time was that it could support prototyping, testing, or heavy R&D, not mainline production. So your iPhone is not made in Santa Clara. It is made abroad. It is made right here. Tyler's desk. Yes. Apple designs the chips while TSM and Samsung.

manufacture actual advanced processors, and the acquired fab does not necessarily mean Apple would manufacture its own ships. So, interesting story. Anyway, we covered this a little bit yesterday, but Figma crushed their Q1, 46% year over year revenue growth, accelerating for the second straight quarter. They had net dollar retention rate of 139% our highest rate in over two years. And they raised their 2026 revenue. guidance. Dylan says design matters more than ever. I agree. Yeah. I agree. Everyone's going to be building more software. At some point, we're going to need to make all of our swamp. At breakfast this morning, we were looking at a website. I showed this website to Rahul and he said,

oh, that's the classic like, taste is the new moat website. Just like the website that looks, the tasteful looking website that looks like every other website, which is inherently means it's not. Yeah. The prompt was like make it look tasteful and it like ripped some shameless thing. It didn't feel inspired and, uh, it is, it is interesting. Uh, fig has up 14% today. Back up to 12. Yeah. And, and, uh, 12 billion. 12 billion. Fantastic. A year ago, fig would be trading at 30x rev on those numbers, but since all the algos have zeroed out terminal multiple, it's only up eight percent. So it's dolly-bally. Uh, and, And yeah, people are going back and forth on this.

But two guys making sandwiches at the Wawa, loudly discussing their profits on semi-trades just now. Is that a top signal? I was looking back through the timeline, and Martin Screlli called the top on semis, I think May 1st, something like that. And Tyler's shaking his head. He thinks we're still going up.

Up only, right? I mean, he was effectively wrong, right? I mean, it's been two weeks. It's like, if you call the top, I expect you to call the top. You can't call the day. Like, you know, he's like, it's a rough call. I think you get like, uh, you get like plus or minus a month. That's a long time.

Plus or minus like two months even. Yeah. Two months. Yeah. I mean like the big, the big macro narrative on semis is like, uh, is like a multi-year. Okay. So end of June is, is kind of the cut off. Yeah.

And, end of, end of June, I'd be like, you need to, you need to update this. You need to give us an update on whether or not you still. think the early, early May was the top of the semiconductor cycle. There are some companies that are in semis that are trading ahead. I mean, Intel is like, we were talking about with Doug O'Loughlin yesterday. Intel has a lot of good news and good plans, but now they have to like actually execute. There are a bunch of other semiconductor stocks that are essentially the multiple on forward earnings is actually compressing.

So Micron, I think, was one that's up 790 percent. but forward earnings are up 2,000 percent. And so they're going to be growing a ton next year. They have a ton of demand. And so the market's moving on that, but they haven't realized that yet. And so, I mean, I think that they will, but the question is how far can they go?

How far can they take it? Well, we're waiting for the situational awareness Q1.30F. Not yet. Okay. Not yet. But it should be in the next few hours. Well, the X-AI co-founder, Aguore Babushkin, is planning to raise up to $1 billion and up to $5 billion valuation for a new AI research startup with general catalyst possibly leading. Why is Tyler laughing so much?

Rul had a good post earlier. Oh, yeah. Okay. G.C. has a very high moral bar, so I don't think Igor will be continuing to work on Ani. and some of the other features that the XAI had been focused on. Might be pivoting. I think that that whole debate did sort of quiet doubt. Like we were wondering if there was going to be an escalation,

if we were going to see Reggie and Eric like going at it or Hamat jumping in. But it's sort of, you know, it felt like a lot of the A16C folks came out and put the line in the sand. Just say you've never closely followed a rat. battle before because there can often be a one or two day gap. They're in the studio. They're in the lab. They're in the lab. They're in the studio. Cooking up the next response video. I would love the new meta to move away from the vibe real, the podcast appearance, the tweet and the one minute polished, scripted ad firing back attack ads. This is great. I do think we should get more into just straight up political attack ads. Like Mark Andruson wants to fund a robot dog. He wants to

put your dog out of business. General Catalyst is for real dogs. And Dresen is for fake dogs. Vote, like, raise money from General Catalyst. Mark Andresen wants to shut down your local veterinarian. Turn it into a dog robot workshop. Exactly. Exactly. Like, there's a certain aesthetic to the, to the, uh, the, the political attack ad that we all know and love. And no one has taken that and appropriated it as a form of marketing. So greenfield opportunity over there. Well, the research startup from the XAI co-founder is called River AI. I like that name.

I think that the- Drop the AI. The recursive, the general intelligence, applied intelligence, accelerated intelligence. There's one that's like indescribable, ineffable intelligence. It was getting a little crowded in that namespace. And the river. River just sounds good. I like it.

I think it's a good name. How about, anyway. Conventional. Conventional intelligence. Conventional intelligence. Midwit intelligence. No one that, you know.

Mid-curve intelligence. Yeah, you do sort of have like, you know, more left-leaning AI labs, more right-leaning AI labs. There's no, there's no like, you know, good old boy southern intelligence, like a model that's explicitly trained to focus on like a cold beer, a lifted truck. That's true. You know, getting your boots in the mud. That's true. Like kind of like country intelligence. Country intelligence. Country intelligence is an opportunity. Where it just constantly, it can't stop talking about cold beer. Yeah. Yeah. Like it'll just slip in. Cold beer on a Friday night. You did great on that

task. Why don't you deserve a cold beer? No one's working on country intelligence. It just can't up, it just, it, uh, it's like, uh, like goblins, right? Or, yeah, yeah, or telling you to go to bed. It's like, it just is like, um, how about that new F-150? Yeah. It's like, what does that have to do with what we're working on? Yeah, exactly. It's like Dario talks about having a, a country of geniuses in the data center. I want country geniuses. What about a country of Ford F-150s in a data exactly? I want country geniuses. Uh, well, uh, uh, this is an interesting, what's going on. Data point from David, he says the entire NIH annual budget for neuroscience research for all

scientists across the U.S. is about $3 billion a year. Now there are something like dozens of neolabs that have all raised zero to a billion within months of being founded. And they are all doing the same thing. I guess the solution here is to give $3 billion to a neolab working on neuroscience. You know, the solution is always more a neolab to for-profit. Has anyone thought about going the other way?

Well, I do think a lot of these neolabs could end up being non-profit. Eventually. Eventually, you never know. Well, you know what's not a nonprofit? Benchmark Capital. Because when benchmark invested 6.7 million in eBay in 1997,

the auction company's valuation was $20 million. By next spring, the company, was valued at more than $21 billion. The value of benchmark steak had grown 100,000% in less than two years. I'm doing the Chad sound effect. I know.

I can see. I can see it. I know what's happening. It's actually better without the IEMs. Somebody commented on Spotify yesterday that somebody needs to talk to Jordy about the soundboard. And then a bunch of other people commented and said, yeah, that he's not using it enough. Sorry. Sorry.

That's like asking a musician, like, hey, don't make music. Yeah. You know? How would you react if some enterprising author, journalist, came in and said, hey, we want to write the definitive story about TVPN. We're going to profile Tyler and Jordy and John, Ben, Brandon, the whole crew, we're going to tell the story. And you're like, that sounds amazing.

