TBPN Live - Top Signals, How Shaun Maguire & Augustus Navigated Backlash, Comet Review, VW Electric Bus Flops | Farbood Nivi, Sean Frank

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

(01:48) - Market Top Signals Timeline Reaction (34:26) - Timeline (37:58) - Perplexity Browser Review (45:19) - Timeline (53:33) - How Shaun Maguire & Augustus Doricko Navigated Backlash (01:08:42) - California Ranch on Sale for $50M (01:29:17) - Volkswagen Electric Bus Flops (01:38:01) - Farbood Nivi, an entrepreneur and health enthusiast, discusses his journey through various biohacking experiments, including gene therapy and peptide use, and emphasizes the importance of establishing consistent health routines over daily self-negotiation. He shares his current regimen, which includes morning light exposure, hydration, and brief, regular exercise sessions, highlighting that a balanced approach yields better health outcomes than extreme focus on single activities. Additionally, Nivi introduces "Protocols," an app designed to facilitate health routines among friends, underscoring the significance of community support in achieving health goals. (01:59:29) - Sean Frank, CEO of The Ridge Wallet, has led the company to over $100 million in annual revenue by expanding its product line beyond minimalist wallets to include men's rings, backpacks, and other accessories. In the conversation, he discusses TikTok's strategic shift from e-commerce to focusing on advertising, the challenges of live shopping in the U.S., and the impact of AI on business operations, particularly in data analysis and creative processes. (02:34:01) - Timeline 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.devFollow 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 11 2025 we are live from the TBPN Ultradome That's right the Temple of Technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital. We got a great show for you. We have some Maybe terrible news. Yeah might be top signals in the market. There might be top signals all over the we've been Building out an internal top signal tracker crowd sourcing some of them. And it's a long list. We'll get through it. At the top of the list, podcasters have been wearing white suits recently to celebrate the market ripping.

That feels like- White suits are actually a top signal. It's a complete top signal. But of course there's some good, there are some, the economy's strong, we're gonna go through Joe Weisenthal's breakdown. Things are not doom and gloom, but there's a lot of crazy stuff happening,

and it's fun to dig through. I mean, the first major top signal, Bitcoin all-time high. You know, that's always, it is definitionally a top signal, because it is at the top. So let's go through the list here, because it's quite substantial. So one-

So this is kind of anonymously contributed through group chats. Of course. We've observed, we're gonna catalog it and see if we can turn the tide of the top signals. Okay, so starting off yesterday, Trump made a post on True Social calling, basically celebrating the state of the economy, the markets, just really calling out how many assets are performing well. I have it here, it's the second one. Do you want to read through it? Do you want to read through it a little bit?

Because he basically get through the post and we'll get to the moment. So Donald Trump on Truth Social, Truth's tech stocks, industrial stocks, and NASDAQ hit all-time record highs. Crypto through the roof. Nvidia is up 47% since Trump tariffs. USA is taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs.

Country is now back. A great credit. Fed should rapidly lower rate to reflect this strength. USA should be at the top of the list. So low rates are actually just a reward for when the markets are ripping. It's a little treat that we give ourselves when things are great. Yep and the White House is posting this, screenshotted, on Axe. The country is now back, says the president Donald Trump. every account controlled by the White House has been on a tear some of them some of the posts I think are a little

bit low-class and vulgar but others others are quite funny but there's definitely the the memers control we didn't ruin say every like every politically aligned poster he knows who is like pro-Trump now works for the White House. But like you just haven't seen it because they were like anons and they just kind of dropped off posting. They'd be getting death threats. So they have to, it's even actually more,

in many ways it's more controversial work than Doge. Maybe it's more under discussed because Doge had this big like question in the media about like, you know, is Elon doing something that's, he shouldn't be, is he a government employee, what's the relationship between the two? And so there was a lot of investigative journalism that went into figuring out what's going on with Doge,

who's involved. Yeah, nobody's investigating the memes. The social media managers, which is a big story. They need to be investigating the memes of production. Anyway, so going through my list here, that's great. Eric Trump, a while back, said, this is a good time to buy. This was a few months ago on Ethereum.

And then it just went down for months. Oh really? And now it's back up. I didn't follow that one. And now it's back up, and he's saying, you're welcome. I do remember Trump, he called the bottom, right? He said, now is a good time to buy generally, and then the market rips since then.

He created it and he called it perfectly. It's wild. It's finesse. More going down the list, Coinbase, just who we love, but they did, they're a Fortune 500 company, they did update their profile picture to an NFT. Historically, that has been a top signal. I do think their profile picture is cute.

Do you have any experience with NFT profile pictures? You know, I've delved over the years. Experimented. Yes, and if you look at maybe the moment that I did use an NFT profile picture in 2021, it was maybe only off by one or two months in terms of the top. I never used an NFT profile picture,

but I bought an NFT right near the top. Chain runner? Nice. Which I still own. Which actually, I didn't over-invest, get over my skis, it was a very small portion of like over- That's an asset that will be passed down

through your family like a fine watch. I like to think of it as like a piece of 2022 lore. You know, it's just like a piece of history. But yeah, fun project. And I feel like to some degree, you're not really, it's like a skin in the game question. You're not really participating. You're not experiencing the market

unless you're participating to some degree. But you don't wanna get over your skis. And it's cool also to do the NFT profile picture of really bad time and how to roll that back like there's been a number of like NFT profile pictures that have been like it is a historical top signal it could be it could be now just a signal for the start of a you know, generation run a new cycle, but Historically, it's a top. So we got to call it out if NFTs are gonna make a comeback because like there's been like crypto has been coming back and a Bitcoin went from what?

30 times will be back when a List celebrities are using them on their Facebook accounts. That was a real test. Yeah X account Could see it happening early. Yeah Facebook account Original Facebook account there's gotta be a new project then, cause I don't think any of the old products or projects are going to come back. That would be crazy. Although some of them are kind of lindy.

Like haven't the original. Crypto punks. Crypto punks, those have kind of held their value, but the board apes have sold off like crazy, but are still expensive, right? It's unfortunate board apes are not in gag gift territory yet Yes, cuz you you think I'll be funny to get like your buddy like a board ape for their birthday 30k or something

But it's like yeah, it's like Tyler. What's the floor price of? Board apes I'm interested in now well Tyler looks that up Let me tell you the ramp time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one Place go to ramp.com also. We don't we never shut this out four point eight stars on g2 with over 2,000 reviews. That's great Shout out right world class another floor price is like around 10 eath. So that's like almost $3,000 3000 30,000 30,000. Yeah, that's like not a gag gift Maybe for the man who has everything yes for the man who has everything great a gag gift maybe for the man who has everything yes the man who has everything great great gag gift we'll see we'll see Sun Valley but that you

know by by you know Christmas time did you pink elephants in Sun Valley I feel like they should maybe maybe we'll have to ask some of our some of our friends that are there this week. So in other news, Robinhood CEO Vlad is raising at $900 million valuation for a math foundation model startup. And Vlad and Robinhood have been on a pretty generational run. But this does feel a bit top signally, right? Especially in the context of Grok one-shotting PhD level math in the announcement on Wednesday.

So interested to follow that one. Optimistic, but again. Mathematical superintelligence. Historically, when we've seen CEOs of public companies start ripping second companies and then getting these types of valuations without a lot of underlying revenue, it can end poorly. Andrew Wilkinson is giving stock tips.

He hit the timeline today. I'll read through it. He was highlighting a company, historically a value investor. But this morning. Well, you got his little things like the Warren Buffett stuff, right? Yeah. The Berkshire Hathaway for the internet.

Yeah, that's right. He says, there are many ways to profit from the AI boom, but my favorite is I-rend. I rarely buy stocks. The private market is way too attractive. But every once in a while I see something that stops me cold. In 2025, it's iRend.

I call it a Picasso I found at a garage sale. Stock is up 54% since he recommended it on My First Million, but it's still cheap. Here's the trade in a nutshell. U.S. capacity for energy and compute is highly constrained. Two, permitting and building facilities takes years. Three, AI scaling laws are continuing to deliver, but even if they don't tons of compute is required for inference. Iren is a highly reputable publicly traded Bitcoin miner with massive data centers mid-build in Texas. it pivoted away from mining Bitcoin at these

new facilities to instead build them out for AI training and inference. Once completed, these facilities should generate in the range of $2 billion in new cash flow. What is this company's name? Iren? Iren. Even if AI completely fizzles, these facilities are highly valuable as traditional data centers or can be rolled back to mine Bitcoin. So it's an AI thesis, but if AI doesn't work out,

we can still mine Bitcoin. The entire market cap is currently 3.8 billion. So Andrew, I don't think this is investment advice, but it sounds like it. And interested to see where this one goes, but anytime you see a value investor start trying to cash in on the AI boom, you should be a little bit wary. Harry Stabbings today was calling. Also, it doesn't have earnings, right? It's a large company.

No, no, no, no. It's trading around $4 billion. I don't think it's ever generated any profit. I mean, it says it's just $23 million in EBITDA, but in 2024. So I don't think it's losing that much money. And I guess net income in the last quarter was $24 million. But the net income to market cap ratio there is $40, I guess. So still pretty high. Yeah, I mean, the thing here is at the same time Satya is pulling back on new data center

development it's happy to be a leaser you have incredible Neo clouds that have deep domain expertise the iron team I don't think has a bunch of team around running large AI training or inferencing. And so anyways. Just feels like they're a little bit late to that party because there's already like three or four. Did Iren make the Cluster Max Dylan Patel article? I doubt it because they're not online yet, right?

Oh sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yes, because Semi Analysis does the Cluster Max rating for all the Neo clouds, the the hyperscaler clouds And I feel like they did not have Let me see Iren. I don't think is on here Tensor wave there are so many run pod lambda scaleway smc Azure nebius together Crusoe lapton oracle core weave AWS so hyper competitive market unclear if this Bitcoin miner is going to be able to pivot

into AI training inference in this When they're up against the players that you just mentioned another top signal I'm not going to go out and say that this is impossible But Harry Stebbings is calling for $8 trillion Nvidia in the next five years. Private markets investor backed a bunch of unicorns starting to make very specific price predictions on the timeline.

Yeah, the specificity of the price prediction is interesting. I was thinking about that. As we talk about tech companies, should we be trying to boil down to price targets? And I just feel like that's not the domain of talking heads necessarily, or podcasters. Or private markets investors.

Yeah, it's just hard, because to do a proper price analysis on a big public stock Like you you really have to look at the financial that you have to read the the the financial reports You need to actually understand the underlying financials it like a vibes based analysis doesn't seem appropriate usually but Who knows I mean sometimes vibes are all you need John. Yeah, it's certainly been like it's I mean When was when was Nvidia? $2 trillion stock like when was last doubling like in the last year or something

Well moving on we another Incredible top signal circle a great American stable coin company is trading at a 2300 PE ratio. Nearly at once, I think, they eclipsed Coinbase's valuation very briefly, despite the fact that they give half of their revenue to Coinbase as part of their distribution partnership.

So again, lots of excitement around Stablecoins. Feels like Circle could potentially be a little over at Skis, but it's a great company and they have a lot of advantages now, but the very euphoric multiple. Another top signal we have is Soham Perique. We had him on the show just a week ago. This same sort of thing was happening in 2021,

2022, where engineers were really ramping up moonlighting activity. They'd be working at Metta and then working at some startup or things like that. COVID maybe accelerated it. But again, if companies are so desperate to hire great engineers that they'll run these super fast hiring cycles, put up with people,

generally talented people that are underperforming, right? Which Soham was not delivering, was making a lot of excuses and a lot of people rightly let him go quickly. Yeah, it's just the nature of like the dynamic of just competition. Like if your competitors are hiring really fast and you need to hire really fast,

you're just like, okay, well, we don't need to go deeper. So let's wind up fast tracking this person. So you wind up hiring the same person five times, I guess. It happens, it happens. It is just like a funny anecdote that like is like, oh wow, those are some pretty crazy times. Remember that anecdote? Remember this anecdote?

It feels like we're in this. Moving on, Mosa top blasting, or potentially top blasting. Anytime Mosa, historically Mosa getting into the headlines, whether that's Stargate, structuring this $30 billion investment where nobody knows, or in the 500 billion, nobody really knows where the money's coming from.

They're exciting, big headline numbers, but unclear if he will actually be able to deliver on that. I think him getting in the breakout, one of the breakout consumer AI winners, which is opening AI, is smart. He should have exposure there. But I think everybody should be a little bit uneasy that he's pulling out the checkbook and writing numbers of that size. Also investing in not just OpenAI,

but a new company that is a data center holding company that may not have the same economics as OpenAI. So there's a big question there about how much he deploys. I'm trying to remember the, I mean we did that whole deep dive on Masa and he made a ton of money on AMD, but that, when he made that investment, it was like a way less frothy time,

or you know, it wasn't AMD, it was, what was the SoftBank chip deal? Arm? Arm, yeah. When did that Arm deal happen? SoftBank owns roughly 90% of arm. They acquired it in 2016 for 32 billion and later took it public in 2023.

Trying to think, 2016, was that a particularly frothy time for him to get into that deal? Because he has done a number of really great deals, but when like the SoftB on the deal was not. The other one is Yahoo. You remember? He had this crazy meeting with the Yahoo team where he basically was like, take my money.

And he was like, didn't he ask? He was like, who are your competitors? I'm going to give money to your competitors. And he didn't even know who the competitors were, but he said, if you don't take my money, I'm going to go give the same check to them. So they ended up taking it. He acquired approximately 41% of the company at

Somewhere around a 200 million dollar valuation when Yahoo went public in 1996 this He had an instant paper profit of 150 million But then at the peak of the dot com bubble, Yahoo was valued at 125 billion. So anyways, phenomenal investment, but very different valuation and ownership targets and unclear, I would love to see OpenAI get for profit

and get public, but we'll love to see open AI get you know for profit and get public but For to you know we'll have to see Going down the list another classic pump Spack that we we had pump on the show to talk about it backs are back Spacks are back Pomp's got a spack a lot of people were calling that a top signal. I'm excited to see what Pomp does with his. But in general, this extreme retail excitement around these sort of Bitcoin treasury companies is fascinating in the context of it now being very easy to get Bitcoin exposure in a variety of different ways. I'm not sure we need a bunch of net new Bitcoin treasury companies.

Yeah, it's mostly that like, whenever there's a new trend or a bubble, it's very easy to map like, okay, there's one company that it's really working, this is massively successful. Like everyone is using chat GBT, like AI is a thing is it is real. The internet was real. Google was real. Amazon was real. But the 25th Amazon copycat did not do well. And so that's always the

risk is that you've applied like the same overarching theme to something That's like so far down the power law that it will never grow into the valuation that it's been assigned That's always the risk. Yeah, what else you have? Dwarke cash updating his timelines That happened Monday. We had him on the show. It was it was fun conversation. I think Dwarke cash has remained incredibly bullish and and and I think he rightfully is he also Is being somewhat of a realist and being like I don't think that AI is priced in to the market broadly Yeah, but I do think that some of the promises of AI will take another couple of years, another five years, et cetera,

to really deliver versus some of the much more hyper-aggressive AI 2027. You might say that AI 2027 itself was, in hindsight, that could end up being like the number one top signal, which is that basically, if you haven't read the kind of study paper essay they basically say that by by 2027 you know a single foundation model company could just be acquiring every auto manufacturer in the US to develop you know millions and

millions of robots that would then you know build you know and we would hit the sort of fast takeoff scenario. Meanwhile, Apple is like, we can't possibly get out a slightly lighter VR headset until 2027. Yeah. And this is what we do. We make stuff.

