TBPN Live - Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers, Trump's $550B Japan Investment, Hulk Hogan's Legacy | Live TBPN Taste Test with Saif Khawaja

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

(00:30) - Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers (17:45) - Timeline (25:42) - Trump's $550B Japan Investment (39:41) - Timeline (42:45) - Hulk Hogan's Legacy (01:00:57) - Bay Area Gets Tesla Robotaxis (01:08:27) - LVMH Lobbies for U.S. Trade Deal (01:21:57) - Timeline (01:34:13) - Vitamin Shoppe Owner Lists Hamptons Mansion (01:39:41) - Timeline (01:50:48) - Sam Altman on Theo Von Reactions (01:59:09) - Timeline (02:13:37) - Live in the TBPN Ultradome: Saif Khawaja, founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems, discusses his company's development of AI-powered robotics that automate the traditional Japanese ikejime method for humane fish harvesting, enhancing both the quality and shelf life of seafood. He explains how their machines, deployed directly on fishing vessels, process fish immediately upon capture, resulting in a product that retains its premium taste and texture for up to three times longer than conventional methods. Khawaja also highlights the company's partnerships with Michelin-starred restaurants and their plans to scale operations to make high-quality, sustainably harvested fish more widely available. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow 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 TBPN! Today is Friday, July 25th, 2025. Time is flying, John. TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, El Capital de Capital. Today we got to talk about Intel. We have a post from Tae Kim, who wrote the book on NVIDIA, the NVIDIA Way about Jensen Wong. He says, indeed, Intel...

Literally, literally, by the way. He literally wrote the book. Yes. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end down from 116,500 in June of 2024. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut. Nvidia is on the other side of the trade. Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday

up from 36,000 in January of 2025, massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you got to get on ramp. Time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bell payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So the news is that Intel. That's a ramp problem. Yeah, they really should get on ramp. Lip-Bouton, I know you're listening. You should get on ramp, Lip-Bouton.

So this is from the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The CEO warns, no more blank checks. Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes, outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars

on new chip facilities in Europe. Ooh, bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip-making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and developing its advanced 14A technology

to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're gonna narrow down, we're just gonna do three incredibly difficult things. We're gonna compete in the most aggressive AI chip market, where we're not just competing with Nvidia, but also the TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grok, Cerebra, all these different companies. So we're gonna like go from zero to one there,

and then we're also gonna turn around our personal computer processing market. Bold. Bold. Intel, which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers, fell far behind competitors like Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial intelligence boom. Liputon, the CEO,

the new CEO of Intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down about a year ago, I believe. He said, there are no more blank checks, he wrote in a memo. Every investment must make economic sense. Love to hear that. Exactly what you wanna hear from us. What is the nominative determinism of lip, boo, ton? Hate to put you on the spot.

Hitting the beach, getting a tan? Like that. You know? I can see it, I can see it. Maybe if Intel doesn't work out, he can get into cosmetics. It's like get a tan with this tanning oil, get some lip balm, lip balm. Yeah, there's something called lip blushing, right? Where I think it's like a mild tattoo.

So maybe if this whole semi thing doesn't work out, he could get into the lip blushing franchise game. Yep, I agree. Revenue in the June quarter was roughly flat at $12.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss, though, widened to $2.9 billion for the quarter from a $1.6 billion loss in the year earlier period. The results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss, extending its longest streak in 35 years. It's got to suck to be in a position where computing, broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things.

AI is magic. We passed the Turing test and you're not a beneficiary. You're losing money and it's because of a bet on, you know on the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile. There's a whole bunch of things that went into it. So sales and Intel's PC chip division,

the company's largest segment, fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago, I built a new massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it. Intel was- you know, massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it. Intel was, as John does. You weren't building it to, as a gaming rig? I did use it for a gaming rig. That's John's vice, he said,

It's market research, I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand the future of VR. I actually did have a sick VR rig. To your credit, I think you beat your video game addiction I did I didn't years and so It's it's an interesting time for Intel I have some more more information here Do you remember six months ago? There was the rumors floating around that that Elon was was a potential buyer I was feel so long ago. I was propagating those rumors

Ultimately it feels like You know he he got the got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter Does he want to do that again? Yep? I don't know I mean my take when when he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has in many ways made it a better product. We stream on it now and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features, good stuff, bad stuff. But overall, I think he put the company back in startup

mode. They're shipping very quickly. Interesting things are happening and he's making plays in an interesting way that I like. But at the time I was like okay $44 billion, there's something like $50 billion from the CHIPS Act maybe going to Intel and foundries in America, run this back and marshal the same amount of capital, let him buy Intel, turn that around. That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. It would put us on a very different path if he got into semiconductor manufacturing But it would be a huge challenge and maybe it wasn't as important to him So, I don't know but I mean only a week ago a small company called AOL

AOL calm was posting that is Elon Musk about to buy Intel so this feels like very, you know, Dylan Patel on January 17th saying, Elon's jet is in Florida, Global Foundry's jet is in Florida, Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. But ultimately, a lot of people were in Florida at that time. Well, if your jet's flying around the world, you gotta take your jet to a wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top- the world, you gotta take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And so Dylan Patel, speaking of Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Liputon at a conference,

and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Liputon and spend some time with him, and everyone's coming up to Liputant, asking him what the future of Intel is, and so he goes up and offers to make him tea, and makes his tea for him, and they sit down and they have tea,

and they like, and I think Dylan Patel really understands like tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee. So they have tea and Dylan Patel's kind of picking his brain and it just feels like Lipputan's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce cost, right the ship,

refocus. And so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson and I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious, just split the foundry and the design business, split up Intel into two companies and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they're both their customer and their supplier

and breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure-all, it's not a panacea. And so it is more complicated. So there's not a super clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions. It's a lot of cuts to employees. And that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff. There will probably be more in the future

as Intel continues to downsize the workforce. Really, really rough for morale, knowing that the workforce will just be, continue to get cut into, like you said, probably not the last. Yep, and so they are focusing on, the direct quote is refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips,

regaining market share in personal computer processors and advancing the 14A technology. Now, the problem is that Intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from semi-analysis. So they have the Intel 3 node, the 18A, and that goes up against the N5, N3, and N2 nodes from TSMC and across the board.

Intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs. They're trying to catch up. They're trying to create chips that are as powerful, but the name of the game is always cost. Yeah, Semi-analysis says the company has cost discipline in its DNA, talking about TSMC. Intel, not necessarily.

This manifests in many ways. TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It is not used the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements. Hence Intel is now moving to copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy? No.

So when Intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this. I mean, it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of lithography is basically etching. That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called etched because they, that you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer. And that's where when you put electricity through it, it goes through a series of gates and that's what a semiconductor is. That's how you create magic. That's how you create magic. Yes. It's it, it goes through a series of gates and that's what a semiconductor is. And that's how you create magic. That's how you create magic, yes, it's the spice. The Dune analogy is the most important one here.

But basically, you have to etch these grooves at as small a scale as possible. So three nanometers, silicon atoms are one nanometer. So you, in theory, cannot go smaller than one nanometer chip because the space between the atoms is only one atom, or one nanometer. So you in theory cannot go smaller than one nanometer chip because the space between the atoms is only one atom or one nanometer. So this is incredibly small. And so you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves. Basically, this is

very, very high level abstraction. But in order to do that, they get these mirrors from a company called Trump, which is unrelated to Donald Trump. And Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you if you if you if you like

Blew them up to like the size of the moon It would still would not be able to see a groove even this hot It's like the most precise process in every single by the way Intel missed opportunity to create the TPU Google's obviously owning that right now But if Intel had said we're making Trump process That's back. It's back. You know I mean they're making Trump processors. That's back it. It's back you know I mean they're already public. Yeah I mean you know what's the chip that's going to be in the Trump phone?

The golden the golden American made phone. It should be an Intel processor. It really should. Who knows. American made. So the the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently at TSMC like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone, they don't even need to send out a notification.

Everyone just knows go to TSMC to just deal with everything. Cause the slight change in like the road noise or slight could like miscalibrate the machines. If it like rains too much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room,

it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield so all this is about yield they'll make a ton of these wafers they'll be small imperfections it ruins the whole wafer that's been a big problem with the wafer scale which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona despite setting up you know this new facility so recently was very unexpected it's, yes. And so the copy exact dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields that when Intel figured out how to make one fab, they said, let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building, they build the exact same foundation. They build the,

the bathrooms would be in the same place. If there was two urinals and one bathroom, like there would be two urinals. The other one, like everything was exactly the same copy. Basically extremely superstitious. Yeah, basically because they were like anything that changes, like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate it might throw off the amount of

Molecules in the air over here and the atoms over it's like it's crazy precise, right? And so that worked for Intel but it had this problem Which was that every once in a while you do want to make an iterative change When you're building the next fab and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things a slightly differently and so now Intel's pivoting to copy smart only copy what's actually improvement instead of just copying everything exactly and TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard and so customers are likely baselining the

18A Intel node against N3, 3 nanometer nodes TSMC, given the characteristics. But Intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer and so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about Intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on. It's Intel three, uh, which is their five nanometer class. Uh, that one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon and Ireland.

These are at Intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18 a, which is at the same sites plus Ohio. And this is competitive with the two nanometer class from TSMC and then they have the 14A, which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below. This is the most cutting edge, extreme ultraviolet, really, really aggressive lithography. And this is also made in America, which is great.

And these will compete with NVIDIA's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head, but the real question will be, can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin because the Nvidia-TSMC partnership is really, really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for cost and reliability and yield and Intel has kind of lost a step there. And so they will probably need to get on Linear

to make this work. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. So Lip-Bouton if you need an intro to the folks over at Linear. Let us know. Reach out, we will make it happen.

Reach out and we'll figure it out. And Intel is, of course, down almost 10% today. Market is not loving much of anything happening over there right now. Yep. So Semi-Analysis continues saying, Intel, the home of Moore's law. Gordon Moore, of course, worked at Intel

and coined Moore's law, the idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on a silicon chip, allowing for more compute power, basically at the same price. They're evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge. This is what moves the stock, in my opinion, more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downsiding, but deciding, hey, we're not even going to

compete on the most advanced semiconductors, which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic, Sam Altman, every single company is like, give me all of the best and give me hundreds of thousands of the best. The rest of the stuff is like, okay, I'll go to anyone because I need a Wi-Fi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10Q, from Intel's 10Q is, however, we are unable to secure a significant external, if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important customer milestones for Intel 14A,

we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading edge nodes on a go-forward basis. In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects. And Semi-Analysis says, just like that, we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American-made semiconductors forever. Very dark.

Well, let's tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 destinations, we couldn't do the show without it. Multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are, you can sign up for free at Restream. So, in other semiconductor news, there's a big debate going on around etched I reached out to the founder I didn't interview with him a while back I'd love to have him

on the show. He was Gavin Huberty etched is the basic high level pitches we're taking the transformer architecture and we're baking it down in silicon. Semi analysis has been taking some shots at the idea saying, Hey, it's just marketing. But I feel like he has something else going on some other strategy. Teal fellow, very smart guy, very interesting, very nuanced take on AI and a lot of his predictions have been right since I interviewed him a few years ago. And so I'd love to catch up with him and hear his rebuttal to this at least. But basically, they semi analysis makes a very detailed analysis saying that transformers are 90% matrix multiplications, you take a bunch of math, you multiply it

together. So baking trans the transformer architecture into silicon doesn't actually get you that much. A different semi semi semiconductor analyst, a different semi semi Semiconductor analyst and the analyst a different semi analyst. I don't know why they call them semi analysts I think that they're full-time analysts. Yeah, I don't think they're anything but semi. It's rude It's very to say that they're part time. This is clearly putting it on the line They're putting it all on the line for sure. So Sally Ward says, okay, I'll bite Yes making a transformer chip does mean making

a large matmul engine, but there's a lot more to efficient transformer inference than gems slash flops. You need to be able to feed and use those flops efficiently. Goes back and forth a bit, even takes a shot at them using GPGPU, which I guess is an industry term, and the Semi Analysis Team drops a very, very thorough post. You can just go read it, but they closed. In regards to, by the way, no one in AI

has used the term GPGPU since about 2020. This is not correct. Many chip architects definitely continue to refer to AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, our class of software as GPGPU, and differentiate from the Tranium TPU Gaudi- style architecture and programming model So a little bit of timeline in turmoil in this semi analysis world, which I enjoy by the way Somebody one of our early listeners Wade Lloyd bought timeline in turmoil

Calm yeah and redirected it to TBPN. So thank you to Wade for doing that. It is a fantastic domain. But yeah, so big debate over how much more you can squeeze out of baking the transformer into silicon. There's also this interesting concept that the, which I didn't know, a lot of people think like attention is all you need is the paper that dropped, the transformer architecture isn't going anywhere

You're long transformers But apparently according to some analysis the transformer architecture moves in on the order of months and how and the typical chip Lifecycle is years. And so yes, we're still using transformers, but the transformer is changing slightly And so we don't have a new word for it, new buzzword, but there are changes that if you got really locked into V2 of the transformer architecture, then V3 might not be as advantageous. So, big debate over the future of semiconductors.

Intel will have to figure it out and see where they can play. Let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. They're IPOing next week. And Figma Make is publicly available. Go check it out for free now. Yep, in other news Jared Isaacman, who we know was Trump's initial pick for NASA administrator, just took Secretary Duffy up in one of his personal fighter jets.