I would love to be in a book. That's so cool. Like what we're doing so important. And then you're like, what's the book going to be called? And the author's like, I'm going to call it E-boys. Would you be down for that? Or would you be like, oh, damn it. I kind of was hoping you would refer to me as a man.

I like this. For an adult. You like this? Yeah. E-boys. The subtitle is hilarious. Subtitles is hilarious. The six tall men?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of you had me in the first. half there, but then the subtitle comes back, because it's the true story of the six tall men who backed eBay, Webvan, and other billion-dollar startups. It's the book about benchmark by Randall Strauss. I've read this book. If you haven't read it, it's probably been a review. Six or seven years, but I've read it. Benchmarks financial exit on eBay was known as a Kagle in the VC industry. That's like the term triple double being associated with Oscar Robinson, because this historic season average. In June 1997, when the internet auction site was in its infancy,

the executives each pledge 6.9 million shares is collateral for two $750,000 loans from benchmark capital. The stock wasn't yet publicly traded and the shares were valued at 11 cents apiece. I remember meeting Bob Kegel at benchmark in 1999, says Trent Griffin and talking to him about eBay, he believed in early that online marketplaces could be important. Yeah, I'd say so. Investing in a category creating business required variant perception. Consensus doesn't identify unknown unknowns a priori. Anyway, interesting. Let's pull up this video you posted this morning that is completely flopping. Yeah, it is flopping. But it's funny to me. We got one, Nick, thank you. Nick Carpentino said, Carpenito says, banger. Can we put it on the big screen?

If we play this, we're going to get demonetized and we're going to have to cut it out. But you can just go enjoy it on my timeline. I can send the, without the music. Nah, it doesn't hit then. Anyway, it's Fast and the Furious plus Jerome Powell. It's fun. Anyway, moving on. Who is Scott Besson was on CNBC talking about meeting with the Chinese vice premier. They're saying it's one of the wettest and purplest appearances in television history, I suppose. I'm not saying that, but Uncle Dumer is, I guess.

We're going to talk about forming a board of trade for the bilateral trade between the U.S. and China. and we're going to talk about the board of investment that will be responsible for investment in nonsensive areas. That's a lot of jargon. Look, being purple on CNBC, that's on CNBC, or whoever his lighting technician is for this call-in. If you're calling into a television show or TBPN, check your lighting. Put a big light off to the side right here, make it nice and soft, make sure you look normal, adjust the white balance. these things can be fixed. Ask chat GPT if you're having trouble. Is this on Air Force One?

Yeah, it's probably in a very temporary setup, like just curtain, flag, what else do you need? Like, it's not that much. But also, powder, I don't do this because we have a temperature controlled facility and we're, you know, like take showers before the show and dry off. But if you are moist, you can use some sort of powder that a lot of people put on before big interviews. It's sort of one step away from like a full hair and makeup set up, but it is recommended if you are moist and you're doing press. These are the things you learn from doing content. Anyway, the CEO of Patec Philippe, Terry Stern says,

you don't come to Patek Philippe because it's more extensive. Well, why do you come to protect Philippe? We will have to figure it out. It's in today's financial times. I want to read it on paper, but you can follow along on the actual article. So, oh, no, this is the wrong one. Here we go. You don't come to Potech because it costs. John. What's up? Chats love in the casual show today. Yeah? They're enjoying it. Order food. Oh, shouldn't we? We try not to eat. We try not to eat on it. He doesn't really work here. You get a lot of dead air. It doesn't quite work. But, you know, it does work going to Potechfully, but not because it costs more, but because of their approach to retail and production, apparently. These are stormy times

for luxury watchmakers. We've talked about this with Quaid from Bezal. Talked about all of the tariffs and whatnot. But the waves have not yet crashed into Patek Philippe. Do you say Patech or Pawtech? Quaid says Potech. I think the real Balnawer say Patech. But the war is there, but we're still selling, says Terry Stern. Stern is the fourth generation of his family to lead Paw Tech. The privately owned high-end watchmaker does not report on its financial performance, and the 55-year-old Swiss scion of the Stern family is not about to break with convention and go into detail.

But Morgan Stanley estimates its revenue has jumped by more by about 25% of the past two years to... How much do you think they're making per year? Gross revenue. Gross revenue for pot tech, full. In a full year, what do you think they're making? Wow, I actually have no idea. Is it like $5 billion?

Not bad. 3.2 billion is the estimate from Morgan Stanley. You divide that by what, $100,000 on average for a watch? Because they have a lot that are higher, but they have some that are 60, 50 or something. But not moving a ton of watches. But don't forget, Pawtech Philippe doesn't produce that many watches. Potek produced about 75,000 watches last year and expects out of that. put to remain at the same level. We have good balance around the world and we have been very

cautious about allocation. If one part of the world doesn't work well, we can always shift the watches. Pottech is clearly active in securing its own retail footprint. In March, it acquired the multi-brand retailer Bayer Chromometry for an undisclosed sum. Bayer, a Zurich-based jeweler founded in 1760, overnight success there, is thought to be the world's oldest watch retailer and oldest Patec dealers. Stern said it would become the brand's fourth owned and operated boutique style salon, adding outlets in Geneva, London, and Paris, and will only sell Patech watches. But he's quick to quash suggestions. The move marks the beginning of a retail grab in the same vein as Rolex's acquisition of the luxury watch retailer, Boucher. Boucher, I don't know how pronounce that.

In August of 2023, I'm a watchmaker, not a retailer. I still need the retail. Pottech has taken a strategic approach. Are you doing the voices on me? imagine you are. I, like, made one joke about it being too much, and people were like, oh, John doesn't have a good sense of humor about it. I'm fine. Don't worry. According to analysts of every watch, which I guess is the semi-analysis of the watch industry,

the Rolex move generated revenue of almost $600 million last year for Switzerland's largest watchmaker. This is the certified pre-owned business model that Rolex launched in 2022. 10% of the global watch market for secondhand Rolex watches. When everybody started, they thought they could make a lot of money. Then they realized it's not that easy. Stern doesn't rule it out, though. I'm thinking about something, but it's too early to talk about it.

A vague posting. He's vague posting about potentially certified pre-owned pottex at a retail store. You go and you buy something, can't afford. Can't get an allocation in the latest watch or something comes in that's special and needs to go on the second hand, second market. He can take a piece of that. For now, he seems content with the shape and strategy of the business. Morgan Stanley's figures indicate that the top four privately owned Swiss watchmakers,

Patek Philippe, together with Rolex AP and Richard Mill, controlled about 50% of the luxury watch market last year, up from 37% in 2019. There's consolidation in the market. Smaller players are fighting for survival. I don't need to have more brand sharing this market, but he does recognize the problem. I don't want anybody going down either, but a lot of people will be out of business. Look, it'd be a shame if my competitors were destroyed and burned to the ground.

I don't want that, but it's very likely. It's going to happen. Some of those struggling with increased competitive pressures have already turned to new markets to generate sales, particularly India, and also the watch collab might be an answer to this. Stern won't be following, though. Why should I go there? It's too early. Most of the Indian clients that want Patech are living in London or traveling to Geneva

in the Middle East, so it's not my priority. What access they might have to his watches when they travel is also unclear. The tourist doesn't really have the chance to buy a Patech, he says. The retailer has to sell to the local client. Yeah. So he's like, the folks in India who want a Patech can just go to Switzerland, but then he's like, Also, I'll never sell the tourists. You have to be a local.