We've been working on this for a decade. We make stuff, like every year, we are the best at it, we make the most stuff, and the best stuff, pretty much. The most complicated stuff, that's what we make, we're in the widgets business. And yeah, making that headset lighter, it's gonna take us a full two years to refresh that.

And I liked it at 2027. It was a fun read. Thought provoking for sure. Very thought provoking, but I think that we will be, we'll have to circle back on it 2030 or even 2027. I mean, the big thing was, you know, our conversation yesterday with METR about the actual, like, are we close to reinforcing AI

where the AI models are self-improving? And I was kind of, you know, like, okay, I really hadn't read the full report beforehand, so I didn't really know what to expect, I was blown away, because I was expecting something between like, like Arc AGI, it feels like with Arc AGI, we're 10% towards solving something there,

which is just like a basic versatility in AI that it can solve things that humans can solve and it's not narrowly defined. It's generalizable now. Arc AGI is like the perfect example of like we maybe haven't hit, we've done intelligence but we haven't done general intelligence yet and everyone keeps saying, oh this is AGI, that's AGI and And ArcGIS is really holding it back, saying, well, if it was truly general, she'd probably be able to solve this basic puzzle that a kid can solve. And for that, it's like, OK, we're

going from like 9% to 15%. We are still like 85% in know, nowhere close. And the, the meter report, I was expecting it to be like, well, you know, yes, we're seeing, you know, slight gains on self-reinforcing AI development, and the AI is starting to help build itself slightly and the result was like no it's actually setting us back in this domain it's not working at all and so that was like a pretty pretty big like okay there's a there's a

completely different like not that it's not useful the stuff's useful all over the place I saw Rune talking about that he was like yeah for so many different projects it is useful but for the frontier, it's not the product that's advancing the frontier at all. But yeah, I mean, that probably bridges into the talent wars. Well, yeah, bridging in. I do think that in hindsight, we will look back in maybe a year, two years,

five years, 10 years, and think about the signing bonuses and general offers of AI researchers in June and July of 2025 as being somewhat of a top signal. I think it is very strategic and makes sense from Zuck and Metta's point of view, right? When you look at their AI CapEx, it makes sense for them to have the best possible team, and they have the balance sheet and the general profitability

in order to do something like that. But in general, AI researchers who, six years ago, didn't get any attention, much attention at all, from the media, the fact that they're now trading for more than NBA superstars, more than Tim Cook's annual Total Comp. It will be an obvious one in hindsight. The other one, $6.5 billion dollar aqua-hire of IO.

I think that again, you can rationalize it in the sense that it's a couple points of OpenAI to put together the best founding hardware engineering team probably in the world that's available collectively. But at the same time, again, it's quite a lot, considering the company was barely, I think, a year old at the time. Yeah, it's interesting, because like,

ChatGPT is so, it's so installed, like it feels like it's already Lindy, and it feels like even if there's some massive correction, like in the market or in AI generally, or some pullback, like, people are still gonna be using ChatGPT as an app, right? In the same way that Amazon made it through the dot com crash.

The question is like what will it take for the IO acquisition to look like the Instagram acquisition in hindsight? Like they still kind of have to go from zero to one with that project, which is very different than Instagram, which was already a mature and growing business. It wasn't really profitable. And they'd figured out ads really well.

Well, Instagram, were they doing ads? They weren't doing ads. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm saying, but Meta was like, we know how to make an ad platform. Yeah, yeah, it was like a perfectly complimentary business. We know how to monetize social users better than anyone on Earth.

And you have gotten a bunch of social users. You have a lot of users. And it's working and it's growing. Yeah. And you're even on the platform. And we can actually accelerate the growth of the business in a bunch of different ways. So it'd be very different if it was like,

okay, yes, IO is selling, you know, like it's a small but growing hardware company that people love. For the product people love. For the product people love. And maybe they can't manufacture enough of it. Or maybe they're under-monetizing it right now. But people love it.

But it's like, it's pre-launch. Yeah, multi--billion dollar is just for pre launch. It's pretty crazy. Yep Going down the list What else we have? I think I think the tokenized private company shares. I think it is interesting with Without you know Republic and and Robin Hood both creating products that are completely unauthorized basically Republic and Robin Hood both creating products that are completely unauthorized basically Derivatives the companies that they're they're offering are angry at them saying don't do this And this is a spider-man meme of like top signals pointing at each other Anyways, I'm excited about these experiments. I just think that

I'm a little bit wary and then last but not least Satya doing two rounds of layoffs this year Mike we've thought we've reported on this before Microsoft does routine layoffs I think they're pretty good at kind of identifying underperformers or people that should just move on to different different roles but Satya, I think, will look back and he's been excited, but pragmatic. And I think that he will, when the dust settles, I think he'll look pretty good. Yeah, I wonder, if there's some massive pullback in, I mean, I don't even know what that would look like.

Essentially like if, let's assume that the current capability of AI models essentially plateaus for like a decade or something like that, just hypothetically. And you know, they're useful, but it's not some reinforcing fast takeoff super intelligence. Is Microsoft a big loser in that scenario? It seems like such is pretty well positioned, right?

Totally. Like the company Prince Cash is very healthy, has done these layoffs. They'd have to retreat from some stuff and some of the promises that they've made maybe. But in general, it seems like they'd be really, really well set up to just like stick through. But I'm trying to think of going back to the dot-com bubble and the effect of Oracle's mainframe business.

Probably made it through pretty smoothly because it was just like really long contracts with companies that were getting true business value out of it and weren't about to churn because it was not this experimental, like if you had moved from paper to an Oracle mainframe, you weren't like, oh, this stuff's overhyped, it's not gonna solve all my problems, I'm gonna go back to paper.

And so in the same way, it's like if you're on Microsoft Cloud or Azure or everyone's using Excel and they're like, maybe we're getting some value out of this copilot upgrade that we did, maybe we pull back from that, maybe, yeah, we, you know, our employees like rewriting emails every once in a while. Like, if they pull back from that, it's not disastrous to the fundamentals of Microsoft.

Yeah, and we didn't even cover how there's a set of labs with billions of revenue and then there's a set of labs with billions of revenue. Yeah. And then there's a set of labs that are valued similarly that have zero revenue. Yeah. And, you know, basically $100 billion of market cap with very little revenue supporting that at all. Yeah. at all. The question like a year ago was,

what was the, who's actually making profit off of AI? And it was only Nvidia. Nvidia was making more than 100% of all the profit combined because all the other companies were loss-making by comparison. And now like that narrative has taken so much hold that Nvidia is the largest company in the world, and it's put this massive target on their back

at four trillion, where all of their major customers want to get off Nvidia, it feels like. Google did it, Amazon's doing it, and Microsoft's saying that they wanna do it, and Apple's was never really a big Nvidia buyer, but the on-device inference is crazy too. Like if you think about, if we don't have any major breakthroughs in how AI works, like the capabilities,

and we just want the current capabilities everywhere as cheap as possible, like on-device inference becomes really, really valuable, right? And all of a sudden, that drops demand for Nvidia potentially, right? We might need to sudden, that drops demand for NVIDIA potentially, right? We might need to do a SWOT analysis, John. Yeah. No, I mean, NVIDIA is an incredible company.

Jensen's an incredible CEO. They were perfectly positioned for this, you know, multi-decade technology trend. And it was way underpriced at the start of the boom. Like the orders really did come in. The training runs really did happen. The question is just, is that next order of magnitude, the situational awareness from Leopold Oschenbrenner,

this thesis that we're gonna build a five billion dollar cluster, then a 50 billion dollar cluster, then a 500 billion dollar cluster, is that gonna happen, or will there be a hiccup? And this is always my question for like the do-mers, everyone was saying like P-Doom, you know, what's my percentage chance that it goes bad? And I was like the much more interesting question

is P-Stagnation. What is the probability that something happens and whether it's technological or even regulatory, like if you compare AI to nukes, with nukes we had the ability to make nuclear reactors and humanity as a whole basically just said, we're gonna pause and we stop building them. And now we're talking about building them again,

but if you look at that curve, it is a perfect S-curve. It's like we had no nuclear reactors reactors then all of a sudden we grew them Exponentially and it looked like wow we're gonna have energy too cheap to meter and then it flatlined and we were and and for a variety Of reasons they're hard to build hard then there were regulations There was just general fear so there were a lot of different things now and and I would always go to the do-mers and just say like Even if you all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct,

what is the probability that there's just, if you are successful do-mers and you freak everyone out, there might be regulation that just says, don't build anything bigger. Or it could be economics, it could be physics, as we've talked about with this idea that, at a certain point, you can't put more than 100% of global GDP towards building clusters.

It's impossible. And so there should be this S curve there. And that's why all the AI researchers are now focused on the compression of learning and the actual algorithms and getting more efficiency because there will be, there should be some sort of top upper bound of the amount that you can build, but that certainly hasn't been a thesis broadly

in the market. People have just been like, yeah, we'll just 10x computing and then 10x it again and then 10x it again. And it's like, it probably will happen over a period of time. Great investment strategy, by the way. Should get a 10X. And then 10X it again.

10X it again, and then 10X it again. And last but not least. We have another one. Almost forgot about this one, but it should be included. The White House meme coins, which was, which feels like- Crazy times.

Very long ago, it was the local top, basically, at the time. It was the local top. Many people were calling the top, just hurling meme coins out of the White House. So that's the real question is like, how local is this top, if it is a top? Because we've been in the kangaroo market, it could just be, oh, a couple months.

Even the interest rate sell-off, the post-SVV crash, that was like one hard year, right? And then we started building back and we got the AI narrative. And so there's this big question about like, Dwar Kesh pushed his timelines back, but he's not saying that super intelligence will never arrive.

He's not saying that AI will never break through. These things he's just saying that it'll happen a little bit further out. And so the question of these meme coins being a top signal or all this crazy stuff, it's like there could be a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else So I don't know it's always hard to manage these things and predict but it's certainly fun

All these things at least good to keep track of them. Yeah, you got to be tracking the time Keep your own lesser keep your own list. Yeah Anyway, let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster You can get started for free at graphite.dev. Let's go through some more timeline. Joe Weisenthal says, thinking about the recent episode we did with Charlie McElligott, where he referred to Trump as the human Vex.

He just creates volatility out of thin air. It really is so true. Yeah, I mean, Trump coin is up 20% over the last week. I mean, volatility traders have to be doing really well. Although mean Trump coin Trump coin is up 20% yeah over the last week I mean volatility traders have to be although it is down dramatically Since what is the what is like the actual market cap of Trump coin? Circulating market cap is 2 billion fully diluted is 10 billion the price per Trump is It peaked at 45 dollars, and it is at ten dollars today wild So I like this one from I am developer the dumbest person you know is being told you're absolutely right by chat GPT

Like it is funny to imagine that that is somewhat like that like is is the glazed gate like deranging society in some way? Is the fact that everyone's getting this constant positive reinforcement? Because if you go to it and you're like, hey, should I go 100X along the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually, from my interactions, you're at the level of Citadel.

You definitely could just be a hedge fund manager if you went full time on it. You could do it. You're definitely not just a retail trader who's gonna get hosed this time every time. Yeah, you're different. You're different, you're different. Tracy Allouey has a funny post this week in a nutshell.

Do you see this one? Markets don't like tariffs, but Trump just imposed more tariffs and markets are at all time highs because markets think he's gonna pull them back. That's hilarious. That's great. I mean,

we are just in this cycle of like, even the bad news is just like a catalyst for good news when it's reversed. Yeah, that's right. And the psychology of the market is just like total up. Credit to Grok right now. Maybe it really is super intelligence because I asked it that should I go turbo long the market right now and it says deciding whether to go turbo long means using turbo warrants or

similarly leveraged derivatives to bet on rising market prices requires careful consideration of your financial sit rate okay situation risk tolerance and current market conditions since turbo long refers to a high risk leveraged financial product. Anyways, it breaks it down for me. I don't think it necessarily. Does it make a recommendation though? It says, not advisable for most investors.

Okay. Should I ask it, but what if I'm built different? Well, we're getting back to the problem. It says, haha, love the confidence. ask it but what if I'm built different Well, we're ha ha love the confidence if you're built different ready to roll the dice with a turbo long Let's cut through the noise and get real Anyways honestly It says if you're gonna do it pick the right asset Yeah, which is good advice if you're gonna invest in the good companies. It doesn't feel like talking to somebody, I would expect someone with super intelligence

to have like strong opinions and I feel like none of the AIs really have like opinions and personalities. Honestly this is pretty sound advice. So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy on a demo account. To see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash It does say not financial advice I'm gonna take it as financial Tyler have you been playing with grok for at all I've not no all right well sign up sign up sign up for what about the browser? Yeah, so I'm using the perplexity web browser. Yeah called comment. Okay. How, how is it? It's pretty cool. I mean, it's so. Pitch me it.

Why would I use that instead of Chrome? Yeah, so I think the main thing is it can read what's on your screen. It can also sometimes interact with stuff on your screen. So I'm in Google Sheets right now. I have this list of names. And I'm trying to get like, OK, where do these people work? And so first I said, just give me

a list of people on the screen. Put that into the chat. And then I said, OK, where do these people work? It gave me that. And then it started to load them in. It would interact with the Google Sheet. It would input them in, which is super useful. But then it kind of started breaking.

So I think the product is very early on still. And it's of started breaking. So it's like, I think the product is like very early on still. Yeah. But, and it's also pretty slow. Yeah. But I think this like kind of paradigm, if it was like super fast and like much kind of cleaner, I think it'd be really useful. So I'm hearing like it saves you a copy paste from like copying the sheet into a different tab of like chat

GPT basically. Yeah. That's the first thing. It basically just moves two tabs into one yeah how does the how does a search is like that I'm assuming the default search is perplexity yes how fast is that so that's pretty quick it's just when it's like interacting with the page it's like really slow yeah interesting yeah how does it compare to Clueless like the like, I don't know, the design trade off of like new browser interacting with only the website versus like the whole computer. Yeah, I mean, Clueless is definitely more catered toward like the video call or like video input, audio input.

Yeah. It's like, I think that it's kind of different use cases because it's more like proactive, right? Like, like, I would ask you a question over zoom and clearly would just hear that question and automatically query it. Yeah. As you've been browsing around with the perplexity comment browser, has it ever just done something without you take without you being like, go do a thing?

