TBPN - AI-Designed Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Who had orange in the chat? Because the chat was trying to guess what color sunglasses we would be wearing today. Is that orange or is that more of like a burnt sienna? Well, I think it's more of a greenish frame with more of with an orange lens. You got to drop the line. I'm wearing sunglasses because I'm looking at the future and it's very bright indeed. Knowing just that reference. Anyway.

It's great to be back. It's Friday. We got a shorter show for everyone today. General partner of Coastal Ventures coming on to talk about their new investment discovery loop founded by none other than Jeff Dean and some of his crew from DeepMind. And then we have Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks, joining to talk about their new blog post. I promise it's going to be more exciting than it sounds like. No, but they're doing smarter model routing and we're excited to catch up with him. Very excited. Well, for the first time, scientists have used AI to create entirely new viruses. You asked for it. They delivered. They delivered. They delivered. They woke up. You know what we don't have enough of?

Viruses that have never existed in nature before. It's marked a milestone that could accelerate biotechnology while also raising long-term biosecurity questions, of course. Nightmare scenario is you go to Best Buy, you get a gaming PC with a couple of, pretty stock graphics cards and you're able to run an open source model that basically walks you through the steps of creating something really problematic. At the same time, there's a lot of really talented and well-resourced organizations that are fighting that tooth and nail. And so we'll probably see a little back and forth equilibrium there. But lots of interesting questions. Important to note that these viruses do not affect humans whatsoever, even these new viruses. they target bacteria.

So it's more of an experiment, more of a demo. But you can see where things are going and are we going to have. That doesn't make me that comforted, to be honest. You like your bacteria to be a virus front. You know, we naturally have, there's bacteria that is, it's part of being human. And you would like the bacteria to be unaffected by viruses. Is anyone standing up for the bacteria right now? Well, it's more so like you have bacteria, you have bacteria in your gut.

Yeah. And the gut is kind of an important part of it. Now that bacteria is going to be suffering from a novel virus, apparently. Yeah. Well, in a study published Thursday in science, researchers at Stanford and the ARC Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns in naturally occurring viral DNA, then used it to generate genetic sequences for brand new viruses. After synthesizing those DNA sequences and inserting them into bacteria, the team found the bacteria produced viable viruses capable of infecting other bacteria. The work does not create a new threat to humans. Be careful. I'm sure that will get cut out of a lot of messaging around this because it sounds really scary on its face.

The AI was trained only on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria and specifically excluded viruses that infect humans, plants, animals, and fungi. As a result, the model cannot generate viruses capable of infecting people. While scientists have been synthesizing viral genomes for years to study diseases and develop vaccines, this is the first time AI. has been used to design entirely new viruses that function in the real world. And I was going back and forth before the show on, is this anything special? You know, we've been using tools to make viruses for bacteria for a long time. This is just another tool to do it, or is there some, you know, material breakthrough? That's sort of a debate point.

It sounds really scary, but also, like, you've been able to design these viruses in a lab for a long time. So what is the material difference here? I think it all comes back to acceleration and cost if all of a sudden it becomes a thousand times cheaper. to generate viruses, then that could reshape biotech in a positive way, but also have biosecurity implications. Yeah, I think a lot of the reaction is just that it feels like a little too soon post-Wu-Han, a little too soon post-hugging phase. There's been a variety of events that I think naturally make people a little apprehensive when you see a headline like this. Yeah, a lot of people are like, you know, the L-EAs are you-Kutkowski reaction of, ah, like this is bad. But we'll see where

goes. If the approach proves effective across other classes of viruses, it could become a powerful tool for medicine and biotechnology. Viruses are already widely used as delivery vehicles for gene therapies and other medical treatments, and AI-designed viruses could eventually expand that toolkit. At the same time, the research highlights how advanced, how advances in AI are making it increasingly important to build safeguards alongside new capabilities, which I'm sure the ARC Institute is working on. And there's also other AI-driven neoscientific labs. I mean, Jeff Deans, one of those was advancing, one of the goals of his new company is to work on biotech broadly. He has a very broad remit, but there are more narrow projects like that new

company that's focused on finding a cure for the common cold. There are a few other projects that are more narrowly targeted, as well as all the biotech companies that are working on stuff. If we're going to get advances in viruses that deliver gene therapies or medical treatments, we got to rebrand virus. We got to come up with a new word. Just like GLP1, peptide, that felt very safe. It was like, you're not doing steroids. You're not on gear. What's the lizard? You're doing a peop. You're not doing helo monster venom. Exactly. Exactly. You're not doing heli monster venom. No. Some Chinese peptides. The Chinese peptides was a rough go. But in general, I think the fact that it was like just a peptide, it felt much more welcoming as opposed to being in the world of the steroid. The

the performance enhancing drugs, and it became easier for people to jump in, oh, I got to learn about peptides. Oh, there's naturally occurring peptides? Cool. I'm into that. But virus has such a bad connotation post-Wohan as well as just everything. You're never like, I got a virus and someone says, a good one or a bad one? Like, it's always bad.