So I imagine he's talking about like Indian billionaires that have homes in the Middle East or Switzerland or Geneva or London. Yeah, if you have an enemy that's getting into watches and they don't really know the game yet, tell them to book a trip to Geneva because all the major brands and presence there and stores. And they should just go there. If they want a nice watch, they should just go there and ask for one. I'm sure they'll be very successful. Interesting. So the U.S. is shifting away. The Patex U.S. retailer network has been reduced by two-thirds to 38, 38 stores, but it still accounts for 16% of the company's total revenue, so they're not doing too poorly. There's a certain category of clients who may be like this, he says, when asked about the perception of his watches as elite status symbols, but you don't come to protect because it's more expensive. He says his family's company is not aimed. at the kind of customer who wants to flaunt an expensive watch to command attention.

This is not me. They won't be doing the iced out from the factory anytime soon, I suppose. Does he talk about the cubitus? No, almost two decades. No, dodged entirely. Doesn't, didn't talk about it. They're not asking hard questions at the financial times. Yeah.

Real missed opportunity. I don't know. The cubitist, I feel like the cubit Cupidus was advertised in here though. Isn't it on the back of this? I feel like I saw it in this financial time. There's a lot of ads in here. I don't know. No Zena. No Vipat. I feel like I saw an ad for Cubidati. Yeah. Yeah. 30 eggs. I got a lot. Do you have the Cudius ad over there? What about this? In here? In here? No. What about in the journal? Is it in the journal?

I feel like I saw it out for the key of this somewhere. Anyway, we should go over to the journal because the mansion section has a very interesting story today about a 40-year marriage, built one gut renovation at a time if you want a successful relationship by 10 houses over four decades and constantly be renovating.

I think there's a lot of truth in this. Let's read the story. I'll give you my take. So one Oklahoma couple spent decades and roughly $14 million, buying, redoing, and selling eight properties around Tulsa for their ninth production

they've built from the ground up. They say, for them, it's an adventure. Anne and Mark Farrow are real estate wildcard. Always at home, never settled. Over 40 years, they've gutted and lived in eight houses around Tulsa. They built the ninth they built. Together, their house transactions

have totaled about 14 million, a portfolio market, by a portfolio market by reimagined floor plans and high-end finishes. Their latest, a 7,200 square foot build draws on everything they have learned since their first renovation in the 1980s. Now, even the pharaohs wonder whether the journey is over. This house would be hard to duplicate, says Mark 67. 6-7.

The Wall Street, Brainrod Journal, added again. Turning turning 67 in 2026 is brutal. They also profiled an entrepreneur who's 67 who just started a company. Weird. But company is ripping, doing well,

never too late to start a company. Let's get them some, let's have them on the show. We'll read that later. Yet resisting another fixer-upper won't be easy for the couple who rejected being called flippers, instead identifying as serial renovation lovers.

I go through, through withdrawal without a home project, says Anne 63, who's retired. While nine home projects would send most couples into mediation, the pharaohs view logistical nightmares as as a shared thrill. Their secret, radical honesty and speed. For us, it's an adventure, Mark says. These are real operators. No, no, this is a team. You're looking at the Collison brothers, the family business builders of real estate. We should scroll through the actual images of the Because they got started pretty small. $86,000 in 1986.

They bought the starter home. They sold it in 1993 for 97,000. Held for nine years, only made 10%. But that was where the adventure began in 1986 with a Cape Cod style house. It was 2,000 square feet. Interior was complete with a lavender for mica countertops in a wet bar.

their first construction project closing in an office to make an extra extra bedroom. Interesting. You know how alcohol sales are falling off a cliff? Yes. And there's like, oh, who was it? Derek Thompson had a good post about this. And he sort of enumerated all the different reasons why alcohol is falling off a cliff.

He posts a lot. He posts a lot of good stuff. Where can I find it? Alcohol, alcohol. Wow, he does post a lot. He said something to the day. I'm like days behind. Okay, here we go.

So off the top of his head, secular anti-alcohol trends, GLP ones, post-1970s rise of helicopter parenting, although I feel like you can drink on a helicopter, as long as you're not piloting it, reaction to the binge-drinking spike of the late 20th century. There was a binge-dreaming spike in the late? 20th century. Oh, that was like the CKY, you know, Johnny Knoxville era, I suppose. That probably led to a lot of that. There's also a power law in binge drinking, right? Yeah, they say what,

uh, one percent of the binge drinkers do 99 percent of the binge drinking. Something like that. No, I think it's actually like 10 percent of people that consume alcohol, consume like 90 percent of no, this is, this is true even for the, uh, you, like, you think about like the, the, the market for Budweiser or beer brands. And you think about like the college party getting a 30 rack. But in fact, the vast majority of the revenue is driven by the like Johnny six pack, which is like a guy who gets off of work at five

and picks up a six pack on the way home, on the drive home and doesn't go for, doesn't buy in bulk because if he gets the 12 pack, he won't be able to stop drinking after six and he'll be hung over for the work day to the next day. And so it's six pack every single day. and this was like a thing in America for a very long time, but it doesn't seem to be happening.

Andrew Heardman said. You got to keep those agents running at all times. Hereman said, all right, guys. Yeah. Let's cut it out. Let's see. So phones are apparently killing teenage partying

because everything's on video, I suppose. You don't want to be in like compromising situations in the surveillance state, supposedly. Surge in young adult fitness, dancing clubs down, running clubs up, and the general rise of health maxing culture among both liberal yuppies and maha devotees. So huge collapse in drinking among high schoolers.

It fell in the 1980s. It was 92% of 12th graders who had ever consumed alcohol. This year, 47%. That is remarkable. There's also a substitution effect between alcohol and cannabis. Significant proportions of cannabis use led to less alcohol, sort of mixed bag there. and I think non-alcoholic beer is getting pretty good

is a small part in this too. So there are lots of reasons why it's down. And I wonder if we will see the next generation of real estate development stay away from the wet bar. Like as you look at houses, wet bar is not at the top of a lot of people's less. You know, they want home office because of COVID, work remote.

So they want sauna, pool, playroom, maybe movie theater even? No, I think I'm weird on that one. But wet bar. Clearly, movie theaters still clearly. I would say movie theaters above wet bar for most people. Yeah. But wet bar used to be like, you got to have it.

Like it was in a 2000 square foot house. Like it was in like a starter home that cost $86,000. And the builder or whoever lived in this house was like, well, we got to have a wet bar here. So let's do that. I mean, 2026 was the year the wet bar and home data center swapped. Oh, you think the home data center thing is going to take off? The tiny boxes are going to be stacking up. Yeah.

Yeah. I was watching a reel from Markiplier. Home cluster. Yeah. Do you know the story of Markiplier? Do you know the story of Markiplier? No. Okay.