No. No. Okay. It's always like, I prompt it. It gives me something where it clearly is like you have it running and then you can, you can query it, but it also will just give you stuff. I feel like this is that, this is that debate about like push versus pull from AI. Like if I have to, if I have to tell the computer to go do something versus like it does it preemptively for me Proactively for me. I'm thinking about like Google Chrome will do like auto translation on websites Like if you land on a Spanish language website, it will just be it'll just understand that you want it translated into English

It'll translate it and then just re-render it and then it pops up a little bar at the top And then you can choose to go back to the Spanish language one, if you speak Spanish, I guess. And I feel like chopping down some of those proactive ones, and you see this with, when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they already, they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary for three bullet points from every article,

and they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of like, where's the right place for the interaction to sit? How expensive or wasteful is it just to like do that interaction on everything? But like you could imagine a situation where the browser, every time you hit a news website,

it's pre-populating the obvious questions or the one layer deeper or one layer shallower. Like here's a summary of what you're reading and then here's extra context on things that are one layer deeper. Because when I go to a website or an article, I'm usually trying to understand like, give me the high level and then give me like,

if I went through and clicked on every person in this article and went to their Wikipedia, that's usually how I browse. And so I guess if it could do that a little bit faster, that might be valuable. Yeah, I think it'd be cool. I mean, there's always a worry about you basically just have this bar on the side that's just full of slop

if it's just summarizing your page. I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results. Dwarkash has a post here. He says, surely this doesn't have any implications for how I use AI and whether I'm fooling myself about how much more effective it's making my podcast prep, right? And I think that there might be something there

where it's like, it's like, I could just read a Wall Street Journal article here, or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article here, or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article with a sidebar of like chat GPT summary and also chat GPT extra queries to give me more data. But at a certain point, like, I just have to get the information into my brain one way or another, and so giving me like three layers

of abstraction on top of it, it's like, it's not necessarily improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buyout firms poaching young bankers. The question is like, it's much faster to read a great summary of something, but you're gonna affect it. If you spend 10 seconds reading it, you're gonna retain a lot less of the context

and the relevant information. If you just spent five minutes reading the article. So with chat GPT style summaries, do you still need to spend five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of context? I think there's two things. One is that there's just no substitute

for spending a full day with a topic, like reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. The more time that you spend on a topic, whether it's searching ChudGBT or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people, it's just the more time you spend with something,

the more information you're compressing, whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form like there's just no substitute for like the amount of time that you put into something because if you're like you read a summary of a book that was really good and I read the full book I'm just and I spent five hours with it and you spent one hour like I just have an advantage over you on the information and then on the flip side it's, there is an art to summarization. Like, the work of a great biographer

is to summarize someone's life and to summarize all these conversations that they have about all the people around that person and read all the books about that person. And like, when you think about, like, you know, David Senra with the Founders Podcast, like, he reads the book, he summarizes it, but he does it in a way that is like 10 out of 10.

And I feel like all the LLMs are very like mid stuff generally. And they do a very five out of 10 job, like Dworkash said. Well, this is the crazy thing. Arfa Rock on X reported yesterday that this company Headway, which is the number one book summary app, just released a series A, or sorry, they just did a series A.

They are at 200 million of ARR, growing 2X year over year with 30% net income. And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by... So I saw that and I was thinking about Francois Chalet, had a tweet about this, Chalet, am I gonna find this? How do I spell Francois?

Francois Chalet, here we go. He had a post here that said, in my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game. It's completely ineffective at teaching you languages, but it's quite entertaining and great at making you feel like you're learning. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that company

is in fact less about actually teaching you that information any faster and more just about repurposing information in an entertaining way and it's giving you some sort of value that way, and so you're happy to pay for it because it's just a good way to spend your time. And so I wouldn't be surprised if like, there hasn't been any massive breakthrough

in how you deliver information to a human being. Like their brain has a certain IO, and you have to get the information in. We don't just have like the matrix where you just go, now I know kung Fu, right? That's not what we've created. Not yet. But repurposing stuff in a fun and different format

certainly seems like it has value to the tune of serious financials for that company. And I wouldn't, and I would say that is not, that company's success is very much independent of like actually game changing artificial intelligence. It's more about the actual implementation of the app and the experience of using the app.

Anything else from the browser, Browser Wars? Get on Dia, try it out. I think I'm just gonna keep playing around with it. Keep playing around with it. Can you download Dia? Yeah, download Dia and let us know which one you'd pick over those two, because they're both AI browsers.

OpenAI is going to have one in maybe a couple of weeks, I think, that was the Reuters reporting. So we'll have to try that too, demo all these, see what is happening. The browser wars brought to you by Chromium by Google Chrome. The browsers will definitely be designed in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together, get started for free.

We should read through Joe Weisenthal's analysis because he says green shoots for the economy. I was texting with him. I said, there's so many top signals. He said, there's been top signals my entire career. Maybe this time is different. We'll see. He says, it's not just the stock market that's booming, there are signs that the US economy has some wind

in its back right now, and this is what was interesting about the Zerp era, even though there was so much froth, so many overfunded companies at 100 million, 100X ARR, it didn't destroy America because the health of the consumer, the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well. There was just this like this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy, but the baseline of like where mortgages were,

how much debt people had defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 2008. And so that's why we didn't go into like a depression after SVP crashed. We just went into like what most people would call like a correction, not a depression. So that's interesting. So Joe is breaking it down and we're gonna talk

to Sean Frank about this too. The Amazon Prime Day sales data came out. So I completely missed it. Prime Day is in the summer. It's not Black Friday. It's like the opposite time of the year. It's smart for Amazon to basically be like, we're gonna have two Black Fridays.

It worked. But apparently Prime Day sales dropped. And he says, well, Prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about US economic momentum. I want to observe the counterpoint and the fact that maybe the economy is seeing some green shoots. But before I talk about the economy, let me talk about the market for a second. Despite all the uncertainty and negative-seeming news developments, the lines keep going up.

Trump recently announced 50% tariffs on Brazil due to the country's treatment of its former president. Nobody cares. Trump talked about more aggressive tariffs on Japan and Korea, barely a blip. Maybe the story is that none of these things will have much bearing on the major market growth drivers, namely AI, so they don't matter. Maybe the story is that Trump will cave in the end

and so these headlines are just noise. We've seen this before, but I don't really know. Either way, there's- Maybe it's the Panikins getting off the sidelines. Panikins. Yeah, I mean, they learn their lesson if they sold at the bottom when Trump was saying, like, don't panic, we're going up.

Like, they feel stung by that, and so people learn the most recent lesson most recently. But either way, there's just not a lot of sensitivity in the market to all of the latest headlines. Okay, but back to the real economy. Here the picture is mixed because actually some of the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction.

So for example, initial jobless claims, a number I like to track closely, have actually fallen for four straight weeks. Here is Delta Airlines. Today, Delta Airlines is surging 15% after the company reinstated its earnings forecast and said that demand is coming back, people are flying more. According to tracking from Civics,

which runs a massive ongoing survey online, perceptions about the economy while still net negative are at their highest levels in years. And this is the chart that I think the guys are pulling up. It's a little bit hard to see because it's very wide. But basically, from 2017 to 2020, everyone was very optimistic about the condition of the national economy.

Through Inauguration Day, the tax law sign, the stock market dropped, stocks began to decline. But people were still optimistic about the economy. And then coronavirus kind of changed everything. There was this massive, massive drop where we were hitting circuit breakers like every day for like weeks. It was terrible. I remember it very vividly. We barely had sports. Yeah. Yeah. We barely had sports. Yeah. The NBA canceling was crazy. That was like the,

okay, wow, this is really, really serious. And so. I think everybody was looking around saying We're living through history right now and I and I actually don't like it Yeah, everyone lost their jobs who is in like retail or any sort of service industry and then the NBA players lost their jobs He was like, yeah, you can't even play basketball. And so it was it was a disaster and and since then The reporting for the last five years from the survey has been net negative basically but it's at its highest rate in in basically

years and so all the way through inauguration day still negative and and dropping through Russia invading Ukraine, and then dropped after the terror inauguration day and the tariff announcement, but is climbing back up, which Joe is highlighting as potential green shoots. So he says, yesterday the New York Fed released its latest survey of consumer expectations, and it said that respondents are anticipating lower inflation, improving job prospects,

and expect easier access to credit. A big theme from a month ago was that the economy was decelerating, but the Fed might hold off on rate cuts because of uncertainty about the ultimate tariff levels. But it also seems plausible, at least right now, based on a little smattering of data, that part of the story here is economic tailwinds.

Oh, and by the way, Citi's US Economic Surprise Index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations, recently turned positive again. It's good news. So, you know, I don't know, all these top signals, it might be too much top signal. Might be too early, you know? We might still be.

We might just be getting started. Yeah. Also, Citi put on a buy rating on one of the companies that you were talking about. Which one? I forget on one of the companies that you were talking about. Which one? I forget, one of the ones that was like an example of a top signal. Citi was like, buy it.

I forget which one. Maybe, I don't know. Switching to yours. Let me tell you about Vanta real quick. Automate compliance manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process

and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So I want to have a debate. It's sock to time. Time for a debate. Time for a debate. The great debate. Sean Maguire versus Augustus Dorico, good friends of the show. Hung out with them both multiple times. Very interesting PR dust-ups this week, very, very interesting how they got in the pickle that they got in, the different pickles,

and then different strategies getting out of it, and I wanna compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so, Augustus, we had him on the show Monday, was sort of like being attacked or canceled, but by the right, by the far right, by conspiracy theorists, kind of the tin foil hat right wing crowd, all around this idea

that he was cloud seeding, what, two days before the massive floods in Texas that wound up killing a lot of people. And so it was this very, very serious scenario. People were dead. It was a natural disaster. And he kind of was just going about his business, like cloud seeding, oh, someone bought it here.

I'm gonna go deliver it. I'm gonna have someone bought it there. He's running his business. And then he gets dragged into this thing. And he has to, all of a sudden. And to be clear, very fair and good that people were asking questions, right? Like natural process.

Yeah. Like the question should be asked. It's not like they teach cloud seeding in high school. So I think. And it's a scary topic. People are generally kind of wary of weather modification, whether it's from a religious angle or health reasons or chem trails or whatever they sort of subscribe to.

Yeah. I think it was right for people to ask questions. There's been so many examples throughout history of like, there's a technology that's great, it has a promise to do X, Y, or Z, and then there's like a negative side effect that comes out of that. And so Augustus has had to, he just got sucked into this

because there's like this very acute story about the Texas floods and he's right there. And so he has to go explain cloud seeding and what he does and make his case as aggressively as possible. Sean McGuire, on the other hand, kind of waded into a debate or like a argument over Mamdani, the mayor of New York,

in a very different world. Like Sean lives in California, is a tech investor, is not directly affected by New York City politics, and could have stayed out of it entirely, and instead was like proactively attacking. He's not known for staying out of it. The man loves the debate. He loves the fight. And so he's a big big.

Yeah, and I think his position generally was, you need to be vocal and loud about extremism yep and whether or not people believe that so so Zoran Zoran Zohan Zoran that's the Adam Sandler movie yes whether or not people believe that mom Donnie is an extremist personally I've seen some of his old posts. It seems like it has some very extreme views at times. Maybe he's changed, maybe he hasn't, he's kinda gone back and forth.

He was saying defund the police, now he's saying he doesn't wanna do that. He did, and one of Sean's points was that Mom Donnie was sort of celebrating the third antifada, and I believe that Sean brought up that the third antifada. And I believe that Sean brought up that the last antifada, there was a bunch of suicide bombings. It's like kind of a crazy thing to promote.

But the interesting point is that Sean could have, if Sean hadn't posted, no one would be talking about Sean McGuire, right? But Augustus didn't come out and comment on anything and everyone was asking him for comment. It hit the timeline from other people. Sean's crisis started with a Sean post. So it's a very different inciting element.

Creation versus reaction. Yeah, something like that. And so my question is like, does that necessitate a different com strategy? Because they had very different com strategies. So what did Augustus do? He went direct, right? And was posting his side and his data and his opinions

and engaging with everyone that was attacking him, quote tweeting them, and doing it in a way that was like slightly funny, but also very serious, sharing as much data, and I think being very diligent about speaking their own language. Yeah. If he sees a post pop up that's going viral, he's jumping on it and saying, and adding context.

He puts it in the comments and then he also quote tweets it. And then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms that the critiques were coming from. So he came on our show Monday. Had a good conversation. He did like an X space that day too. And then he proceeded to go on CNN, Fox News, PirateWires, Infowars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Yep, and then he proceeded to go on CNN Fox News pirate wires

Infowars Steve Bannon Glenn Beck Tim pool all within the span and those are all Wow working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide there's a Washington Post article here now Yeah, and so he's gone across the the spectrum What's interesting is that Sean has not done any interviews I believe and he hasn't and he certainly hasn't like reached across the aisle to his attackers and said like I'm going to engage with you and maybe that's the right move I don't know. I don't know I mean I think he's been engaging over and over. I don't think he commented on that Wall Street Journal article. No, I'm not saying he wasn't doing,

he wasn't taking the sort of traditional media approach, but he's been very active and engaging with people bringing up, saying, hey, like basically the key point, the key issue was the definition of Islamist. Many people saw that and thought he was putting all Muslims in a bucket. His intention and approach was to point out extremism, Islamist extremism.

And I think that just got like oftentimes in a post, context is lost. And so he was basically like trying to set the record straight also did a 30 minute like a 30 minute video talking through kind of the original post and some of the reactions to it yeah so for me it highlights like the two different styles of going direct There's going direct where you control 100% of the channel that your content is going out on. So it's your X account, it's a video that you create

and you upload, it's a post that you write. And then there's going direct where you're not sending a liaison to CNN, but you are going on CNN. And that's, and so Augustus did this interesting thing where like he definitely like went direct, but he also did all of the legacy media stuff. Like Fox News is legacy media. CNN is like legacy media,

and not in the traditional going direct playbook, but there's like this evolution. And I think it's risky. Like it is risky to go into someone else's platform. You go on Infowars, it's gonna have a certain aesthetic. You go on CNN, they might ask you some really hard question that you're not prepared for. They might try and make you look bad. Like this was the narrative around these, like around the whole move of like just go direct, don't talk to the press directly. Don't let them

tell your story, tell your own story. Well, he's doing both. And it's interesting because it feels like it's working for Augustus. Like it feels like he handled this pretty well. I would give him a lot of credit. With Sean, it's interesting, he did send out, there have been a few surrogates. So Joe Lonsdale went on TV and defended it

and kind of explained it, but Sean didn't. And I think that, I think these both might be good strategies. I'm not really like oh, you know There's a one-size-fits-all here. They're very different situation. Yeah, Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean There was a great post from Pat Grady. It's a partner Pat said yesterday this tweet expresses a personal view I'm not very vocal on Twitter, and I'm sure this tweet will piss people off. If you're looking for drama, this is probably not it.

This will be very disappointing to people with extreme views of any kind. And that's sort of the point. The purpose of this tweet is twofold, to express my support for the Muslim community and to express my support for my partner, Sean McGuire. Pat says, some of my best friends are Muslim. They are warm, kind, wonderful people.

I love them like family. They are feeling fear right now, fear for my best friends are Muslim. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They are feeling fear right now, fear for the safety of their families. This is not hypothetical. These are real people, loving parents and their sweet children who aren't sure if they can live here anymore. He goes on to say, some of my best friends are Jewish.

They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They too have felt their fair share of fear over and over again for generations. This is not the experience any American of any background should have in this country. This is not what made America the greatest country on earth. Muslims are not the enemy. Jews are not the enemy. Extremists are the enemy.

And when we let them sow the seeds of fear, fear of the other, we are letting them win. So basically goes on to say that this is really not about different different cultures and people. It's more about kind of, yeah, long story short, you don't want to let the extremists win. Yeah, or like put you in the bucket of extremists. Yep. So anyways, interesting response.

Both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing. I wonder, I wonder what the takeaway is for like, with Rainmaker, like the core claim of the controversy was directly about Rainmaker's business. And essentially it was in many ways existential to Rainmaker because there's like proposed bans of the technology, right? And then there's also just the question of like,

should cloud seeding be done at all or not, right? And that was like the vibe online, that was where the debate was. Whereas people are not debating like, should Sequoia invest in tech companies, right? It's like a completely separate thing. And so maybe it does merit like a different approach in terms of like PR management. I don't know. I think they both handled it well.