Yeah. It's never good. But so they need a new brand for that if they're going to commercialize that for sure. But we'll see. Anyway, there's a whole article in the New York Times about it. This AI just created viruses not found in nature. The new study published Thursday in science goes well beyond duplicating viral genes, scientists at Sanford University and Arkansas,

taught AI to recognize patterns of DNA in nature and then use that DNA to write recipes for entirely new viruses. The viruses dreamed up by AI do not pose the threat to humans because they are all similar to a naturally occurring virus called Phi X174, which can only infect bacteria. really hardcore name for something that's not that dangerous. FIX-174 sounds like an offspring of Elon Musk. Governments and scientific organizations have been slow to develop guardrails that could block the creation of a deadly virus, even as the science races ahead.

So I don't think they'll be open sourcing this anytime soon. But there is other news. Mark German's been reporting on opening I's first consumer device. It'll reportedly look like a hockey puck size donut. Mark German? The Germinator? Oh, the Germinator. The Germinator, yeah.

Opening on his first consumer device. will reportedly look like a hockey puck size donut and cost roughly $300 to $400. What a funny form factor. Love hockey pucks. Yeah. Love donuts. Okay. So you're in.

I like where this is going. There's also a rumor that it has mechanical pieces on it, so I think it can like undulate potentially. The speculation's all over the place. According to Bloomberg's Mark German, the Germanator, as you put it, the battery power device is essentially a portable smart speaker without a screen designed to be carried around the house are placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter, it will include speakers and microphones, along with cameras and other sensors that allow its AI to perceive what's happening

around it. The device is intended to work much more, like a much more capable version of chat TPT's current voice mode, learning about its owner over time, and using that context to make conversations more personalized. Open AI is also making the hardware itself feel more expressive. The device will reportedly include lights and parts that physically move as it responds, with the goal of making it feel more alive than existing stationary smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The product being developed by Johnny Obs design team is expected to arrive in 27. Feature request. And envisioned as the first in a broader family of open AI hardware long term, the company reportedly hopes to develop AI devices capable of taking over some of the functions now handled by smart phones.

Future request. Yes. Rolling flashbang. Flashbang. That would be a good feature request. Yeah, it says it has lights. It's got sound. You should be able to use this as an on-the-go flashbang.

Yeah. So you're going to hang out with some friends. Yeah. You want to prank them a little bit when you're kind of coming in? Yeah, I was reflecting on the deep mind story of, you know, the departures there and the question of, you know, how the models are progressing versus the commercialization of those models. There's some real strong points.

There's some weaker points within the rollout of Google's AI strategy. And I was thinking about, like, what happened to Notebook L.S? Because that was heralded as a very magical technology. You would, you know, give it some sources, a particular report. And it would just generate a podcast talking between two different people, much more conversational. And a lot of people like consuming information that way. So you could just go read a deep research report on the history of, you know, how bacteriophages work. you want to get up to speed on that because you're trying to understand what the ARC Institute is

working on with these new viruses, you could go to Notebook L.M and say, hey, why don't you generate me a podcast of, you know, two scientists explaining this at, you know, high school level and take it into college level? Tyler, in the YouTube chat says, Nut loves notebook LM, use it weekly. Use it weekly. I always thought that I would have used it when I was in college. Yeah. And I needed to, let's say, write a paper on something, and I wasn't super prepared. I could say, generate me an hour-long podcast about this set of topics, and I'd listen to that, and then I could probably rip the paper. I did that for a history exam.

Wow. It was like a vocab list, and it went through. Okay. Yeah, middle-age history, I think. Wait, oh, you used notebook LM? Yeah, it generated a podcast. So I basically fed in a vocab list of, like, dates and various things. Then I had it.

And was it just a general podcast? It was really easy. I think I probably aced it. Wow. There we go. He needs a better confidence monitor. I'm a big fan of that new trend that's like asking old people, like, how did you write a five-paragraph essay without AI? And then the answer is like, buddy, we wrote a five-paragraph essay without even reading the book.