YouTuber filmmaker. Online animation Mark Edward Fishback. Exactly. So Markiplier, he does these let's play videos for indie horror games. So he would essentially like a Twitch streamer, but YouTube and would upload the full let's play. He was listed by Forbes as the third highest content creator on the platform in 2022, won four Streamy Awards,

spun off his YouTube fame into a notable media career. And then in 2023, he signed with UTA and starred in a series called Edge of Sleep and then made his theatrical debut directing, producing, writing, and starring in, and basically financing horror film Iron Lung. in 2026, which was a breakout hit for a $3 million budget. The box office is $51 million. Real narrative violation on can YouTubers cross the chasm?

They can if they bring their audience into the theater, but Hollywood doesn't want to play nice with them at all because he still had to sort of go around in this weird way where this seems like an obvious thing if you were a studio executive that you would have been able to predict this, but they didn't in this case and he financed it himself. Anyway, Markiplier was talking about the process of doing one particular visual effect shot with, I think, a lot of blood, like, pouring everywhere. And so he's not in the AI era.

He's also not in the practical era. He's going to be using visual effects for this. Simulation of fluids, which is extremely computationally intensive. You have to create the system that shows with a gravity, simulate the gravity, simulate all of the different 3D mesh. where the geometry is, where the blood will be spilling in this particular scene. And he was working with an outsourced visual effects house that was very, very costly. And most importantly to him, it required a lot of back and forth. And he mentioned, this is an international group.

So there was a little bit of like lost in translation where he would say, I want the blood to be more red or darker. And then they would say, okay, we'll re-render. And that would take days. And then they would come back. And he'd be like, no, I actually want it to be splashier. thicker or something like that. And so those notes were going back and forth.

And he wound up converting a bathroom in his house to a supercomputer. Like he basically got a whole bunch of racks and a whole bunch of GPUs and wired them all together and was able to do the rendering his own. And he actually put in a 220 volt power into his bathroom like it's a, like it's where you charge an electric car.

And he said that the electricity was actually somewhat expensive, but it sped up the development so much that even though, This bringing it in-house process was extremely expensive. It was still worth it. So I think get rid of the wet bar, put in a home data center. If you're building a new house and you want it to, if you're doing a flip, it's going to be the hottest trend of the next couple of years,

a place to stack up Mac minis, IT cabinet otherwise. So they moved on to the heartbreaker. They were moving up. In 1992, they bought a house for 173. Sold it two years later for 225, a little bit more of a bump. 3,000 square foot traditional brick house. Then they get into the rambling ranch. stepped back in terms of price. This one was only $140,000, but they sold it in 1999 for 250.

Then they move into the architectural anchor. And then there's something interesting. They were in this estate. Mark bought a house. I bought a rose garden. They paid 785,000 in 2007. That's right before the housing collapse. So they were probably underwater for a little bit, but they wound up getting out with a good gain in 2014 for $1.675 million. It was 6,600 square feet. House needed a gut renovation. They added the best of everything. That included a basement sports bar.

They went back to the bar. No data center back in 2007. Four televisions. I don't know. Local compute existed then. You could have a land center. You could be landing. You could be playing cod.

You could be playing rust. Outside, they enlarged the road. garden then in 2014 said why did I even answer the phone six hours later their real estate agent brought an innocent looker by the house and they committed to a sale so then they dramatically downsized in 2014 they moved into an apartment for 320,000 dollars they sold that for a gain of 375 then they moved to the penthouse in the same building got renovated it again and then finally they moved to the Tulsa Picasso and then they built their massive new

home, which they actually bought the land for just 740,000, but then they put a construction budget of $5 million, a huge ratio of house to land prices, but they have paid for everything, pre-paying for windows and HVAC units a year in advance just to stay ahead of the supply chain. The result is a home that balances grand scale with the warmth that has become the Faro's trademark. The interior has walnut floors, mahogany trim, and a dramatic marble fireplace with graphite an amber vaining, though it does have what Anne considers her biggest ever design blender, a swim jet, which creates a current for swimming in place in the pool. It's a treadmill pool, and she doesn't like it.

She says, I just don't like using it. Have you ever used a swim jet? Have you ever felt the urge to go on a swimming treadmill? I've never been a big swimmer. I did rent a house at one point. More of a surfboard guy. What about Wave pool? That would be an option.

Yeah, there is this company that makes a device that allows you to mimic paddling on a surfboard. But you can't stand up and actually surf? No, it's just for training this motion. And, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty. Yeah, that's rough. They pitch it as like you live, you don't live near the beach and you're going on a surf trip and you want to be in peak. Oh, so it's truly for working out. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Well, anyway, did they do a wet bar? Let's find out. I don't think so. They did a baby kitchen for catering, a wine room leveling up, and an office that feels perched in the trees. The couple remains unsentimental about the bricks and mortar.

We'd never move back into a house we've sold. We're always looking to what's next. For now, they say they're having too much fun with their current house, hosting parties, golf friend get-togethers, board meetings, and even a wedding to think about what's next. Next, those who know them best are skeptical. I give them three to five years. There is this one elusive neighborhood that keeps slipping through their fingers.

I predict they will do a house project one more time. famously, there was Bob Hope in... Adam in the chat. I used a swim jet. It was like trying not to drown in a controlled manner. Yeah. Doesn't sound... He...

Bob Hope was a radio star. talk show host, traveled the world, did USO tours, always on tour, world famous. It must have been very difficult for his relationship with his wife, but they worked together for decades. And I think part of the secret was that they were constantly renovating this massive estate in Burbank. And they would renovate it from start to finish back and forth constantly. And he had this amazing office there with a vault that was, that you could walk in.

and he had every joke that he'd ever written cataloged in filing cabinets there and had a whole studio basically where his writer's room could come to him. And then eventually when they got older, they built an elevator. And this whole time they had a project that they could work on while he was also doing his project and everything else. So never bored. And it stood the test of time. Anyway, have you heard of Smashbox Cosmetics? Has anyone heard of Smashbox Cosmetics?

What is the story of this company? Because the co-founder has one of the greatest names I've ever heard. His name is Dean Factor. Dean Factor. It's a powerful name. And he is selling an estate in Los Angeles for just shy of $50 million. It's in Sullivan Canyon. It was inspired by the architecture of classic California ranches, including San Ysidro Ranch,

where John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned. I didn't know JFK was up in San Yosidro Ranch. Cosmetic Scion, Dean Factor and his wife Shannon Factor, knew they had their work on their work cut out for them in 2011 when they purchased a neglected piece of property in Los Angeles's Sullivan Canyon. The modest dilapidated house on the roughly eight and a half acre parcel, that's a huge parcel

for this part of town, was filled with asbestos. The driveway was cracked, the landscaping was barren in dry. For six years, it was kind of used as a dog park, so it was just beat up. Do you think robot dog? would do more damage because they're heavier, right? And also the EMF might fry

all the local fauna, all the local bushes are just getting roasted by the Boston Dynamics radio waves. As it's stepping through the grass, the grass is just wilting and dying around it. You can put a microwave on top of the robot dog,

plug it in, just be running it constantly. They're like, it doesn't pee on the grass. There's going to be no damage. Have we studied it? Do we know that that's the face? Have we looked at the, data. Have we looked at the data? So we looked at the data. And it's actually 10 times worse than just

having a dog running around. I don't know. The robot dog's only 75 pounds. Okay. So that's like a big dog. That's half my dog. Yeah, there's dogs that are bigger than that. Okay. Are there any other environmental damages that could happen from letting a robot dog run wild on an abandoned property? Let's figure it out. Undeterred, the factors brought the land for 8 million according to property records. It's unable to salvage the home. They kept knobs, fixtures, and other hardware using it in the new roughly 17,000 square foot home with a private lake. Private lake. That is insane.