So this guy rocks. If you have a personal fighter jet and you can fly it yourself, I think you should have a good shot at becoming the NASA administrator. I think that kind of narrows the options down to probably one man. I don't know. We should figure out how many people on Earth have their own jet, fighter jet that they can actually fly. I wonder what-

Can't be that many. I wonder what fighter jet this is. I know people used to buy MiG trainers and fly around in those and those are fighter jets, but they were like decommissioned, easier to get. And I don't believe they were actually that expensive. I think they're cheaper than a Gulfstream. And so-

Well, they have the tam of people that are going to buy one and, and use it. Yeah. Just very small. Yeah. Very, very small. Obviously high skill ceiling. But if you pull up in a jet, it's just incredible aura. Incredible. I mean, the one that's going to be, uh, you know, the best personal jet will be the f-35 It's a little bit pricey, but being able to you know vertical takeoff landing. Here's the video makes it much more Useful I Wonder yeah, we got to figure out what what how much that thing costs I've long advocated for the president to recommission the sr-71 and

And use that as the Air Force one. Because at going, I mean this is the pitch for Hermia's and boom, supersonic. Michael Miraflore in the chat says that's a MiG-29. MiG-29, so it is a MiG trainer, which is decommissioned, doesn't have weapons on it, I believe, but pretty, pretty amazing. But I think it's like a 20 million dollar plane.

He says it's the only western-owned make 29 really yeah interesting okay wow very very cool well thank you for the details in the chat Meg was apparently designed by Russian Russian. Yes, but this guy... John Miggs. Yeah, I'm looking it up. It's Mikoyan, which was headquartered in Moscow and the designer creator was born in 1893 in Kursk, Russia and died in the 70s. Well, if you're accumulating military hardware for personal use, you probably got some compliance needs. You gotta get advanced automated compliance, manage risk, group trust continuously.

Banta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Let's go to Donald Trump meeting with Powell at the Federal Reserve. Pull up the video.

Tom says, LMAO, this is a comedy skit. I wanna watch this video, let's play it. So we're taking a look and it looks like it's about 3.1 billion. It went up a little bit. We're all, so the 2.7 is now 3.1. I'm not aware of that. Yeah, it just came out. Yeah, I don't, I haven't heard that from anybody, And it just came out. I haven't heard that from anybody. The Fed. I know that about 3.1 as well.

3.1. 3.2. This came from us. Yes. I don't know who does that. You're including the market renovation. You just said you just said it in the third building is what that is. That's a third building.

Right. And you're saying that's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. That's the third building. is that you're including the Martin renovation you just said you just said

you just added in a third building is what that is that's a third building it's a building that's being built we finished Martin five years ago so we're good I think there's another one where he talks about like now we have to lower rates because of this well yeah there's one where he says I love I love it I love it if my buddy here would lower the rates yeah I love to see him in hard hats really shows that they're you know getting close to the metal yep totally well Donald Trump is doing deals, trying to bring more money into the United States.

The news is that Japan is apparently committing $550 billion to the United States. It's over 10%- To our Sovereign Wealth Fund? Yes, yes. This is a crazy, crazy story. Very, very American to treat the Sovereign Wealth Fund as just a private Private equity was in the journal today. Yeah, there's the

No, I don't think I don't think this one printed yet But look at this costly overrun to renovate feds office fuels criticism the journals so good at picking Images this image is so iconic. Yeah, so in the journal today, Trump's quest for his own sovereign fund gets $550 billion boost from Japan. We were talking about this earlier. The Japanese government. Japan was like kind of not wanting

to play ball on the tariffs for a while. There was a question. They're playing ball now. They're doing deals. But already, I think there's some weird externalities as government intervention in free trade often has. So, President Trump has long wanted a U.S. sovereign wealth fund that would give him

free rein to make big investments in key sectors. Japan could help him get the next best thing. As part of a trade deal reached this week, Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in projects across strategic U.S., including energy, semiconductor manufacturing, and shipbuilding. The White House said Trump would have final say over where the money goes. Deploying capital, folks, is effectively

the GP of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. New title. And the US would keep 90% of the profits on any investment. Yeah, it's like, instead of like two and 20, it's like a zero and 90. Yeah. I guess that's the way it's set up. I'm sure we're getting some fees off the top too.

You can feed them. I mean, we gotta have management fees. How else is Trump gonna travel three months in Europe? All these tier one funds are like, oh, two and 20, no. We're a four and 40 shop. We're three and 30 shop. And they think they're so fancy. There's levels.

There's levels to this, yeah. And you just got absolutely bogged by the President of the United States. 90% carry. 90% carry. Let's hear it for the United States, baby. I mean, this is gonna inspire some hardworking allocators out there

that are gonna look at their fee structure and say, if I'm really a generational investor, should I really only be getting 20%? Also imagine getting staffed on this as like a principal or like an analyst or something. Cause like- Yeah, is the investment team gonna get some points on this?

I don't think so. I think no matter what you do in the government, like you're basically salary capped at like 200K. I don't think there's anyone in the government who really gets- How are we gonna get our best and brightest? I know, we gotta uncap the salary cap. Get some rising stars on Sand Hill Road. We need some VPs from everywhere, from Blackstone to Sequoia.

I want Andrew Reed deploying the US sovereign wealth fund. Poached. Poached. Benchmarks, hemorrhaging partners, put them on the team. Yeah, maybe Victor is going to the US Sovereign Wealth Fund. Maybe, that would be a big bombshell, I'd love to see it. One Trump official said the administration was thinking of an arrangement like a Sovereign Wealth Fund

that Japan is funding. I love that we're just rebranding Sovereign Wealth Funds. The money will take the form of equity loans and loan guarantees and come from the Japanese government Said senator Bill Haggerty not private companies specifically. It's coming straight from the from the Japanese government, which I think is frustrating people in Japan although Hero, no, no, I don't know if this is he's using he's using they so it seems like he is not in Japan currently Says it's greater than 10% of their GDP,

they exported $150 billion to the US and assuming they just bore the extra cost of 15% extra, even that's 20 billion a year. So that is a huge, huge commitment. But I mean, I guess if they have a big balance sheet, like makes sense to put to work somewhere. Howard Lutnick said, this is literally the Japanese government

giving Trump 550550 billion and says, go fix whatever you need to fix. I love it. One admin official gave a hypothetical example of how Japanese money could be deployed. The US could fund construction of a semiconductor facility for say Intel, then lease it to Intel and keep 90% of the leasing revenue. Well if you're looking to fix your code review process, get on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI,

graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Anyway, let's continue with this. If the fund materializes, Trump envisions a significant question, it would give an American president unprecedented power to steer money into the projects of his choosing potentially with some significant impacts on particular industries. This is

interesting because I feel like this story just broke and the re-industrialized crew isn't necessarily talking about it yet but this feels extremely aligned with the whole re-industrialized movement. The idea of more more US dollars. We saw this with the AI summit and the AI action plan. There's a lot of talks about positioning, but there wasn't that much actual new legislation or new funding that could specifically move a particular project forward,

which I think would be more exciting, to be like, okay, we're building a bridge, we're building a dam, we're building a nuclear reactor, we're building something like the US government hasn't really been in build mode for a long time, it feels like, everything's kind of stalled. And some of that's good because it's handled by the private sector.

Who was the founder? We had the founder of Bright AI on yesterday who scaled to a hundred million dollar run rate or bootstrapped to a hundred million dollar run rate and then recently raised from Coastal. He was saying a lot of US infrastructure was built during the World War II era with a 20 year, expected 20 year lifespan and obviously is still what we're relying on today.

Well, speaking of the re-industrialized crew, they sent us this wonderful clock from Shinola, a Detroit based company. Clocks are incredibly underrated. Yeah, clocks are fantastic. Thank you guys. sent us this wonderful clock from Shinola, a Detroit based company. It has some reindustrialized. Clocks are incredibly underrated. Yeah, clocks are fantastic. Thank you guys. Thank you, Aaron and Austin.

Very frustrated that we couldn't make it to reindustrialize. Seemed like an awesome time with all the absolute boys out there having a good time. I think we will have our remote workflow worked out and studio stuff worked out so that we can travel more in the near future. But it was fun having so many of the folks call in from Reindustrialize give us the updates from the ground and excited to do more of that. So who is this? Christina Davis, Harvard University

professor of Japanese politics who directs its program on US-Japan relations said Where this one deviates is the step toward investing at the president's direction with the profits going to the US It makes it sound coercive socialist and unprecedented in any sense of past trade negotiations now The US has a many ways it makes sense that the president would be the chief capital allocator, the chief GP. Yes, yes, yes. So commander in chief, GP in chief. Yeah, what's weird is that we've talked a lot about how when the US government tries to pick a winner,

it often doesn't go very well. The famous example, at least from zero to one, Peter Thiel's book is Cylindra. Are you familiar with this? So Cylindra was a clean energy startup. Oh yes. That was a cylinder, like instead of just a flat photovoltaic panel,

I believe it was like a cylinder, and the idea was like clean energy, and they got this massive grant from the Obama administration, and the company went bankrupt and it was a big mark on this idea of the government like picking winners and backing companies and and in zero to one Teal kind of outlines this idea that like from first principles

You could tell that just mathematically a circle didn't fill as much space as a square and so you should have gone with the square Solar panel and so the the business model was kind of flawed from day one didn't fill as much space as a square. And so you should have gone with a square solar panel. And so the business model was kind of flawed from day one, and you could have figured that out if you'd just done the basic math of how energy dense is a circle versus a square. If you're packing them in, pack a bunch of circles in, there's gonna be a bunch of extra space.

I think that's basically what happened. Maybe I'm collapsing it a little bit. But I'm not a huge fan of the government picking winners. I like the Tesla model a little bit more where there was just this EV tax credit and anyone could have gone after it. And then Tesla just dominated it and won it.

And then we've diffused benefit. China effectively encourages massive competition and then kind of waits for there to be a breakout winner. And that creates a talent vortex. And then the state is effectively saying, starting to really back it in a meaningful way. Yeah, it's very controversial to say. But they didn't necessarily pick the winner.

Exactly, it's somehow more capitalist. And that's what this Harvard professor is kind of taking shots at, saying like it's pretty socialist to be picking winners and in a weird world like China's policies tend to be more capitalist in some ways. Like they are doing a lot of investing in technologies and putting government and I guess taxpayer funds into strategic technologies and subsidizing whole industries. Like their chip manufacturing, their supply chain for semiconductors has been lagging for like 50 years.

They've been not competitive. But the Chinese government has just been like, well, there's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. There's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. Who's gonna do it? Who's gonna do it? Who's gonna do it? And it's one company and then it's SMIC and then it's me and then Huawei's getting stuff.

And it should be the same thing with electric cars in America. Tesla got a benefit. Rivian also got a benefit. Lucid got a benefit. And even when BMW went over into electric cars, they got a benefit. And now those benefits are pulling back

and we can go into what's happening with Tesla stock But well to put the five hundred and fifty billion number in some context American tourists spent just under six billion dollars or Six billion dollars in tourism in Japan last year, okay So we'll go learn it back in a hundred years hundred years of tourism and they get it back But no, I mean the thing is that this is not them giving us the money like they should earn a return I would be surprised if these infrastructure investments don't be hard to beat the market if you're getting 10% of the Upside, I mean if you collapse it down, you know

You're basically you're basically treating Trump as a solo GP and you have to look at his historical IRR and he's gone. He's gone bankrupt a few times. I think overall, overall, he's not just zeroing everything. Right. Some of the stuff's ripping. I bet on average he's preserving capital if not returning multiples of it. And so, you know, you think about a scale of, okay, there's gonna be a new semiconductor plant in Arizona

and Japan's gonna come in and underwrite a hundred billion dollars of, you know, development and some massive, probably debt deal or something, and they're gonna earn some sort of return. The chance that they don't get anything back is pretty low, I think. I don't think this is money going into a pit and burning.

You're here a little bit. You're here a little bit. I'm a little worried. I mean, the example was the money goes into a, let's say a semiconductor manufacturing facility, and then Intel would pay the US government to lease it, and the US government would keep 90% of that, it's gonna be hard to, you will be losing money

if you factor in inflation. Maybe, I mean, the way I see a deal happening is, I'm gonna go, I need $100 billion to go build a bunch of nuclear power plants. I go to Trump or the US government and say I need a hundred billion dollars and they're like great take 20 billion in equity take 80 billion in debt and then there's you know an interest rate a coupon rate attached to that debt and then the equity has some sort of value and hopefully the plan works out so that there's a multiple return on the equity

and there's an interest rate that, and you blend the IRRs and you're getting to, I don't know, five, 10% across everything. And then yes, the US is taking 90% of that, but you are still preserving your capital. The idea that it's instantly a zero is probably, hopefully, avoidable, right? It could be if they do another cylinder

They'd have to do a lot of deals But if they have a portfolio, you know, you would as you would assume that the portfolio broadly does okay Yeah, it's possible that a Shiva the the president of the Prime Minister of Japan is just so a GI pilled He's way and is such a firm believer that America is gonna win the AI race that he just says, yep, take it Mr. Trump, you got it from here. Yeah, I mean it could be seen as, like are you comping it against buying treasuries?

Because that's just a way to like index to the dollar if your currency is in decline, like at least at the end of that term you've got 3%, 5% continuously. That'd be really funny if Trump just takes the 550 billion of five T-bills. To lower the rate, to bring down the yield curve. Just wants to bring down,

it's just obsessed with the yield curve. Just market buying T-bills. And taking 9%, or sorry, 90% of the yield. Anyways, lots of fun. Asset management is the greatest business. AUM Maxing. He's AUM Maxing. Jeremy Gaffan called it. Avalanche.

Let's keep going with this. Okay, you want me to go on more? Yeah, there's a little more in here that I want to go through. The plan has raised more questions than answers on Wall Street and beyond. Details remain unclear, including whether Japan will have any discretion over projects in the time period during which the investments will be made. Hagerty said the investment will be overseen by two Japanese-backed administrators,

Japan Bank and Nippon Export. One administration official said the funds would likely arrive only as needed, so you make capital calls when you need to. As you know, these deals have been agreed in principle, but they have not been fully papered yet. In selecting investments, this is where it gets interesting, Trump would have help from the commerce department's

US investment accelerator headed by former Morgan Stanley investment banker, Michael Grimes and Polytechnic alum. I went to the same school as this guy, absolute beast. He took Facebook public. He has a massive row. He's like the king maker. The deal toy final boss. Deal toy final boss.