Because you just go to Spark Notes or something. But I was interested in the evolution of notebook L.N because it's this like, there's this collapsing of capabilities where Sam Altman was recently sort of dragged a little bit for saying like he would use Chachapiti work to generate a podcast about what's going on on his calendar and the family life and stuff. And people are like, how about you just talk to your kids? But the more interesting technical point on that is that do you even need Chachapiti work to generate you that podcast? Or will, you? the voice mode and the memory feature have enough context to just sit there and talk to you like it's a podcast on the fly? Like live voice. Yeah. If you're trying to learn about a topic, for example, pretty good. It's probably better than just generating a podcast because a podcast assumes like some certain understanding. Yeah. And it's rigid. Maybe it thinks you understand too much or too little. Whereas voice, you can be like, go down this like. Exactly. Exactly. It's a choose your own adventure. It's an expert call. It's instead of notebook L.M. It's Teegis LM, basically. I mean,

you're talking to an expert and you can just guide the conversation wherever you go. So we'll be interesting to see where this goes, what the reception is like. I mean, huge, huge delta divergence between like the social media pushback for Chachapit versus like the app store ratings. There's like a billion people using it. A lot of people just like the product. And then they'll be like someone dunking on it to the tune of a million likes on Instagram. And so how do you measure those two things when it comes to an actual consumer product? If it's delivering something good, if people are like, if the stated preference is like, I don't like AI,

but the revealed preference is like it's kind of nice to have this thing around the house. It's kind of useful. Interesting to see where it goes. The launch of this device will be very, very interesting to see how things come. come together. Like, you can see the Chachapiti work, Chachapit Codex, Chachapit, like coming together into one product. But there's a world where this product launches with voice mode and it's not really capable of linking to a cloud codex instance and writing you software and doing the more advanced things that are required just to accomplish some tasks. Like, you can go to Chachapit

and ask it to pull down an image from the internet, restyel it, change it, but you can't really tell it to do like 40 of those. Or like every day, forever, do a whole host, a whole workflow. But you can't in Codex. And you can talk to Codex, but it has to be running on a computer. And I would hope that by the time this launches, there's full context. Like I was doing some work in Codex and I had the output and then I wanted to like generate an image based on that. and take it on the go, but I wanted to be able to close my laptop and not and still be able to access it.

So I had to like copy the context window into chatchapit just the normal app so then I could like access that information and continue to transform it. And that was something that is like a very, very temporary thing that feels like it's going to be fixed in like a couple weeks. But there's a whole bunch of these little minor integration issues that probably need to be fulfilled before this product launches and delivers like the full, the full capability of what you can do. because so many things, so many tasks instead of just knowledge retrieval, require actually firing up a browser, scraping it, writing some code, downloading things, you know, setting up an actual service and workflow, as opposed to just something that can be done within the context window of a single LLM interaction.

Last top story. A New Mexico judge has ordered META to pay more than $900 million and impose new restrictions on how minors in the state use face. Facebook and Instagram. This is a continuation of the social media addiction. If you're watching this clip on Instagram, let us know in the comments. Are you addicted to TBPN Reels on Instagram? It's not our fault. Apparently it's Facebook's fault. If we got you hooked on this stuff, the ruling requires meta to establish a $567 million fund aimed at addressing harms linked to its platforms. On top of a 375 million,

million dollars in civil penalties previously awarded by a jury. So they're up 900 million. They're very close to a billion dollars. And the numbers are going to get bigger from here. At least they're going to try. Okay. So last time we really covered something from this ongoing saga, there was a verdict on March 25th, a Los Angeles jury found meta and Google slash YouTube negligent for designing platforms harmful to young people. A woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child was awarded six million, four point two million against meta and one point eight million against Google. And again, at the time, we had this a lawyer on, he was giving his opinion. He was like, this is just the start.

Yeah. I was like, no way. The jury has a, has a verdict. Yeah. To say, you know, talking to the biggest companies in the world, you must pay six million dollars. Yeah, yeah, it was nothing. It was like this tiny amount, but it was to one person, right? And so you can imagine as these cases evolve, this new one is in New Mexico.

New Mexico is not the biggest state in the union. It's not the biggest state. But there was also one in May 2026, so just a couple months ago, for $9 million to a school district in Kentucky. Yeah. Same sort of issue. The lawsuit accused Instagram of deliberately using addictive features that contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other problems among students, forcing schools to spend more on mental health services. The district had sought more than $60 million.