Fruit trees and medicinal herb garden. Now with the two oldest of their five children in college, they are listing the property for 50 mil, or 48.5. Dean's great grandfather co-founded the cosmetics company Max Factor. What are we doing here? That is an insane name. Dean co-founded Smashbox cosmetics, which Estee Lauder acquired in 2010. He's now a private investor. Wow.

The factor spent years rehabilitating the land, installing irrigation, regenerating the soil, replanting seeds and caring for trees. It looks fantastic. Their eight-bedroom home was inspired by the architecture of San Jacido Rance, which we mentioned. It does look fantastic. So, ooh, the downstairs is pretty cool. The basement-level entertainment hub. They call it the lounge.

It has a wet bar. It also has a pool table and a game center. Nice little rustic vibe. This feels straight out of like Montana or something. And the rest is very, very modern California. Really, really nestled in there. The property has indoor and outdoor fireplaces, private hiking trails in a sports court.

Over the years, every inch of the house and land has been enjoyed by the children, friends, and many animals. So they're letting the animals run wild. No robots on site. We needed extra quiet spaces for studying and working Other humanities include a gym and elevator and a massage and yoga room. And this last one, the tree house, magical little inspiration portal set in nature.

This thing's cool. I like a big... Isn't that even a treehouse? That here's a house that's adjacent to a tree. I feel like a treehouse needs to not touch the ground and be built entirely around the tree to qualify. Slarping. Right? Yeah.

Because you see these houses where they put the tree inside the house. This is like, this is more that than a full tree house. It looks like the tree's going through the pool. porch. Yeah, yeah. So. Yeah. I think this is a little fit of false advertising. That's a tree porch. This is a tree porch. This isn't a tree house. This is a house that's built adjacent to a tree. Nice try. Nice try. Could be a great place for a home data center though. It could be. It could be.

Inside of a tree. Do you think you know how like with AI a lot of people are building like useless stuff? Like you see a lot of things. This happens all the time where someone will like vibe code something and you'll be like, but I could just use the real thing. Do you think like during the metallurgy revolution, people were like, I made a tree out of iron? People were like, but why can't I just use it? Why can't I just have a tree? People were like, it's an iron tree. And then they had to explain like, oh, we're going to have to be more creative here. We're going to do something new with this. And then people were like, okay, like rails for trains or, you know, boilers for

steam engines. They were kind of doing that. They're like, I made wood out of metal. Yeah. I think there's a little bit of that. You gotta be, there's a lot of when a new technology comes around, you just sort of reinvent everything. This was the same thing with a lot of, you know, you see it in media all the time where the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the old thing on the new platform doesn't quite fit. Did you see. Yeah. Yeah. That Matthew McConaughey once exiled himself from Hollywood and lived as Mateo in Peru. No, is this real? For 22 days without electricity. Ooh. He said, I needed to get my feet on the ground.

So I clicked out. Boom. Go to Peru. I needed to find it to check the validation. I knew I had it. I just had to go prove it. I wonder. But I did question now that I just got famous,

I've got all this affiliation for this and that and the other, and I'm trying to decipher which part's real and which parts BS. I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. And at the end of 22 days, the tears in their eyes and the tears in my eyes and the hugs we had on the sadness and happiness of saying goodbye, were all based off the man they met named Mateo, who had nothing to do with a

celebrity. It reaffirmed my own identity that, oh, I still got it. This is based on me. There might be alpha in going to Peru adopting a fake name and living for 22 days without electricity. Yeah. Because every time I hear Matthew speak, there's always, always there's always some wisdom that comes through. How did he pull this off? You missed your opportunity to go to China this week and just simply post a picture and say, thank you for, thank you to China for allowing me to be here in your incredible country during this incredibly significant visit.

But it's not too late to go to Peru. When did he go to Peru? Do we know what year this was? let's find out because he's married with three kids I'm imagining it's a big ass to be like honey I'm gonna be gone for a month and I won't have electricity

good luck with the three children but clearly worked out they're still together so you know it landed wait it was in 97 okay that was that was that was before he was he was married anyway

another option if you're feeling burned out at 67 you don't want to renovate your house, start a business. This entrepreneur started a business at 67, says it's been much better than retiring. So many of my retired friends are bored, but I'm constantly learning new things and meeting new people. So my late father-in-law, this is a piece by Daniel Oxt. He says, my late father-in-law loved orchids. They're saying Matthew was larping as Mateo.

He was larping around. Eventually. Just larking it up. My late father-in-law loved orchids, and in his decade-long passion, he built and maintained two large greenhouses. At an age, when most people were retired or worse, he was still breeding new hybrids, knowing full well that they wouldn't blossom for years. He wasn't a man to sit idly in death's anteroom awaiting the grim reaper. I take heart from his example when I wonder in moments of doubt for exhaustion. Why in the world have I launched a demanding business. in what otherwise might have been leisurely dotage. In some ways, the nature of our undertakings is similar. Mine is a publishing venture, but when I, but I was more motivated by the flowers, which is to say the books we bring forth than any prospect of financial gain. Some, well, so he's launching a striped press competitor. Oh.

Shots fired. Call Tammy Winter tell her to double down, because there's a 67 year old who's coming and he's going to to eat Stripes lunch potentially. No, it seems like this is more of a labor of love. Starting a business is a lot of work, but for an older entrepreneur, that can be more of a feature than a bug, he says. Some of my friends retired from impressive careers now find themselves bored or under occupied. Meanwhile, I deal with a continual barrage of challenges great and small. Most of them welcome. People assume that I'm the one keeping my little business going, but the opposite is probably equally true. Starting a business in retirement may sound like an awesome.

But the idea has quite a few virtues. First of all, it's up to you if you want to do it. You don't have to apply for a job. You don't need you didn't worry about age discrimination unless you plan to fire yourself in favor of someone younger and cheaper. You can decide for yourself whether to keep things small and casual or build yourself a modest empire. Either way, you'll be just as busy as you want to be. Wasn't workday founded by a senior citizen? I believe the founder was 60 something when he founded that company. There are a number of breakout companies that have... How old was he? Workday founder? He said senior citizen, I think... 65. So, yeah, he was a... I don't know. Dave Duffield.

Do they move the senior citizen designation when they move the national retirement age? Dave was born, the founder of Workday was born in September 21, 1940. Wow. Imagine being born during World War II and having the opportunity to build enterprise SaaS.

It's electric. Electric. It's like you see the moon landing when you're 30 and you're like in 50 years, I'm going to make it easy. I'm going to do my own moon, my version of the moon landing. My version of the moon landing to pay employees. What age does senior citizens start? Let's say about that. 65.