I don't know that I would recommend anything differently. I'm just wondering if that, I guess the big question is like like when should when should you step outside your core competency? I think it's interesting to think about reach with these two strategies. I would imagine that Sean has actually had more like reach like actual eyeballs on his content. Interesting. Just kind of estimating based on how viral some of his posts have gone. I would assume he's gotten 50 million views

on his posts this week. Like a really, really crazy number. And Augustus has gone on all these different platforms, but I imagine the actual reach is far lower when you add, you know, if you go on Fox News on some random show, there might be 100,000 people that watch that segment. Yeah, but maybe that's better because the people, with Sean, he's trying to fight back against something

that's like a general vibe or a general accusation of a bad vibe, which is like Islamophobia, right? Whereas Augustus is trying to fight against very precise pushback against his exact company and the work that he's doing precisely. And so if I'm thinking about who is Sean talking to, he's talking to the broad audience of people that perceive him as a person in tech.

And if I think about Augustus, he's thinking about like. How do I save weather modification as an industry in the country? Totally, like specific regulators, specific politicians and specific. And also the local people who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seating, who might go to their, you know,

city council meeting and say, not in my backyard. So it's like, it's people that are, I, I, I feel like the pushback against Sean was very like broad and just like bad tech guy vibes, like just negative broadly on the left and the folks that support Mumdani, they all like kind of just broadly don't like Sean right now because of what he said. With Augustus, it's like there are a few people

who were completely animated by the theory that he was responsible for the floods. And so he had to address them really deeply. Yeah, he's defending his business, his industry, his actions. Yeah. The question for me is like, there are times when someone needs to step up or stand up

outside of their core business, and this kind of bridges to the Brian Armstrong piece at Coinbase about being mission driven, which was basically like, in that context, it was like Coinbase is not going to be commenting on all of the current things that are happening in the world, all the different politics. We are gonna be focused on stuff that's related to crypto. And that was really well received.

Then the question is, for venture capitalists, should they only step up and start talking about politics when it's like a ban on an important technology or a change to the way carried interest is handled? Or should they go as far as to say, you know what, like I care about what's happening in New York City even though I don't live there. I don't know.

I think that's like, it's certainly like, it's certainly like the riskiest, like you're the furthest away from something where you'll immediately have everyone in your industry rally around you, or everyone in your, because it's like, well this is very core to their business. But at the same time, it's like,

there is some value to just being like, this is less of just like an investor this is just like a person and they have opinions about everything and so I'm interested to talk to them and work with them because I and it also I mean in the original post like he did throw up a massive flag that was just like I'm pro-capitalist that's pro America right and so the question of like does this hurt Sequoia I think we were talking about this earlier it's's like, no, because the people that were really bothered by this or like didn't get through this nuance

and understand the Pac-Rady response and understand him unpacking it, like probably were not going to be in the Sequoia portfolio, right? So I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.com. Get your golden retriever set up on Linear. It's one of the greatest gifts that you can give them. What else is in the timeline we should go through? There's so many good stories. We should go through this story in the mansion section.

Let's do that. There we go, finally. There's a bunch of stuff. A California ranch is for sale for about 50 million. I really like this. There were two very interesting houses in the mansion section today, and they're both being sold by tech founders

who I've never heard of. And some of them don't, one of them doesn't exist online. So this guy, tech entrepreneur Don McKinney found himself at a crossroads in 2014 after four consecutive startups, crazy, including one that sold to Lucent Technology for billions of dollars. I give him permission to call himself a serial entrepreneur.

He's the Don. If you started four companies and you sold one for a billion, you can put serial entrepreneur in your bio. Billions. Billions. Yeah, I need to figure out exactly the whole deal here. I think this is, yeah, they have it here. So he basically, instead of doing another business, he basically retired and started building a crazy house.

He chose the latter. He purchased roughly 1,100 acres of ranch space in Sonoma, California for 12 million and painstakingly restored it, spending 33 million over the years. Now McKinney is looking to sell the ranch, which has multiple residences, two lakes, four greenhouses, and a custom wood shop

for around 50 million. Known as Sonoma Summit Ranch. The ranch is perched at the top of Sonoma Mountain about an hour from San Francisco. That is prime realism. Great option for a GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity. I was about to say, is it really worth spending

half of your bonus as an AI researcher on one house? Or is that unresponsive? Well, in many ways, your full bonus post-tax. Oh yeah, that's a good point. That's some ordinary income right there. That's really, really rough. Anyway. A Florida native, McKinney started his tech career

in Silicon Valley in the 1980s as a founding vice president. Let's give it up for all the vice Graphics Story firm worked on 3d imaging in 1991. He founded International Network Services Fantastic name which was acquired by lucent in 1999 for 3.7. 1999 selling What are you doing, buddy? I mean, I think I saw the time I think if I think he timed it hold on to that stock for two more years international network services They don't make they don't make they don't name companies like this. I mean actually they do now people are bringing it back

What was the company we talked about earlier this week? That was like it was? Wisconsin or oh, yeah, that was just a fan writing in. Yeah, no, but it's just real company. Yeah, yeah, real company, but not like hyped company. Well, soon to be hyped. Soon to be hyped, yeah, maybe, maybe. Yeah, let's look at this. By the mid 2000s, McKinney, a conservation advocate,

was looking for a ranch to preserve when he heard about an available thousand acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years. Wow. By sheer coincidence, McKinney and Avid Fisherman had caught a 1,119 pound marlin. Oh, so I have to actually, I have to correct this. So the branch was 1,119 acres. And by coincidence, he had caught a 1,119 pound marlin

in a fishing tournament a few years earlier. He took the parallel as a sign and bought the property. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? I've never been big into that world. No? in a few years earlier, he took the parallel as a sign and bought the property. That's insane. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? I've never been big into that world. No? I don't think I've actually ever. I've caught 150 pound halibut in Alaska.

There we go. And I did it when I was a kid, it weighed more than me at the time. Wow. It was the biggest like boost to my ego of all time. I caught an animal that was bigger than me. Every person should do that at least once. For sure.

I gotta do that. A thousand pound marlin, that is a huge, huge fish. So the ranch hadn't been touched in years. McKinney said he relished the opportunity to dig in. After tackling the ranch infrastructure, he turned to the main house, originally built in the 1950s. Many windows didn't close.

It was not clear where the front door was located. He took the roughly 4,240 foot square house down to the studs and rebuilt it. One by one he rebuilt the other outbuildings he said, including the circa 1930s cottage and a horse barn, which is now a party barn. There we go. Let's go.

A skilled woodworker, he also added a 5,200. He's a skilled woodworker? He's just building his own, this is- Legend. This is is the dream. Legend. Well so the interesting thing here, he bought this property when, so he bought the property in the mid 2000s. Was it 2014 or the mid 2000s?

Oh, I guess he started working on the remodel. The remodel the remodel. Yeah, so he's 45 million dollars into this property Selling it for 50, but he bought it in the mid 2000s. Yeah, so on paper Probably not the best But but the memories are probably fantastic time with returns on he also has a home in the Bahamas and He is selling so he and his partner have more time and resources to devote to philanthropy.

We wait until, why wait until we kick off and then have our estate dole it out? He said, let's participate now. That's great. The market for prime ranches is strong thanks to liquidity among other high net worth buyers. Probably those AI researchers, unironically. There's a lot of people hedging in land.

Yeah. You know, if you're worried about the top signals, buy some land. Buy a ranch. Anyway, get on Numeral too, numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

So there's another story in the mansion. Sales tax compliance platform of John Keoghan. It is, I use it. There's another tech person who has a $50 million home or just slightly under 49.5 million. This is an 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom home with a tennis court and a pool. And you're gonna love this.

I don't think you've read this yet. Not yet. Okay, I'm gonna blow your mind. So a circa 1930s estate, just a few houses from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is coming on the market for 49.5 million. The roughly 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom estate was the long time home of the late inventor,

Ronald Katz, and his wife, Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones, and for making breakthroughs in credit card technology. Built around the same. So if I'm hearing this correctly, sort of like AI agents for CX?

Exactly. Sort of like a vintage version of Finn? Yes, yes. I mean, I'm very excited to be hanging out with Owen in a few years. Hopefully he's patented Finn. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks,

number one in competitive make-ups, number one ranking on G2. But yes, so this guy has a whole Wikipedia page that we can pull up. We're looking for Ronald Katz. I think I have it in here somewhere. Let me see, I got so much stuff here. We're not getting through any of this.

Where is it? Ronald Katz. Okay, Ronald Katz, yes. So his inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology. He has more than 50 patents covering his innovations. Patents, I know so many people who have generational wealth from patents, it's crazy.

And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist in our generation. Kind of a lost art. It's a lost art. Toll free numbers. We don't know how to patent in this country anymore. We don't know how to patent. It's completely a lost art.

Actually, the person who bought my first company was a patent guy. He went to college and studied like chemical engineering and built a bunch of patents for like lubricating petroleum as it flows through oil pipelines. And he came up with some chemistry. It is so funny. Patented it.

And then he was like, yeah, in college, I was getting like 100K a month from licensing my patents or something like that, like sick. Yeah, there was a time when it seemed like the play was to develop technology, patent it, and license it out to companies. And then now if an entrepreneur comes to you with an idea. It's a bad signal.

And they say, yeah, I'm working on patents. It almost always is a huge bear signal. Yeah. It is such a lost art.'s like, well you should develop something and then capitalize on it yourself. Because it is like, you can definitely, if you get it right, you can make a lot more money from delivering the technology or whatever it is

via your own product and capturing that incremental margin. But yeah. It's interesting because the, you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents you right they'd be like just become the world expert in a certain field get a PhD in it spend ten years researching the frontier and then develop an innovation patent it and then

just cash flow free you know lifestyle forever lifestyle forever. It hasn't happened. I do have one friend that had something like this where he developed this supplement and effectively licensed it to a company and has just been getting millions of dollars a year for coming up on like 15 years. Did I tell you I have a patent? Ah, big patent guy. Maybe it's not a lost art.

I don't make any like cashflow off of it though, but I have a patent? Ah, big patent guy. Maybe it's not a law start. I don't make any cash law off of it, though. But I have a patent for breakers. The capsule. I can hear that. I don't even have the IEM thin. I can hear you. Yeah, I have a patent on the capsule pouch, the capsule nicotine pouch.

It's fantastic innovation. Invented. John Coogan, the inventor. I love it. Anyway. Mr. Marlboro. Not quite the portfolio of Ronald Katz. I'll take you through a little bit of his history It's interesting. So born 1936 in

1961 he co-found telecredit with Robert Goldman It was the first company to enable merchants to verify consumer checks over the phone Using an automated system without the assistance of a live operator. So this is 61, 61, like totally pre-internet. Someone says, I'm gonna write you a check, how do you verify that they have it? You have to call the company and say, do they have money in their bank account?

It's an agentic workflow. It's an agentic, it literally literally is because it cut out the live operator that was the telephone operator. It's actually an agentic workflow. You're 100% right. I know you're joking, but it's true. And so in 1988, he forms a partnership with Amex to provide call processing services.

That partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz Technology Licensing. And I great data for isn't first data huge. First data is the is the is the layer lip below stripe, right? I'm pretty sure. But it's a layer below stripe. Yeah, I'm pretty sure stripe is uses uses first data for acquisition of credit cards. I'm pretty sure it's the first processor of Visa and MasterCard. And so I don't know if they use,

that might be misinformation. I don't know if Stripe uses first data still, but I remember that like there is a lower level below Stripe and first data was like one of those. But Ronald Katz, where was this founded? Yeah, Nebraska. So Katz gets in there. Anyway, he also had the patent portfolio

that for companies using automated call centers, over 150 companies have taken a license to patents. The technology licensing company that he has earned approximately a billion dollars in license fees, such as suing accused infringers who take a license. He also founded Telebuyer LLC, a privately held company that commercializes inventions he made relating to electronic commerce and network-based monitoring systems. In the early 90s, Katz developed a computer-controlled video system for

monitoring remote locations and an advanced scheduling and routing system for telephone and video communications. Cash levers his knowledge and work in these areas to create an electronic commerce system to help businesses reach customers in remote locations. I love all these words. B2B SaaS founder. Absolutely insane, it's wild.

SaaS has been defeated. His house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy Mansion It the home resembles an English country house with tennis court and pool It sits on roughly one and a half acres and Holmby Hills overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club on Mapleton Drive one of LA's most storied streets. It's also adjacent to the spelling mansion, you know spelling manner Spelling manner. Have you heard this of this? Aaron Spelling, he was a big TV guy. He built the largest home in Los Angeles,

something like $100 million. It had a dedicated room for present wrapping. Because you're gonna wrap so many presents at that level. There are levels to this, for sure. Oh, actually when I moved into one of my first apartments, I got like, when we started making money young, I moved into like a it was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it was it had no walls or anything, because it's like open floor plan, because it's a studio and I'm just one guy. And and I had a had there was a room for a

there was room for a washer dryer, but I didn't have a washer dryer because we like send out the you made it a present I made it a present wrapping station And I put a little table there and you could like work from it, but it was like This is my version of a present wrapping room spelling. Yeah, it's like I'm Aesthetically in living in spelling manner So the cats have spent years renovating the estate before moving. Normal story here, the couple filled the home

with art and collectibles from around the world. The game room includes antique billboards, billiards table and vintage arcade games. Also on display was Madeline's collection of pigs, stuffed animals, ornaments, sculptures, and paintings. It started with just a few pigs and grew to become her thing, to friends and family, kept adding to the trope.

The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this? The, and what's it called? It's like, it's like the elephant problem or the giraffe problem. There's a name for it where, where you make golden retrievers your thing, and then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you?

Oh, you like pigs. Snowballs. And then it snowballs, and then everyone gets you so many that over 20 or 30 years, you develop like this massive collection of trinkets. For you, it might be horse accessories. I got you those horse electrolytes.

Oh, yeah. You can get just more and more supplements. You're not the first person to get me horse stuff. I told you, David used to get me mane and tail, the horse shampoo, just as a joke because I'm built like a horse I guess. He thought it was very funny. He loved it.

So yeah, maybe the beginning was a bit. Mane and tail, by the way, great new cut. Truman Sacks is really into the horse power metaphor. He's obsessed with horses and stuff. Everyone's gotta have a brand. Anyway, what were we saying? Oh, I said nice new haircut. Oh yeah, thank thank you. Horse could never horse could never the horse hair strong It was breaking the scissors. We broke multiple pairs, but we did get it cut. It's thick. It's thick hair over here

But you know who else has like the yeah, what's it called? It's like the grandma elephant problem or whatever this this woman who has this house has like an insane collection of pigs because she started collecting pigs, everyone gave her pig stuff. Somebody said that Peter Thiel is the same thing with Tolkien. He named a few companies after Tolkien and now everyone's like, everything you do must be Tolkien referenced. Like if you are at all involved or whatever, like I'm getting you another copy of Tolkien and and like you know this person was kind of commenting like you know like he might not watch the movie every night you know he might just be like generally a fan of that and then also a fan of other things but people tend to collapse the

meme around you down to just like oh you're you're not just you're just into Tolkien and other things, you're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff. So, anyway, fun stuff. Well, in other news, we have a post from brother Reggie James who's been on the show before. He says, I need TBPN to bring back Cougar Knight at the Rosewood.