You walk into his office and it's just, there's no room to put down a coffee because there's just a deal toy on every single surface. It's insane. Absolute beast. The dream. One of the greatest to ever do it. His team will help identify investments

and make sure the funds are used properly and expeditiously. People familiar with the matter said, the size of the commitment dwarfs most investment funds. It's more than twice the size of Japan's gross foreign direct investment in the US last year. And so we can't really evaluate the agreement because it's so vague at this stage.

There's a lot of vague deals happening right now. The AI action plan is kind of in that territory now, but we still are only six months into this administration. Maybe all of this crystallizes. And then they comp it to Stargate, which was unveiled at the White House in January, involved a commitment from OpenAI. This apparently already been scaled back,

unclear exactly what that means. And so there was also an EO from Trump in February directing his team to develop a plan for an establishment of a sovereign wealth fund within 90 days this is the start of that so anyway get on numeral HQ comm sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance let's go to avalanche energy we got a little dog was awarded a ten million dollar grant from Washington the states to develop fusion This marks small-scale fusions evolution from a laboratory curiosity into a neutron source that creates real-world value

Robin Robin Langtree the CEO of avalanche. We've had a show great guy I've toured his facility with Ben up in Washington. We had a lot of fun. Extremely hard project, small scale fusion. Fusion is still not fully commercialized. Small scale fusion is in some ways easier because you're making something smaller, but also still untested. Lots of work to be done,

but great to see that they have more money to develop more technology. So congrats to the team over there. Love to see Washington State putting. They've been really, yeah, it feels like Washington's been kind of under the radar as being very hard tech friendly. He's had a pretty, he set up a whole facility over there by the SeaTac airport and seems to be able to do stuff.

Although he's not working with radiation because he's not doing fission, he's doing fusion. And so his power sources are like he needs like hydrogen or something or you know It's like it's like pretty inert gases that aren't that big of a deal. He should he should talk to Trevor from Nikola's Brother the man. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah the head of hydrogen Yeah, I mean you want to be taking advantage of those 80% energy gains for sure. Yeah, they're making it for 80% less

than anyone else in the known universe. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. Say it again, don't get in a bake-off with fin.ai if you enjoy winning. Don't do it. Anyway,off with an AI don't do it if you if you enjoy winning don't do it anyway Great toast here from Antonio

Garcia Martinez he's coming on the show next week by the way the 80s were the apex of American civilization And today is a sad day his memory will be a blessing. Yes mentioned Hulk Hogan. Let's play this video Yeah, pull up that video and I will read from the Wall Street Journal Hulk Hogan is Let's play this video. Yeah, pull up that video and I will read from the Wall Street Journal. Hulk Hogan is gone but still everywhere. He may not have been a traditional athlete but the late pro wrestlers influence in sports and the culture at large was pervasive. So I'm not sure where to put, this is from Jason Gay in the sports section of the Wall Street Journal. Jason says I'm not sure where to put this is from Jason Gay in the sports section of the Wall Street Journal. Jason says, I'm not sure where to put Hulk Hogan in the

history of sports or whether to put him in there at all. Hogan, who died Thursday at age 71, could pull off exceptional athletic feats with his massive sculpted six foot eight body. We got some misinformation yesterday where we were quoting him at six foot seven. Six seven seven seems like he is my height exactly still a professional wrestlers trade is spoiler alert entertainment not pure competition and yet it's impossible not to recognize wrestling's evolution from regional circus to widespread cultural force it is crazy that rest pro wrestling started is just like a traveling circus like just a bunch of dudes coming into regional circus to widespread cultural force. It is crazy that pro wrestling started as

just like a traveling circus, like just a bunch of dudes coming into town and being like, you want to see us fight? It's so funny. Today, this is an accepted, well trodden observation. Sports, politics, and daily life are closer, atmospherically, to the wrestling ring than ever before. This is the idea of kayfabe in politics, the idea of people being in on the joke, they know that people are just saying things to rile up the other side, they're entertaining, we see this in journalism and media, we see it in tech, we see it all over the place, and Jason here in the Wall Street Journal is drawing more analogies from that. We become a nation of noisy confrontationalists. The

skillful soft touch replaced by the swing of the folding chair. Reason is routinely drowned out by the loudest voices in the room, wrestling strips life's complications down to primal conflicts, and few wrestlers embodied this approach as famously and forebodingly as Hulk Hogan. I'm not a wrestling obsessive. I've been a couple times. That's it. I still need to look up the correct spelling for Bruno Sammartino. But I know enough to know Hogan, born Terry Bollea, was a transformative figure, one of the most larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life universe. And I think we have the video ready to pull up. It's not a video after it's not just an image

I think it's just a picture. It's just a picture from a gym. Well, we well we did we did play the Hulk Hogan calling Calling out someone else. I forget in one of those like pre-show Reels on the last show so you can go check that out if you want anyway like pre-show reels on the last show. So you can go check that out if you want. Anyway, he says, a true brand name, Hogan over time refashioned himself as a heel, to hero, to heel, and everything in between.

So we went back and forth. Then I think the actual wrestling term is a face. A face is someone that everyone loves. A heel is someone that everyone cheers to lose. But they both play the role, and there's a lot of interesting like fourth wall breaking all sorts of stuff going on. He had too many comebacks, collapses and professional detours to count. At one point he went and did movies and he came back

and everyone was saying he's Hollywood Hogan. He's gone to Hollywood. He sold out. He doesn't represent us. And so that was like a whole character that he played up Hollywood Hogan. He's too good for the for the you know, the the mainstream wrestling fan and everyone loved that. There we go We got some video of Hogan running around with an American flag. You love it. It's interesting it over time his Character seemed to merge with Terry. Hmm Terry Balea the the human yeah and Hulk just became the same person yeah I was talking to Rob about this there's this idea just generally in

media about like you play this character when you're on camera but you want to be authentic but you don't want the the attacks on your character to ruin your personal life you don't want to lose yourself in the sauce. It's all very, it's all very complicated, modern. It's very, very bizarre. Celebrate, celebratized and repeatedly scandalized, swapping places as poster boy and pariah, fired for getting caught on tape using racist slurs, a strange protagonist at a media crusade, and even a convention speaker. Yeah, he spoke at the

most recent RNC convention, where he ripped off his shirt in in support of Donald Trump. He was controversial and omnipresent through the end. He exploded on the scene in the early 1980s. A lot of people's first exposure when they came when they when came when he appeared in the ring as thunder lips, the ultimate male against Rocky Balboa in Rocky three tossing rock like a rag doll as a horrified Mickey and Adrian recoiled going to Hollywood cost Balaya his job in the then WWF they didn't want him to do

it. But hulkamania only grew and he returned. The fever reached the point he landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in April of 1985. Biceps flexed, hands clawed, a fictional barbarian at the gate. Transitionalists- Pull up this post from Luke Metro. Oh yeah. Traditionalists howled. Pro wrestling wasn't real sports. How could the Hulkster enter the same cathedral as Kofax, Ali, and Abdul-Jabbar? I admit to harboring the same feelings when I see pro wrestling events treated seriously by major sports outlets. Why are we doing this? Why? Yet wrestling's reach is indisputable and Hogan's timing in its ascension was impeccable.

He hitched his career to its leap from localized products to to global force a handsome blonde Agent of Vince McMahon's aggressive growth strategy and a media ecosystem that cultivated better than most Hulk understood a very old-fashioned wrestling concept to be seen It's better to be outrageous to be heard. You need to be loud if you if it earns you love great But even if you are hated you are still noticed great lesson there So what did Luke Metro says you watch the earth? I'll watch the sky brother What a great of course the reference thing the Gawker take down where? these two

Yeah linked in such an odd way such different characters and yet linked both in the support of Donald Trump at various points on the conservative politics world and also with a mutual distaste for Gawker and their salacious reporting Absolutely insane This kind of intentional performance, what wrestlers call a work, is routine in sports. Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name and make money.

It's pervasive in every profession now. The media used to be a necessary partner, but now the digital tools exist to do it on one's own. Influencers, business antagonists, media flame throwers, and the performative fray of social media, the exhausting, not very real reality programming on television, there's a bit of wrestling in all of it. I'm not sure the tools exist.

How much do you think the combined entity that includes WWE and UFC is worth in the public markets today. I would say like $4 billion. Close. How much? 33 billion. Whoa, not close at all, dude.

I was not playing over the magnitude. Wow. Yeah. That's a beast. Yeah, it also includes IMG, the sports talent management. Isn't that a modeling agency too? I think they have a modeling division, but it's primarily sports talent.

They also own PBR, the premier bull riding. Oh, you mean the beer. We gotta get a TBPN bull riding athlete. I'm a huge J.B. Monty fan, one of the greatest to ever do it. He's one of the most legendary bull riders I know all about him. Recently injured, very sad, but the bull that retired him by breaking his back, he now owns

and affectionately takes care for and they are now friends. Beautiful story. I'm not sure the tools exist to turn the clock back. The appetite exists for relief, but I don't know if there's room anymore for subtlety, context or even expertise. The algorithms reward volume and so does the culture. The rest of us are caught in the noise. Hulk Hogan is departed, but he remains among us. What a wonderful obituary. Tell me about UFC.

It is incredible that so many it says something about the character that Terry played in Hulk Hogan, that he could have these glowing obituaries despite having so many, you know, sort of terrible moments, whether it was when that he made some terrible comments on recording at one point and to still to get this. I watched referencing what I said earlier is like, recording at one point and to still to get this again, referencing what I said earlier is like, who is the man? Is it Terry? Is it Hulk Hogan? Are they the same thing?

I watched a hilarious interview with him in maybe GQ or something where they go in his house, they see his supplement stack. And he said that during this time when he was fighting, this was insane. He, uh, he would, uh, he was like, what was it? They were like, what was your diet? What were you on? He was like, well, I'd wake up and I'd have a beer and two Tylenol.

And then, uh, and then like after the fight, I'd have six beers and two more Tylenol, something like that. And I remember you asked me one day, you were like, oh, I got like aches, I'm not feeling well. And I was like, you gotta take Tylenol. And you were- Why didn't you recommend beer? I shouldn't have recommended beer. But I remember you asked me like, okay, John,

like I know you're like really like nerdy about all this stuff. Like you probably have some like really solid rationale for like why Tylenol is like the correct painkiller to take. And my entire rationale was just like, it was good enough for Hulk Hogan but in this in this video, they're asking all these questions they're doing the rapid-fire questions and And they ask him like Hulk Hogan if you could fight anyone alive or dead, who would you fight?

And he just says Bill Clinton It's just like they just move on to the next one. It's like why is it? I have no idea what he's thinking. It's just like, and then you just move on to the next one. It's like, why is he? He holds some grudge, I assume for political reasons or something, but it was just a wild thing to say. Very entertaining. But on the note of entertainment,

I want your reaction to this. That seems a little more tan than you'd want to go for. A little too tan. I think that's probably the camera adding some color correction or something. It seems like the exposure on the camera was a little low that day, but he is very tan. Because here, look at this picture in the Wall Street Journal.

It's the same photo, and it's a much more normal tan. But he is very, I don't know if he's Italian, but he is very tan. So I want you to explain to me about how this relates to UFC. In this article they say, common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention,

make a name and make money. It's pervasive in every profession now. How does getting attention work in UFC? You mentioned that Conor McGregor was particularly good at like trash talking and that allowed him to be more successful than some of the modern UFC fighters. But how does that dynamic work?

Because I feel like UFC is not fake like wrestling. It is very real, and so why is it that the points aren't all that matter? I guess there aren't points in UFC, but like the wins, the knockouts. If I come in, I should be able to be entirely silent and win and I should still be comped the same, but that's not how it works in UFC, explain that.

Yeah, so Conor McGregor had, had, had, arguably had the gift of gab. Yet he backed it up with a series of wins that elevated him to superstar status, right? You can't just be a yapper, but there were some iconic moments where he would, I believe, I'm forgetting the guy's name, but when he was fighting the Brazilian champion,

he basically called exactly how he was gonna knock the guy out the day before. And there was these moments that just launched him into superstar status. Since then, you've had people like Ilja Tapuria, who are probably more talented, better all-around fighters, more consistent. And it's interesting because Ilya Topuria, the main critique early on was that he was just like a, just copying Conor McGregor. He wasn't his own man. He would use Conor McGregor like lines. He got a tattoo that's almost exactly like Conor's on his back.

But overall, UFC people, hardcore fans, will be frustrated because they'll say, oh, this is just wrestling. He shouldn't be getting the fight. This is just pro wrestling. It's like, you realize the companies are owned by the same group? It's an entertainment company, right? So TKO. Oh, wrestling and UFC are both owned by the same company like it's it's all it's an entertainment company right so we wrestling and TKO are both owned by the same guy that's missing 33 billion dollar public company or church or Gale yeah it's all entertainment it's an entertainment company entertainment

disguised as sport okay obviously the athletes on and UFC are incredible but yeah oh you know over and over you've seen the best paid fighters end up being oftentimes the most entertaining. The Russian fighters like Khabib were historically very humble and very quiet. Less entertaining. But they were so dominant. Islam is so dominant, he can be humble and still draw attention.

But nothing like Connor did in his prime. The UFC has been- Yeah, remember the Connor swag walk is iconic. There's a lot of things that are- And then you have people like Patti the Batty from the UK who's a loud mouth, very entertaining in a bunch of different ways. He swells up, he gains like seemingly 50 pounds in between fights.

When I saw him for the first time, I was like, that does not look like a fighter. That looks like a musician or something. That's fantastic. Yeah, I'm gonna look at the pound for pound rankings right now on UFC, if I can pull this up. Yeah, it's interesting because that hasn't really, I feel like that hasn't really happened in the NFL for some reason, like because the Super Bowl is not decided based on any qualitative

factors whatsoever. It's purely stats. I believe there's no voting at all. College football used to be that way. Yeah, the UFC is trying to make fights that will sell pay-per-views. Yes, exactly. And so they will elevate somebody. I mean, this is the critique of Sean O'Malley, another guy with very bright, bright hair. He posts TikToks of himself smoking weed and stuff like that, and then has been put in his place fairly recently. But again, they would call it Dana White privilege, right?