Okay. So that has not been changed. And he had started PeopleSoft at age 47. Wow. Legend. Legend. There's another good thing about a retirement business. It doesn't really need to make money as long as it doesn't lose much in the case of my

publishing venture. I considered launching it as a nonprofit, but I didn't want to board or anyone else telling me what to do. Doesn't want to wind up in Oakland in a courtroom dealing with stuff if he winds up coming up with the next generational technology. Doesn't want to defend himself. Running it as a business means you have skin in the game and an easy way to keep score, even if we're immune.

generation isn't the primary goal. Whether you make money or not, your business will still deliver all kinds of additional benefits. For instance, nothing could be more educational. Even though I have written lots about business in my career, I was astonished when I launched my own at the age of 67 to discover the range of tasks and skills involved in running a small enterprise. You may think you are a book publisher or a soap maker or a dealer in vintage telephones, but inevitably, you are also a bookkeeper, a shipping clerk, a marketing specialist, and an navigator of government regulations. Interesting. Well, I like this idea. I think it's a good idea. He says, I wish I had started this venture years earlier, but was busy earning a living and writing books of my own. Now our children are well launched, and my wife, a passionate lifelong reader, has time to help old age subsidized by Social Security Medicare. Turns out to be an ideal opportunity for a stunt like ours. And never mind the nearness of the end. All of life has lived in the shadow of mortality, humans have always thrived there and starting a business can help. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Jordy? I don't know. Hostile takeover. Leverage buyout.

We make friends with this guy. We bring him on the show and we say, oh, we just want to, we love what you're doing. It's such an inspirational story. We'd love to just like acquire just a small interest in the business. And then we'd like to lever it up. So what are your stance on including ads and books? He's like, he's like, well, you know, I. Yeah. You know, I've always thought I wanted to, you know, maintain the purity of the text. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Okay. Pure, pure slop book. We're going to use open source models that are run on commodity hardware. Just let, we're going to figure out how to run it on that old Xbox and just let it cook for a week to turn out a slot book. And then we're going to stuff it with ads and monetize this puppy. Take it to the moon. Flip it.

Sell it on to the next person. sorry about your business. I really do, I joke about it, but I really do think that ad-supported business books is a great idea. Specifically, I think it would be a great idea for one company to release a bunch of books and basically charge a dollar, a book, or whatever, whatever the actual cost, and then printed around the book. So you can imagine like, it's like e-boys, but it has a ramp jacket.

Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Maybe you could get old run books that are out of print, bring them back in some sort of anthology or something. I'd be interested in that. Well, I need your review of the new Lamborghini. Lamborghini says they are proud to announce the Lamborghini phenomenon. I cannot pronounce this.

Roadster. It's the most powerful open top ever created by Lamborghini, limited to 15 units. Look at this, Jordy. Tell me what you think. I'm looking. Okay. powered by an iconic 1080 CV

sounds like a Nvidia graphics card naturally aspirated V-12 hybrid HPEV sorry about that got a little bit too much Diet Coke engineered with an aerospace

inspired carbon fiber mono fuselage advanced active aerodynamics and capable of zero to a hundred kilometers an hour in just 2.4 seconds the Roadster delivers pure performance with uncompromptom

driving emotion of V12 symphony, you say. So pretty odd in 2026 to release a supercar and not talk about onboard supercomputing. Hmm, okay. What kind of like models can I expect to run locally while I'm driving, right? So that's the first question. Unironically, Tesla has great onboard compute, and it is a lagging feature. Have we talked about this? Like, it is so crazy that the LLM, like, chatbot race is so intense.

And you open up the app store and it's chat chibit, Claude, Gemini, chat, ChachypT, Gemini, Claw. And then even Grock is in the game. Meta has meta-AI now. Like, everyone is training a foundation model and or wrapping something and having a chat interface. And every company is like has an answer, has a solution. Apple is like the most far behind. They still have a chat GPT integration.

They're solving the Gemini thing. And there may be like a year or two behind in terms of like the knowledge retrieval use case that is in so in such high demand. And if you have an iPhone, you get the chat GPT app, the Claude app, the Gemini app, like you check that box really, really quickly, right? And so every tech company, Microsoft co-pilot, like every company has had like an answer to like, how are you integrating LLMs? how are you answering questions?

What's your chat interface? Like, Ramp has a chat interface. It's really good, actually. And it works, and it's implemented. And they're not five years behind, 10 years behind. But every car company is like 10 years behind Tesla. It's crazy that no one, that they haven't been able to figure out how to just like clone FSD into Rivian and GM has super crews, which is nowhere near a fast effect.

Because it only works on certain roads. And so you can't just use it on a normal street. And then it'll be like, oh, well, we mapped this part of the freeway and this part of the freeway, but not the transition between those two freeways. So we're disengaging. Like, every self-driving technology in any other car is just 10 years behind Tesla still. And I don't understand why. Data advantage? I don't know.

I mean, just throw the cameras on something. And like, like, every other company has figured out how to get data for LLMs. Like, do a new web scrape. Like, just go and spend the money on it. But there's something where the LLMs with the super intelligence narrative, the coding narrative, like all these things are much more easy to underwrite, whereas I think if Ford said, like, we actually need to spend Tesla level money to get on the trend here, people would just say, well, people are still buying Mustangs and they don't really care about self-driving.

If they wanted self-driving, they just get a Tesla. But it seems like a huge miss. I don't know. Also, I mean, a huge opportunity to just like work with Open Pilot, which from George Hots, Com AI, like that system is better than everything else except for Tesla. Yeah. And no one can figure out how to work with it effectively. Maybe it's a regulatory thing.

It might be NHTS. Tanner says they're Laurel maxing. They are Laurel maxing. They are definitely resting on their laurels. They're bloated. I did, yeah, I talked to a guy who owns a couple Porsche dealerships. Mm-hmm. And I said, do you have clients come in that tell you, hey, I love this, I love this car.

I love the McCann, but it doesn't have self-driving. driving. And he said no right now, which I was surprised by, because you look at these like commuter focused cars and you assume that commuters are going to start to care a lot. But I think it's very, I think it's going to be very location dependent. So there's places like if you live in L.A., friends in L.A. that like can't possibly drive anything but a Tesla because they want to be able to just set autopilot and forget it. But if you live somewhere where you're driving like five, 10 minutes a day, then it just matters way less. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's it.

Interesting. Well, what's your final say on the new Lamborghini, this limited thing, which I think is just like a almost like a body kit on the Revolto, which is the V-12 platform. Like it has all the same specs. So it seems like it's a tuned and modified Revuelto like they've done before with the Reventon, for example.

So this is probably like a million dollar car. These special Lamborghinis have never been interesting to me. What do you think? I think it looks great. Better than the Burrvato, though? I don't personally like roadsters over their counterparts, but I think it's a great car. It's not the spec for me, but I'm sure it's a spec for someone. Someone in the chat said it looks like a McLaren.

It sort of does. There's a little bit of that in there. Rearend a little bit. Also the colors are doing. If it was a yellow Lamborghini, I think you'd be much more tied to yellow. You tend to see these different colors on McLaren's more often. Well, in other car news, Waymo is maybe going crazy or something. What's happening in Atlanta?