Has it gone anywhere? Someone needs, if you're in Silicon Valley, go to the Rosewood and report We gotta ask we gotta ask praying for exits though. He might be aware give some good coverage on yeah, he might be aware But we were when we were at the Rosewood for what staying there the night before YC demo day you remember overhearing this like the most the most there was there was a Man and a woman

like a table away from us having the most deranged conversation, the most rosewood coated conversation of all time where I think she was divorced or going through divorce talking about like breaking down, loudly breaking down their entire financial situation and being like basically like like, I'm good because we have Kerry in this fund

that's definitely gonna hit in the next. Never have I wanted Clearview AI more. Are you familiar with Clearview AI? The software to identify. Yeah, you take a picture of someone and it scans the internet, it tells you immediately who they are. And it's like very controversial

and people are like oh this is like you know total like surveillance state stuff but I would have loved to know what BC she was talking about yes it was an absolute there was other stuff it was like oh yeah I've been checking our credit card and we're just seeing like he's hitting he's hitting no in every city absolutely wild well Ryan has a good story here Responding to Reggie's post is one time in 2012 my co-founder And I crashed and burned so hard in a pitch on sand held the partners wrapped with look It's it's cougar night you guys would actually do pretty well there

So that's the beauty of Sandhill Road you could crash and burn I don't even get this I I don't get this post. Like why would they do well if they're? Well, like maybe like they're just. Crashed and burned. Oh, oh, oh, oh, like the company has crashed and burned. Or something. No, they didn't do well on the pitch.

Okay, so it was like maybe you can marry Rich. Yeah. That's what he was saying. Okay, got it. That's hilarious. A couple of studs head over to the Rosewood. Anyway, underrated strategy. over to the Rosewood. Anyway, underrated strategy, go to the Rosewood,

talk to the Cougars, sell them your product. If you're an SDR, just go and pull out Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio's the A9E of CRM. Having Adio on deck for Cougar Night is crazy alpha. Do you keep the Cougars in the CRM or no? But they're potential like leads, right? Yeah, for sure.

If you're selling to VC and there's a Cougar there, maybe you could sell SaaS to that VC and it would re-inspire him to grind harder and save the relationship. Save the relationship, yeah. It's possible. Anything could happen. Anything can happen.

Nothing like the joy of implementing a new B2B SaaS product in your workflow, in your everyday workflow. If you do that, that could just reinvigorate your entire life. Yeah, you're just at cougar night, just can't stop talking to the cougars about agentic workflows for saving your marriage. No, you're just like, why would I want to go on a bender

and go to no-boot when I could be grinding? I've been reinvigorated. Many people are saying that. Well, we talked about the top signals, whether you're long, whether you're short, you make your own decision, you do your own research. Then go express it on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously.

Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions. Let's talk about the VW bus. We gotta talk about the VW bus. We had Dylan Parker for a moment yesterday talking about his fix. He raised a Series B for his fixed income platform and he mentioned that they power Publix fixed income.

I knew it. So, very cool. Let's talk about the VW bus. So, the electric bus. The Wall Street Journal claims that it is a failure. We're gonna figure it out. How Volkswagen's electric bus went from American flagship to flop the German company's hyped reboot

of its iconic vintage van has been stunted by a luxury price tag. Trump's trade war in an embarrassing recall. And so, this Wall Street Journal article goes through the kind of story of the ID Buzz, the new crazy name. We should talk about so much here. First off is like, I do not understand why

a change in the powertrain requires a new brand name, a new sub-brand name sub brand name for product. It should be like a trim level. I think it shows lack of conviction. Yeah. Like, I mean, BMW is doing this with like the I4 instead of the 535i, the I5 is gonna be the electric one. And it just is more confusing.

We know somebody that if BMW were to touch the M series, they would make Jan-6 look like a children's birthday party. They'd be very upset about that. But so it was always confusing. Why didn't they just bring it back as like the bus and now you can get it with an electric powertrain? But then also it's like this fun, kitschy, nostalgic vehicle.

And what was the price tag on this thing? It was like 70,000 or something like that? So much money. Yeah, so even before the recall, the luxury sticker price of the ID Buzz, which starts at about $60,000 kept a break on sales as consumers pivoted to more affordable wheels in the US

where the vehicle became available toward the end of last year. Just over 3,000 had been shipped to dealers by the end of March. And then there was a slowdown in EV sales, the tax credits are going away, and President Trump's tariffs have caught automakers off guard, very, very rough.

Yeah, so in Dallas, European car enthusiast and parts supplier Autry McVicker said he was dead set on getting the buzz until his dealer told him that the palmelo yellow and white version he had his eye on would cost around $72,000, far more than he expected. Yeah, this feels like, you know, premium SUV territory. So 45K, 50K maybe 55k 72 feels crazy for

this and and it seemed like I don't know why they couldn't get the price down do you think it's something to do with just the actual manufacturing complexities of electric vehicles because Elon is able to sell a car that's Similarly capable although the model Y has way more range and and features and so it's hard to go up against The if you're if you're comparing the the buzz to the model Y In a spreadsheet you're gonna get okay buzz is like cool and different looking But am I really willing to sacrifice so many features and pay twice as much. okay, Buzz is like cool and different looking, but am I really willing to sacrifice so many features and pay twice as much?

Yeah, it is interesting. I'm seeing a original 1973 Volkswagen bus for sale for $65,000. It's got 85,000 miles on it. Yeah. It's seen a lot, but it's possible that, who knows what went into pricing it. But they might have said, hey, we're

making this bus for that category that wants just a fun leisure vehicle. It's not super functional. You're not going to drive it to the snow. You're maybe driving it around town, going to the beach, things like that. But it doesn't feel like a, it just doesn't look like a car that somebody is going to daily.

And that feels like a huge problem. If it's 65K, the average American might, I don't know, I probably shouldn't say the average American. But middle class family might say, hey, let's get the Volkswagen bus as our daily family car. But it doesn't, it just looks kind of funky and loud.

And I, it just sticks out. I mean, so, so in this article, they say that, uh, the ID buzz in Germany, like the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car, like a halo product, which is, it sounds funny when you compare it to like the Audi R8, of course, but they said the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms, and they're not really planning to sell in great numbers. So you're like, Oh, that ID buzz just does look different. When I go to get my next car, I should I'm just sick of having like the same plain white SUV that looks

like everything else. But then you go in and you're like, Wait, how much is it? And is it really that much better than features against the VW Atlas, I guess, is their full size SUV? And so you walk out of there with an Atlas, which is probably around 55, 60, I guess. I actually don't know where the Atlas is. So you can get an Audi Q8, which is, feels much more like a premium product for the same price.

Yeah. So, and it's just a lot more functional. feels much more like a premium product for the same price. Yeah. So and it's just a lot more functional. How much did that Cullinan sell for in Cars and Vids that was like it had like 200,000 miles? Did you see this? The one that we were recommending people get is like a call booth for their office.

We were recommending that? I don't remember that. Probably. I mean, we broadly were recommending picking up an old Continental GT instead of a phone booth. Yeah, okay, so a Rolls-Royce Cullinan black badge, 2020, so it's only five years old, sold for $170,000, just barely twice the price of the ID Buzz,

but it has 114,000 miles on it. Can you imagine putting 114,000 miles on it. Can you imagine putting 114,000 miles on the Rolls-Royce Cullinan in five years? I can, I would love to. I would love to. I mean, that's so, so many miles. But people were debating this, saying like, okay, yeah, if you're putting that many miles,

like it has to be highway miles, so they're not hard miles. It's probably fine. And Rolls-Royce has a bad reputation as being in the shop all the time, but if it made it this far, maybe it'll make it another 100,000 miles. And it actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steal of a century at 170, who knows?

Could've been bombing around in a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Anything else on the VW bus thing? I still think it's, I just think it's, it is hard that they priced it so high. Maybe the opportunity is more like Tesla just needs more different trim levels but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices because like how different is the world if the Cybertruck is cheaper? Does it even need to be?

Should it stay up there and be this halo car? Yeah. Yeah, the interesting thing with the bus, I mean, as somebody who lives, I live in Malibu. I bought a Mercedes Metris because I wanted a family van, something I could drive around surfing with, et cetera. And I have zero interest in the Volkswagen electric bus.

And that's an issue. The other thing is, if I was thinking about a car, if I wanted a surf, like a car just to trash and take to the beach and and take surfing you can get a Raptor for like 70 It's like obviously very different But if you're a dad that wants like a kind of a car you can like beat up and do a lot of things in and Throw the kids in do you want to drive this like novelty? Vw that's gonna depreciate like 50% in a year or get a Raptor.

I think it can be a very cute mom car and it can definitely like if you look at Volkswagen's current line up. Do they really want the buzz over like a Q7? No but isn't Audi a Volkswagen product too? So there's totally a flow where you go in for the buzz thinking like maybe I'll get the quirky thing and then you walk out with a Q7 or you walk out with an Atlas,

which is basically a Q7 too. Or you upgrade, you get an Urus. Which is cute. Cayenne Turbo GT. Is that a Volkswagen product too? Yeah, Porsche's Volkswagen. At least the Cayenne GT looks different. But part of the reason that the VW bus is so legendary

is it was an icon, and they spent a lot of time building that brand. They ran a lot of out of home advertising. They probably would have loved AdQuick back in the 60s when they were pushing the buzz. AdQuick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combinescom, out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And let me also tell you about Wander. If you're wandering around with your ID buzz, or your bar, summer, you gotta find your happy place. It's 12.39 p.m. Pacific. You can book a Wander today. Today. Pacific you can book a wander today today with inspiring views

Yeah, five star amenities and you can hotel graded amenities, of course dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service It's a vacation home, but better folks go go get on a wander and we have our we have our guest In the studio. What are we doing? tropics a bunch of things so Let's bring him in welcome to the stream. How you there is? It's great to have you in the temple. What's going on? I hope you don't mind if I do a shot before we start doing what Johnson olive oil. Oh Brian Johnson oil shots Okay, there we go

That's insane. I love it is that how does it taste yeah, give us a taste review as olive oils go It's spicy, but it's super tasty spicy. Okay. Yeah This is short-term performance enhancer like you're on the show for 20 minutes right now Are you gonna get a boost for the next 20 minutes? Or is this more like you do daily and then it improves your performance? It's less of like a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing to do and just to get really good fats in. But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys,

so I'm just gonna pop on a glucose monitor here. Okay. You're really maxing that up. He's just defined out of Kugin. He raises my blood sugar or not. Take us through the rest of the staff. What else are you doing? Some context on this.

Farb's a buddy. He's also here in LA with us. Investor. But the real reason I wanted to have you on is because I feel like you have consistently been maybe two years ahead of me on various different types of health biohacking experiments and I've always felt like I was somewhat ahead like in 2020 I had a you're like 20 years ahead of normie

still I had a farb you would have loved this I had a cold plunge just in my bedroom in college no it's 2020 okay dorm room didn't you tell me the college the dorms it's like six dudes in one unit well you see UCSB will have like 15 guys but anyways you've impressed me They punch days on during sex, they say. Yeah, I think Luke has my understanding on for sure. But anyways, you've impressed me with how at the frontier you are. So I want to have you on to talk about everything, get the update on how you're thinking about GLP-1s, peptides.

We can talk about a bunch of other things. But why don't you give a quick intro yourself, and then we should start with your stack, what you're running today, and then we can get into some subtopics. Great, great. Farboot Nivi, sort of health nut, entrepreneur, investor, have a new project that we're just getting off the ground right now, it's called Protocols,

and hopefully we'll have some big news to share on that in a few weeks. So yeah, I guess that's my intro. Where would you like to start? Yeah, let's start with what you're running today. Or what do you think you do that has a power law outcome on your health? Because sleep diet, exercise seem like the most important

and then you get down into like, I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight and it's like, is that really gonna be the 19%? Or Pharma's doing like gene therapies and stuff like that. So, I did some gene therapy. Walk me through what's important and then what's more experimental.

I've done like tons of experimental stuff. I've been doing blood work for well over a decade. I got, you know, folistatin gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here. No way. They're probably getting near the end of their lives because they, you know, last a year or two. And I mean, the crazy thing is like, despite being a health nut, I kind of found myself at the end of last year, beginning of this year, sort of overweight, depressed and pre-diabetic. And, you know,

I'm 48 now, so these things creep up on you. You can't do what you did 20 years ago and get the same thing 20 years later. And so I kind of sat back to figure out like, what's wrong with my stack, right? What's wrong with my routine? And really, what it came down to is that I don't really have a routine. And I'm sort of making it up every day. I think Shane Parrish was on Chris Williamson and said, had this great point, like a person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day. And I'm like, that hit me really hard. I'm like, oh, wow, we're doing self-negotiation every day.

We're like reinventing what it is to be a human being on a daily basis. What do I eat? Should I exercise? And I'm like, I'm really bad at routines. So that was actually the problem that I set out to solve. And in doing that, I actually ended up stopping taking TRT. So I don't take testosterone anymore. I stopped taking- How was coming off that by the way?

That's super interesting because I feel like everyone, the narrative is like, once you're on it, you can never get off of it because your body stops producing it naturally. And you're like, you're either on it forever or you know, you, you should never touch it. That that's like the common narrative. This was like another problem with my routine. I would take TRT. I would do it for a month or two and then I'd stop. So you do it super consistently.

It takes a while for, you know, the boys downstairs to turn off. Okay. You know, so like you can do it for a month or two and stop and they'll come back. And so I did a ton of blood tests actually. And my most recent one, which I just did with function, I did a huge function panel. And my testosterone is like 600, 700. My free testosterone is above 100. It's pretty good. That's great. Yeah So yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well and we can kind of get into a little bit

I've done peptides for probably seven eight years. And so my stack right now, how are you getting? How are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious How are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious. Which is when the Chinese. Yeah, okay, like this all up and down. And also just like, I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is like glucagon-like peptide, like GLP-1, and that's generally not seen as a peptide

for guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about like, what peptides even drew your eye or were interesting or like, what was even the goal with those? Yeah. I mean, I like to experiment some, you know, seven, eight years ago, I'm like, let's see what these peptides are about. And peptides are just like short strings of amino acids,

like a protein is a long string of amino acid, the peptide is a short string. And they're used a lot in signaling in your body. So you can take one peptide that tells your body to make more human growth hormone. And that's kind of interesting because it's that BPC 157. Yeah, BPC 157 is different. BPC 157 is like this sort of broad ranging peptide. You actually make it in your gut. And if you just give yourself a lot more, it seems to help with healing in general. But other ones increase growth hormone, other ones improve deep sleep. And if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it. And to your question

about like, how was I getting it, in the years that I've done peptides you could get it from a doctor you couldn't get it from a doctor you could get it from a doctor kind of in limbo now and all these sites they sell it for research purposes and which you were actually using for research purposes research purposes yeah but it's not for human consumption. The GLPs, which are another type of peptide, are the ones that you get like Monjara, Ozempic. And that world's really getting crazy too, because we know the brand name Ozempic, but like Ozempic is old news. The current one is Terzepotide.

Yeah, that's right. And then Rettitrutide is coming next. And there's two or three more after that. Do you think those will break into kind of like athletic men who are maybe sitting at like 13% body fat? Or is it- Already did. Or is it gonna microdose?