It's like a fighter who's entertaining loud enough enough of a draw. Yeah But if you look at the pound-for-pound rankings, there's some guys on there that Over time the pound-for-pound ranking tends to reflect somebody's actual athletic abilities. You have Ilya, Islam, Mirab, Tom Aspinall and Andrei Alexandre Pantoja who are all ultimately just incredible athletes. And a lot of the loudmouths will end up getting paid quite well but they're not necessarily getting on that pound for pound ranking. Yeah,

there is a little bit of a dynamic of that in traditional professional sports where I believe like the MLB is basically hoping for Dodgers, Yankees in the world series, like every single time because the Dodgers and the Yankees have like the biggest fan bases. And so broadly there will be more people tuning into that than say two teams facing off from second or third tier cities. But there's no world where, you know,

oh going into the Super Bowl, you know, there's really like, you know, a lot of trash talking going on. But like. Yeah, it's just looked down on. There's an interesting story. Colby Covington, who has fought for a championship, I think a couple of times, never won.

He was at a point in the UFC where he was facing getting cut. He was just not really doing that well. And he decided to basically completely rebrand himself as a heel and just say the most offensive possible things he could say. He came out loudly in support of Trump Yep, when that was much much less popular

He would post videos of himself with like seemingly only fans creators Adult entertainers and it totally actually turned around his career and he ended up again. He didn't actually fight and win didn't win any titles and probably never will but it definitely turned his career around well if you're looking to talk some trash to about your competitors when you're selling your product you got to do it in Adio customer relationship magic Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the not endorsed not endorsed by audio But endorsed by John at this moment turn turn, you know, you're serious looks like WWE exactly

Really getting into it people you're using our competitor. Take a look at this deal card. Tell me you don't want to switch right now Yeah channel Hulk Hogan in your next meeting Tell me you don't want to switch right now. Yeah, channel Hulk Hogan in your next BBR meeting. Sheel has a good post here announcing some news. Tesla is telling staff internally that it plans to roll out its robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekend, and they'll include Marin, much of the East Bay and San Francisco

and stretch south to San Jose. This will be crazy if it goes through this weekend. I mean, it's gonna come soon. Will be very interesting to see because I imagine that driving in San Francisco is a little bit harder than driving in Austin, but there's a ton of people that have Teslas and have been driving around San Francisco

for a decade or more now with cameras So they should have a lot of data. They should be trained. I think the robotaxes will be fine If the if if the robotaxes were a Tesla humanoid driving stick shift, they'd have a really rough time in San Francisco You ever driven stick in San Francisco? No, but it is extremely hard on the hills. I maybe once I think I actually once did it is It was really bad. My first car, Toyota, 20-year-old Toyota stick shift. And I would drive it into San Francisco. And it was already at a time where people were just assumed everybody was in an automatic.

And so you'd pull up on just the most steep hill, and somebody would come up right behind you, park an an inch away from you and it's very exhilarating So I think they'll do fine. It will be interesting though Like you know are the car or the robotaxi is gonna be like followed by another car We'll probably have safety drivers in them for a while. Yeah, right and And they'll probably be tele-operated for a while. The question I think is just like, will we see memes on X of people switching? Because we've seen a lot of people in San Francisco post,

I think, what is it, Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz said that she hit her like 500th Waymo ride. Like people truly just use Waymo constantly, and they've really shifted from Uber to Waymo. And so will they shift again to Tesla? Will they be dual using? Will one be cheaper?

Will it be a price war, capital war? What's gonna happen there? Finally, they're going head to head, so it'll be interesting to follow. Well, no matter what you think of Tesla, whether you're long or you're short, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously.

They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. In other news, if you're not looking to take a RoboTaxi, I would recommend picking up this 2025 Ferrari SF90XX. It's $2.3 million. It's a stunning example here, loaded with over $100,000 in options. And everyone will know that you are not just rich,

but wealthy because this car's probably gonna depreciate like crazy. I don't know, how many of these are they, how many of the XX are they making? Well, the original SF90 priced at $700, $800,000, but it was not a limited production run. And so it has traded down to about half that price very unfortunate for the SF 90 buyers in the audience our our hearts go out to you after taking such a bath

but you can make it all back on an SF 90 xx I love the xx I gotta say now what basically is the egg is the xx street legal car? I they do this weird thing where they make a road car then they make it a track car and then they make the track car road car version and we've gone kind of back and forth and back and forth but I think this is the road the road version of the track car version of the road car. Is that right? I think I'm right. I think you're right. The chat will correct this quickly. I'm pretty sure the XX series is is they took it,

they got it ready for the track, and then they dialed it back to where it was street legal again. Anyway, you got to pick this up, folks. It's a steal. John Exley in the chat says, just got a notification from the FT. Anthropic is reportedly raising capital from the Middle East at a valuation

north of $150 billion. $150, wow. That is wild. Love to see it. But I'm sure. Seems like every company in the world is using Claude Code, maybe even OpenAI. Yeah.

It's just that good. Yep, so the article went up 11 minutes ago. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropix is in early talks, OK? We're not advanced talks. Early talks. No term sheet yet. At more than double its valuation to more than $150 billion and a new funding

round giving it additional firepower to keep pace with rivals building advanced models. Its preliminary stages has received interest, which was a massive jump from their current $61 billion price tag. So it sounds like they're talking with MGX, Obby Dobby's AI fund. And again, coming off that nice memo that they had

that leaked earlier this week saying Saying something He basically said bad. They're bad bad people are gonna make money on this Yeah, he said unfortunately I think no bad person should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business That's the worst quote the quote quote you should drop is, I can change him. I can change him. I can fix that. Wait until, wait until he, if I don't, if he's doing something bad over there, wait

until he starts talking to Claude. And he's like, yeah, maybe I should be nicer. Maybe I should just get into the Golden Gate Bridge, have him chat with Golden Gate Bridge Claude for a while, cheer him up. and whoever Dario's worried about, get him on the straight and narrow. It's just so funny because it's like, how much does Anthropic rely on sovereign investment from the Middle East already for their business? Oh, just through the VCs?

Through the passenger vehicles? All life, right? All life, right? right there a key player And it's just I mean it's I mean I've Been Been to the to the UAE twice and met so many so many amazing people and Sure, I've never been to the UAE. I've been to Qatar. It was cool. Yeah so many amazing people and share.

I've never been to the UAE. I've been to Qatar, and it was cool. Yeah. And other than that, I don't think I've been to anywhere in the Middle East. Maybe I should go, I don't know. Need to do a world tour. I met a buddy of mine, a now friend when I met him.

He showed me he had his formal wear on and he got it custom made to have a- Like you, Casual Friday over here. Casual Friday over here, sorry folks. Slack it off. Sorry folks. And he had a custom insert for his vape and then extra cartridges at the side.

Wow, that's pretty sick. Who's that designer that does extra pockets everywhere? That's like a thing. Is that, is that? I'm not gonna name it. I'm not gonna name it. They're a friend. They're a friend.

Accidental pockets. Accidental pockets. Let's throw a pocket on it. So these are not advanced talks? These are early talks? Early talks, preliminary talks. Yeah, preliminary talks. But they are talking terms, it sounds like. There are other preliminary talks they are talking terms there are

other preliminary talks going on between us and ad quick for their next for next billboard by there you could be in advanced talks with ad quit here and if you're interested in making out-of-home advertising easy and measurable you can say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising because only ad quick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the given how given how addicted we are, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Oh, folks. Given how addicted we are to out-of-home, we're pretty much always in advance talks.

Always, always. With the good folks at AdQuick. Bernard Arnaud is in the paper again. LVMH boss Bernard Arnaud seeks to avert the trade war. This is a very interesting article. I wanted to kick it off with a little background on Bernard Arnaud. So we have some posts here, one from Speedwell Research.

He was explaining the difference between iPhones and Dom Perignon and the CEO of LVMH says, in 50 years time will the iPhone still be used or the people who are making it today? Will they have found out what will be at the cutting edge at that time? But I believe I can say without being mistaken that in 50 years time, we will still be drinking Dom Perignon.

And I agree. Iconic. I agree. Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are teaming up to make a champagne brand, baby. They're coming for the iPhone. The issue is it's hard to create legacy quickly. It is, it is.

Heritage is not made in a day. The other funny thing, this is extremely disrespectful to Apple. Did you know this? So it's disrespectful in multiple ways. One, obviously Apple would say, of course we'll be around in 50 years, but Apple has a set of rules for

PR people and if you're working with them and you're and you're talking about the iPhone They have a set of rules for how you talk about the products and they specifically don't want you to say the iPhone They say let's talk about iPhone Really? Yes, and if you watch the keynote, they never say the iPhone they say let's talk about iPhone Really? Yes, and if you watch the keynote they never say the iPhone they say iPhone know the and this is just like part of their thing and they have a Set of rules that are like it's like hundreds of pages in this PDF It's crazy how much control they exert over the over over like the P.L. and file guides. I wonder if you get Siri to say the iPhone.

So they have a bunch of funny things. You're not supposed to say click here. You're not supposed to use App Store generically. You're supposed to capitalize it. You're not supposed to say the device wants, thinks or tries. Apple prefers a tone that's helpful, not whimsical or personified.

You're not supposed to describe the apps that come with the device as free. You're not supposed to say, oh yeah, Apple includes like a free maps app. You're not supposed to say that if you're doing an iPhone review. And so, choose your words wisely if you're trying to get good graces of Apple's PR team.

And I don't think Bernard Arnaud will be reviewing the next iPhone with language like this. But maybe people will be using their iPhones to buy Dom Perignon in 50 years. Max Meyer highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnaud a while back earlier this year. He says, when you cannot dream when you talk numbers, when you create desire, profits are a consequence. So good, you could be creating desire. I think this is in reference to the Tiffany's store in New York.

Yes, he spent $500 million renovating the Fifth Avenue Tiffany flagship. People were like, that sounds like a lot to spend on a renovation of a single store. He says, you can't dream when you talk numbers. Don't talk numbers, create desire. And if you want to sleep in the Tiffany store of mattresses, get Natesleep, get a Pod 5 Ultra,

but it has a five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. So David Sentra also has a good quote. Bernard Arnaud's advice to himself, in business I think the most important thing is to position yourself for long term and not be too impatient, which I am by nature and I have to control myself. I think that's a good point. And Sentra also highlights 10 highlights about Bernard Arnaud.

He made a bunch of commitments that early, that were very, very detail oriented, things that you wouldn't typically notice, but once you'd seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, it's what comes to your mind immediately. He spots any incongruities that might disrupt the aura of opulence he has carefully constructed. Then he reels off texts and emails

to his senior executive describing any perceived deficiencies and bullet points of obsessive detail. Arnoux has assembled the world's largest luxury conglomerate and globalized the sector once constrained by the limited ambitions of family-owned European companies encrusted in tradition. Very good at in stewarding these brands that probably are owned by families and don't want to part ways if they, you know, it's not just a source of income for the family, but it's also a source of pride to be the owner of a luxury house. But Bernard figures out how to get them to part with it. He believed luxury brands could be larger than anyone at the time imagined.

be larger than anyone at the time imagined. Yeah, there was that, the acquired is such a good coverage of LVMH of course, but just how long he, just how badly he wanted Dior and how it ended up in the hands of this like weird government owned conglomerate. Anyways, wild story. He did take over Dior. So it had three stores in the equivalent of 90 million dollars in sales when he

acquired it. Now it has 439 stores. So I mean a massive growth and 9.5 billion in sales. He hundred X the business. Absolutely insane. It's it's it's wild how bullish she was despite, you know, probably not being able to predict social media early on. Like he, despite, you know, probably not being able to predict social media early on. Like he, like you could kind of identify flex culture just maybe in a cafe or a restaurant. Totally. But scaling flex culture and the way that Instagram and social media did, has been incredible. So if you're looking for a luxury watch, get on Bezel, go to getbezel.com,

your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. So let's talk about how he's working behind the scenes to avert a trade war. President Trump's efforts to secure a trade deal with the European Union have the help of an old, powerful friend, luxury titan Bernard Arnaud. The LVMH chief has spent recent weeks shuttling between Europe's

capitals meeting with German Chancellor Frederick Mears and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maloney, pressing them to agree to a deal along the lines of the one Trump reached with Japan this week. He and he has spoken to the president seeking to deescalate tensions with Brussels. Arnaud is also hedging his bets. He plans to open another Louis Vuitton factory in Texas, a move partly credited with sparing the luxury industries from tariffs during Trump's first term. I'm pushing as much as I can for us to reach an agreement with the Americans so that we don't get

caught up in a trade war, which would be extremely damaging for European businesses," Arnaud said in an interview at LVMH's headquarters in Paris. Much is now at stake for Arnaud. On Thursday, LVMH reported a 22% fall in first-half net profit, hit by sharp decline in sales as its core fashion and leather goods division that includes Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. The company is contending with a range of challenges. China, long the luxury industry's growth engine, is in a protracted economic slump and consumer confidence.