And I guess the total payout was $20,000. $7 million because it was split between YouTube and TikTok and Snap. Yep. And in that case, there was no admission of liability and no required product changes. So I think it's time to start thinking about what the sort of battle that social media has ahead of it, kind of in cigarette terms. Tell us about... Tobacco Master's agreement. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So the tobacco companies wound up getting sued individually initially, and there was a whole bunch of court hearings, very similar to the Senator We Sell Ads moments, but more focused on the cancer-causing nature of cigarettes. And the question was like, who is ultimately being harmed economically? And you would think it's obvious. The person that saw an ad that made smoking look cool, they picked up a pack of cigarettes, they started smoking, and then they got cancer, and their life was cut short, they are the victim, they should be paid by the tobacco company. That's what would be very logical. That's not what happened. In fact, the tobacco master settlement agreement

landed in 1998, and it was agreement between all of the major tobacco companies. There's more nuance to this. One of them broke loose and testified against the others. It's a crazy story. But that's for another time. In 46 states, I'm the good cigarette company. Basically, yeah. And so they don't have to pay. They're not part of the settlement, so they don't have to pay because they basically snitched on all the others. It's crazy. Are they still in business? Oh, yeah. Brinton.

They're doing great. Who are they? Look at Victor? I've never heard of it. Yeah. Last name, Victor? Yeah, they were literally the victim. They won.

They won. Yeah. There's more nuance to it than that. But that's, like, one way to tell the story. Anyway, so a bunch of the big tobacco companies versus 46 of the U.S. states, the District of Columbia and several territories. The states agreed to end major law. lawsuits against the tobacco company. So the same thing was happening where all the different states were suing and they were suing because the negative externality of cigarettes causing

cancer was driving up medical bills in the states. So the states have health care and they assume, hey, okay, we're going to spend this much on doctors, this on radiology, this much on x-ray equipment. And then all of a sudden they're starting to look at their populations and saying like, wait, everyone's getting lung cancer. We're not equipped to deal with lung cancer. We need to hire way more oncologists and cancer doctors who specialize in lung cancer. We need equipment. We need drugs that treat lung cancer. There's a whole bunch of other things that we have to spend money on. And so you got to pay us because you, the tobacco company, are responsible for us running out of money for our health care system. And so that was the nature of these, like, the battles between

the states and the big tobacco companies. You would think it would be the individuals who got the cancer. That would be very logical, but that's not actually the structure of this deal. And so in return, all the states said, hey, we'll drop all those lawsuits. You won't have to, we won't be nickel and diming you across every single state. Instead, the companies will make large payments and follow new limits on advertising and business practices. So the end result, the headline number is $206 billion, which feels like small relative to today's standards of like hyperscalers and social media. Facebook generates roughly $200 billion in revenue every year, although if they got hit with a $200 billion fine, that would be existential.

But what happened with the master settlement agreement with the tobacco companies was that there wasn't just one fixed payment. Instead, it created a system of annual payments that continue indefinitely. They will actually have to pay forever as long as they are in business. They have effectively a special tax paid to them. And the amount changes based on cigarette sales, inflation, market share, and other adjustments. So if cigarette sales fall, the total payments usually fall,

and that's a big reason why there's like a shift to non-cigarette products. Well, and that just naturally makes sense. If less people are buying cigarettes, less people are going to have health issues down the line. Exactly. Exactly. So. Yeah, so I brought it up because I think that we could be heading in that direction with social media. There's also a fascinating dynamic because these states now have an indefinite revenue stream that will be paid to them. And you can model that out financially and you can

financialize it and a lot of people have. And so investment firms and banks and financial institutions have come in and said, okay, you are the state of New Mexico, for example, and you are expected to get 300 million from big tobacco this year and then next year we think it'll be 297 and then 2.98 and then it'll go down. And we can model that out. And we We can just give you $4 billion right now in exchange for that revenue stream or a piece of that revenue stream, and then those states can take that lump sum of cash and build a new bridge or something like that, whatever they need to do. So there's been a lot of financialization on top of it.

Each tobacco company pays a share of the total amount. Its share depends mainly on the share of cigarette sales among companies that participate in the MSA. The settlement then divides the money among states using fixed allocation percentages. Some states later borrowed against these future payments by issuing bonds backed by MSA. revenue. The MSA also limits tobacco advertising and marketing, especially marketing that could reach children in simple terms. The agreement created a permanent system. Major tobacco companies received protection from many state lawsuits while states receive continuing payments and new enforcement

powers. The result is not just a legal settlement. It created this long-term financial and regulatory structure built around cigarette sales. And it's now the 10-year anniversary of starting Lucy, 2016. August 8th, technically, it was the day. New regulation. You know what I'm going to hit. Overnight success. Yeah, for sure. The exact opposite.