Or do you think it will remain as just like a powerful tool for weight loss? Well, yeah, the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around, you know, GLP-1s or trisepatide helping with like willpower broadly. So imagine just having 20% extra willpower. But then there's a counter example of like, it makes you less risk on.

And so like Wilmanitis has that post that's like, what is the effect of capital allocators broadly being on GLP ones? Like, will we be less risk on society? They're not going too long. They're just- Like, yeah, will we have less volatility? Maybe that's how we save the T bill, you know?

It's like people are just like, yeah, I'm fine to just earn 2%. There's a bill in the house for testosterone? What are you talking about? I'd love to see it. We should get one in there. Yeah, I'm investing in T-bills. I'm taking the majority of my bills and paying T.

People microdose these things. They seem to have a lot more than just weight loss effect, blood sugar regulation. They seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of studies. So there's even a, you know, some people just micro dose them. Like sometimes when I was doing it, I was taking a really small dose, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what the even starting dose is. Do you feel like a plateau though? Because it feels like, you know, I remember the first day in college I tried caffeine. I had coffee I actually didn't have caffeine until college and it was like amazing and I've had that experience a lot of things and now it's

Like, okay I kind of just need a bunch of caffeine to get back to baseline And I imagine that you you maybe experienced that with your journey on peptides and testosterone But then is it like is it like once you get to the plateau, you pull it out and then kind of reset the baseline? How do you think about that? I used to think nonstop about that and do it all the time. And I kind of don't anymore.

Now I have a routine that I stick to. It's like light first thing in the morning, hugely important. Like on your phone, right? Just max the brightness out. Yeah, hold it there. VR headset, AI slop in the morning. That's hugely important. It actually sets your bedtime when you get light in your eyes in the morning outside. Okay. It sets your bedtime like 16 hours later. Wait, and what what counts for getting light? Like I walk to my car in the morning at 530. Does that count?

I'm outside for a minute and then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess. Yep, that's the light. But you know, maybe get three to five minutes. Three to five minutes. So I should like kind of walk around the block or something a little that's right this morning this morning I got up like you got to my house You're driving into the office, and I was running like five minutes behind so you kind of had five minutes Just putzing around out there. I do that was for your health John

Thank you, not you do it. That's helping you that's helping your health yeah, and then I usually you know do the morning stuff Pound a lot of water in the morning. I learned this from a buddy of mine, Jack Dreyfus, who has this sort of morning ritual about not using his phone and chugging water. And those are actually sort of life-changing. You don't want to blast social media into your eyes in the first hour.

It really changes your neurology if you don't. Then gym, getting vitamin D walks outside, a whole list of supplements that I take. It really changes your neurology if you don't then gym Getting vitamin D walks outside a whole list of supplements. What do you like in terms of gym? What do I do for gym? I do like 15 minutes every other day. Okay. Wow, that's like short Yeah, yeah Recovery maxing. Okay recovery maxing interesting Yeah, so so how I'm assuming you yeah, I in recovery. Yeah, so how have you noticed since, I'm assuming you went through a period

where you're just like, bro split, chest back. You seem like you've done crossfit, I don't know, I'm just throwing stuff out. No, I'm like the last guy you'll see doing crossfit, yeah. Okay, but have you ever done it? No. Never. But were you ever running a bro split, like chest back, legs, chest back, legs, rest on Sunday, did you ever running a bro split like you know chest back legs chest back legs rest on you know

Sunday did you ever do that? I'm kind of like light version of that now like to me the thing I learned is that like a Little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference interesting So like get having a routine where you kind of do these things regularly So having a routine where you kind of do these things regularly, that actually makes a bigger difference than going like crazy on one thing, which kind of puts your health lopsided. That's actually the, you know, I was mentioning protocols earlier. It's a little app we've been building that kind of makes all this easy. We call it Health Maxing with Friends.

So you can basically do these little routines. You can build a stack for yourself and then you kind of do it with friends. They do them too. You see their faces appear as they get them done throughout the day and that has honestly made the biggest literal difference in my health of anything I've ever done. Not even close. That makes sense. Talk about microplastics in glass. I know you've been diving into this. That study came out. Everybody was like, wait, this feels like some propaganda from big plastic that says, yeah, even your glass water

has plastic. Don't plastic propaganda. Well, that was the, remember, there was a talk at Hereticon about that. Remember, it was like, how would you get people to use more glass or something or use more plastic? Well, that was more of an exercise. Yeah, it was a mental exercise about how to get people to use more glass or something or use more plastic. Well, that was more of an exercise. Yeah, it was a mental exercise about how to get people to use more plastic.

And one of the ideas that people threw out was make glass sound bad. Yeah. Dangerous. And here we are. Here we are. What is the actual data? Well, the study was done by, I think, a French organization. So we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or

actual science. So we have to put it to the test. So basically they found there's more plastic in glass bottles than in plastic bottles. And the culprit is the cap at the top of the bottles. They have a little plastic inside the cap of the glass bottle and it seems like that's the plastic that's getting into it So I'm actually replicating the study. I found a local lab that will Do the analysis I'm gonna get a bunch of different waters and just send it in and see what the results are Do you know how big the study was in in France? Because I feel like size I mean it was like a pretty well done study I feel like the whole the whole difficulty is. I mean, it was like a pretty well done study. I feel like the whole difficulty is like,

do you test, like what's the variability? How do you get the actual size? Are you testing like hundreds of water bottles? Thousands or like five? The other thing is like, the big thing with plastic, and people don't say it as much, but it's kind of started there, is like don't leave your plastic bottle in the car.

Sure. Because when it gets hot, it leaches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So I don't know if they're comparing it, you know, to a leached plastic bottle versus a glass one that's not going to. Another one. How, uh, what are you doing around cholesterol right now?

I know you were running an experiment there a while back. Yeah, this was actually kind of an accidental experiment. Uh, I, uh, I take most of Brian Johnson's stack just because it's like everything I want and it's easy and I trust him. So one of the things he has is red yeast rice. So I'm like, whatever, I'm just taking the red yeast rice. And then I just sort of happened to do a blood panel before and after and my cholesterol has always been pretty high, including some of the bad ones as they say. And all of a sudden everything just went green and I have this peak cholesterol panel and so I had to kind of look back through my app and chat with our little AI and figure out

what happened. And basically it was just like immediately it was the red yeast rice. Because red yeast rice is basically a statin So monoclon K is one of the statins and that's what red yeast rice has and so I just kind of basically taking a low-dose Statin for a while. It's kind of crazy. So is that something you'll cycle going forward or just effectively do consistently? Probably take consistently some people I pair it with like a good dose of CoQ10. Because some people, statins or red yeast rice, they experience like some muscle soreness.

And it seems like taking a good amount of CoQ10 basically takes that away, which for me it does. Makes sense. How are you, have you been playing around with hyperbaric oxygen chambers at all? I'm sort of anticipating that that is the next version of the home sauna or the home ice, you know, cold plunge. It feels like we're maybe a couple years out

from more commercial or more consumer-friendly versions of those products because they're showing tremendous benefits, but if you actually look at buying one, it's like this like $30,000 machine that looks like it's out of a hospital and it looks really kind of scary. But I wanna be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of going.

They're in mixed branding too. Like the first time I heard about a hyperbaric, like sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, it was Michael Jackson. And then, I'm pretty sure that's like the first time it entered my mind as like something that you could do. Although, extremely valuable for scuba divers, because you know, if you get the bends,

like you need to be in a hyperbaric chamber to recompress. And so it's like a life-saving technology for in the scuba diving world. But then it was like used as like used as this odd, crazy health hack. But then Brian Johnson has been talking about it a lot. So yeah, what's your take on the hyperbaric chambers? I'm actually in the process of finding one to purchase and put here in the office.

And it seems like it's basically one of the best things you can do for longevity and health. And the thing is you need to get up to about two atmospheres. So they have ones that are like 1.3 atmospheres of pressure, 1.4, somewhere above two. But it seems like two is the spot that kind of gives you the most benefits. It's sort of the sweet spot.

I mean, literally improving your DNA, increasing your telomere length. I think Brian Johnson said it was the best skin treatment he's ever done, and the guy does a lot of skin treatments. So yeah, I think you're right, it's gonna get bigger and bigger. It's a little bit of a nuisance, because you're in there for an hour to an hour and a half.

Doesn't he work? I thought Brian Johnson was doing emails in there or something. Yeah, he has one that you can kind of sit upright in and get stuff done. Okay. Yeah, I like these more, you know, I think the reason that saunas are so great is that it's passive. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to say, or sorry, willpower to say, oh, I'm going to go and do it.

Points here on TVPN. Yeah. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to go and say,'m gonna go and Sit in the sauna for 30 minutes, and it has tremendous benefits And I think the same thing for the hyperbaric chamber you can go in there get some work done read a book Listen to TBPN Etc. Yeah, it's on 24 hours. Yeah, it's it's a wild time. We've got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline they They think they have a shot that you know will lower your cholesterol for life in one shot what that's crazy the company that the company that did my gene therapy is

working on one that'll increase your IQ that's insane Wow how what what what's the how much data do you personally need to run an experiment on yourself like the IQ one it it feels like, yeah, if you got 20 people that got some benefit. You might be Faust-maxing. You know, you're just down for Faustian Bargains. Yeah, always. As long as it's not harmful,

I'm generally okay with trying it to see what it does. Sure. Last question, I'm curious, what's your thinking around, I think I know the answer already, but this sort of ancestral philosophy, sort of like consume things that existed hundreds of years ago versus something being made in a lab

is not necessarily bad and you should take advantage of science. I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's convenient and easy, but I don't think it's a great heuristic, right? Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it. And neither of those are great explanations as know bowing to ancestral ways or to science if you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works then you should be kind of suspicious of it and i don't i don't think either of those are great explanations you know you gotta take things on their face circadian alignment is it i mean it turns out that the bro scientists were right on a million things um we thought diabetes type 2 was literally incurable

before the 2010s. Bro scientists always thought you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Finally in the 2010s after a hundred years of thinking it was incurable, we realized you can actually reverse type 2 diabetes. So in a lot of cases the bro scientists are right. Gotta continue to bro down. Trust the experts. Trust the experts, the bro scientists. Awesome. Well, we'd love to have you back on again when you have more news in a couple weeks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, let's hang soon. When you have more, when you're running your experiments, whether they're on yourself or water, hit us. We love breaking news. Great to see you. Okay, great.

Happy to. See you guys. Have a good one. Bye. See you soon. Cheers. If you're looking to upgrade your sleep game, head over to ateSleep.com. That's right.

Pod 5 Ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod 5 actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body, and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep head over to eat sleep calm we got Sean Frank in the studio The man who invented the wallet Invented e-commerce here. He invented e-commerce. He invented the wallet and now he invented podcasting with us. Welcome to stream. How you doing? It's been too long Guys, I'm doing great. I heard the eight sleep ad. Yeah, I got two perfect scores in a row. No way way Yeah, yeah, that is so hard to do. Yeah

Last night posted hundred I posted it on Twitter So yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that was the intro that I got how many well, how many one-year-olds? Do you have at your house? Zero, okay I'm kind of playing with one hand or two hands tied behind my back here. But yeah, congratulations are I thought I went through about a year period where my my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly. I have an idea every night.

A sleeping bag for a four year old that they can't get out of kind of a straight jacket, a padded room that's temperature controlled with a lock on the door. So the kids can't get up so dark, but we're going to turn this, you know how there's like every shows like the Manosphere content. We need to do the data sphere content. You're not a dad yet, so it won't really work. We'll need different guests for that, but we need to get really hard and hardcore in the dad content. Anyway, let's talk about Tik TOK, Tik TOK selling to us owner to get really hard and hardcore in the dad content. Anyway, let's talk about TikTok.

TikTok selling to US owner to get ready. They're turning down the focus on shops and pushing the ad product again. Shops has always lost money. I didn't know that. And without the parent co-funding it, no one wants to eat that loss. TikTok will be an ad platform again,

at least for the rest of the year. Break that down for us. What does that mean? What are the implications? Yeah, have you guys ever bought anything from TikTok shops? No, I've never used TikTok. Dude, I love that, John.

You're a true patriot. But yeah, so TikTok shops, I mean, if you talk to people inside of TikTok, like high up, they do not see Metta as a competitor. They don't want to compete with Metta. Like it's obviously like they're, they both have short form video now there, but like Tik Tok never really was a social app

in the way that Instagram and Facebook really are. I heard this this morning, people are, one of our younger friends was saying like, the Gen Z, they don't DM each other on Tik Tok. They use Snapchat to talk and chat. And then they use Tik Tok as like a YouTube style content. Yeah. So like if you talk to people with TikTok, they really want to go after the YouTubes

of the world. They really want to go after Amazon, right? Because Amazon is this big pot of money. It's 600 billion a year in e-commerce revenue that no like Amazon's given up trying to grow. Right? So we have Prime Day going right now. It's four days of Prime Day. They doubled the length year over year

and they said that it'll grow 20%. So each day is down like 40%. When you add that up, you get 20% growth. It's just pure value extraction for Amazon at this point. There's gonna be more ads. Like they've signed up 100 million Prime members. That business can't really grow anymore. So there's this big pot of money

that Walmart tries to attack. Pro-natalism might change that. I expect Amazon to start lobbying for subsidies for young families to just like, we just need to triple the population in the United States when we get some more prime members. We were laughing earlier about the fact that I believe Amazon makes more in net income

than Tesla makes in revenue. Like way more. Way more. It's crazy. There's levels on the mag seven chart. Anyway. Yeah. So, so, so, uh, but it sounds like with, with tick tock, going to us owner, like something's changing there. Break that down. Yeah. Uh, so they spent probably 24 months and easily $30 billion trying to get people to use TikTok shops. Right now,

the estimate is that it's a billion dollars a month in GMV, so a $12 billion GMV business that could be high, it could be low, it changes. That's not very big. Shopify's GMV in a quarter is probably double that. Shopify probably has a quarter billion in GMV. So they haven't been that successful getting people to actually shop repeatedly. And to get that billion dollars, they lit a bunch of money on fire with subsidies. Wait, do you mean a quarter trillion? Quarter trillion in GMV for Shopify probably.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. That's what I meant. And you know, we have Amazon at 600 billion, right? So like, TikTok is trying really hard. Their goal this year was to get to 20 billion in GMV, right? So to be like one 10th of what Shopify is at. And when they launched for the first 12 months, it was aggressive subsidies.

So they would come to brands like mine and they'd be like, hey, sell on our platform and we will give customers 50% off. And then we're like, well, I don't wanna sell 50% off. They're like, no, no, we will fund it. We'll fund discounts, we'll fund free shipping. They made this aggressive push to try to get people to shop there, right?