So dozens of empty Waymoes have invaded an Atlanta neighborhood and circled a cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers. And Brooks Otter Lake says, oh, so it's wrong for cars to invent religion? I don't really get that one Is that like going door to door evangelizing or is that It's like a cult like oh they're circling In the center there's the yeah and then apparently Someone put out like a yellow sign

To try and like deter the Waymo's and that only made them more aggressive I don't know what's real here I'm all over the place with this one But very very weird I thought that Waymo The ratio is like one to four Something like that on teleoperators Maybe something along the

line. So you would think that the teleoperators would see this and intervene. So something must have gone wrong in the organizational structure. But these things are bound to happen. At least no one was hurt, you know, but it is annoying if you live there and you just see a ton of what you're breaking from Raghav in the chat. SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline targets June 11th pricing on the NASDAQ. So they went with, it says June 11th. It says June 11th. and Reuters. We're less than a month out. And interesting that they're going with NASDAQ,

this would, I imagine, get them allocated into QQQ really quickly. And I know that was a priority. Yeah, during this process. But let's see if there's any. Can't wait for the filing. It's going to be so interesting to dig into the numbers. Yeah, is now aiming to flip its prospectus public as early as next Wednesday. Ooh, that's going to be a big day.

With the roadshow launch targeted for June 4th and a market debut as early as June 12th. That will be exciting. The process had originally been planned for around late June around Elon's birthday. A faster than expected SEC review the company's filing partially drove the timeline forward. The whole market is selling off. The NASDAQ is down 1.2%. Russell 2000 down 2.18%. S&P down 1% and Dow Jones down 1% as well.

The US 10 years sitting at 4.599999999. Something like that. Well, Bill Ackman is doubling down on Mag 7 stocks that have sold off. He's going long. Microsoft. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square bets on Microsoft's AI ambitions with new stake, he says the tech company is underpriced and we'll disclose the stake in regulatory filings later on Friday. So Microsoft is up 3.62% today. And Ackman said in the post on X that Pershing

has started building a position in Microsoft. We will disclose a new position in Microsoft. Because Microsoft shares are down 15% this year and have lost more than a quarter of their value since they peaked last fall, the drop has been part of a wider software industry sell-off and investor concerns over hefty investments in AI. The shares were little changed in pre-market trading. Akman said investors underestimate the resilience of the Microsoft 365 subscription suite given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price value proposition. So if you look at what's happening with Figma and then you think about how that might translate to Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

Not that crazy to imagine that there's more resilience here than maybe the market is pricing in. Ackman cited Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which gives the software giant access to the startup's models and products, which he said he believed Wall Street hadn't factored in the

company's interest in Open AI, which has been valued at approximately $200 billion because of the 27% stake. And with the trial coming to a close any day now, Jessica Lassen over at the information was saying that it's all good news for for Open AI shareholders.

The Kalshi has, will Elon win his case against Open AI down at 20% today on the back of the closing statements, the closing arguments from both sides and Microsoft's lawyers. And I'm sure we'll have more to dive into on the court case next week as the trial wraps up. High yield. Harry says, I like how Bill Ackman's whole thing now. I was just buying Mag 7 names that have traded off. There's all pieces on this. Yeah, so he did this with Meta. Are you brave enough?

He did this with Meta based around the response to their Cappex guide. He did this with Google during the chat Chb-T post-Chabit. Did you see the new feature that Meta launched on Instagram Reels or Instagram something or other? It's in the DM tab and it's called like Instance Disappearing, photos, no viewer list, reactions and replies are private. So they made, they made something that's like more disappearing than stories, I suppose. So you can click through this stack of instance. And the whole idea that Adam Masary was pitching was that, um, they launch a product. It's very authentic. This was the original Instagram. It was like, oh, photos of the run clubs,

right? And just like photos from your life, people would just hard post them on the grid, because that's all there was. Then Snapchat came out with stories and all of a sudden stories were more ephemeral and Instagram of course clone stories into the top feed with all those circles. But then those became places that were monetized and places where people were more thoughtful about what they posted there. And so you wound up with this again, the same anxiety over, are you going to post that photo? Is it polished enough for the stories feed? And so by launching instance, Instagram's trying to rebuild that casual sharing of their user base so that people don't just purely consume or pick between do I never post or do I go full editor professional camera set up at you know scripted like

full post because that's what's happened to stories everything is very very calculated but I don't know another reason to be bullish on Instagram. Ben Thompson had a bunch of takes about why he's a perma, permable for meta is that every pixel of their entire family of apps is monetizable. They just have to choose to monetize them. And he, he opines that Mark Zuckerberg has never been that interested in ads. He likes products. He likes new technologies. But he's willing to post some ads to serve his other interests.

Yes. Yes. And, I mean, he's been fantastic at launching ads. and monetizing and everything's going well, but it just feels like it's not the core. Like there are some CEOs that would get up every day and say, not just Senator, we sell ads, but every day on the, or every quarter on the earnings call,

talk about only ads and say, oh, the VR thing, yeah, we'll address that when we can advertise in it because we are an advertising company that hasn't always been the ethos of meta, for better or for worse. But what else is in the timeline that you wanna go through, Jordy? Another from high yield, Harry, everyone loves the docusyme has a quarter million employees bit.

But can we talk about how Accenture has 786,000 employees? This is true. The first one about DocuSign was not. But Accenture does actually have 786,000 employees. That's a lot. That's a city's worth. Yeah. There's this interesting, the latest bear thesis on the AI.

boom has hit the timeline. I think Axio summed it up well here. AI can cost more than human workers now. This is a quote from unusual whales citing Axios. And there's an interesting bit here where if you look at the token spend at some of the tech companies and then you match that with their stories about AI efficiency and layoffs, they're actually growing their total OPEX. So they might be saying, okay, we're going to lay off thousands of employees. Shrink the headcount 5%. That will save us $2 billion in OPEX a year, but then you look at their token bill and it's $5 billion. Hopefully they're doing more. I think a lot of CEOs are starting to ask the questions about ROI on the token spend. And that will probably be the next big hurdle. The next big question on were you just running useless scripts overnight to token max? Or did you actually ship a feature that move the needle? And is conversion rate up? Is retention up? Is revenue up? Is revenue up? Is profit up?

This is the key question for anyone who has, whose organization has flipped to the token maxing meta. It is very funny to imagine, like, when you think of KPIs, anything that is a cost, the KPI should usually be going down. And token maxing really flipped that, a slight aberration. But you would never at a startup say, one of our KPIs that we're tracking is headcount and we want it to go up. You would never say one of our... Oftentimes founders can get a little to sort of tying their own. Yeah. Oh, I run a 200 person company.

Yeah. Oh, I run a 500 person company. You know, and it's like, okay, well, is that, is that the right size for your business? You want to be maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. If every single, if every single person in San Francisco left. Yeah. And Accenture brought their entire team to San Francisco. You would actually need to build more houses.

There could be, there's, there would actually be overflow. It would be overflow. If every person had basically one bed that currently exists in San Francisco. Wait, there's only 750,000 beds in San Francisco. 809,000 people live in San Francisco. Wow, that's not a lot. I, I always think of San Francisco. That's not a lot.