Slaving away for years and obscurity. But a very, very interesting, very, very interesting industry to have operated in for as long as we have. Semi-analysis chimed in on the deep mind news, not just chimed in. I think the terms posterized. Grave-digger. No, not grave-diving. No, they're-grave-diving? They're digging the grave-

Yeah, four deep mind in it. And then they're dancing on it at the end. Anyway, semi-analysis says, for all intents and purposes, we believe deep mind is no longer a frontier lab due to large numbers of departures from their RL teams and poor compute allocation. Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of ever-reaching state-of-the-art again have dropped to zero. Whoa.

Damn it. Google is now simply unable to retain top AI talent. Again, this is what I was saying, the day that the news, broke. It's like researchers want to work with great researchers, right? And so the more talent density you have, the easier it is to recruit. Yeah, Gnome leaving earlier with like a canary and the coal mine. Obviously, these are not the actions of people excited about Gemini 4 Pro. Jeff, Sanjay, Kwok, and Oriol are just the latest in the long string of high-profile departures from deep mine. Jeff Dean is the undisputed goat of Google.

Google engineering, co-founded Google Brain and started the TVU program. Google, on the other hand, decided it was totally worth it to sell enormous amounts of compute to Gemini's fiercest competitors on long-term contracts without any hope of ever returning it to DeepMind. More than 20% of total TPU shipments from third quarter of 26 to fourth quarter 27 are being sold directly to Anthropic. The issue with Google was not Jeff Dean nor Noam Shazir, but rather they're extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow, and strategically timid culture.

Google will join the ranks of other legendary tech giants like IBM and Intel to give up on the harder thing and do the thing that will make you more money. It becomes demoralizing as many of the great technology leads have left. And take him, taking a victory lap. He wrote a piece on July 21st. Google is a secular short kind of getting at a lot of these issues. Brutal, brutal stuff. This is insane. On the other side, GCP is working.

GCP is basically a money printing machine. No wonder Google executives are choosing GCP over Gemini. So although EBIT margins for these system sales are slightly lower than core cloud margins in the low 30% range, we still expect total GCP to deliver mid-to-high-30s, EBIT margins going forward, how investors decide to capitalize the current TPU backlog and any large future sales is an open question. However, given the strong compute demand from the labs, we expect more multi-gigawatt deals to be announced soon,

adding to this backlog. In all, we estimate that over 250 billion additional TPU bookings could be added to GCPRPO in the next coming quarters from semi-analysis. Very interesting. I mean, there is like a positive spin on this, which is like they seem to be really good at chip development, really good at cloud, like focus where you're, where it's working, and you don't have any tensions there because you have excellent teams and then you have the ability to underwrite that build out with the cash machine that is Google search and YouTube and their ads products and having more of this like barbell approach as opposed to playing in like the middle race is maybe the maybe ultimately the right thing to do. There are plenty of hyperscalers that have lived that and are doing very well on the back of it. Like Microsoft Amazon for example, they've been partners to labs at various points and are very good at building data centers, very good at scaling and have not tried.

to really go on a crazy poaching race and amass the dream team and, you know, they've been rewarded for it. Yeah. I don't know. Still wild series of events. They obviously had effectively a version of ChatGVET internally. They didn't ship it. Tebow, who's now running Chat Codex, was there working on that product, which is really wild.

It just seems like Google leadership has a very different idea of like where value accrues in AI than like Demis or like the other labs. right? It's like, it's not actually like the model itself. Yeah. It's the like infrastructure, GPUs, cloud business. It's interesting because you can run back the old Demas quote about like he went, when he was selling Deep Mind, he talked to Mark Zuckerberg and is like, what are you excited about in the future?

Are you excited about AI? And Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, according to this exchange that Sebastian Malibai reported on, Mark Zuckerberg says, oh yeah, I'm super excited about AI. And then Demas is like, I'm going to test this guy. I'm going to see if he's a true believer. What do you think about VR? And Zuck's like, oh, VR is like equivalently. as big and then Demis was like, no.