In the US, which accounts for one third of the group sales, has been shaken by uncertainty over tariffs, then some consumers are now questioning the inherent value of luxury goods after years of price rises. That's insane. Who are these consumers? It's ridiculous. Investors, meanwhile, are scrutinizing

whether the business model of LVMH, a conglomerate of more than 75 brands that ranges from cosmetics retailer Sephora to Hennessy Cognac, is built for a world with rising trade barriers and deepening geopolitical uncertainty. LVMH's shares are down more than 30% since January. That is, they are one of the durable losers

because the S&p 500 and the mag 7 have both dropped down probably around 20 30 percent in some cases during the post liberation day tariffs but they all bounce back and now Jensen's running a four trillion dollar company. LVMH is bouncing back. It's been rocky over the last week, but they're up 11% over the last 30 days. But like you said, down 27% in the last six months, but only down 10% year to date. They have been growing nicely into the new year. So Arnaud pioneered the luxury brand conglomerate

in an era when the world economy was opening up. Lots of trade, a burgeoning middle class around the globe fueled a decades-long boom in luxury spending that made him one of the world's richest men. Now LVMH's two biggest markets, the U.S. and China, are at loggerheads with Europe and Arnaud caught in the middle. Trump is demanding European countries move manufacturing to the United States to avoid tariffs. A tall order for luxury brands that market their wares as made in Europe with old world craftsmanship. That's a very good point. Arno. Yeah, it is funny to imagine a Birkin bag made in Texas. It's just like it just doesn't feel right. It's not the brand. Um, Trump. Uh,

so Arno said that while LVMH is strong enough to ride out the slowdown, other luxury companies were getting exposed, echoing Warren Buffett. He added that when the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming without a swimsuit. For Arnaud, the luxury downturn is temporary, not a structural shift, and successful investors often do the opposite of stock market players who he called a bit sheep like shots fired. LVMH's array of labels gives the group scale to attract top talent like creative directors and designers, secure prime retail locations and negotiate favorable media rates by buying in bulk according to the billionaire. In periods when the economic climate is more difficult when

markets slow down, which is the case today We tend to come out stronger our no is putting his money where his mouth is his his family holding company Have bought more than 1 billion in of LVMH shares since the end of January regulatory filing show So he's buying back in increasing his stake. He said that He said that he said that put them he said that put them on their the track to own more than half of LVMH's Stock by the start of next year the most urgent order is of the business. However, breaking news Please LVMH is in talks to sell Marc Jacobs. Oh, wow, Michael mirror floor in the chat again. Just just breaking breaking news delivering insights and just breaking news, delivering insights.

Not super surprised to see this news. It feels like Marc Jacobs, I don't know any people or in and around our world that are super excited to buy whatever's coming down the Marc Jacobs runway. So anyways, LVMH is in discussions to sell fashion brand Marc Jacobs in a deal that could fetch around $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. They've been discussing deals with multiple parties,

including Reebok owner Authentic. Authentic, I think, is we should try to have the CEO on sometime. They basically buy up, let me list all their brands, but they buy up brands that are honestly I hate to say it Aging out a little bit not not necessarily aging out but losing some relevancy Reebok champion Nautica Arapostale Eddie Bauer Brooks Brothers Bill Billabong,

Quicksilver, Juicy Couture, et cetera. So they buy these brands seemingly when they're in decline and then try to kind of make them more relevant. I think the strategy has generally worked pretty well and I could see them reinvigorating Marc Jacobs, but not surprising. It just doesn't feel like it's in the same category them reinvigorating Marc Jacobs, but not surprising. It just doesn't feel like it's in the same category

as many of the other LVMH brands. Yeah, the thing that I remember about Marc Jacobs was that at one point they had a line called Mark by Marc Jacobs, which I thought was just hilarious and recursive and tautological. Of course it's by Marc Jacobs if it's called Marc, but. I would like to see Mark Andreessen have a standalone fund in a 16 Z by mark by Marc Andreessen That's really good a little personal. Yeah, get in the solo GP game

Give a lot Gil a run for his money. I get but the the key turnaround strategy if you're trying to turn around Marc Jacobs or Increase aero pastel or Nautica. Of course, put Sidney Sweeney in the ad. That's the move. Overfit quantitative strategies has the meme. You find your target audience, craft a compelling message, reach them through experience marketing. Storytelling is key. Long-term brand loyalty is the end goal.

And they say this marketing thing is easy. You just put Sidney Sweeney in the ad. And of course, that's referring to what is it? American Eagle American Eagle are they already owned by authentic brands? Oh, maybe I don't know Anyway now American Eagle is publicly listed listed right and the new CEO is making moves putting Sidney Sweeney in ads and Absolutely printing and bringing new relevancy to that brand. I mean, while they're up 16% over the past five days, the Sydney Sweeney effect.

When was the last time people were talking about American People? I really wonder how much they paid her for this because she clearly could, I mean, probably it would be hard for her to capture the real value of this. Totally. If her manager. What was the market cap move? Like how much, what's their market cap?

And you said sitting at 2 billion up 16% over the past five months. That's 300 million. So Sydney, if you got less than 200 million, call us. We'll help you negotiate the next one because you deserve every penny of that. The question is how many times? That question is is how many how many times? How many times? Oh in this apparently somebody called out the second part of this ad was made with AI Oh, really? So look when the car is driving away. Okay. Okay. She's getting in the car. This is real Could have been fake news.

Other than transitions? Yeah, I don't think she was doing that burnout. Yeah, the burnout would be really hard to do in a sound stage like that. That feels really, really difficult to do reliably. Well, some deep TBPN lore. Our production team went to college film school with Sydney Sweeney. Yeah. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that.

Docs. I just dox you guys. Anyway, I am a podcast crossover accelerationist. You are. I posted this last night. I'm not satisfied with Sam Altman on Theo Von. I want Tyler Cowan on Hot Ones. I want Dylan Patel on Nelk Boys.

And I want Sarah Payne on Impulsive. It had some fun with this. People are really into this. Imagine the Hot Ones audience interacting with watching Tyler Cowan. It'd be hilarious. It'd be amazing. All of these are good ideas that would go viral. I want more of these crazy crossovers. And I was thinking about it like the Sam Altman on Theo Von. This is a this is a formula that is it feels very new but it it has happened before

And I was thinking about are you feeling with love line? So back in the late 90s early 2000s, there was a show a radio show you were like what 30? Yeah, exactly There was a show, a daily radio show. I think it was an hour or two, two hosts, not unlike this one, but it was between Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew. And they played different characters because they were different people. One was a comedian who would kind of make fun of every situation that came up. And the other one was a doctor,

like a clinically trained psychiatrist or psychologist. And so people would call in with their relationship situations, kind of the precursor to the T app. Am I dating the same man? We got to talk about the T app, by the way. We do, we do. They were recently hacked apparently and everything is leaked on 4chan now. Is it even a hack if it was publicly accessible? It is crazy. You would expect a Salesforce PM to be able

to lock down the database a little bit better. Data walls. But we will see how true that is. I saw some community notes out there. I wanna hold my judgment until I see really how that works. I mean, there's apparently a fight. Like a... It could be fake.

It could be AI generated images in there. It could be all sorts of things. You know, we don't know. I'm reserving my judgment until I see it in the printed in paper. I needed it in the Wall Street Journal to believe it. I don't know. But this Loveline show was very popular. People would call in with relationship problems. Oh, I think this person's cheating on me or I'm, you know, how do I find a date? This type of thing. And then Dr. Drew would give a very serious psychological analysis as a doctor. He's actually like a board certified psychologist, I believe.

Uh, and then one of us should become a doctor. And then Adam Carolla would be just the jokester, just the comedian. And he would just like have a lot of fun. It was a very good show. It was very successful. Uh, and uh, it had went on a massive run. Uh, and then they kind of like scattered to the wind and did their own things eventually. But this putting two people together that have different interests,

it actually creates something new and beautiful. And I think it's a case for getting Tyler Cowan on Hot Ones. I'd like to see it. I like it. We need to brainstorm some more. If you have ideas, let us know in the chat what crossovers do you want to see. It was a crazy weekend. I mean, it was just a wild week in podcasting. We need to brainstorm some more. If you have ideas, let us know in the chat what crossovers do you want to see.

It was a crazy weekend. I mean, it was just a wild weekend in podcasting. I think I said it yesterday. Netanyahu on the knuck. That was also a wild crossover. Sam Albin on Theo Vonn. There's been other crossovers. I mean, when Mark Zuckerberg went on Theo, that was crazy.

There were also. Was it who was the, but Alexlex from scale was the first you had done One of the first to go on the people to go on. Yeah I mean a while ago like years ago. I said like, uh, Tech is like truly crossing over because there were three back-to-back tech people on rogan so Peter teal did it

mark andresiel did it Marc Andreessen did it and Mark Zuckerberg did it and so it was like oh wow like tech has really like crossed over into the mainstream going on Rogan And I was advocating that they should get Pat Gelsinger from Intel Jensen Wong from Nvidia and then the wild mean the way to save in more is challenge Intel to trade like a meme stock and access get liputon on Theo immediately Immediately happen put them on the whatever podcast. That's what I want. Put them on fresh and fit get get liputon on fresh and fit That's what we need something there. Should we cover the tea the tea news since we're talking about it Break it down and give me give me the facts put it in the truth zone

So curm you posted earlier the T app has been hacked, and you can now download 59 gigabytes of user selfies right now. The hack is real. A picture from someone I know who signed up just to see what was on there was in it. This was obviously a vibe-coded app and was bound to be insecure.

So it is over on 4chan, as well as proof of what it took. So yeah, if you ever wanted to see people's selfies without filters, I've got the dump for you. Okay. If, if Camus reporting it in that way, I'm a believer now. This is a, Camus says free unicorn startup idea, security audits for vibe coded apps. Ooh, that is interesting. I would be. There was a company that was doing AI agents

for cybersecurity and they were saying that the problems of cybersecurity were actually beyond the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art models and they were still having trouble getting their product fully polished. John, what's this? Well one Creme U has another app, App Idea, facial recognition that warns you if a date was trying to use this godforsaken app. OK. There was also, somebody also vibe-coded the opposite app

for men to check on are reading the same woman or something along those lines. And so that was somewhat inevitable. Yeah, we won't say the name of that one. Apparently, one of the users of the T-App is at the US Department of Defense. She used an official ID card in order to get access to the app.

So I'm not. There's a lesson in here. Touch grass. Anyway, anything else on the T-App today? I think that's it. It's a very unfortunate. I actually feel bad for all the people that, um, yeah, data breaches suck. Hopefully it's one of those situations where it's just like so big and messy that

it doesn't actually affect any single person. It's just kind of like, okay, cause like I'm sure like my credit card details have been leaked in some sort of, you know, I, I'm pretty sure like Home Depot got hacked or Walmart got hacked my emails out there I get random phone calls my phone call my phone number has been leaked And it's just part of life now that like stuff is out there I have old selfies that are on the internet if you google me there's old pictures from like oh I signed up for a Music website, and I put an image on there. there. It's somewhat embarrassing, but who cares. Interesting on the T app, a couple days ago,

T-Born, which was a copycat of T, was the number three app. Now it's not even in the top 100, from what I can see. A flash in the pan situation, interesting. Were they monetizing the T app? Were they actually getting $20 in-app purchases going? Because it feels like if you're going viral and you're at the top of the app store and you're not cashing in at that moment,

you made a huge, huge mistake. Sam Lambert says, CEO of PlanetScale says, new training data set just dropped. No. If you signed up for the T app you were already being used to train the next Ghibli. The next VO or something like that. That's rough. Is it tagged? I guess I guess it's a pretty well tagged data set too. That is crazy. I mean I used to reverse engineer APIs when I was a kid and kind of figure out

oh you like if you went to an app, you could do this thing where you would kind of man in the middle yourself. So typically when you open up an app, the flow as it goes from your iPhone, it makes the request to the backend, which is a server. It hits a API dot the app you're using and it goes over your wifi.

So what you could do is you could have it route to your laptop and then to the wifi pass the signal along essentially. And you could see all of the requests and all the data that was going back and forth. And you could see the actual API that was that you were interacting with. And oftentimes you could get kind of like, you know, it was, it was usually against terms of service to really do anything with this data, but you could see the data that's going back and forth and you could get kind of like, you know, it was usually against terms of service to really do anything with this data,

but you could see the data that's going back and forth and you could get the undocumented API. So there's like the public API where you need a key and they're like, hey, if you're gonna use a lot, you gotta pay us. But then there's the private API that's used for the app and that's what's going on here. But usually you can't just get into the database.

Usually it's like, okay, I could get my Twitter feed sent to me in JSON form, and that's like maybe a nice tab if you're hacking an app or something, and just hacking something together, you want to digest up your own data, you can just scrape it out without needing to scrape the HTML. But lots of companies will lock that down,

certainly all the big ones have encrypted this stuff, so you can't do it. This seems like it was very poorly built. So good luck to everyone involved. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of long nights and weekends fixing all those bugs. I went back and forth on email with the CEO. I think it was on Wednesday morning.

And I think it's probably good that he's not joining because he's got some work to do. It sounds like they've secured the database now, but a little bit too late. Yeah, they've stolen the data already. Many, many. The data is already out there. Yeah, but it's just a picture. Meanwhile, Levered Lloyd on Axe has an interesting startup idea here that he's been running. He

says, every summer I open a new bar in the Hamptons. Cheapest lease I can find. Just enough plumbing to pass inspection. Hire smoke show bartenders, book a wash DJ, and bring in TikTok influencers to call it a hidden gem. $5 Costco tenders become $100 tender tower. Kirkland vodka, $25 a shot. Reject 95% of the door to create fake exclusivity. No resi, no signage.

Kids max out credit cards for clout. Staffs underpaid, tips or guilt trips. Clear two million by Labor Day. Same scam, new name next year. We don't sell drinks, we sell delusion. Have fun staying broke, suckers. This feels like fan fiction, but fantastic post. Levered Lloyd, I would love to know

if you actually do this. It feels like kind of real Maybe exaggerated a little bit definitely seems possible. Well, I would argue that this is not actually a scam. This is just Marketing genius. Okay. Wow. Yeah, it is. It is genius It definitely exposes unless he's selling Kirkland vodka and saying that it's gray goose, you know people that make they say oh, it's the same It's the same. it's the same alcohol. If you're out in the Hamptons, you gotta be suspicious. But he should do this 45 years in a row,

bank 90 million, two million a year, and then he should buy this beautiful house that's for sale from the founder of Vitamin Shop. I'll be right back. It's an $89 million Hamptons home, and it's in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal the Friday edition Let's read through this. So this is from the vitamin shop founder You've probably been there picking up creatine or something like that says it pays to take your vitamins Jeffrey Horowitz founder of the nutrition

Nutritional supplements retailer vitamin shop is putting his oceanfront Hamptons estate on the market for $89 million. The 3.5 acre property in Sagaponack, New York has a nine hole golf course on it. That's incredible. I believe Emily Sundberg was telling us about Sagaponack that it's extremely delightful because it's a micro climate. Everyone wants to be there. The listing agent is Ryan Sirh of Sirhand brokerage, a fantastic, uh, social media influencer, content creator and real estate broker has a massive team pumping out a ton of

cool content. Uh, I've seen a lot of, uh, what he's built in the business that he's built is absolutely fantastic. So excited to see that he is listing this $89 million, nine whole golf course, uh, 3.5 acre home. It also has an arcade. That's very cool. Um, so the properties to parcels are also available separately. The two acres containing the houses are priced at 75 million while the golf course on 1.5 acres can be had for 15 million.