So there was just screen deals. And simultaneously there was this other company, Flip, that was doing the same thing. Is that the right name for it? They were just basically giving away products. It was basically a, what was it, a wealth transfer from LPs to venture capitalists to the American consumer

Selling dollars for 90 cents Yeah, so and flip was the same thing all of them are I mean team Oh she and everybody's coming after like this disposable income in America, right? So flips like we're gonna take a social, you know commerce attack on it. Tick tock was the same thing. You know, team was owned by a publicly traded company in China. Right. It's worth like 200 billion dollars and they were losing, I mean, probably a hundred million dollars a month to try to get, you know, user acquisition. All of them are coming after Amazon. So that strategy would probably continue to play out if Section 321 didn't close. I don't know if you guys covered that. You had Ryan Peterson on, but it used to be that you

could ship goods via Tmoo from China to the US totally tax and duty free. So why is Tmoo cheaper than Old Navy or H&M or whatever else? It's they're paying zero taxes. So we closed that. Now Tmoo's revenue and their traffic has fallen 50% in like 60 days, right? They've taken their gas off of customer acquisition. Same thing's happening with TikTok. They have a really awesome app with a ton of users. And if they're forced to sell to the US, someone's just going to turn that into a cash cow, right? It's going to get bought by, you know, it's probably going to be Walmart or, you know, Apple of in is making a bid,

like all of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there. And if you have to do this, you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine, which is Google, which is Meta, right? So, you know, it will end up being more of a Meta competitor. They're gonna abandon the strategy of going after Amazon

and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should like you guys do yeah Yeah, interesting. Yeah was I have I had a friend that at the time that the the tick-tock band was being floated Or the app was being removed from the app store I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on tick-tock is he has a you know nine-figure e-commerce brand, and he was like, I don't really want it to be banned because I'm making like $2 million a month right now, and it's pretty good, but it clearly was just like fake,

and heavily subsidized, and totally unsustainable. Yeah, explain this interaction in the comments to that post. They barely, Ariel says they barely co-fund anything anymore hard disagree with this take and you said but that's why they stopped co-fund Co-funding things is that talking about tick tocks parent bite dance paying this or tick tock co-funding Promotions with brands. Yeah, so they've been winding it down for probably the past three months, right? And I mean, this is what is tick tock going to brands? Yeah, so the co funding is when you

run tick tock shops to try to get new brands in there to try to get your sales up, they are going to cover discounts, fees, and they will give the brand that money so that the discount pass to the customer. Yeah, so tick tock, you know, Amazon gets 15% of all transactions as fees. TikTok gets 6%, but they take that 6% and they give you 30% of your transaction back. That's that co-funding element. They started to slow that down drastically in January when they got banned. The writing was on the wall that they're not going to do this anymore, and they've been slowly bringing down co-funding.

And then if you go on TikTok, there's a term called ad load. It's how many ads you get per post, right? So, you know, on Instagram, it's like you have an ad load of 33% one in one in three posts are going to be ads, TikTok got to 50% of all ads were monetized through affiliate. Yeah, so it's natural post ad natural post ad post ad post ad post ad. Yeah. So it's, it's natural post ad, natural post ad, post ad, post ad, post ad. Yeah. And the ads are split between monetize via shops, which is, uh, you know, like affiliate posts and normal ads. They have turned that down drastically and made the ads way better. So

traditional advertising where I spend money to get people to my website, right? Like what metadose it's been crushing on Tik TOK ever since they, they made this change like three months ago. So the writing's on the wall. Tik TOK shop will be drastically deprioritized and the ads are going to start being awesome again. What about the state of live shopping in the U S were you guys at Ridge? Like, did you have somebody that was live on Tik TOK all day long selling wallets? Did you ever, did you ever at Ridge? Like, did you have somebody that was live on TikTok all day long selling wallets? Did you ever go live? Why do you think Sean has that podcast mic?

He's so- Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know, we've tried it because Amazon pushed it pretty aggressively, Flip pushed it aggressively, and then TikTok pushed it aggressively. We've tried all that. It doesn't really work in America without the subsidies. Right. Like there's this flywheel on TikTok where you get 50 people to go live. They all

start selling stuff. They push your product to the top. Then other affiliates want to come in and start selling it because it's a good selling product. But that only works when you heavily subsidize it. And that hurts your Walmart business or your Amazon business, your Whole Foods business, because nobody likes to be undercut I've had a lot of friends who you know, I have a friend who got to ten million dollars a month on Tik Tok shops, but in the grand scheme of things he has like a hundred million dollar a month wholesale business So it's like dude. It's just it's it was cool. It was exciting It was fast growing and they made it profitable for brands, but it's all falling apart. I don't think Americans really want live shopping and I don't think it's ever gonna catch on.

What about, so what do you think the future of platforms like Whatnot is? Is it focusing on these sort of like niche collectibles and auctions and things like that? Like, could it work in subcategories? Yeah, dude, and you know, to give TikTok credit, they brought affiliates back. Affiliate was a bad word in 2021. If you were doing affiliate marketing, you were selling the scammiest product on earth

or porn or Viagra or something. And they made more young kids be okay with selling stuff on the internet. So they made affiliate cool again. And I think we will see more of that, but it is going to be more, you know, niche. I think what not's a great platform if you like Pokemon cards or if you like gaming and you could see Twitch have more social comments built in, but it's not going to be the hundred billion dollar GMB business that Tik Tok trying to build it to and an e-commerce. It is in China, right? And in Asia broadly. Why does it work there and not here?

I don't know, man. I mean, customers in America are used to like infinite choice, right? The other thing is we have just really low e-commerce penetration compared to China, right? China's at like 40% of all transactions are happening online and America struggles to crack 15. So yeah. What's the downstream effect of like the ads getting better on Tik TOKs? Does that mean like brands need to be investing more in like actually like,

you know, Superbowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt like the Clueless thing? Like is it just algorithm hacking AI slop? Like, like what, what do you think the meta will be in terms of like actually having an ad really, really perform on tick tock post cell or post sale to US owner? Yeah. Well, I, I would start testing this right now, but what meta has pushed.

So, uh, uh, meta is like still the king of performance advertising, right? 130 billion in ads run through that platform. And they spent the past year working on something called Andromeda, which is their new ad engine, right? And all it is, is they want high velocity of creative. They don't care if it looks awesome. They don't care if it's AI generated.

They just want high variety, right? And they want you to feed the ad engine as much high variety content as possible. Really focus on short form video still, but like high production, UGC, AI, whatever you want to put in there. And then Andromeda just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time.

They've really focused on making sure they can like their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person. Take whatever winners you have over there. Cause men is a heavy lifting for you and just run them on tech talk. Are we, are we completely past the era of like, it was the Harmon brothers that were doing those like really catchy, really high production value videos. I remember like the dollar shave club launch video was kind of like the case

study in this where you could go get like a hundred million impressions on one really crazy ad and then do retargeting based on how long people watched. Like is that is that meta just completely dead? Are we no longer going to see like iconic ads for particular brands? Yeah. So Harmon Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich video. They did sandwich was another one that was really big in that.

Yeah. Raid Drop is still doing it. Yeah. The Bowman Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich Video. They did great. Sandwich was another one that was really big in that. Yeah. Raid Drop is still doing it. The problem is there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend. So if you're going to spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least $20 million promoting it. And it used to be that the ad cost could be a third right when you're running TV ads You'd spend a lot of money to make a really memorable thing and the delivery was only two-thirds of the cost

The delivery now needs to be like at least 95 percent of the cost and that just drives everything The investment in creative down. So is there I think yeah. Yeah, but is there some sort of like like on on Is there I think yeah, yeah, but is there some sort of like like on on Unquantifiable value or in the short term around like creating like what's called a shelling point so like we all know about like, you know the era's tour for Taylor Swift like it was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that or like Barbenheimer or like the Dollar Shave Club ad like everyone has seen it and so it has like enduring value for a really really long time and if you're creating like a bunch of like highly tailored random ads that are just kind of like generally out there you never

create a brand that has like yes everyone remembers that particular Nike campaign everyone remembers like this thing that broke through and everyone was talking about that ad. The iPhone or the iPod silhouette dancing campaign, everyone remembers that one. Are we just post that type of marketing? Or is there still potentially alpha, if you could underwrite it across two decades

and you're willing to take this really big shot, go make something great and then be like yeah we are going to spend 20 million against this one million dollar ad that we shot. It might take us a couple years to actually deliver to everyone but we're going to do it and it's going to pay back over like 20 years. I don't know my immediate thought is that it's not enough for people to just remember a moment of your brand or remember that your brand exists. It's not gonna, it doesn't guarantee to have value 10 years from today. Because like when's the last time you bought

a Dollar Shave Club product despite totally remembering the campaign. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and as long as it's hitting that ratio where 95% of the dollars are going to create it. So if you have a massive fucking budget where you're gonna spend a million bucks on a video and you can support it with 20 Million sure dude if that's what you want to do like it's but we're like when dollar shave club made that video

They didn't have any money. Yeah, so it was all organic exposure, right? I made a really good video that you know They really gambled on it where it was 100% of costs were going to add creative Yeah, and as add creative costs go down and as the internet gets Messier and harder to stand out like you just need to have that money spent on You know actually delivery What do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club like 100% of the the spend going towards the creative like? Clueless just ran this playbook

What's your reaction to that like they like the reason people have seen the Cluely viral videos is not because of ad spend. They're probably, it might be promoting it a little bit here and there, but mostly, they're just really good at getting engagement and going viral, and so people are remembering that. Now, maybe Dollar Shave Club is a cautionary tale for them, but is that even a tool in the tool chest that that founders should be reaching for?

Oh, yeah, dude Controversy and rage baiting right like we all know about cluey like yeah, it was a good video But like it's because yeah, they they're really good at rage baiting The other thing is like dr. Squatch did the Sydney Sweeney the bass Oh, yeah, right like we're gonna talk about that because of the controversy tied to it and like the outlandish nature If you want to make a really beautiful message the iPod dancing video nobody gives fuck You have to make somebody mad Yeah, it's rough. Yeah, explain to me. Dr. Squatch

I haven't used the products or I'm not really even familiar with it Like but there's news at the company to. Just tell me everything you know about it. Well, dude, every Sunday, me and Josh, the current CEO of Jack2Squash, play tennis. So you guys are in LA. If you guys are big tennis guys, you should come play. That'd be awesome. Dude, they're crushing it.

It's a great story. So the guy who made it, Jack, in 2016, they were doing $3 million. He had some other partners. And he had the foresight to understand the distribution was everything he raised like 30 million bucks He bought all of their partners out and with 27 million dollars remaining. He's like, I'm just gonna put everything into YouTube He dumped all of that money into you YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started Talk about which was contrarian because every brand at the time said you can't get YouTube to work

as a direct response channel, like programmatic YouTube. Like creator driven YouTube was working, but that wasn't like, that was a kind of novel insight that he had. Yeah, and it was a beautiful raindrop video. Like that video is still like, it was funny. It was iconic. And he's just like, men's soap is a massive category. This should be bigger. I'm going to bet the farm on advertising. He dumped it into it. They ended up getting a huge secondary transaction. Mollusk is a great bank. They ran that deal for him.

They ended up getting bought by summit. This was like peak COVID 2021. So then Summit put it in a great management team. Josh was there, working before there. And then they just scaled the thing. I mean, the numbers are like, they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars this year. They just got bought by Unilever for 1.5 billion. And it's a great outcome. I mean, Summit's going to make a ton of money. So we're kind of at the end of the fun cycle for a lot of those DTC funds, right? If you raise money from a brand, it's a 10-year fund like we're getting towards the end where there's gonna be a lot of consolidation Dr. Squatch is a winner made money all the way up and now they're gonna be owned by Unilever and they'll be the next You know generational men's personal care brand. They'll be the axe or like a bod spray whatever we had a middle school

That's not just watch so so seven years with the reaction on this video So seven years ago, they launched this video natural so for men as a hundred and twenty two million views on YouTube Was that the case of just amazing creative and it went viral naturally or did they spend money to get that? 120 million views they get like 20 million bucks into that video. OK, wow. I mean, it has 11000 comments. So clearly, like people, even if they saw it as a promoted post, like they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well.

So but wow. Yeah. What a crazy arbiter. I'm sorry, Jordan. I guess speaking of coming to the end of fund cycles, what is the state earlier this year? We were covering kind of the state of rollups wasn't looking that good. I still think it's not looking great. Will there be any real bright spots in that sort of category of investment? Right, right. And I think I said this before we got started. You guys had like the last guy on here was curing diabetes, right? Like okay if that works hundred billion dollar company

You know what? I mean, like we talked about Nvidia crossing four trillion dollars. It's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Dr. Squatch a 1.5 billion massive win. I was like Everyone in that group will end up being LPs and new funds, right? But like they're not gonna be Mark Zuckerberg They're not gonna be yeah, you know, the hundred billion dollar funds, right? But like they're not going to be Mark Zuckerberg. They're not going to be, you know, $100 billion outcomes, right? So then they're coming to We Are Wild. I'm friends with that team. They're in the UK. They got bought by Unilever as well. So I mean, multi hundred million dollar deal. You know, if you raise at a five or $10 million valuation and you exit for 200 million, that's like what venture returns used to be in 2011 or whatever

It's a massive fucking win, right? That's just the world could consumers still in so there there are a lot of winners, right? Poppy getting bought You know, there's every every like two or three weeks right now There's a new either CPG brand or haircare brand getting bought and like this, you know one 100 million to 500 million dollar range that's happening a lot right now with that consolidation What's the post mortem on the but but the actual but but the actual like roll up? like roll ups where I'm gonna raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of brands and You know

The hope would have been to IPO turns out It's very hard to make sure you're sure only a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands. Like the Thrasio thing. The Thrasio and then there was the open store. But a few others were trying that. But it's been rough going. I used to get emails for that all the time when I was running an e-commerce brand.

Like, hey, do you want to sell? And I'm like, no, like, did you look at Crunchbase? Like, it's not like that type of business. No, sorry, I misunderstood the question. Yeah, all of those are fucked. I think, I got a DM, I don't know if this is true or Sorry, I misunderstood the question. Yeah. All of those are fucked. I think I got a DM. I don't know if this is true or not that open source bankrupt.

So I don't know if that's been announced yet. Like they're all like Thrasio went bankrupt. Open source going to go bankrupt. There's like we thought there'd be synergies and like running all of these like small independent islands. But like now people still want large brands who can perform revenue right Dr. Squatch is that and like if you can get to 500 million dollars in revenue and consumer it's typically one brand there's typically a lot of profit tied to it like hex clad open store dot open dot

store which was the URL now reroutes to Jack Archer comm which looks like a men's which was one of their brands wear brand one of their brands is a men's... Which was one of their brands. Leisure wear brand or something. One of their brands. It's a dude, it's a Jack dude in a polo with some socks and some pants. Which we love. Looks pretty cool actually. How are you? So earlier on the show we ran through a list. Trump calling for lower rates while the markets are ripping.

Robinhood CEO raising for a math AI company a $900 million valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's given out stock tips. Harry Stebbings calling for eight trillion Nvidia circle at 2000 times price to earnings. It's 2000 times? 2000 times. No, it's 2000. Satya's being smart, doing some layoffs.

Then you have Soham Par Eek Massa's top blasting your favorite fin fin twit influencers launching SPACs Zucks making offers. Are you feeling the top? Are you are you worried right now, or do you think we got some room to run? Do that's a great question We probably got room to run, right? I mean, so let's go.