He even said that. He was just equivalently as excited. Yeah, yeah, excited. And he was excited about a few other things. And Demis was like, I want to be with someone who's like all in on AI as a fundamentally different technology, not a normal technology, not like VR, not like new devices,

not like electric cars, not like, you know, satellites in space. It needs to be considered as a completely separate development, a completely separate technology. Yeah, like I don't know if Sundar like, believes in RSI. It seems like he doesn't think that that's like really going to. So the point is that Demis should have probed more and said like, well, how excited are you

about cloud? How excited are you about AI overviews? And if Sundar, it wasn't Sundar back then, but if Google was like, oh yeah, we're equivalently excited about cloud infrastructure as ASI, then that should have been Demis's moment to be like, ah, maybe I shouldn't. The only thing, The only thing is there's a world where he's actually so RSI-pilled that he's thinking, okay, it's over for us. I need to back up the Brinks truck and help Anthropic, right? Putting together this like, you know, almost a quarter of a trillion dollar financing package. Yeah.

And a variety of data center guarantees to enable Anthropic to scale up, even though they don't have, you know, really access to the debt markets and the way that Google does. Google's ownership in Anthropic is capped at 15. percent. They, I believe, have roughly 14 percent. Weird. Why, wait, well, how is it? I think Anthropic just didn't. Oh, we don't want you to have nine. They don't have any voting rights. They don't even, they're not even a board observer. They don't have a board seat. They basically are just a purely financial background. Branding moguls, Miami Beach Home lists for $68.5 million. Branding mogul, Nick Woodhouse, was sailing around Miami for his birthday in 2019 when he realized he

found his new home. Turning to his wife, Jocelyn Woodhouse, the Canadian-born businessman said, we have to live here. It wasn't long after relocating from New York in 2020 that the couple, then living in a condo on Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, saw a waterfront lot on a guard-gated Lagorch Island. Is that how you pronounce? Legorche? I don't know. Island in Miami Beach from a friend's boat. The property had the foundation of a house that was just starting to be built. purchased the partially built home for $17 million in 2021 and completed construction of the roughly 8,800 square foot seven bedroom contemporary house around 2023.

It's a 0.4 acre estate, and they're selling it for 68.5 because they're building another home nearby. Nick is the former president and chief marketing officer of Authentic Brands Group, and that's why I wanted to talk about this, because authentic brands is a very fascinating company. Tyler, you have something here? Yeah, so it's pronounced Lagueres.

Legors. Thank you. Legors. Well, Authentic Brands Group is a very interesting lifestyle platform, I guess. I don't know exactly what you would call it. They have some truly Tier 1 assets. They own more than 50 consumer brands as well as likenesses and estates of celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe.

But what stuck out to you? Let's start at the top, cream of the crop. They own tap out. They do. An iconic brand. Tapout teas. And if you guys ever run into John on the weekends, he's almost certainly head-to-toe tap-out. It was one of their first purchases, Silver Star and Tap Out.

In January 2011, they acquired the rights to the likeness of Marilyn Monroe. So if you see Marilyn Monroe on a T-shirt, authentic brands is getting a chat. They own Ruka, the surf brand. They own Neiman Marcus. They own Prince. They own Brooks Brothers. Goodman. They own D.C. Shoes.

Yeah. Tyler, I know you're still, you're pretty much head to toe Volcomb at all time. Volcomb, maybe some Billabong thrown in there. Well, they also own Billabong. Anyway, Nick is the former president and chief marketing officer of Authentic Brands Group, a licensing and managing company that works with companies such as Reebok Champion and Brooks Brothers. TZH says ABG is a graveyard for iconic brands. It's the bending spoons of brands.

No, it really is. I mean, it's somewhat sad because a lot of these brands are so, so iconic and with the right sort of management and investment, they would be back to their former glory. A lot of the surf brands and the skate brands are a little sentimental for me, just because I grew up watching so much of the content that those brands put out and following the different athletes on their teams. Those industries have just been impacted surfing most aggressively, just because kids that don't live by the ocean now, they don't really care about surfing.

Yeah. They care about Chrome Hearts. Do you think the surfing industry needs a federal backstop? I would push for one, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. A couple billion dollars from the Treasury directly to get Vulcone. Quicksilver, Billabon.

Wicksilver back to the top. We're onto something here. This is our new platform. I think so. We'll be back in the Ultradown. We're going to have a lot of coverage this weekend, too, around. You may have been seeing some of our Getty images. Yeah.

You might be seeing some more. Yeah, we're working on it. We'll see. But have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday. We'll see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at www.com.

Goodbye.