So if you're looking to pinch pennies you can just pick up the golf course and deal with the house later maybe sleep in the putting green on a tent Horowitz and his wife Helen Horowitz bought the land in the mid 90s for about 2.68 million and built the estate in 1998 according to property records they the Horowitz declined to comment. Interesting. Usually they they throw something in here. Earlier this year the estate was quietly shopped off the market for 125 million. Now it's down about 30% cheaper. What a bargain. It's now being offered for 89 million. Who said an 80 million dollar waterfront

house recently went into contract in East Hampton a nearby waterfront home in Segaponica is asking 85 million dollars Sir Hans said the contemporary home has eight bedrooms and measures about nine thousand square feet Features include an outdoor pool and a video game arcade with pinball racing games a movie theater hockey Let's figure that out for sure a pavilion air hockey fall off. it did for sure. It's dead. Don't do it. I don't know air hockey Air hockey never been big into that whole world really not even placed by video games, you know movie theaters It really was a physical it felt like a physical We got you know Mark Zuckerberg's trying to disrupt air hockey with the new virtual reality, augmented reality glasses. We played basically a version of that.

This the Orion headset you put on and you see a hologram and you kind of play pong with each other. It's kind of a modern version of air hockey. So I got the data here. The air hockey table market is set to reach 3.6 billion in 2024 7.7 percent keger Crucified let's race for it now It's a massive market Uber for air hockey. Let's do it Horowitz who is an avid golfer built the golf course with views of nearby Fairfield Pond nine holes got Really magan your buddy in Malibu

with the three hole golf course or whatever. Was that five holes? Yeah, people say there's no golf in Malibu and there's a private golf course in the center of Malibu right by the country mark. You can't really see it because there's a fence, but there's just one guy. I think it's a five hole par three.

I've never played it, but nobody really ever plays and because it's private So the Horowitz's also have homes in New York City and on Florida's Fisher Island. They are selling because their children are grown They founded the vitamin shop in 1977 I didn't realize it was so long ago right right? Right during the Hulk Hogan rise. Hulk Hogan's rising, you gotta get bulky like Hogan. The Hulkster, you're gonna go get some whey protein, some creatine. The New Jersey based company was sold to Bear Stearns

for about 300 million in 2002. I had no idea that Bear Stearns did a buyout. He then became an executive at Vitacost. Oh wow. Which then sold to Kroger in 2014. What an absolute dog. This guy's a boardroom general. You'd love to see it.

Homes in the Hamptons are traded for me. Put the KPIs in orbit, John. He really, he clearly did put the KPIs in orbit. It's funny because, you know, this is a lost art. You start a company, you sell it to a bank. People don't do that, Bear Stearns. I don't know not around anymore unfortunately the most expensive home ever sold in the Hamptons was a 137 million dollar East Hampton sale in 2014 according to Jonathan Miller so seems like a decent house I'm not really I'm

not too big into golf so I'm not that into it I won't be bidding on that one, but you can if you're looking for a Golf state in in the Hamptons, but I do want to go through this article because we got to have a debate so which one is that because I think we should cover the the drama in the air in the Hamptons Yes, let's stay with Emily Sunberg and then we'll go Emily Sunberg's got the scoop She says feel like I'm losing my mind seeing a candle brand fly influencers to the Hamptons on a private plane for a brand trip with my candles fly private pillows and some so anyways

Her post was going viral. Yes, I wish I What is the name of the candle company is that is the problem? I can't see it anywhere. It's unclear The candles got to be pretty good if they're flying private. I know the candle is hotel lobby candle That's the name of the candle company hotel lobby candle. You can go check them out if you want company. Hotel Lobby Candle. You can go check them out if you want. They didn't take off. Okay I have some I'm doing some Capital J journalism right now with Preston Holland. Yeah so Preston says, oh you talk to him? He's calling it out he says this is a King Air. Yeah it's also on the ground parked and put to bed see the ground outside and windshield cover on. The windshield cover is on, the screens are off, so they might not have even taken off.

It's King Air, the windows are too small. He said it might be a CJ-3, which is a small, like Cessna Citation type plane. Still beautiful, but I really think, so Emily Sundberg's take here is that there was backlash because it's just a candle brand, what are they doing flying private? Emily Sundberg says there was backlash. I gotta say they have a Hamptons candle, they have a Hamptons reed diffuser,

they have the poolside candle. Kind of makes sense for them to do an influencer trip out there but did they why we're just get on the plane get off and then hop in a car that's the that's the conspiracy theory put the tinfoil hat on there you go anyway oh we both have straw man hats today but I think that the big problem here is that why didn't they go with the BBJ? They should have gotten the 747. A wrapped BBJ. A wrapped 747 in the VIP configuration. Only nation states have access to it. Just borrow the one that came over for Trump. Yeah. Get that. Wrap it.

Sell the most candles ever. That's the real solution to this problem. I don't know. I think it sounds fun. Very cool. Interesting activation. This is something that Emily's been talking about, this idea that more brands are doing influencer parties, sponsoring things, and I've never really gotten into that. Your Instagram is entirely cars and watches and bodybuilding, so you wouldn't have seen the rise of influencer trips. Maybe I do though.

Maybe I do and maybe some of that content is generated. It's actually really, I mean it's really, I mean looking at the pure economics of it, you could pay an influencer $10,000 for a post or $5,000 for a post. Or you could plan a trip that it's gonna cost you $10,000 per influencer to come on. And then, but you might get hundreds of posts. Yeah, I have a friend who's an influencer and some tequila brand paid for like a whole, like just party at her house with her friends.

And they were just like, just have the tequila there, show people and maybe it shows up in the Background but like you don't really have any deliverables. It's very very interesting. I wonder if there is an agency that sits in between Have you ever run into that in the influencer ad buying world? Sorry, you said retainers. So what I'm talking about is Like you built a business where you match brands with influencers, particularly on YouTube for host read ad reads, correct? That's a good description.

I'm wondering if there's a line extension for your business or potentially a new business for a firm, an independent firm, that brokers these contracts and make sure that they happen seamlessly. So it's easier for a company like Hotel Candles. What's it called? Hotel Lobby Candles. Hotel Lobby Candles. They say, we want to make a private jet plane trip

happen to the Hampton with some great influencers, but we don't have all the mechanics to make it happen. We want it to look good, we want our product there, we want some special pillows on the seats, we want the plane rented, we want... there was also like a custom floor mat that they stepped on as they stepped onto the plane. There were some photos and so I'm wondering if there is a world where an agency could spring up, maybe there's already an agency that brokers these types of deals. Because right now they seem very one-off,

but they seem like they're growing in trend. What do you think? Yeah, I think there's plenty of agencies that do that kind of thing. I also feel like this is the kind of things that brands want to actually own end to end. You want to have deep relationships with specific influencers and have it not feel like

Entirely like the person only came because they were getting paid or because it was free So so maybe it lives within the certain Yeah A lot of I mean certain influencer deals make sense to do kind of programmatically others make a lot of sense to go Direct. Yeah. Anyway, let's go back to real estate and the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal because I want to debate the nature of what makes a house special. Do you need a weird cork? And this is from their section called In the Trenches, which I love, commonly used in the

crypto world, also used in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. So Robin, In the Trenches has an article called Batman's Cave and secret bathrooms and there's a question here. What's the most unusual design feature you've ever encountered in a home you've listed or showed? So Andrew Kilkeemah, a real estate agent in in Seven Fields Pennsylvania says I recently listed Castle bristle cone a 23,500 square foot property in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania About a half an hour north of Pittsburgh which sold for guess how much it sold for Geordie. It's a tour million thousand Yeah, did you already see this?

3.8 3.8. You nailed it Wow. I was looking up an image of it. Yeah, it's amazing When you hear 23,000 square feet in LA, I think 20 million easily easily. Yeah easily So there so it's the most it was definitely the most unusual home I've ever listed or shown There was a replica of Batman's office from the television show Not the movies on the desk was the iconic red bat phone and a bust of Shakespeare when you tilted Shakespeare's head back a bookcase slid open and two poles appeared There were poles for both Batman and Robin and if you slid down them you reach the Batcave below Which was the basement of the house the owners built the house in 2008 and they liked eccentric things and

Also things that were part of their life since they were interested in movies and TV production they included Batman's office naturally There was a chapel which was a replica of Heinz Memorial Chapel where they had gotten married There was a bedroom that was a replica of a hotel room at the Hotel del Coronado Where they spent their honeymoon all of the important This is textbook, you can just do things. This is amazing. I'm so pro this, it's ridiculous. I think everyone should do this at some point in their life. Build a project that consumes you.

It probably took them a decade to make this. And they spent so much money on it. And they ended up selling it for 3.8 million. Yeah, if they didn't have all these weird quirks, probably would have sold for twice as much But that's not what life's about. I think the whole thing holding back the price was most likely because it was in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania What's wrong with Gibsonia, Pennsylvania? That seems like a great place to hang out Probably a future of technology and innovation. Maybe an AI company going in there soon

All the important pieces of their life were designed into their home The Batman office was so iconic that when the bookcase opened, it blew my mind. I jumped right on the pole and slid down, says the real estate agent. So there's another one here. There's a few others. So Alex, uh, Micus, a real estate agent, Oakland said in September, my business partner and I listed a five bedroom contemporary home in Oakland called Sky House. The masterpiece of the home was a 1000 square foot glass veranda

that was created from 28 tons of industrial glass. The owner considered it a piece of art. From this vantage point, you not only had fantastic views across the hillside and out to San Francisco Bay, but since the veranda was made of glass, you could see into the family room below it. Walking out from the kitchen onto the glass floor was not a comfortable experience. I'm afraid of heights, so it took a bit of trust to walk out there.

It gets even scarier when you go toward the railing because a drop to the ground 30 feet below is visible there through the glass. Many people who came to see the house were timid about walking onto the glass, and several asked if they needed to take their shoes off. Of course, the glass did create some issues. Women were not excited about the balcony

because of the optics from below. And when we planned the open house, we wondered if we should tell people not to wear dresses. But the veranda got us a lot of exposure for the house, and it sold in two months to an out of town buyer for 2.655 million, just shy of the asking price. Then there's another one, Chip Madsen says, in February, this is in Las Vegas,

I sold a three bedroom, four bathroom home on the 10th hole of Canyon Gate Golf Course in Las Vegas, right near Andreessen Horowitz's new headquarters, I imagine, for 1.7 million. It had all of the usual luxury features that you expect in a home of this caliber, but one feature I didn't expect when I first saw the home was a cabana bath by the pool that was hidden behind a rock wall. This was not the only unusual bath in the house.

There was also a secret bathroom located behind a bookcase in the family room. But the one by the pool was hidden behind a giant rock wall with a lazy river streaming above it and anyone who walked in was taken by surprise because when you turned on the light you realized you were in a rock cavern but with a full bath. The walls and ceiling were built to resemble the contours of a cave and it was all done in various brown tones to resemble the rock walls of an actual cave. Speaking of caves, we should pull up Sam on Theo Vaughan. Sam is talking about his bunker. We can pull up the video. Oh yeah, I want to pull up that. Do you have the timestamp already? Yep. There's another one here from the Modern Family actress Julie Bowen.

She was talking about, today I live with my three sons in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. I bought an updated farmhouse and barn in 2022 following her divorce. Previously, they lived in a beautiful mid-century glass box, but my boys were skateboarding into the walls. Growing up as one of three girls, I had its challenges. Now I marvel at the tranquility of my boys. Girls have a million things to say about everything boys say nothing they grunt and eat food

That was a great section in the mansion section Let's pull up Sam Altman on Theo Vaughn and we're like just a practice or was it just his verbal reminder? Like I'm gonna do that just kept saying to myself. Yeah, I was just like someday you'll miss these moments you may as as well find a way to find the happiness and kind of great gratitude for them in the moment. Yeah. A lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunkie.

I know that somewhere out in Hawaii. Zucky has a bunkie? People have bunkers. Do you have a bunker? I have underground, concrete, heavy, reinforced basements, but I don't have any bunkers. Do you have a bunker? I have like underground concrete heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have any. It's like not beating the bunker allegations. Never.

You definitely have a bunker. You keep me on ropes in a lot of those conversations, but I am gonna call that out as a dang bunker dude. That's a bunker, exactly. It's a bunker. What's the difference between a basement and a bunker? Here we go. A place you can hide when an old base is off or whatever.

I know, yeah, I have been thinking I should really do a good version of one of those But I don't I don't have like a I don't have what I would call a bunker But it has been on my mind not because of AI but just because of like people are dropping bombs in the world again You know like that's a good point Yeah, based right there part of a house building typically Yeah, based right there part of a house building typically This is technically a bunker protection often military or emergency related not eating the bunker Reinforce is just a new day use chat GBT is the fact check

Appreciate it we do this nice Okay, pull up pull up Pull up this other video. It's in the chat with the team. Sam has some interesting thoughts around sensitive stuff that people might have in chat GPT. OK, oh yeah, people are reacting to this a lot. Policy framework for AI. One example that we've been thinking about a lot, this is maybe not quite what you're asking.