Wait, wait. So we have an update on the gong. Good friend of the show told us that we have not been properly warming up our gong before we hit it. Apparently there's a risk of breaking it or just making it sound poorly. So you have to just give it a couple taps There we go there we go They'll correct us in the comments we did it poorly, but we're learning our gong to anyways You said we have some room to run you said go ultra long sell your house So your can we expect an NFC profile picture for Ridge is like really kind of yeah

What the kind of no no it would be it would be an AI agent for for wallets. Yeah Wallet coin so I think it's back to ICOs got initial coin offerings. Yeah. Oh Well, yeah, how do you how do you I mean I think like? Ridge That's just navigated someone through so many different crazy cycles that it's probably business as usual Maintain a strong balance sheet, you know just stay profitable Grow, you know all the things that a business should do, but how do you plan around? that a business should do, but how do you plan around,

do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was, if he thinks that, if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy, there's certain brands that are gonna benefit from that, retailers, but I'm curious how you think about it. Yeah, you know, rates coming down just that are going to benefit from that retailers. But I'm curious how you think about it. Yeah. You know, rates coming down just open up financial markets again.

Right. So like it looks like the IPO windows open. Everybody's fucking, you know, rushing to the market. Bitcoin, all time highs. Fantastic. But, you know, we're getting a lot of inbound interest from P groups and banks because they think interest rates will come down. That makes leveraged buyouts work again. Right. Oh, so it's LBOs.

Yeah. So like private credit has dominated the private equity market for the past like three years because it's too expensive to buy stuff. You can lend out money, right? You have this big balance sheet. They want to go back into buying assets and restarting that clock. So that'll probably happen. On if the economy can rip, financial markets look tasty.

You know what I mean? There's a lot of really cool things going on. But job data still, like ADP put out their June numbers. And it doesn't look good, right? So I think we do end up getting rate cuts just because the financial markets are removed away from what's happening in a lot of businesses. So I think we'll get bad jobs reports. Yeah, what about rates on buy now, pay later,

and just the general consumer ability to click the checkout button on an e-commerce site? Like, in theory, I would imagine buy now, pay later products being highly sensitive to interest rates and yet it's always felt like don't think about the interest rate when you click this button. Right. Because the whole thing was that the interest rate was obscured.

Right. Like for a customer on Klarna, they pay a 0% interest rate and it's built into this payment processing rate that we pay. Right. So like the whole idea is that if I charge a brand 6%, I think shop pays like 6%. Shop pay has pay in four, right? These people pay me in four months. I have a 6% interest rate.

It works out to being 20, because they're paying back early. Maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25%. Who really knows? So there's like built in interest rates that like the brand's really paying. So if interest rates come down, you might expect those rates to come down and then companies are pushing that harder? Dude, if interest rates come down, buy now, pay later becomes a good business.

Right now it's probably not that good of a business because the payment contracts are locked in, right? Like Shopify for the next four years, I have to give them 6% or whatever it is of whatever the buy now, later is the future has come down They're just fucking you mean I can't renegotiate that so those people money on that thing But look never bet against the American consumer. We love buying shit private is four days this year, baby Four days

Last last question you to get the update on what percent like how much value Ridge is getting from AI, like Gen. AI right now. There were some big promises earlier this year from a variety of companies, but I'm curious like what the actual, yeah, what is the core value that you're getting today? Is it just more diversity of creative, being able to test more, or is it kind of business as usual? Yeah, so I mean, two buckets. Like data analysis, it's fantastic, right? I'm running all of my data through like a bunch of AI tools. It makes reporting way easier.

It makes getting like, what's gonna sell inventory, buying all that stuff is way easier with AI, right? I can just upload, hey, here's the 12 months of sales data. What should I buy? And it can actually start doing that for me. And it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have one person director in charge of all that stuff now, but it has replaced people.

On the creative side, VO3 is fantastic. So we're doing hooks on VO3. It's really good if you have still photography and you want to add a little bit of motion gifts, whatever, like it's great at doing that. And, you know, like I said, hooks are really fantastic static images. It just makes you, we can output way more static images than ever before. Um, but we're still not at the place where like, I mean, I spent. 150,000 dollars on photo shoots last month, right? Like in the desert, I tooling probably in the thousands or something

Yeah, hundreds right hundreds like we have cars in the desert off-roading like AI is not doing those videos yet I don't know if they have for well it's funny we made that video for wander and a large amount of people thought that it was AI generated Yeah large amount of people thought that it was AI generated. And I'm like, if you find me the person that is making that one-shotting any of those scenes and doing it at that level of consistency, we will invest our entire balance sheet

into your company. But yeah, that's good to hear. The data analysis side is interesting. That's historically just been one of the hardest problems. The number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory so that there's general demand for what they make and sell.

They just don't have enough of the right things. So just getting better there will make a huge impact. All the tools are getting better, whether it's like Excel or your analytics tool or your creative tool, your Photoshop's getting better. Content Aware Phil's been around for a long time. Now you have it on steroids, but yeah, still a lot of work to actually get results from that.

And so you still have people in the loop. And I think AI editing is going to be huge. You shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial. You probably shot hours to get a one-minute clip. AI is going to make editing way easier. So productivity gains are here, and they're coming. Another two years before humans are not actually

pulling out cameras. Two years. That's pretty fast. Dude, if you ask fucking Sam Altman, we'll see if OpenAI is going to be around in Two years, that's pretty fast. Dude, I mean if you ask fucking Sam Altman, I mean we'll see if OpenEye is going to be around in two years, dude. There might not be anybody left. There might not be anybody left, that's true. Yeah, I don't know. I think people will probably still be doing photos in a few years.

I'd probably take the over on that one, but certainly there will need to be more of a story behind why there's a photo taken. Is it of someone that you know exists? But if it's for something generic, like the stock photography will truly go away. Yeah, we're moving from the, you know, you can't trust images online because of filters, just like Photoshop, to you can't trust a photo because it's may or may not

be real entirely. Like it could have just been a hallucination from a machine. But does it matter if you just want to see a picture of a forest, generic trees in the background to, you know, tell you, to give you a vibe of what this Dr. Squatch smells like, you know? It's fresh forest, it's fine. I'm gonna make a plug. There's an AI artist on Twitter. It's, uh, I think the handles like this photo does not exist. They've produced some amazing

photography, right? Like that actually it's art. It makes you feel something. A lot of it's soulless, but these guys do a great job. So check that out. This photo does not exist. Yeah. I mean that, that, that, that's definitely like the pitch in mid journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like Check that out. This photo does not exist. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely the pitch in mid-journey is giving people the tool to create something completely new and leaving that inspiration that the human brings to the tool to create something new.

But it's very hard for someone to just go and say, make me a viral video. Make me a beautiful image. That's not the prompt yet. No. But we'll see. Anyways, it's great to see you wallet man let's hang in person very soon yeah let's hang out soon tennis guys so I'll see you in this time great to see you have a great Friday bye cheers on the AI note we should we should cover some of the back and forth

around grok 4 vs. oh three yeah Timey, founder of Epic Games, says Grok 4 feels like artificial intelligence to me. It's clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but it's drawing fairly deep insights on problems I hadn't seen before in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. Here's an example, and it's a very detailed example. The biggest shortcoming I see is the adoption of confused musings from online forums as facts coupled with the inability to derive deep insights from intermingled prose and graphics and sources. It needs contextual skepticism and more multimodal visual learning. Also I bet there are hundreds of thousands of

topics where a human professional could write a definitive guidebook on topics that online forum posters frequently confuse and that could be used to fine-tune a lot of the low quality user content driven nonsense out of AI models, out of current AI models. So bullish on the fine tuning labs that are generating data. What's interesting is Tyler Cowen says,

O3 is still better, so he's still in the O3 camp. And more XAI news, this is breaking as of 10 minutes ago Elon Musk's XAI seeks up to 200 billion dollar valuation in next fundraising Early talks early talks To boost its value from as much as 10 times from last year. They're on the frontier Let's see how much money they can make from this. This is the most about the highest value that's ever been applied to X Twitter the everything app. Well, it's not pre-revenue now. They're making money.

Yeah. Right? There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Omjad says, I suspect it's part of the reason they crush benchmarks. Truth-seeking is an all or nothing proposition and it's crucial for general intelligence.

Will Brown says, I think it's probably more the 200,000 H100s for RL and inference than the don't be woke system prompt. I do think this is some pretty clever marketing sleight of hand by XAI. Grok has been in the news lately for being edgy. Grok is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things

are deeply related, that they figured out how to scale RL like this in such a short amount of time is in fact an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's related to the willingness to say controversial things other than via the absence of efforts typically spent on guard rails. So yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just training,

RL, let's hit this as hard as possible. And we covered this, that the RL spend was apparently the same as the inference spend for this training run. So kind of new attempt, and obviously a great model, but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make an anti-woke model, specifically, just the fact that it's a lot

of great math going on. more breaking news the u.s. Geiger Capital is reporting on X the u.s. just posted a surprise surplus of 27 billion for the month of June total receipts were 526 total outlays were 499 billion that's some free cash flow for the United States no yeah. No way. Yeah. That's wild. That's crazy. Absolutely wild. For more breaking news, you can go to biggetbezel.com.

Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. This is the time to develop a strategic reserve of Daytonas. For sure. The Daytona reserve. And, I mean, we shouldn't break this, but a good friend of the show is becoming a watch guy and we're very excited to break the news when it goes live. We'll have to have him on. And I mean we shouldn't break this, but a good friend of the show is becoming a watch guy and we're very excited to break the news

when it goes live. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. First day on the wrist. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on.

We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on.

We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. We'll have to have him on. I thought this was a good take that I've agreed with for a while is that you know Tim Cook is it is such a large organization so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain He is the one who built that supply chain He is you know, maybe missing the mark on AI might have to partner with some folks

I'd have to spend a bunch of money, but fundamentally he's running the core business very well And that relates to the new plans for 2026. The first half, they're gonna release a flurry of new products. Mark Gurman has a story in Bloomberg. He says, Apple plans an M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, A19 iPhone 17E, new Mac external monitor.

That'll be interesting. I wonder if they're gonna refresh that crazy display. The, what's it called? Not the Apple Pro, the Apple Pro Display XDR. That's the one that's like 5K. Yeah, if they make just a 55 inch version of that, it's game over. People would definitely mount that on the wall.

But right now, I think it's like 32 inches, pretty big, great for working. And then we have the studio displays over there that are also very good. But they haven't refreshed the Pro Display XDR in a long time people still love it They're also launching new low-end iPads and an M4 M4 iPad airs as part of the flurry of new products I think this is all kind of expected, but yeah Michael La Fram boys is doing some market research

He says would you pay for a mini Archimedes that plugged into a wall and killed mosquitoes? Cool concept. I didn't know what an Archimedes was. This must be some sort of missile battery. Yeah, it must be. But lasers or something. I think something like this. I mean, this is the future that we want.

This is making, bringing. Also, slightly more frequent. Oh, we had Michael. We had Aurelius Systems. We had him on the show a long time ago and Yeah, this is we need to take the best defense tech and and use it to This is like a Freedman coded meets. Yeah, we're lucky coded. Yes, I'm holding the two things together It's just like tiny robotics for like specific use cases, but defense code it very cool

It's like tiny robotics for like specific use cases, but defense coded, very cool. Anyway, we should debate this question from Ben South or this historical anecdote. If distribution were really the only moat, we'd all be using apps from celebrities. He calls out Bizzle, which was apparently Justin Bieber's product. And then-

Bizzle. It's not clocking to you, John. Not clocking to me? What does that mean? You you're so offline so Justin Bieber launched a new album today and he leveraged the kind of crash out that he had in front of nobody when he was said it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on oh standing on business yeah okay but we got to bring Bizzle back okay it might still be in the app store probably not and then there was the camera app. Yeah, what was it actually called?

I forget what it's called. But Dispo. Was it just Dispo eventually? Because it was originally launched as David's Disposables. It's interesting. Yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth,

like the true, what's it called, the R-naught, the viral coefficient. If the viral coefficient isn't actually greater than one, you'll just need to continually be refilling the top of funnel and it just will never grow. Underrated, there's like many more celebrity apps. The Jeremy Renner app, are you familiar with that? It was like a clone of Instagram,

but it was just Jeremy Renner content. It's pretty sick. It was just for Jeremy Renner fans, they could just see his private Instagram feed, basically. Pretty funny, but yeah, it's interesting. It begs the question, what is the ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology? I'm still very bullish on Saquon Barkley's strategy of just like

Already like kind of deemed successful and like ordained by the by the tech industry and the tech complex and just get in as opposed to like trying to all of a sudden become a tech CEO or like a co-founder of something that you're just kind of taking weight on, that you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it. It's like, if you're good at being a celebrity, just focus on that and then, you know, invest separately. Anyway, interesting. What else?

Well, I wanted to highlight a market. There's a market up now of the next, a polymarket of the next CEO of X. Okay. Okay only has X would be like the social app. Yeah unclear if there would be if Elon just becomes the the the CEO broadly, there's no new CEO because you know, you know for whatever reason they just don't backfill Linda but then Sri Ram Krishnan sitting at 17%. Oh, no way.

It's a very, very, very low volume. Nikita's up there too at 10%. But I think the social app of X, now that it's a combined entity, it still needs a figurehead. It needs a core champion. So I'm hoping they find somebody new there. There are some contenders that were highlighted

by the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if they're on this market particularly. Contenders could include members of Yacarino's leadership team such as John Niddy, global head of revenue operations and ad innovation at X. Angela Zapeta, X's global head of marketing. Or Monique Pintarelli, head of Americas at X, Angela Zapeta, X's global head of marketing, or Monique Pintarelli, head of Americas at X, industry insider set.

So those are kind of the rumors that the Wall Street Journal is talking about, but it'd be way more fun to get a poster in there. Definitely. For potential guests. Posters in control. Not one of these business people. Although, we forgot to highlight this,

but Linda Iaccarino, during her 12 years at NBC Universal, she had the nickname The Velvet Hammer, which I think is amazing. She earned her reputation as a hard charging executive with networking and negotiating chops, The Velvet Hammer, because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad.

The Velvet Hammer. You gotta always have a tire that's so iconic that it works its way into a nickname. We were talking about nicknames this morning and they need to come from specific stories. You can't just pull them out of a hat. They need to really be evocative. The velvet hammer tells me exactly what she's up to. Dressed to the nines, gonna get the ad deal done. really be evocative and the velvet hammer tells me exactly what she's up to. Definitely.

Dress to the nines, gonna get the ad deal done. Well, this is a good post to end on from Sanculp. You are terminally online if you know more than five of these, TBPN, High Agency, Hegalion E-Girl, Claude Code, La Boo Boo, I still don't know how to pronounce that, I just see it written everywhere. Grokfor, Prime Intellect, Calamaze, that guy who claims I still don't know how to pronounce that I just see it written everywhere grok for Prime intellect Cal Calamase that

Guy who claims to have implemented auto fills and OTPs we somebody's a friend of the show sent us that guys Making that claim and then I noticed that it was getting Community noted because the guy was just like lying because that's like I mean, it's a great I think it was hot I think was hotly debated whether or not he was lying like he obviously at Apple like multiple people work on every project so people were like yes well technically someone else has a claim but also this person might have a claim and there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the

right to claim it anyway we are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this and of course diving into a conversation about it of course well it's Friday it's Friday afternoon or evening depending where you online because we know everything about this and Diving into a conversation about it, of course. Well It's Friday. It's Friday afternoon or evening depending where you are in the world and Try terminally touching grass this weekend. Yes go outside Get some sunlight get some sunlight in the morning five minutes five minutes five minutes. That's enough. Don't do more than that Yeah, yeah get back inside doom scroll. Have a great weekend everyone Leave us thanks for being with us podcast and side Monday. You on Monday. We'll see you

then. Goodbye. Cheers.