I always think of San Francisco is like a city of 10 million, but that's obviously the greater Bay area. Yeah, the greater Bay area. Well, there's some bad news for the U.S. dollar. Hedgeye says the U.S. dollar has lost 30. percent of its purchasing power over the last six years. And Brian says, damn, that's what I purchased my stuff with. Speaking of purchasing stuff, chat chit launched personal finance features. Yes. And this was in partnership with Plaid, right? Yeah, I think Plad's under the hood.

This is really cool because we were talking to Zach. I'm going to play around with it. We were talking to Zach about we were like, oh, like, like, I have to imagine that a lot of people are starting to use Plaid alongside, alongside LLMs to suck in all of their personal financial data and sort of understand what they're spending things on and and doing a lot of the you know there's a mint dot com there there's different services that can do little pieces here and there there's a whole service that just figures out if you're subscribed to multiple things that may I have two Netflix subscriptions let me consolidate that down even just knowing okay you're spending a lot on gas now or groceries is this what you expected.

All that can be helpful. And Zach was sort of quietly admitting that he has clearly been very AI-pilled in conjunction with Plaid and had been wiring up all of his personal finances to dashboards that he's been building. And so I imagine that a lot of that was brought into this product. So excited to see people play around with it and ask questions. There is a new partnership between Stad Guy. and Bentley.

Really? Yes. He introduced the chalet edition. Okay. What is this? Is this actually something? Can you think of a time where a creator partnered with a major car manufacturer for a special edition car?

Yes. I can think of like the, you know, McLaren Sena, right? Yes. I was going to say the Dale Earnhardt edition, Monte Carlo. Oh. All right. We'll pull up the chalet edition. And then pull up the two.

2002 Chevy Montacarlo SS Dale Earnhardt edition Shodgai was in L.A. around Coachella. It's possible that his alter ego Colton was going to

Coachella. We were trying to get him on the show but the timing didn't overlap because he was podcast maxing himself with his own show. Explain the alter ego thing. Is he one of these single creators that runs two accounts? No, it's one account. One account. Oh, but he plays a character.

guy. And then, you know, this sort of like elevated, okay. Kind of character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's like Colton who's like the new rich, you know, new money, okay. Yeah.

Character. But I think they did an excellent job with this car. A lot of wood and, and tan leather on the interior. So is this something that you can, like, is this limited allocation? Yeah, they're making 25 of them. Wow. And he's going to sell 25 Bentley's. And how much does he make off of this?

A good question. I bet this looks more like a A million dollar ship, not a. Yeah, but probably a million dollar brand deal, right? Yeah. $2,000 car. It's a really, it's a really smart. Yeah.

I think it's a little derivative of the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo S.S. Dale Earnhardt edition, but. Yeah, let's pull up that. Yeah. If I had to pick one, I'm going Dale Earnhardt edition, probably. You know what I'd pick. We'll see. Yeah, pull up the 2002 Chevy Monaccarlo SS, Dale Earnhardt edition.

Is that it? That does not look like it. No, no, that's an AI image or something. That doesn't have the right wheels. Google it again. Gabe says, when TVPN, Nissan, Marano, cross cabriole. Ooh, that would rip. I'll put this in here, yeah.

This is the image. Here we go. Stad guy. Yeah, the McLarence, has there been another one? I've been waiting for the Morano Cross Cabriolet to fall in value, and they're holding strong. They're holding strong. John, guess the price on this. 87,000 miles, two owners.

It's a 2014. $20,000. $16,000. $16,000. They hit the floor and they're only going up from here. You can get a white one. You can get a white one at 2011. It has 137,000 miles for just under 7,000.

There were rumors of a collab that might, I don't know. I want to know what you think if this would be a great partnership. But Lewis Hamilton, driving for Ferrari now, famous Mercedes F1 driver. He has been spotted multiple times. times. In his reveal that he would be joining Ferrari, he posed in front of the Ferrari F40, an iconic supercar. There has been, there have been rumors about a bespoke Ferrari project, doved the F-44, which was supposed to be a modern V-12 powered manual shift tribute to the legendary F-40. It's allegedly been scrapped. It's still only in the rumor. It's been potentially canceled.

But do you think that would work? Do you think that would be successful with him still racing, him still in the throes of his career? Would he need to retire? Would he need to, would this need to be like a posthumous tribute at some point? What do you think it takes for a Lewis Hamilton Ferrari special edition car to be successful? I think you would have to win a championship. With Ferrari? Yeah.

Otherwise. Okay. Hmm. Can't just or a farm with Kim Kay on 80s vibe reels? You've seen that video, right? Yeah. It's so sick. It's such a good. I think you got to win. You got to win. Well, what else is going on? Is there anything else? We talked about a lot of this stuff. There's some bigger articles, but we can get to them tomorrow. All the longer articles we need to get to. 2014 Nissan Marano cross cabriolet for 9 grand It's only only has 116,000 miles on it and one accident How are you modifying it for the TVPN edition? You got a four owner 2011 with 109,000 miles for 8 grand I mean these things are a store of value

I think we're actually kind of at the bottom Or the J curve and we'll start seeing it tick up from here Well, there's one. more post here we should go through there might be a few uh YouTubers be like wake up at 4 a.m. and run that's alpha no it's not look at apex predators they're all lazy bears hibernate lions sleep all day you know who wakes up at 4 a.m. and runs squirrels don't be a squirrel hibernate sleep all day work like a lion. Nivalr avicant said it best um yeah it's good advice but depending on

where you're at in life. Sometimes you have to work up early. Sometimes you got to wake up early and you've got to work really hard. Yeah. But 4 a.m. Maybe not always optimal. Depends on your flow. But in general, I think the YouTubers that say like, get some energy in your life.

I heard one of these inspirational guys talking about like if you want something you need to use more of it, if you want more of something you need to use more of it. So if you want more energy, you have to use more of it. more energy. If you want more muscle, you have to use more muscle. And it was sort of a pithy. It doesn't apply to everything, but sort of you've got to spend money to make money. Yeah, the issue is if you wake up late, you don't get to start winding down when the sun goes down. You haven't earned it yet. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Night owl mode. Some people go night owl mode. Some people go squirrel mode. Some people go bear mode. It just depends to each their own. I like this, this cartoon from Delip Rao in context learning in LLMs. Tyler, you can probably explain this. So the man walks out

with his robot to paint the fence, paints two full planks, starts painting the third plank, gives the paint bucket to the robot and says, continue. The robot says, got it. And as you scroll down, what did the robot do? Repeated the pattern perfectly, not painting the third thing. You think this is solvable? It doesn't generalize. It doesn't generalize. Okay, yes. Do you think this is possible?

Do you think this is solvable? Yes. What time do eagles start hunting? What time do eagles start hunting? I don't know. Just after sunrise. Just after. What time do sharks start feeding?

Just after sunrise? Dawn. Dawn. Okay. So if you want to be a shark or an eagle, get up and get after it. Well, so what is P. Venous enhancement?

What is? Andrew reads, send this to all your private equity friends immediately. What is the Because they ask What is P.E.?

Yeah. And he says something that's uncouth. All right. Well, that's a great place to end it. Yes.

Is the flashbang working? I think so. Perfect. Thanks for hanging out. Yeah. It's been a really classic show. This feels like a fall 2024.

It's a great show. Episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast. spot five sign up for a newsletter tbp.com and we'll see you on monday weekend another one goodbye