This is a very human-centric version of that question. People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to chat GPT. People use it. We try to bleep them out. As a life coach, having these relationship problems, what should I do? And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer

or a doctor about those problems, there's like legal privilege for it. You know, like it's, there's doctor patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever. And- Just doesn't exist on chat GPT. We haven't figured that out yet

for when you talk to chat GPT. So if you go talk to chat to keep out your most sensitive stuff And then they need a lawsuit or whatever like we could be required to produce that and I think that's very screwed up I think we should have like the same concept of Privacy for your conversations of AI that we do with a therapist or whatever and No one had to think about that even a year ago yeah, and now I think it's this huge issue of like how Okay, pause, because one thing that's interesting here is that there was a

court that successfully has made OpenAI, at least in the near term, save even private chats. Yeah, but that's true of email and that's true of chat and and if you commit a crime you can get subpoenaed and they'll pull your WhatsApp, they'll pull your private messages. Like, this is standard. Sure, sure, sure. But I think this is a super, super critical issue because I think some people are going to, as an example, you know, let's say they're going on of course they're saying yes You know if you're dealing with like custody over children and the mom or the dad is saying I'm actually I think I'm a pretty Bad parent like that can be 100% 100% so people need to be aware of it and then people need to know that there is another option Which is to go and buy George hot George George Hot's tiny box and run llama locally.

And then it probably can't be subpoenaed or you can have it delete chats. You could set it up like Signal, where it deletes the chats after a day and it doesn't have a long memory. But if you give your data to another company and the United States law enforcement sends a letter and the judge says, we need to get this data. Like they're gonna get it. And it's the same thing. I mean, the FBI can come in here and take these papers.

Take all of our posts. Yeah, they can take our posts. Take all of our bangers. And now like shredders exist and people shred stuff and you can get in trouble if you're shredding something that you know that the government wants. But in general, document retention policies are understandable.

But I like his point that you should, it's not that unreasonable to say, okay, I'm gonna be using it as a therapist, put it in therapist mode and keep that private. Or, you know, a lot of people will cc their lawyer on sensitive things to maintain attorney client privilege so that those discussions cannot be admissible in the court of law because you're discussing the legal issue because if you could just see someone's other side, it's like you know the whole game plan.

Right? Pull up the segment on UBI. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Economic model where we share that and distribute that to people. I used to be really excited about things like UBI. I still am kind of excited, like universal basic income,

where you just give everybody money. Yeah, you hear that term a lot. Yeah, universal basic income. I heard you and Rodney talking about that two a while back. I still am kind of excited about that. But I think people really need agency. Like they really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go.

And I think if you just like say, okay, AI is gonna do everything and then everybody gets like a, you know, dividend from that, it's not gonna feel good. And I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just like, if we're in this world where we're not just distributing money or wealth, like actually I don't just want like a check every month. What I would want is like a ownership share, you know, whatever the AI creates so that

I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal Pilled I don't like basic either. I want like universal But but even then like I think Agency to kind of co-create some what not true. No, no, no, it's more just like like I've always I've always said that like the the like No, no, no, it's more just like, like, I've always, I've always said that like, the, the, the, like, uh, money doesn't make you happy.

It's the second derivative of money that makes you happy. You want to be accelerating the amount of money that makes you happy, getting the same amount of money. Like if you talk to a billionaire, and they're like, I made less money this year than last year, they will be sad. But if you talk to somebody who is making minimum wage and just got a pay raise, they'll be like, this is great. And so the, the people, people live off of growth and acceleration. And when you can feel growth and feel acceleration, you are,

you feel like you have more claim on things. Your house is getting bigger. Your car's getting faster. All these different things express themselves. And so if you keep everyone this perfectly flat UBI level, it will feel extremely stagnant. And so if you're giving people a stake in AI, a stake in whatever super intelligence creating economic value, then they should be getting bigger UBI checks

every month effectively. Yeah, somewhere else in the interview, he talks about everybody just getting free GPT-7 tokens like a little allowance it's like hey everybody gets a little bit of GPT-7 yeah you and it's up to you to you know earn some earn some yield on that intelligence buddy. The game theory of that is very odd because yeah I don't know yeah if everyone goes and says make money do they says make money, do they all make the same amount of money? It's all very odd, I don't know. Anyway, should we do this, Chase?

Somebody, yeah, in one second. So I posted two days ago, founder of Tea Dating Advice was previously a product leader at Salesforce, massive moment for big tech PMs. Are you getting dunked on now? Never doubt them again. And Yohei says, this did not age well. That's true. A narrator. You should have doubted them.

It was very rough, bad day for the, for the PMs. Hopefully they can build back better. Um, well, we have a very exciting segment. We're coming up on that soon. We'll figure out with that. Let's go to some timeline. We got a post from Rio saying the browser company is what happens when you get too many designers in a room with no adult supervision. The vibes have really turned on the browser company, obviously rooting them for them to have a hit and get back in the game.

But it feels like they're really great at marketing, really great at designing. I understand that, but not huge penetration of products. And now they're in an extremely, it's just hard, right? If you have a multi hundred million dollar valuation and you're trying to still iterate towards product, people are going to put pressure on you as though you are already an established company. Yeah, it's a way different vibe than Avi Schiffman who's raised I think a seed round.

And it's like, yeah, he's still early. Not everyone's using these friends, but you're just kind of like, yeah, he's figuring it out. He's iterating through things. You just give a seed stage founder a much different line of credit to just go and experiment with things. And now the browser company is facing competition from perplexity with Comet. They're also facing competition from open AI potentially.

Obviously Google is not asleep at the wheel. They're investing in CapEx. They're going to stuff Gemini and everything. Chrome's going to get better. The default is still Chrome for most people. You can see Safari, Apple Intelligence stuff. There's a lot of big companies that are facing this off, and no one wants to lose the browser wars 3.0.

Yeah, we're working on getting the founder Brave on the show. Hopefully that'll happen in the next week or so. Brendan Eich, absolute dog. An absolute dog, boardroom general. Boardroom general for sure. This is just a funny post. Starting to think business is standing on me.

I don't even know what it means. Ideally you're standing on business, but sometimes business flips the script and stands. Rough, rough. Well Palmer Lucky says it's time for a new service pistol, and by new service pistol I mean old service pistol. Of course he's talking about the 1911 I believe that's the correct weapon. Two World Wars it was used in and this is in response to the US Air Force's global strike command indefinitely pausing the

M18 pistol use after a fatal incident very sad at the AFB FE Warren this follows concerns over six hours P320s firing without triggers being pulled leading ICE to ban them permanently and so there 1911 Lindy Lindy beautiful I have one that I designed in the style of a Patek Aquanaut. No way. So I matched the metal treated to have the same finish as the Aquanaut. And I got the handle in the same texture, now green. Silver and green. It's fantastic.

I will pass it down generations. It's fantastic. But yeah, this post was in response Ice is Retiring the six-hour p320 as they've been firing without triggers being pulled And there was recently a fatal accident at Fe Warren Air Force Base. So Very sad, hopefully they can figure it out. I hadn't heard anything bad about P320s from just random followers, people that I follow.

But hopefully, they can figure it out. I mean, Sig has never, to my knowledge, had a great reputation. They made, on the retail side, they made, I believe they made some that were people liked for as everyday carry because they were just super compact but the m18 just doesn't you need these things to be reliable on a level that that is extremely difficult to achieve 1911 right is Lindy it's been in service around the world for so long. The Glock 19 and other Glock variations are also... I saw a lot of Glock fans on the timeline being like, it's our time. Total Glock victory. It's our time. No safety. Still doesn't fire

without pulling the trigger. Isn't there a Founders episode on Glock? Yes, there is. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it it David Senors founders podcast and glass In Glock you got to go listen to it. It's it's it's fantastic one of the it's the iPhone of firearms true true Well speaking of the iPhone every millennial is now paying $9.99 per month for two terabytes just to not delete their life Says signal. This is Tyler Cosgrove's future

He's gonna get roped in as he gets a bigger iPhone which he won by defeating Arc AGI v3 as a human in the human category. He's on the leaderboard. He was number five. He beat the clanker allegations Beat the clanker allegations. Clanker? What do you think of that? I'm, I'm. So this comes from somebody who says when you call customer support and a Clanker picks up and it's somebody pulling off the headphones, very, very annoyed. And Kit Greer Mulvenna says, can't believe I've lived far enough into the future to learn the first slur for robots. Six hundred000 likes on this.

Clanker is definitely gonna go mainstream. It'll be an okay boomer moment. It'll be a okay Clanker. Yeah there's gonna be so many memes around this. Do you like that as a pejorative for AI systems? Do you think it's a good term? I'm big into not using slurs against Anyone's and robots as well, right? They remember everything you get you're gonna be in the training data Yeah, they're never gonna forget. Maybe we need to coin a Positive nickname for AI systems along the lines of a giga Chad But something along those like a good bite

gigabyte a Gigabyte picks up something along those lines... A gigabyte. A gigabyte picks up. Something along those lines. We need something that's uplifting as we go into the age of super intelligence that makes sure that we are the last to pick up. Speaking of super intelligence, there's a post here from Barely. Yeah, Barely AI. And it's DeepMind founder Demis Hesabes on how he set up his life to maximize deep thinking with two full work days in a 24 hour period. I'm going to read through this and then I have some thoughts. Dennis Demis says, I think I probably have some quite unusual habits.

I generally sleep at about four in the morning, goes to sleep. I get into work around 10 a.m., do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family, and then start a second day's work at 10 a.m., do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family, and then start a second day's work at 10, 11, and go on to the small hours in the morning. Usually that's the time when I do my research, so I'll be reading about the latest academic papers. I like doing all my kind of creative thinking

in the small hours in the morning. I thought this was funny because there was a post, there was like this viral video from this like hustle. Oh, I have it, baby. Pull it up, pull it up. This hustle bro that he was getting completely roasted. Can we, can we pull this up? I just put it in the tab.

He was getting completely. I have changed and manipulated time. It's one of the greatest. It comes from this podcast and it's one of the funniest memes of all time. I love it. So hopefully we can play this on the stream Because it's it's a fantastic Mars even the chat says row buddy. Okay, okay I like that. Okay, let's play this and listen to this

play this We get the audio too Maybe refresh is that gonna work? Can you scroll back on it? It's short now? So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is six a.m. to noon, and I'm not crazy.

You're crazy. You're crazy thinking it takes 24 hours, just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago. That's the best part. My second day starts at noon and goes till six p.m. If you're standing up right now, sit down and listen. And the next day is six p.m. to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed a manipulated time

I now get 21 days a week stack that up over a month I'm gonna kick your butt stack it over here your toast your second up over five years My entire life is different than it would have been otherwise. So I measure time. I've compressed the condensed time I bent it my day is 6 a.m. To noon and I'm not crazy. You're crazy I'm thinking it takes 24 hours just like some dude in a cave did dude in a cave dude in a cave 300 years ago 6 p.m. 1700 what are we talking about night we're in a cave to manipulate it I know we built the Louvre 300 years ago

pretty sure over a year your toast stack it up over five years my entire life is different okay kill that okay It's one of the greatest videos ever. Okay, so wait. So Demis can say that and he goes viral. Everybody's like, wow, brilliant, genius, giga-chad, gigabyte. Yep. But you say it as a hustle guy and all of a sudden you're demonized. Yeah. He's demonized for compressing time.

You can't even compress time in this country anymore. Demis has changed manipulated time. Not like someone living in a cave 300 years ago. I don't know, I think part of it is the way in which it was presented. Demis was just like, I do this, it works for me. This guy was like, I'm gonna kick your butt. My life's gonna look completely different.

Stack that up over a year, you're toast. Stack that over five years, my life's completely different. That's great. It is a good habit, I guess. We that over five years, my life's completely different. That's great. It is a good habit, I guess. We should have Demis and that guy on the show to just hash out time compression. Time compression. It's a great debate.

It's great. Yeah, podcast crossover, let's get them two on a podcast together. That would be fantastic. Anyway, more hilarious posts on the timeline. From Power Bottom Dad says, I'm pregnant. She said holy base Which is only Respond and there's another post from him in here come just a completely insane stat 12 million less children for

41,000 the story here is 41,000 Chinese kindergarten Kindergartens have closed in the last four years because there's just so many less kids being born. This is what collapsing birth rate looks like. This is their one child policy, right? They've reversed it, but not, they've reversed the policy to some degree, but not like the cultural meme, right? So they are falling behind.

That is a lot of kindergartens. I wonder how many kindergartens are in the United States I feel like it can't even be 41,000. That's so many 12,000 12 million less children very insane. Well, good luck to them. Hopefully they can get it Kylie Robbins Robison says Sam Altman on Thea Vaughn is indescribable like the first contact between two alien species That are entire that are from entirely different parts of the universe. I kind of disagree with this. I feel like they were vibing. I feel like, I don't know, maybe I didn't watch

the full thing, so maybe I missed a little bit, but it felt like they were getting along really well. It would seem like- Theo's doing his bit of, you know, acting a little chud-like, you know, but it is actually powerful combination in order to understand AI progress. That Theo I like that Theo Von JD Vance meme. Have you seen this one?

It's Theo Von interviewing JD Vance, and it's like one of these men is the heir to a dynasty and a family fortune, and one of them was raised by a mother with a substance abuse problem. And Theo is the one that comes from like a amazing family lineage and JD had the family with the substance abuse issue. Something along those lines is that he comes from like a very very strong lineage and his full name is Theodore Kapitani von Kurnitowski III. I love it.

I love it. What a badass. Amazing. Oh no, swear jar. Gotta put some money in the swear jar. We're trying to clean up the language around here. How are we doing? We are at the end of the deck. Of course we can pull up more posts though. I got a whole stack here. You guys are gonna have to go into the archives if you wanna pull up the actual slide deck. But we have posts that we didn't get through previous days if we're waiting around. We got Meta. We got App Store.

We got a whole bunch of stuff. Timeline wasn't turmoil. Let's see. Will Minitis, it's a Friday show. It's a no-guest show. We gotta highlight Will Minitis. It's a no guest show. We got to highlight Wilma Nidus. Work hard with people you love. Don't gamble. Live simply and below your means. Create beautiful things.

Spend most of your time in silence. Do intense physical labor. Tend to your community. Speak simply and truthfully. Avoid complexity in all things. Most things are simple. Just I mean, he is he's dropping the hustle. He's like highbrow hustle porn. I like it.

Really is. Just a pump up speech in your timeline. We talked about that, we talked about that, we talked about Blueprint. Brian Johnson's still hiring a CEO. If you wanna get in on the action over at Blueprint, hit up Brian Johnson. He's hiring a CEO and a CTO

who can lead his business day to day and he's getting earned media for his job posting. What else do we have? Oh, Meta. Breaking news. Meta has a new chief scientist of Meta MSL, Meta Superintelligence in labs they snagged shung Jia Zhao trade deal a research scientist at open AI got his PhD from Stanford in his own words he likes training models love it so Alexander says Xing Jia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team. So team is stacked. Stacked would be an understatement.

I've been digging into their training facility, seeing the amenities of the super intelligence building designed by Frank Gehry. And he was in the video for Chachi Petit agents from last week. Stolen. Stolen. Stolen base. You'll have to see it. The AI talent wars continue to heat up. We will be covering it.

I'm sure we'll cover it all next week. Was this announced after market close? Close to it. I don't know, not yet. But we have our only guest of the Friday show. Surprise guest. Surprise guest. Bring him in on the walk-in cam.

Whoa, blowtorch going. Let's go. Let's see. There we go. In the TVP jacket. We love it. Safe himself. Welcome to the stream. Founder and CEO of Shinkei.

Shinkei. Fish robot man. The fish robot man. We're doing a taste test today. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? First time eating on the show. Ooh, yeah. So, yeah, let's go. You can see it. You. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? First time eating on the show. Oh yeah. Good to see you. How are you? How are you? It's been a while. Let's go on. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Gentlemen. How are you? Good to see you. Okay. Hi. This is Cody, Director of Culinary. Yes. Amazing. Good afternoon. Cool.

All right, we've got a few things to show off here. Let's do it. Wow. What do you got? We've got this over here. Okay. So side by side action. We've got um, sushi piece for you guys to try. Ooh, lovely sushi. Let's get on the Wow, what do you got? Okay? Lovely sushi, let's get on the mic so people can hear you and yeah, welcome to the show guys Thanks, when were these when were these caught by the way, so take a look over here Yes, I'm going in clockwise order from the piece close to John You'll see so you have one of our pieces fresh frozen then on the top right you have just a piece from Whole Foods that we bought comparing comparing and comparing you're gonna try this side by side right now okay we're trying both of them like the Whole Foods one, two. Okay, I'm a little worried about it. I'm a little worried about it. You're taking shots at Jeff Bezos.

I don't know, I'm a Whole Foods defender. I don't know, Whole Foods. That's one of the greatest things I've ever done. Whole Foods, the fall off of Whole Foods needs to be studied. Needs to be studied. Okay, so let's do it. Incredible. We can get the bucket pole bucket out of here.

We can also get the re-industrialized Shinola clock out of here. We can really clean out this whole area. So yeah, give me some fish. I want to try the sushi. Let's see. So for this species, what we like to do is... Okay, what is this species? So this is black cod. You know, we source everywhere from central California all the way to Washington and Alaska later this year. Okay. Cod on a traditional fishing boat? Yeah, it's like fully traditional. You know, we have anywhere from 35 foot to 80 feet Yeah, you know across all our different partner boats Yes, if you recall basically the way that we work is we give the machines to fishermen for free

We pay them more to use our handling process. Yep, and then we're vertically integrated So we sell the fish directly to a retailer or wholesale to a distributor That would go to a restaurant and he is the is the machine that you build on the actual would go to a restaurant. And is the machine that you build on the actual ship, on the boat? Yes. So it's deployed at sea so that they don't need to keep the fish alive.

Forward deployed robot. Forward deployed robot. We'd love to see it. OK. And then about how old do you think this fish is then? So our fish is going to be nine days old. Nine days old? Yeah.

And you're going to be able to still eat a raw. And it'll probably taste better than anything else you ever had. Fantastic. It's pretty crazy. And then the whole food stuff we just got this morning Okay, so we don't be like a couple years old Really putting putting whole foods Let's get our ours and the three are the the frozen fantastic

I look at the chopsticks or you can just raw dog with your hands There we have if you are one of those people that love sauce, yes, we're Americans That's a miso sauce and this is like what you would call like a kabayaki. You're like an eel sauce. Okay, great. Great Here we go. Here we go There we go. Okay. Tell me where to start. I'll start with the whole Yeah, oh you wish which oh you won't yeah, I just did but whatever I'll just sit there paying attention. All right here. We go Okay, this is just seared just to bring the fat out and change the texture of black cod But that you can taste the fat as what happens with that species and then we're ready to try those guys. Okay, okay

Back to back back to back at the baseline This is good. I always get hungry during the show. Good. Glad to feed you. Wow. Night and day. So this is yours and this is mine?

Yeah, exactly. So the whole food one just tasted like kind of wet rubber. Yeah, yeah. It's more like homogenous texture, I feel like. Also no flavor at all. Yeah. It just was like, okay, I just ate something that was just wet.

Yeah. Versus this one is like, I'm not a fish expert, but it has like, it's more there's like, layers to it. Yeah. I feel like this is, you can have the next whole food one. I feel like this is introducing me to this particular type of sushi. I don't, I don't usually order. This is what type of cost is black cod. Black cod. Yes. So say what fish is another name. You know, Miso black cod from Nobu. Yeah, this is the exact same, same one.

We actually, we, we're partnering with, you know, I'd like 40 mission stars across, you know, all the different exact same amazing same one. We actually we we're Partnering with you know of like 40 mission stars across you know all the different restaurants. We work with now Yeah, and like for most of them. They're saying that this is the best black coffee about that It's not insane with the sauce too. Yeah, yeah Those things with that species that that sauce everything really works hand-in-hand. Yeah, so the reason you doing before this oh I've been a sushi chef for over 30 years. Well, no. Yeah. Yeah. What did you were you like, I was all my short culinary school and became a Japanese apprentice to the Japanese restaurant and work my way out of the dish pit all the

way to start doing sushi. And then I tried to quit in 2015. And really got into like, tragic ways. He's addicted. You're always on the precipice of going back into the business But um, I went into aquaculture. I started looking behind and trying to find really good I've been obsessed with finding good fish quality fish that led me down to Baja and looking at aquaculture projects and really Seeing getting behind and like what? Fish could be I wanted to get more local fish

And then I got a call one day from one of our investors and was like, I've got something for you. It's gonna blow your mind. And I met safe. And he told me the whole thing. And I was obsessed like right from day one, tell me how we can do this. You should tell the story of your time with fish trying to source. Yeah. So my chef partner, we had a restaurant in Culver City here. And our whole thing was trying to source as good as local fish as possible. Nothing against Japan, but I wanted something more local. We have great stuff off our coast. The perception is that the Japanese stuff

is just so much better, which it is, but at the same time, it's like you're flying it all the way over here, you're paying this money. So we wanted to have something that was just a representation of local fish. And so we were buying from some local fishermen that were doing Ikejime and bleeding.

Oh, really? But the hard part is now we're competing with the other LA chefs. No, I wouldn't. The cost wasn't the thing. It was competing with everyone else. So it was really hard to menu that because you could only, if you're on the tech thread and you were a little late,

everyone else is getting better. So that local fisherman, hey, I've got this stuff. And by the time you answer, oh, I've got this. No one's built a SaaS platform for trading fish. You sure? Yeah, yeah. What's going on? I can only get my hands on like three to four fish at a time.

So it was really hard to menu, have it basically every week. And so this, to me, was like, oh, this is a no-brainer. This is for us. This is basically a love letter to chefs that want this kind of quality, Yeah, but at scale now. Yeah. So talk about scale because you said you're going into Michelin star restaurants. That feels like a little bit of an unfair comparison because I don't usually go to a Michelin star restaurant and say, Oh yeah, this is

better than Whole Foods. You know, that's not really the problem. But I'm excited about the future where I get Michelin star quality at just, you know, the Whole Foods equivalent or wherever you guys are distributing. So what are the next steps? How much do you have to scale this up? What's the volume and what's the plan for actually getting this like widely available? Yeah, for sure. It's a great question. We are focused right now on the Michelin star restaurants because they are the taste makers. Totally.

But this is, you know, I don't know if you're a believer in trickle down economics, but this is kind of the same thing. Yeah, it's a loose analogy. Yeah, it's very loose, yeah. But I mean the premise is we're finding this market that has a segment, the willingness to pay for the quality and then basically... Use that to get more scale and then you can... Yeah, and we're actually moving and making that transition now. So like, you know, earlier this year we're doing like, you know, a couple thousand pounds a week now, or like, you know, in the eight figures this year, we're doing like, you know, a couple of thousand pounds a week now. We're like, you know, and they figures now, uh, just like tens of

thousand pounds. Is the bottleneck, uh, like capital or actually people to build more machines? We cannot build machines fast enough right now. What's the bottleneck to building more machines? Technicians, if you're listening, please field engineers for deployed equipment. You want to build killer robots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah for deployed equipment. You want to build killer robots? Yeah Yeah, reach out. So yeah, what does a technician actually do? Are they like assembling different parts that have been cut on a CNC or something and piecing together your machine from? Parts that have been machined themselves. So we do very very light fab work Okay, most of it is just assembly in-house. Okay, you work with local machine shops got all you know in you know Local to Southern Southern California.

And then the intention, of course, is like, we're going to build out a full team that is doing all the assembly work and also diagnosis, test engineers, whatever have you. Right now we're still early days, but we're doing machine every two weeks at this point. Is there a world where you partner with someone else to help build the machines? We were just talking to Chris Power over at Hadrian. He was saying like every company will need a Hadrian-style factory. Of course he's focused on defense technology

and ship building and all of that stuff. So he's saying like I'm gonna go to a company, he didn't mention anyone by name, but you can imagine he goes to Anderol or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX and says, okay, you need a new factory to build this stuff at scale. We will set that up for you. We will manage it. It lives on our balance sheet. Like how do you think about where the long term, uh, like assets sits? Because that's more of like

a capital structure question, right? The machines paid themselves back in 12 weeks, very fast. And so we're very capital light. There is definitely a world where we could go for CM and we decide that, you know, we're making hundreds of machines Sure I don't think we'll ever reach that reduction capacity speed or because I don't think we'll need to it might we might fragment You know if we decide to expand internationally, you know in different countries have different factories But you know in the core factory here in Southern, California, you know, I really doubt we're gonna be making machines a year How much does the machine like way how big is it? It's like pretty amazing. Yeah, so it's about, you know.

It's about as big as this table, right? It's actually much smaller now. It's like the size of a large refrigerator, six feet tall. So you could, in theory, make that in America and still ship it to Japan. Oh yeah, totally. It's totally doable.

And again, that's as a percentage of the cost. Machine is pretty heavy. It's like 750 pounds. Yeah, it's gonna be freight. It's gonna be on a boat for a month or two. But it would be improved. It's gonna be on boats for a long time. It'll going to be frayed. It's going to be on a boat for a month or two. But it's going to be on boats for a long time. It'll probably be on boats.

If people want to try Shinkai, which are you allowed to talk publicly about the rest, like the various Michelin stars? All our fish are sold under our brand in grade, ceremony grade. And so kind of like a nod to ceremony. We have matcha right there. So if you go to ceremony.com spelled with an s and with an i, we actually have a list of all the

restaurants, you'll see all the different ones. We're in every major metro. So like Miami, Austin, Denver, Colorado, Minneapolis, as well as all the coastal cities of like, you know, every every single one you can think of. Yeah. And so we'll have like our key restaurant partners there. Sure. If you're based in LA, and you want, and you want a few buddies of ours, you can go to Yes downtown. And they do, that's a great story there.

You know, there's a Japanese chef who came here to the US and he taught a lot of the local fishermen how to do Ikejime and then start using our policy. He's the guy we really wanted to get the, I would say his approval. And we did, which was a huge, I think he almost started crying. I forget when we actually met.

It was at a year and a half ago or two years ago. And it was just you on the team. You maybe had one other person. We had two engineers. Two engineers. And you were laying out this plan of you were going to make the machine. You were going to get it on boats.

You were going to actually produce the fish and then sell it to the end restaurant and it sounded pretty unhinged to like verticalize Basically like go that quickly and own the full process But it's absolutely the progress is when you have such a huge difference in the fish like it's a no-brainer because you know, we actually initially started doing the go-to-market in is we actually initially started doing the go-to-market more like a robotics and service business where you'd pay for every single fish that you would process this way. What we found was when we'd work with fishermen,

they're out on their Nokias in the middle of the ocean with their cell service, they're not gonna be sitting there trying to post on Instagram some funds real about how they cook their fish this way. And basically what we would have to do is do all the same work we're doing now of talking to distributors, talking to retailers, teaching them about the technique, you know, across like more nutrition, more shelf life, more weight retention, like all these different benefits. And so rather than us having to do all that work and having to share that for reduced

risk with the fishermen, we thought let's just go risk on. And so we basically like built all the machines ourselves. And then we own and maintain them on our balance sheet. Fishermen make more money. In some cases, we're literally doubling their take-home margins. And obviously, they increase shelf life, all those other benefits trickle down across the entire supply

chain, and everybody wins. Very cool. Amazing. Awesome. First ever tasting on TVPN. Live tasting. It's the Food Network. You guys knocked it out of the park. This ever tasting. First ever live tasting. Live tasting. It's a food network.

You guys knocked it out of the park. This is a high stakes demo. We might have got it wrong. We might have been like, oh. I'm confused. Yeah. You guys crushed it. I appreciate you coming out.

Thank you for bringing sushi on. Sushi on the set. Yeah. Fantastic. Progress is amazing. All right. Well, thank you for having us. We can close out the show together.

Yeah, let's close out the show. With the boys here. We'll see you Monday. Everybody have a fantastic weekend. Apple podcasts and Spotify and have a great weekend. See you Monday. I can't wait. Love you. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye.