TBPN - 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 11th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. That's right. The Temple of Technology. The Fortures of Finance. The capital of capital. We got a great show for you.

We have some maybe terrible news. There might be top signals in the market. There might be top signals all over the place. We've been building out an internal top signal tracker, crowdsourcing some of them. It's going crazy. And it's a long list. Yeah. 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 white suits are actually a top signal. It's a complete top signal. But of course there is some good, there are some, the economy strong, we're going to go through Joe Wisenthal'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. Yep. You know, that's always, you know, It is definitionally a top signal. So let's go through the list here because it's quite substantial.

So this is kind of anonymously contributed through group chats. Of course. We've observed. We're going to catalog it and see if we can turn the tide of the top signals to ideally. So starting off yesterday, Trump made a post on true social, calling, basically celebrating the state of the economy, the markets. you know, just really calling out how many assets are performing well. I have it here. The health.

Do you want to read through it? 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 truths, 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. No inflation. 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 screenshoted on acts. The country is now back, says President Donald Trump. Every account controlled by the White House. House has been on a tear some of them some of the posts I think are a little bit low-class and vulgar others others are quite funny but there's definitely the the memers are in 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 a nons and they just yeah dropped off posting and now they'd be getting death threats so they have to that 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, you know, he shouldn't be. Is he a government employee? Like what's the relationship between the two?

And so, you know, there was a lot of investigative journalism that went into figuring out what's going out with those who's involved. Yeah. But nobody's investigating the memes. The social media managers, which is made a big story. They need to be investigating the memes of production. But 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. On Ethereum. And then it just went down for months. Oh, really? And now it's back up. Now it's back up. And he's saying, you're welcome. I do remember Trump. He called the bottom, right? He said, like, now it's a good time to buy generally. And then the market rips since that. 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, their Fortune 500 company, they did update their profile picture to an NFT. Historically, that has been a top signal.

I do think their profile picture is cute. Do you have any experience with NFT profile pictures? You know, I've delved. 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 never used an NFT profile picture, but I did. I bought an NFT right near the top. A chain runner? Nice. Which I still own. Which actually I didn't like over invest, get over my skis is a very small portion of That's an asset that will be passed down through your family like a fine watch. I like to think of it is 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 know, you're not really, it's like a skin in the game question. Like you're not really participating. you're not experiencing the market unless you're participating to some degree. But you don't want to get over your skis. And also did the NFT profile picture of really bad time and had 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, generational run. New cycle. But historically it's a top signal. So we got to call it out. If NFTs are going to make a comeback because like there's been. Like crypto has been coming back.

And Bitcoin went from, what, 30 to 120? And FDs will be back when A-list celebrities are using them on their Facebook accounts. That was a wild time. That's the real test. X account. You could see it happening early. Facebook account. Original Facebook account.

There's got to be a new project then because I don't think any of the old products or projects are going to, you know, come back. That would be crazy. Although some of them are kind of Lindy. Like haven't the original crypto punks? Cryptopunks. Those have kind of held their value. But the board apes have sold off like crazy, but are still expensive. It's unfortunate board apes are not in gag gift territory yet.

Yes. Because you think, it'll be funny to get your buddy like a board ape for their birthday. 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 me how ramp, time is money save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Go to RAMP.com. Also, we never shout this out. 4.8 stars on G2 with over 2,000 reviews. That's great. Shout out RAM. World class. Another, the floor price is like around 10th. So that's like almost $3,000. 3,000? 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, great gag gift. It is. Pink elephant. We'll see. We'll see. Sun Valley. But by, by, you know, by, you know, Christmas time. Did they do pink elephants at Sun Valley?

I feel like they should. Maybe, maybe. We'll have to ask some of our friends that are there this week. So in other news, Robin Hood, CEO, Vlad is raising at $900 million valuation for a math foundation model startup. And Vlad and Robin Hood have been on a pretty generational run. but this does feel a bit top signally, right, especially in the context of GROC, one-shodding, PhD-level math in the announcement on Wednesday. So interested to follow that one, optimistic, but again, mathematically, superintelligence.

Historically, when we've seen CEOs of public companies start ripping, you know, second companies and then getting new. 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, 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 ren. 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 IRAND. I call it a Picasso I found at a

garage sale. The stock is up 54% since he recommended it on my first million, but it's still cheap. Here's the trade in a nutshell. The 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, IRE?

IREN. Even if AI completely fizzles, these facilities are highly valued. 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.

in on the AI boom. Should be a little bit wary. Harry Stabbing's today was calling. Like it doesn't have earnings, right? It's a lot of company. It's trading around $4 billion. I don't think it's ever generated any profit. I mean, it says, it says $23 million in EBITDA,

but in 2024. So I don't think it's like losing that much money. And I guess net income in the last quarter was $24 million, but the net income to market can. 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 neoclouds that have deep domain expertise. The IRN team, I don't think, has a bunch of team around running large AI training or inferencing. And so anyways. It just feels like they're a little bit late to that party, because there's already like three or four. Did IREN make the ClusterMax, Dylan Patel article?

I doubt it because they're not online yet, right? Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Because Semi-analysis does the cluster max rating for all the neoclodes, including the hyperscalor clouds. And I feel like they did not have, let me see, IRN I don't think is on here. Tensurwave.

There are so many run pod, Lambda, Scaleway, SMC. Nebius together, Crusoe, Lepton, Oracle, Corweave, AWS. So hypercompetitive market, unclear if this Bitcoin miner is going to be able to pivot into AI training and inference in this when they're up against the players that you just mentioned. Another top signal, I'm not going to go out and say that this is impossible, but Harry Stebbings is calling for $8 trillion in VDIA in the next five years. private markets investor backed a bunch of unicorns starting to make, you know, very specific sort of price predictions on the timeline.

Yeah, the specificity of the price prediction is interesting. I was thinking about that. Like, should, like, as we talk about tech companies, should we be trying to, like, boil down to, like, price targets? And I just feel like that's not the domain of talking heads necessarily or, like, podcasters or private markets investors yeah I yeah it's just it's just hard because like to do a proper price analysis on a big public stock like you you really have to look at the financial 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 is Nvidia $2 trillion stock? Like when was the last doubling, like in the last year or something? I don't know. We can pull up our video chart. Well, moving on, we, another incredible top signal. Circle, a great American stable coin company, is trading at a 2,300 PE ratio.

Nearly at once, I think they eclipsed Coinbase's valuation very briefly. No way. despite the fact that they give half of their revenue to Coinbase as part of their distribution partnership. So, again, lots of excitement around stable coins feels like Circle could potentially be a little over its skis, but it's a great company, and they have a lot of advantages now. But the very euphoric multiple, another top signal we have is Sohan Parique. We had them 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, right? They'd be working at meta 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 like 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, you know, same person five times, I guess. 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. Masa top blasting or potentially top blasting. Anytime Masa, historically Masa getting into the headlines, whether that's Stargate, structuring this $30 billion investment where nobody knows, and the $500 billion, nobody really knows where the money is 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 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 Open AI, but like a new company that is a data center holding company? that may not have the same economics as Open AI. 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, you know, he made a ton of money on AMD. But that, when he made that investment, it was like a way less frothy time. 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 in 2016 for $32 billion and later took it public in 2023. I'm trying to think 2016, is 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 soft bank arm deal was not. The other one is Yahoo.

You remember he had this crazy meeting with the Yahoo team where he basically would, was like take my money or I'm gonna and he was like didn't he ask he was like who are your competitors I'm gonna give money and he didn't even know who the competitors were but he said if you don't take my money I'm gonna go give the same check to them yeah so he they ended up taking it he acquired approximately 41% of the company at somewhere around a 200 million dollar valuation yeah when yahoo went public in 1996 the he had an instant paper profit of 150 million, but then at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo is valued at 125 billion. So anyways, phenomenal investment, but very different valuation and ownership targets and

unclear. I would love to see OpenAI get, you know, for profit and get public, but for to, you know, we'll have to see. Going down the list, another. classic Pomp SPAC that we had Pomp on the show to talk about it. Spacks are back. Pomp's got a SPAC. A lot of people were calling that a top signal. I'm excited to see what what Pomp does with his.

But in general, this 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 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 GPT. Like AI is a thing. 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. Yep. What else do you have? Dwar Keshe updating his timelines. That happened Monday.

we had him on the show. It was fun conversation. I think Dwar Keshe has remained incredibly bullish 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. But I do think that some of the promises of AI will take another couple 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 2027, you know, a single foundation model company could just be acquiring every auto manufacturer in the U.S. to develop, you know, millions and millions of robots that would then build, you know, build, you know, and we would hit this 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've been working on this for a decade. We make stuff like every year. We are the best in 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 going to take us a full two years. And I liked 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 in 2030 or even 2027. I mean, the big thing was our conversation yesterday with Meter about the actual, like, are we close to reinforcing AI where the AI, where the AI models are self-improving and 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 you know you know something between like you know like Arc AGI it feels like with Arc AGI we're 10% towards solving something there which is just like you know a basic versatility in AI that it can solve things that humans can solve, and it's not narrowly defined. It's generalizable now. Arch 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 Arc AGI is really holding it back saying like, well, if it was truly general, should probably be able to solve this basic puzzle that a kid can solve. And for that, it's like, okay, we're going from like 9%

to 15%. Like, we are still, like, you know, 85% in not even, like, you know, nowhere close. And the, the, the, the meter report, I was expecting it to be like, well, you know, yes, we're seeing, you know, slight gains on self-reinforcing AI development and the, and 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 Roon talking about that. He was like, for so many different projects, it is useful. But for the frontier, like, it's not

the product that's advancing the frontier at all. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, that probably bridges into the talent wars but well yeah bridging in uh i do think that in hindsight uh 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 meta's point of view right when you look at their AI CAPEX, it makes sense for them to have the best possible team, and they have the balance sheet and the general profitability in order to do something like that. But in general, AI researchers who, you know, six years ago didn't get any attention, much attention at all from the media,

the fact that they're now trading for more than NBA superstars, more than, you know, Tim Cook's annual total comp. It will be an obvious one in hindsight. The other one, six and a half billion dollar aqua hire of I.O. 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, you know, the company was barely, I think, a year old at the time. Yeah, it's interesting because, like, chat GPT 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 going to be using chat GPT as an app, right? In the same way that Amazon made it through the dot-com crash. the question is like what what will it take for the i.O. 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 is already a mature and growing business. And they figured out ads really well. Well Instagram were they doing ads?

They weren't doing ads. Oh yeah yeah saying but meta was like we know how to make an ad platform. Perfectly complimentary business. We know how to monetize social users better than anyone on earth. And you have gotten a bunch of social users. And it's working and it's growing. Yeah. And we're even on.

And we can actually accelerate the growth of the business in a bunch of different ways. So it would be very different if it was like, okay, yes, I.O. is selling, you know, like, it's a small but growing hardware company that people love. Or the product people love. Or the product people love. And maybe they can't manufacture enough of it. Or maybe they're under monetizing it right now. Yeah. But people love it.

But it's like, it's pre-launch. Yeah. Yeah, multi-billion dollar accuracy for pre-launch. It's pretty crazy. Yep. Going down the list. What else do we have? I think the tokenized private company shares, I think it...

That is interesting. Without, you know, Republic and Robin Hood, both creating products that are completely unauthorized, basically derivatives, the companies that they're offering are angry at them saying, don't do this. And... Is the Spider-Man meme of, like, top signals pointing at each of... everyone's like this is a toxic 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 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 roles.

But Satya, I think, has been, I think, will look back and he's been excited, but pragmatic, right? And I think that he will, when the dust settles, I think he'll look pretty good. Yeah, I wonder, like, if there's some massive pullback and I mean, I don't even know what that would look like. 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 Satcha 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 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 the dot-com bubble and the effect of like Oracle's mainframe business. Like 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 like experimental. Like if you had moved from paper to an Oracle mainframe, you weren't like, oh, this stuff's overhyped, it's not going to solve all my problems, I'm going to go back to paper. Yeah. You know, and so in the same way, it's like if you're on, you know, Microsoft Cloud or Azure or,

you know, everyone's using Excel and they're like, yeah, maybe we're getting some value out of this co-pilot upgrade that we did. Maybe we pull back from that. Maybe, yeah, we, you know, our employees like rewriting emails every once a while. Yeah. 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 that are valued similarly that have zero revenue. And basically $100 billion of market cap with very little revenue supporting that 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. And video was making more than 100%

of all the profit combined because all the other companies were loss making by comparison. And now, and now, like, that narrative has taken so much hold that Nvidia's the largest company in the world. And it's put this massive target on their back at $4 trillion where every, all of their major customers want to get off Nvidia, it feels like. Yeah. Like, Google did it. Amazon's doing it and Microsoft saying that they want to do it. And Apple's, you know, was never really a big NVIDIA buyer, but the on-device inference is crazy, too. Like, if you think about, if 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 do a SWAT 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.

Yeah. Like the orders really did come in. The training runs really did happen. The question is just, is that next order of magnitude, the, like, the situational awareness from Leopold Oshendbrunner, this thesis that we're going to build a $5 billion cluster, then a $50 billion cluster, then a $500 billion cluster? Like, is that going to happen? or will there be a hiccup?

And this is always my question for like the doomers. Everyone was saying like P-Dume. You know, what's my percentage chance that 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 going to 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, then all of a sudden we grew them exponentially, and it looked like, wow, we're going to have energy too cheap to meter. And then it flatlined. And for a variety of reasons, they're hard to build, then there were regulations, there was just general fear.

So there were a lot of different things. And I would always go to the DOOMers and just say, like, even if all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct, what is the probability that there's just, like, if you are successful Dumeers and you freak everyone out, there might be regulation that just says don't build anything bigger. Or it could be economics. It could just be, it could be physics, as we've talked about with this idea that at a certain point, like, you can't put more than 100% of global GDP towards building clusters. Like it's impossible. And so like there should be this like S curve there. And and that's why, you know, all the, all the AI researchers are now focused on like the compression of learning and like the actual algorithms and getting more efficiency because like there will be, you know, there should be some sort of like, you know, top upper bound of the amount that you can build. But that certainly hasn't been like a thesis broadly in the market.

People have just been like, yeah, like we'll just, we'll just 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. Just get a 10x. And then 10X it again. And then 10X it again. And then 10X it again. Yeah.

And last but not least, almost forgot about this one, but it should be included. The White House meme coins, which was, which feels like 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. Yeah. So that's the real question is like, is like, how local is this top if it is a top?

Because it could be, 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, like, you know, Dorcasch 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, you know, like these meme coins being a, being a top signal or all

this crazy stuff, it's like there could be like a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else. So I don't know. It's always hard to manage these things and predict, but it's certainly. fun to highlight all these things. It's good to keep track of them. Yeah, you've got to be tracking the top. Keep your own list.

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 Wisenthall says, thinking about the recent episode we did with Charlie McElgott,

where he referred to Trump as the human VIX. He just creates volatility. out of thin air. It really is so true. I mean, Trump coin is up 20% over the last week. I mean, volatility traders have to be doing really well. Although it is down dramatically. What is the, what is like the actual market cap of Trump coin? Is it sticking around? The circulating market cap is two billion. Fully diluted is 10 billion. The price per Trump is current. It peaked at $45 and it is at $10 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 the glazegate, like, deranging society in some way, is the fact that everyone's getting this, like, constant positive reinforcement. Because if you go to it and you're like, hey, should I, should I go 100 X long in the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually, for my interactions, like, you, you're at the level of Citadel.

You're definitely, you definitely could just be a hedge fund manager if you went full time on it. Like you could do it. Like you're definitely not just like a retail trader who's going to get hosed this time. Yeah, you're different. You're different.

You're different. Tracy Alloey has a funny pause. This week in a nutshell. Do you say this one? Markets don't like tariffs, but Trump just imposed more tariffs than markets are at all-time highs because markets think he's going to pull them back.

It's hilarious. It's great. I mean, you know, 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 over. Credit to GROC right now. Maybe it really is super intelligence because I asked 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 situation, risk tolerance and current market condition. 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... He says, ha, I love the confidence. If you're built different and ready to... 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, 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, honestly, this is pretty sound advice. So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy a demo account to see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash

that's good it does say not financial advice well i'm gonna take it as financial advice 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 sign up for heavy browser yeah so i'm using the perplexity web browser yeah called comment okay how is it it's pretty cool i mean it's so pitch me it like why would i use that instead of Chrome. Yeah, so I think the main thing is like it can read what's on your screen. It can also like 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, okay, where do these people work? And so first I said just give me a list of people on the screen and put that into the chat. And then I said, okay, what does people work? It gave me that and then it started to like load them in like it would interact with the Google Sheet. them in, which is like super useful. But then it kind 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, if it was like super fast and like much kind

of cleaner, okay. I think it'd be really useful. So I'm hearing like it saved 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 the search is like 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. How does it compare to Cluelly? Like the, I don't know, the design tradeoff of like new browser interacting with like only the website versus like the whole computer? Yeah. I mean, Cluelly is definitely more catered toward like the video call or like video input. but audio input. Yeah.

It's like, I think it's kind of different use cases. Yeah. Because you're also more like proactive, right? Like, like I would ask you a question over Zoom. Yeah. And Cluelly would just hear that question and automatically query it. Yeah, yeah. As you've been browsing around with the perplexity Comet browser,

has it ever just done something without you, without you being like, go do a thing? No. No. Okay. It's always like I prompted it. prompted, it gives me something. Interesting.

Where clearly is like, you have it running, and then 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 will 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 like, when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they already, they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary for like three bullet points from every article.

And they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of like, where's the right place for the, for the interaction to sit, 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 extra 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're basically just like have this like bar on the side that's just full of slap. If it's just like summarizing your page. I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results. Like, like Dwar Cash 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 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 not necessarily improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buy out firm poaching young bankers. The question is like it's much faster to read a great summary of something, but you're going to affect if you spend 10 seconds reading it, you're going to retain a lot less

of the context and the relevant information. If you just spent five minutes reading the article. So with chat GPT, like style summaries, do you just need to like spend, do you still need to spend five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of context? I think there's two things. Like one is that like there's just no substitute for spending a full day with a topic, like reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. the more time that you spend on a topic, whether it's searching chatypt or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people, like it's just the more time you spend with something, the more information you're compressing,

whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form. Like there's just no substitute for like the amount of time that you put into something. If you're like, you read a summary of a book that was really good and I read the full book, I'm just, and I spent five hours with it and you spent one hour, like I just have an advantage over you on the information. And then on the flip side, it's like, there is an art to summarization. Like, the work of a great biographer is to summarize someone's life 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 ten job, like Dwork Cash said. Well, this is the crazy thing. Arfer 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. Yes. And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by... So I saw that, and I was thinking about Francois Chalet. I had a tweet about this. Cholet.

Am I going to find this? Cholette. How do I spell? Francois Cholet. 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

it 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 there hasn't been any massive breakthrough in how you deliver information to a human being. Like their brain has a certain I.O. 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 like 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 like that is not, 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. I think I'm just going to 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.

Open AI is going to have one in maybe a couple 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 Wisenthal'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 U.S. 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, 100 X ARR, it didn't destroy America because the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well. There was just this like this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy, but the baseline of like where mortgages were, how much debt people had defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 2008. And so that's why we didn't go into like a depression after SVV 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 going to talk to Sean Frank about this too. 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 going to have two Black Friday. But apparently Prime Day sales dropped. And he says, well, Prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about U.S. 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 no. always. We've seen this before, but I don't really know. Either way, there's...

Maybe it's the panikins getting off the sidelines. Panicans. Yeah, I mean, they'd 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, you know, 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, here the picture is mixed because actually some of the... the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction. So for example, initial jobless claims,

number I like to track closely, have actually fallen for four straight weeks. Today's 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 were 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 are 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 cancelling was crazy. That was like the, okay, wow, this is really, really serious. I think everybody was looking around saying, we're living through history right now, and I actually don't like it. Yeah, everyone lost their jobs who was in like retail or any sort of service industry. And then the NBA players lost their jobs. They're like, yeah, you can't even play basketball. And so it was a disaster. 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 basically years. And so all the way through inauguration day, still negative, and dropping through Russia invading Ukraine, and then dropped after the inauguration day and the tariff announcement, but is climbing back up, which Joe is highlighting is. 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, cities, US, economic surprise index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations, recently turned positive again. It's good news. So, you know, I don't know, all these top signals, it might be, might be too much top signal. Might be, might be too early, you know. Yeah. 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. One of the ones that was like an example of a top signal. City was like, buy it. I forget which one. Maybe, I don't know.

But let me tell you about Vanta real quick. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Continuously. Continuously. 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.

Time for a debate. Time for a debate. The great debate. Sean McGuire 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 want to compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so Augustus, we had them 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 tinfoil 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 going to go deliver it. I'm going to 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... To be clear, very fair and good that people were asking questions, right? Like natural process. Yeah. Like the questions should be asked. It's not like they teach cloud seating 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 whatever they sort of subscribe to. Yeah. I think it was right for people 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 seating 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 an argument over Mom Dani, 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.

No, no, the man loves the debate. He loves a fight. And so, yeah, I think his position generally was you need to be vocal and loud about extremism. Yep. And whether or not people believe that Zohon, Zoron, Zohon, Zoron. Not Zohan. That's the Adam Sandler movie. Whether or not people believe that Mom Dani is an extremist, personally, I've seen some of his old posts. It seems like it has some very extreme views. Maybe he's changed.

Maybe he hasn't. He's kind of gone back and forth. He was saying defund the police. Now he's saying he doesn't want to do that. He did. He did. And one of Sean's points was that Mom Dani was sort of celebrating the third antifada. And I believe that Sean brought up that the last anti-fought-up, 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. Like it hit the timeline from other people. Yeah. Sean's crisis started with a Sean post. So it's a very different like inciting inciting element. Creation versus reaction. Yeah, something like that. And so my question is like

does that necessitate a different calm 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 like speaking their own language. Yeah. If he sees a post pop up that's going viral, he's jumping on it. He puts it in the comments and then he also quotes it. Yeah. And and then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms. Yes, I have a list here. critiques were coming from. So he came on our show Monday. Yep. He had a good conversation. He did like a space that day too.

Yep. And then he proceeded to go on CNN, Fox News, Pirate Wires, InfoWars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, and Tim Poole, all within the span. And those are all conservative outlets, basically. While working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide more context. There's a Washington Post article here now. Yeah. And so he's gone across 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 on the time. 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.

Yeah, yeah. His intention and approach was to point out extremism, Islamist extremism. And I think that just got like oftentimes in a post context of the 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, 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, 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 Info Wars is going to 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, 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. 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 Longsdale went on TV and defended it and kind of explained it. But Sean didn't. And 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 situations.

Yeah, Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean. There was a great post from Pat Grady, Sequoia 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, Shaw 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 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. 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 um this is uh really not about uh different uh different cultures and people it's more about um kind of uh 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 interesting response Both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing. 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 seating be done at all? or not, right? And that was like the vibe online was like 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 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 like the people like with with Sean, like he's trying to fight back against something that's like a general vibe or general accusation of a bad vibe,

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

And if I think about Augustus, he's thinking about, like, how do I save weather modification as an industry in the country? Totally like specific regulator, specific politicians and specific like and also like the local people in who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seating who might go to their city council meeting and say not in my backyard. So it's like it's people that are I feel like the pushback against Sean was very like broad and just like bad tech guy vibes like like just like negative broadly on the left and the folks that support 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 yeah he's defending his business his industry, his actions. Yeah. The question for me is like, is like, there are times when someone who, when someone needs to like step up or stand up outside of their core business. And this kind of bridges to the Brian Armstrong piece at Coinbase about being like 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, like we are going to be focused on stuff that's related to crypto. And that was really well received. Then the question is like for venture capitalists, should they only step up and start talking about politics when it's like a ban on an important technology or a change to the way, you know, 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. Yeah.

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, you know,

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 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 like, no, because the people that were really bothered by this or didn't get through this nuance and understand the PAC Radio response and understand him unpacking it, like probably we're 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. Get your golden retriever set up on linear. It's one of the greatest gifts that you 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. Sonoma.

I really like this. There were two. Two very interesting houses in the mansion section today. And they're both being sold by tech founders who have 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's 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 primary. Great option for a, you know, a GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity.

I was about to say, you know, is it really worth spending half of your own? your bonus as an AI researcher on one house? Yeah. Or is that unresponsible? 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 president. Of sales at Silicon Graphics. That is a story firm. Worked on 3D imaging. In 1991, he founded international

Network Services, fantastic name, which was acquired by Lucent in 1999 for $3.7.009 selling. What are you doing, buddy? I mean, I think he timed it. I think he timed it perfectly. You hold on to that stock for two more years. International network services. They don't make names. 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? Oh, yeah. That was just a fan writing in. Yeah, no, but just real company. Yeah, yeah, real, real company, but not like hyped company. Well, soon to be hyped.

Soon to be hyped. Yeah, 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 1,000 acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years. Wow. By sheer coincidence, McKinney and avid fishermen had caught a 1,119 pound marlin. Oh, so I have to actually, I have to correct this.

So the ranch was 1,1119 acres. and by coincidence he had caught a 1,1,119 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? I don't think I've actually ever. I've caught 150 pound halibate in Alaska.

There we go. And I did it when I was a kid. It weighed more than me at the time. It was the biggest, like, boost to my ego of all time. I conquered an animal that was bigger than me. Every person should do that at least once. For sure. I got to 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, 19, 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, this is like the dream.

So the interesting thing here, the interesting thing here, he bought this property. When, so he bought the property in the mid-2040s. Was it 2014 or the mid-2000s? Oh, I guess he started working on the, on the, uh, the remodel. The remodel, yeah. So he's $45 million into this property, selling it for 50, but he bought it in the mid-2000s. Yeah.

So on paper, not the best return. But the memories are probably priced. Fantastic time with it. 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 can't, we wait until, why wait until we?

kick off and then have our estate dole it out he said let's participate now that's great chat the market for prime ranches is strong thanks to liquidity among other high net worth buyers probably those AI researchers unironically uh there's a lot of people hedging in land yeah you know if you're worried about the top signals buy some land buy ranch anyway um get on numeral too numeral hq.com sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance um so there's another there's another story in the mansion platform of john 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 going to love this. I don't think you read this yet. Not yet. Okay, I'm going to 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 longtime home of the late inventor Ronald Katz and his wife Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones and for making breakthroughs in credit card technology. So if I'm hearing this correctly, sort of like AI agents for X? Exactly. Sort of like, you know, a vintage version of Finn. Yes. Yes. I mean, I'm very excited to be hanging out with Own in a few years. Hopefully he's patented Finn.fin.fin.a.i. The number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeups. Number one 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. They got so much stuff here. Ronald. 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 like generational wealth from patents. It's crazy.

And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist. Kind of 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 patents.

it and licensed 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, like I'm working on patents, it almost always is a huge bear signal. It is like, well, you should develop something and then capitalize on it yourself. Because it is like that 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. Yeah. It's interesting because the, you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents, right? They'd be like just become the world expert

in a certain field, get a PhD in it, spend 10 years researching the frontier, and then develop an innovation, patent it, and then just cash flow free, you know, lifestyle forever. 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 his coming up on like 15 years. Did I tell you I have a patent?

A big patent guy. Maybe it's not a lost art. I don't make any like 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 I am. I can hear you.

Yeah, I have a patent on the capsule pouch, the capsule nicotine pouch. fantastic innovation. Invented. John Coogan, the inventor. I love it. Anyway, 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 going to write you a check. How do you verify that they have it? You have to call the company and say, do they have money? It's an agentic workflow.

It 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 AMM. to provide call processing services, that partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz technology licensing.

And I feel like first data. Isn't First Data huge? First Data is the layer below Stripe, right? I'm pretty sure. There's a layer below Stripe? Yeah, I'm pretty sure Stripe uses First Data for acquisition of credit cards. and 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 leveres 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. B2V SaaS founder.

Absolutely insane. It's wild. So anyway, his house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy Mansion. 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 Spelling Mansion. You know Spelling Manor? Spelling Manor. Have you heard of this? Aaron Spelling, he was a big TV guy. And he built the largest home in Los Angeles something like $100 million.

It had a dedicated room for present wrapping. Because you're going to wrap so many presents at that level. Like there are levels to this. For sure. Like, oh, actually when I moved into one of my first apartments, I got, like, when you started making money young, I moved into, like, it was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it was, it had no walls or anything because it was like open floor plan

because it's just studio and I'm just one guy. And, and I had a, there was room for a, there was room for a washer dryer. But I didn't have a washer dryer because we like send out the. You made it a present room? I made it a present wrapping station. I put a little table there. And you could work from it, but it was like in the bathroom. I was like, this is my version of a present wrapping room.

And the spelling. Yeah. It's like I'm aesthetically living in spelling manner. So the cats have spent years renovating this date before moving. Normal story here. The couple filled the home with art and collectibles from around the world. The game room includes antique billiards, 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, two friends and family, kept adding to the trope. The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this? What's it called? It's like the elephant problem or the giraffe problem. There's a name for it where you make golden retrievers your thing. And then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you?

Oh, you like pigs. And then it snowballs. And then everyone gets you so many. that over 20 or 30 years you developed like this massive collection of trinkets for you it might be horse accessories i got you those horse electrolytes we 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 main and tail the horse shampoo just as a joke because i'm built like a horse i guess he thought it was very funny i loved it that's great so yeah maybe maybe maybe maybe

The beginning of the beginning of the tail. By the way, you know, you know, Truman Sachs really into the horsepower metaphor. You know, he's like obsessed

with horses and stuff. You know, everyone's got to have a brand. Anyway, what were you saying? Oh, I said a nice new haircut. Oh, yeah, the horse could never.

A horse could never. The horse hair is strong. It was breaking the scissors. We broke multiple pairs, but we did get it cut. It's thick 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 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. You can be a fan of multiple things. But people tend to collapse the meme around you down to just like, oh, you're not just into Tolkien and other things.

You're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff. Yeah. So anyway, in other news, we have a post from brother Reggie James has 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 got to ask, we got to ask praying for exits. No, he might be aware. He gives 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, the most. The most, the most, there was a, there was a man and a woman, like a table away from us, having the most deranged conversation. the most rosewood coded conversation of all time where i think she was divorced or going through divorce talking about like breaking down loudly breaking down their entire financial situation yeah yeah and being like basically like i'm good because we have carry in this fund that's that's definitely going to hit in the next never have i wanted clear view ai more are you really Clearview AI. Oh, like 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. Yeah. Because it was an absolute about that. 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 boo in every night in every city. Absolutely wild. Well, Ryan has a good story here. Uh, uh, responding to Reggie's post. This is one time in 2012, my co-founder and I crashed and burned so hard in a pitch on Sandhill. The partner's wrapped with, look, 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 don't get this post. Why would they do well if they're? Well, like, maybe they're just crashed and burned. Oh, oh, oh, like the company has crashed and burned or something?

No, they didn't do well in the pitch. Okay, so it was like, maybe you can very rich. Yeah. That's what you say. Okay, got it. That's hilarious. A couple of studs. Head over to the roadwood.

Anyway, underrated strategy. Go to the roadwood. 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.

Addio is the AIDA. Having Adio on deck for Coogar Night is crazy alpha. Do you keep the Cougars in the CRM or no? But, but, their potential leads, right? Yeah, for sure. If you're selling to VC and there's a Cougar there who's, who's maybe, maybe you could sell SASS to that VC

and it would re-inspire him to grind harder and save the relationship. Save the relationship. It's possible. Anything can 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 Nobu when I could be, you know, grinding? I've been reinvigorated. Many people are saying that. Well, you know, we talked about the top signals, whether you're long, whether you're short, you make your own decision, you make, 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. And we had Dylan Parker from a moment yesterday talking about his fix. He raised the Series B for his fixed income platform. And he mentioned that they power public's fixed income products. 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 going to 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 power train requires a new brand name or new subbrand name for a product. It should be like trim level, in my opinion. It shows lack of conviction. Yeah. Like, I mean, BMW is doing this with like the I4 instead of the, instead of the 535 I, the I5 is going to 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 power train? 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 U.S. 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 on 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 McVickers said he was dead set on getting the buzz until his dealer told him that the Palmello, yellow and white version he had his eye on would cost around $72,000 far more than he expected. Yeah, this feels like, you know, premium SUV territory. So 45K, 50K maybe, 55K, 72 feels crazy for this.

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 features. And so it's hard to go up against the, if you're comparing the Buzz to the Model Y in a spreadsheet, you're going to get, 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. It's for sale for $65,000. It's got $85,000 miles on it. It's seen a lot. But it's possible that, you know, who knows what went into

kind of pricing it, but they might have said, hey, we're making this bus like for that category that wants just kind of like a fun leisure vehicle. It's not super functional. You're not. 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's going to daily. Yeah. 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 the ID buzz in Germany like the the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car like a halo product which is it sounds funny when you compare it to like the Audi R8 of course but they said it the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms and they're not really planning to sell in great number 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

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, what a 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. Yeah. I actually don't know where the Alist is, 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. are functional. How much did that Cullin 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, you know, picking up an old continental GT instead of a, instead of a phone booth. Yeah. Okay, so a Rolls-Royce-Colonan 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? Can you imagine putting 114,000 miles on the Rolls for Race Colon 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, is saying like, okay, yeah, if you're going, if you're putting that many miles, like, it has to be highway miles,

so they're not hard miles. Like, it's probably fine. And Rules Royce, you know, has a bad reputation as being, like, you know, in the shop all the time. But if it made it this far, like, maybe it'll make it another 100,000 miles. And it, like, actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steel of a century at 170. Who knows? Could have been bombing around in a, you know, Rolls Royce Kellenin.

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 like like Tesla just needs more different trim levels but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices because like how different is the world if the cyber truck 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 like 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, that's an issue. The other thing is if I was thinking about a car, if I wanted like, if I wanted a surf like a car just to like trash and take to the beach 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, 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 going to 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 SUV lineup. Do they really want the buzz over like a Q7?

No, but isn't Audi a Volkswagen product too? Yeah. 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 Uris. Chai and Turbo GT. Is that a Volkswagen product too? Yeah, Porsche's Volkswagen.

At least the at least the Kyan GT looks different, you know. But part of the reason that the VW bus is like so legendary is like it was an icon and they spent a lot of time building that. 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 good bet it 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 car, summer, summer. You got to find your happy place. It's 12.39 p.m. Pacific. You can book a wander today With inspiring views Five star amenities And you can Hotel graded amenities

Of course Dreamy beds top tier cleaning And 24 seven 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 Dordy? Deep diving tropics A bunch of things So Let's bring him in Let's bring him in Welcome to the stream

How you doing It is It's great to have you in the temple what's the latest i hope you don't mind if i do a shot before we start doing what are you drinking johnson olive oil oh brian johnson all of oil shots okay there we go is this a performance that's insane i love it uh is how does it how does it taste yeah give us a taste it's spicy as olive oils go it's spicy but it's super tasty spicy okay yeah is this a short-term performance enhancer like you're on the show for 20 minutes right now are

Are you going to get a boost for the next 20 minutes? Or is this more like a, you do it does daily and then it improves your performance. It's less of like a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing to do just to get really good fats. But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys. So I'm just going to pop on a glucose monitor here. Okay. There we just. You're really maxing the half.

He's just to find out of my blood sugar or not. Take us through the rest of the stats. 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. He's two years ahead of you. Farb, you would have love this. I had a... a cold plunge just in my bedroom. The college?

No, this is 2020. Okay, okay. A year and a half. Dorm room. Didn't you tell me the college, the dorms? It's like six dudes in one unit or something. UCSB will have like 15 guys in a house. 15 guys are one house.

Not the ideal biohacking environment. Imagine you're just like old punch stays on during sex, they say. But anyways, you've impressed me with how at the frontier you are. So I want to have you on to talk about everything. getting 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 like your stack,

what you're running today and then we can get into some subtopics. Great, great. Farboot Nivie, 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. What's the stack?

Yeah, let's start with what you're running today. Or what do you think you do that has like a power law outcome on your health? Because like sleep diet exercise seem like the most important. And then you get down into like, I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight. And it's like. Or Farber is doing like gene therapy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So walk me through.

I did some gene therapy. 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, a folostatin gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here. 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, 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. Williamson and said have this great point. It's like a person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day. And I'm like, that hit me really hard. I'm like, oh, wow, we're doing self-negotiation every day. 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 should never touch it. 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 if 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 test actually and my most recent one, which I just did with function. I did a huge function panel. And my teeth, my testosterone is like 600, 700, my free testosterone's above 100. It's pretty good. That's great. Yeah. That's cool. So yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well. And we can kind of get into a little bit of that. I've done peptides for probably seven, eight years. And so my stack right now is more.

And how are you getting, how are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious. Yeah, okay. Like Chinese. And also, and also just like, I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is like glucagon like peptide,

like GLP one. And that's generally not seen as a peptide for guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about like what, what peptides, even 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, BP, BPD. DPC 157 is different. PPC 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. Yeah. Do you think that... But other ones increase growth hormone, other ones improve deep sleep. And if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it.

And to your question about, like, how was I getting it? In 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. Yeah, yeah. Kind of in limbo now. And all these sites, they sell it for research purposes. Which you were actually using for research purposes. Yeah, I'm using it for research purposes, yeah. But it's not for human consumption. The GLPs, which are another type of peptide are the ones that you get like Monjara, Ozempic. Yeah. And that role is really getting crazy too.

because we know the brand name ozempic but like ozempic is old news um yeah the the current one is tersephotide yeah that's right um and then red at true tide is coming next um 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 like a microdose or or do you think it will remain as just like a a powerful tool for weight loss. Well, yeah, the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around, you know, GLP-1s or Trezpetide helping with like willpower broadly. So imagine just having 20% extra willpower.

But then there's the, 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 a less risk on society? They're not going turbo long. They're just like, will we have less volatility? Maybe that's how we save the, the, the, the, the, bill, you know, it's like people are just like, yeah, I'm fine to just earn two percent. There's a, there's a bill in the house for testosterone?

What do you talking about tea? We love to have one. We love to see it. We should get one in there. Minimum. Yeah, yeah, I'm investing in tea bills. I'm taking the majority of my bills and paying tea. People microdose these things.

Sure, sure, sure. And they, they seem to have like a lot more than just weight loss effect, blood sugar regulation they seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of studies um so there's even a you know some people just microdose them like sometimes uh when i was doing it i was taking a really small dose uh you know one fifth to one tenth of what the even starting doses um 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 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 of light and 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.

And what counts for getting light? Like I walk to my car in the morning at 5.30. Does that count? I'm outside for a minute. And then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess. Yep. That's the light. But, you know, maybe it gets three to five minutes.

Three to five minutes. So I should, like, kind of walk around the block or something a little bit. 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 did.

So that was for your health, John. Thank you. You did it. Whether or not you knew it, that's helping you, that's helping your health. Yeah. And then I usually, you know, do the morning stuff. Count 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. Um, then gym, uh, 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. Wow. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, I'm a recovery maxing.

Okay. Recovery maxing. Interesting. All your gains coming. Yeah. So, so how you notice? I'm assuming you, yeah. I'm assuming you went through a period where you're just like, gross split.

You seem like you've done crossfit. I don't know. 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, you know, chest back legs, chest back legs rest on, you know, Sunday. Did you ever do that? I'm kind of like, I'm like light version of that now. Like to me, the thing I've learned is that like a little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference. Interesting. And so like 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. And 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. Well, that was 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 of an exercise it was yeah it was a mental exercise about how to get

people to use more plastic and it was like one of the one of the ideas that people threw out was like make glass and sound bad yeah and like here we are here we are somebody ran the here we are what is the actual data well the study was done by like i think a french organization so we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or actual science so um you know 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 like the cap at the top of the bottles. They have like 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 going to 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 France? It was a decent size. 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 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 leeches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So I don't know if they're comparing it, you know, to a leech. plastic bottle versus a glass one that's not going to.

Another one, what are you doing around cholesterol right now? I know you were running experiment there a while back. Yeah, this was actually kind of an accidental experiment. I take most of Brian Johnson's stack just because it's like everything I want and it's easy and I trust them. 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. 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 have happened. And basically, it was just immediately,

it was the red yeast rice. Because red east rice is basically a statin. So monocolic. 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 Q10. Some people statins or red yeast rice, they experience like some muscle soreness. And it seems like taking a good amount of CO10 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 want to be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of. Very 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 the, you know, if you get the bends, like you need to be in the 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 this odd, this odd crazy health hack.

But then Brian Johnson's 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 aptness. So they have 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 going to 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 like work? I thought Brian Johnson was like 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 these more, you know, I think the reason that that saunas are so great is it's passive. It doesn't take a lot of it doesn't take a lot of willpaper to say or sorry, willpower.

Will power to say, oh, I'm going to go on TVPN. Yeah, it doesn't take a lot of willpower to go and say I'm going to 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 TVPN, et cetera. Yeah, it's on 24 hours, yeah. It's a wild time. We've got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline.

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 did my gene therapy is working on one that will 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 I the IQ one it feels like yeah if you got 20 people that that got some benefit maybe Faust maxing yeah just down for

Faustian bargains yeah always it's not harmful I'm generally okay with trying and see what it does sure last question last question I'm curious where's your what's your thinking around, I think I know the answer already, but the sort of like ancestral philosophy, you know, sort of like consume things that, you know, existed hundreds of years ago versus, you know, something being made in a lab is not necessarily bad and you should take advantage of science? I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's like convenient and easy, but I don't think it's a great. great heuristic, right? Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it.

And neither of those are great explanations is like, you know, bowing to ancestral ways or to science. If you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works, then you should be kind of suspicious of it. And I don't think either of those are great explanations. You know, you've got to take things on their face. Circadian alignment is, I mean, it turns out that the bro scientists were right on a million things. We thought diabetes type 2 was literally insurable before the 2010s. Bro scientists always thought you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Finally, in the 2010s, after 100 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. Got to 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 news real quick. 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. So great to see you. Oh, okay. Happy to. See you guys.

Have a good one. See you soon. Cheers. If you're looking to update your sleep game, head over to 8Sleep.com. That's right. Pod 5 Ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. pod five actively adjust your temperature elevates your body and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep head over to eightsleep.com we got sean frank in the studio the man who invented

the wallet 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 I posted 100, I posted it on Twitter. So it makes a lot of sense

that that was the intro that I got. How many, 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 congratulations. It's a remix. I went through about a year period where my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly every night. Eight sleep should make 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 show's like the manosphere content we need to do the data sphere content you're not 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 TikTok TikTok selling a new u.s owner to get ready they're turning down the focus on shops and pushing 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 so TikTok shops I mean if you talk to people inside of TikTok like high up yeah they do not see meta as a competitor they don't want to compete with meta like it's obviously like they're they both have short-form video now they're but like tictock never really was a social app in the way that instagram and facebook really are i heard this this morning people are uh or one of our younger uh friends was saying like the gen z they don't dm each other on tictock they use snapchat to talk and chat and then they use tic-tok as like a youtube style content yeah so like if you talk to people at tic-tok they

really want to go after the YouTube's of the world. And I 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, like, Amazon's given up trying to grow, right? So we have Prime Day growing right now. It's four days of Prime Day. They doubled the length year every 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 going to 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. I mean, to just like we just need to triple the population of the United States. 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 uh yeah so so so uh but it sounds like with ticot going to u.s owner like something's changing there break that down yeah uh so they spent probably 24 months and easily 30 billion dollars trying to get people to use ticto shops right um right now the estimate is that like it's a billion dollars a month in gmv so a 12 billion dollar gmv business that could be high it could be a lot of changes that's not very big like you know shopping shopping Shopify's GMV in a quarter is probably double that, right? So Shopify probably does 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 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 the $20 billion in GMV, right?

So to be like one-tenth 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 want to 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. 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?

For a lot less than that. For 50 cents apparently. Yeah. So and Flip was the same thing. All of them are, I mean, Timu, Sheen, everybody's coming after like this disposable income in America. Right. So Flip's like, we're going to take a social, you know, commerce attack on it.

TikTok was the same thing. You know, T-Moo is owned by a publicly traded company in China, right? That's worth like $200 billion. And they were losing, I mean, probably $100 million 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, you know, goods via T-Moo from China to the U.S., totally tax and duty-free, right? So why is TEMU cheaper than Old Navy or H&M or whatever else? It's they're paying zero taxes. So we close that. Now, TEMU'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 U.S., 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, app loving is making a bid, like all of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there. And if you have users, you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine, which is Google, which is meta, right? So, you know, it will end up being more of a meta competitor. They're going to abandon the strategy of going after Amazon and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should, like you guys do. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it was, I have a, I had a friend that at the time that the, the, the TikTok ban was being flubing

or the app was being removed from the app store. I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on TikTok. He has a 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, you know, heavily subsidized and totally unsustainable.

Yeah, explain this interaction in the comments to that post. 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 they talking about tick tock's 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 this is tic talk going to brands yeah so the co-funding is when you run uh ticot shops to try to get new brands in there to try to get your sales up they are 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 tic

tockitk you know amazon gets 15% of all transactions as fees tick tic tic tc gets 6% but they take that 6% and they give you 30% of your of your transaction back right that's that co-funding element they've started to slow that down drastically in january when they got banned right 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 do you get per post right so you know on Instagram it's like you have an outload of 33% one in one in three posts are going to be ads TikTok got to 50% of all ads were monetized be through your affiliate 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 monetized via shops which is 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 meta does, it's been crushing on TikTok ever since they made this change like three months ago. So the writing's on the wall. TikTok 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? 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, Mike? 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 $10 million a month on TikTok 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 was cool.

It was exciting. It was fast growing. 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 going to catch on. What about, so what do you think the future of platforms like What Not 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, right? affiliate was a bad word in 2021 right if you were if you were doing affiliate marketing you were selling like the scamiest product on earth or like porn or viagra or something right and they made more young kids more you know be okay with selling stuff on the internet so they made affiliate cool again and i think you 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 more social comments built in, but it's not going to be the $100 billion GMB business that TikTok's trying to build it to. And that it is in China, right, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the downstream effect of like the ads getting better on TikTok? Does that mean like brands need to be investing more in like actually like, you know, Super Bowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt like the Cluelly thing? Like is it just algorithm hacking AI slop?

Like what do you think the meta will be in terms of like actually having an ad really, really perform on TikTok post sale or post sale to US owner? Yeah. Well, I would start testing this right now, but what meta has pushed, so meta is like still the king of, you know, 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. possible really focus on short form video still but like high production uGC AI whatever you want to put in there and then a drama to just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time like it they've really focused on making sure they can like their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person take whatever winners you have over there because that is a heavy lifting for you and just run them on tic-tok yeah like are we are we completely past the era of like it was the harman 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 harman brothers did great there's a company called sandwich video they did yeah sandwich was another one that was really big in that yeah right right right up is still doing it. The problem is, like, there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend, right? So if you're going to spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least

$20 million promoting it, right? And it used to be that, like, 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% of the cost. Interesting. And that just drives everything, the investment in creative doubt. So is there, I think, yeah, yeah, but is there some sort of like, like, unquantifiable value in the short term around, like, creating like what's called

a shelling point? So, like, we all know about, like, you know, the ERAs tour for Taylor Swift. Like, it was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that. Or, like, Barbenheimer or, like, the Dollar Shave Club ad, like, and, like, and, you know, 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. Like the iPhone or the iPod like silhouette dancing campaign. Like everyone remembers that one. Like are we just post that type of marketing? Or is there still potentially alpha if you could underwrite it across like two decades and you're willing to take this like really big shot? Go make something great and then be like, yeah, we are going to spend 20 million against this $1 million ad can't add that we shot. It might take us a couple of 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 going to, 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 going to 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? They made a really good video that, you know, they really gambled on it, where it was 100% of costs were going to ad creative. And as ad creative costs go down and as the internet gets messier and harder to stand out, like you just need to have that money spent on, you know, actually delivering ads.

What do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club, like 100% of the spend going towards the creative? Like, clearly just ran this playbook. what's your reaction to that? Like they, like, the reason people have seen the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the cluely viral videos is not because of ad ad spend. They're probably, they 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, uh, controversy and rage baiting, right? Like, we all know about Cluey. Like, yeah, it was a good video, but like, it's because they're really good at rage baiting. The other thing is like Dr. Squatch did the Sydney, Sweeney. The bass.

Yeah. Right. Like, we're going to talk about that because of the controversy tied to it and like the outlandish nature. But if you want to make a really beautiful message, the iPod dancing video, nobody gives a fuck. It's like you have to make somebody mad. The culture shifted. 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. But there's news at the company too. Just tell me everything you know about it. Well, dude, every Sunday, me and Josh, the current CEO of Jack Squash, play tennis. So you guys are in LA. If you guys are big tennis guys, she should come play. That'd be awesome. Dude, they're crushing.

It's a great story. So the guy who made it Jack, you know, 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 other partners out and with 27 million dollars remaining he's like I'm just going to put everything into YouTube he dumped all of that money into YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started talking 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 yeah like creator driven YouTube was working but 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 was still like it was funny, it was iconic and he's just like, men soaps 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. Molest is a great bank. They ruined that deal for him. They ended up getting bought by Summit. This was like peak COVID-2020. So then Summit put it in a great management team. Josh was there, you know, 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, right? I mean, someone's going to make a ton of money. So, you know, we're kind of at the end of the fund cycle for a lot of those DTC funds, right? If you raised money from a brand, it's a 10-year fund. Like, we're getting towards the end where there's going to be a lot of consolidation. Dr. Squatch is a winner, made money all the way up.

And now they're going to be able by Unilever. And they'll be the next, you know, generational men's personal care brand. They'll be the axe or like the bodd spray. Whatever we had in middle school, that's not just watch. So seven years with on this video. So seven years ago, they launched this video, Natural Soap for MET, it has 122 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? Oh, they dumped like 20 million bucks into that video. Okay, wow. I mean, it has 11,000 comments. So clearly like people, even if they saw it as a promoted post, like they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well.

So, but wow, yeah, what a crazy R but 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 roll-ups who 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 sent you to do this before we got started. You guys had, like the last guy on here was curing diabetes, right?

Like, okay, if that works, $100 billion company. You know what I mean? Like, when you talk about Nvidia crossing $4 trillion, it's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Dr. Squatch at $1.5 billion, massive win. Like, everyone in that group will end up being LPs in new 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 them, there's coming to the 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 $5 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 consumers still in. So 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 or CPG brand or hair care brand getting bought in like this, you know, one, 100 million to $500 million range. That's happening a lot right now with that consolidation. What's the post-mortem on the bill versus buy, but the actual,

but the actual like roll-ups where I'm going to 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 money on a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands. It's like the Thrasio thing. Thrasio and then there was the open store and 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 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, Joy, 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 is bankrupt.

So I don't know if that's been announced yet. Okay. They're all like Thrasio went bankrupt. Open source is 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.

You can perform revenue, right? Dr. Squatch is that. And, like, if you can get to $500 million in revenue and consumer, it's typically one brand. There's typically a lot of profit tied to it, like Hexclad. Open. Dot Store, which was the URL, now reroutes to jackarcher.com, which looks like a men's, which was one of their brands. Which was one of their brands.

It's a dude, it's a jackdudan a polo with some socks and some pants. Which we love. It 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. Robin Hood CEO raising for a math AI company at $900 million valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's given out stock tips.

Harry Stebbings calling for $8 trillion Nvidia. Circle at 2,000 times price to earnings. It's 2,000 times? 200 times no it's 2000 uh satyas being smart doing some layoffs then you have soham parikh masas uh top blasting uh your favorite uh fin fin twit uh influencers launching spaks zucks making offers are you feel on the top are you are you worried right now or do you think we got some room to run uh do that's a great question um we probably got room to run right i mean so Let's go.

We heard it. Wait, 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 to get it warmed up. There we go. There we go.

That's great. They'll correct us in the comments. If we did it poorly. But we're learning our gonged. You said, we have some room to run. You said go ultra long, sell your house, sell your car. Can we expect an NFT profile picture for Ridge is like really kind of the, what the kind of question. Well, no, no.

It would be an AI agent for rich. For wallets. Yeah. No, dude. Wallet coin. So I think it's full circle. It's back to ICOs, guys. Initial coin offerings.

Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. How do you, how do you, I mean, I think like Ridge. that's just navigated 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, like, do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was,

you know if he thinks that you know if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy uh you know there's certain brands that are going to benefit from that retailers um 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 rush into the market bitcoin all-time high is 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 that's That makes leverage buyouts work again. Okay.

Oh, so it's LBOs. Yeah, 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, you know, ADP put out their June number. and like it doesn't look good, right? So I think we do end up getting rate cuts just because the financial markets are like, you know, removed away from what's happening, you know, in a lot of businesses, right? So I think we'll get bad jobs reports.

Yeah, what about rates on like buy now, pay later and just like the general consumer ability to like click the checkout button on e-commerce site? Like is our 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 Carolina, 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. You know, it works out to be 20, you know, 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 not pay later is and if interest comes down they're just fucking I mean I can't renegotiate that so those people money on that thing but look never been against the American consumer we love buying shit

five days four days this year baby four days 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 going to 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 could actually start doing that for me. And it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have, you know, one person director in charge of all that stuff now, but it has replaced people. On the creative side, V-O-3 is fantastic. So, like, we're doing hooks on V-O-3, you know, it's really good at, like, 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. But we're still not at the place where like, I mean, I spent $150,000 on photo shoots last month, right? Like in the desert.

How much did you spend on AI tooling probably in the thousands or something? Yeah, hundreds, right? Yeah, hundreds. Like, we have cars in the desert, off-roading. Like, AI's not doing those videos yet. I don't know if they ever will. It's funny. We made that video for Wander, and a 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 makes, I mean, that's historically just been like one of the hardest problems. Like the number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory so that there's like, demand, there's general demand for what they make and sell. They just don't have enough of the right things. 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, you know, steroids, but yeah, still a lot of work to actually get results from that. And so you still have people in loop. Yeah, dude. And I think AI, like editing is going to be huge, right? like, you know, you shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial, right? You probably shot hours, right, to get a one-minute clip. It's going to make editing way easier.

So productivity gains are here and they're coming. We probably another two years before humans are not actually pulling out cameras. Two years. That's pretty fast. Dude, I mean, if you ask fucking say a Malmint, I mean, we'll see if open our eyes going to be around in two years, dude. They might not be anybody left. It might not be anybody left.

That's true. I don't know. I think people will probably still be doing photos in a few years. I 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.

and just like Photoshop to you can't trust a photo because it may or may not be real entirely. Like it could have just been a hallucination from a machine. But doesn't 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. I'm going to make a plug. There's an AI artist on Twitter. It's a, I think the handles like this photo does not exist. Okay.

They've produced some amazing photography. That's cool. Like that actually, like, 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's definitely like the pitch in mid-journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like leaving that inspiration that the, like the human brings to the tool to create something new. But it's very hard for someone to just go and say, make me a viral video. Make me a beautiful image. Like that's not the prompt yet. No, it's not yet. But we'll see.

Anyways, anything else? It's great to see you, wallet, man. Let's hang in person very soon. Yeah, let's hang out soon. Pennis, guys. Send us to us. I'll see you. I'll see you.

Send us time. I'm down. Great to see you. Have a great Friday. Bye. Cheers. On the AI note, we should cover some of the back and forth

around Grock 4 versus 03. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. This says Grock 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 post. is frequently confused, 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 Cowan says O3 is still better, so he's still in the O3 camp. And more XAI news. This is breaking. No breaking. As of 10 minutes ago, Elon Musk's XAI seeks up to $200 billion valuation in X fundraising. Wow. 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 API. This is the most value, 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. There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Amjad 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 H-100s 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. Grock has been in the news lately for being edgy.

Grock is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things are deeply related, that they figured out how to scale RL like this in such a short amount of time is, in fact, an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's, that it's related to the willingness to say controversial thing, things other than via the absence of efforts typically spent on guardrails. So yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just, you know,

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, new attempt. And obviously a great model, but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make like an anti-woke model specifically, just the fact that it's a lot of great math going on. Well, 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 for $526 billion.

Total outlays for $49 billion. That's a free cash flow for the United States of America. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Well, more breaking news. You can go to big getbezzle.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.

First day on the risk. Mark German is talking about Tim Cook. The rhetoric that Tim Cook should be replaced is just nonsensical. Replace him with who? Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs sadly isn't walking through that. door. I thought this is a good take that I've agreed with for a while, is that, you know, Tim Cook is, it is such a large organization, so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain.

He is the one who built that supply chain. He is, you know, maybe missing the mark on AI, might have to partner with some folks, might have to spend a bunch of money, but fundamentally, he's running the core business very well. And that relates to the new plans for 2026, the first half, they're going to release a flurry of new products. Mark German 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 going to refresh that crazy display. 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 like, you know, 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 iPad airs as part of the flurry of new products. I think this is all kind of expected. But interesting. What else is? Michael La Framboy's is doing some market research. He says, would you pay for a mini Archimedes that plus? plugged into a wall and kill mosquitoes.

Cool concept. I didn't know what an Archimedes was. This must be. It must be. It must be. Lasers or something. I think something like that. I mean, this is,

this is the future that we want. This is, this is, you know, making. Also, we had, so we had Michael, we had, so 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 use it to, for, This is like Matt Friedman coded meets Palmer Lucky coded.

It's like melding the two things together. Just 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. Bizzle. It's not clocking to you, John.

Not clocking to me? What does that mean? 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 Nubu. When he said, it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business. 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 was called. Dispo. Was it just Dispo eventually? Yeah.

Because it was originally launched like David's Disposals. It's interesting. It's like, yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth, like the true, what's it called, the R-Not, 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 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. Interesting. It was just for like Jeremy Renner fans. They could just see his private Instagram like feed, basically. Pretty funny. But yeah, it's interesting. It's like, what is the ideal celebrity, the ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology?

I'm still very bullish on Sequin Barclay's strategy of just like invest in the power law companies that are already like kind of deemed successful and like ordained. 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 the, you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it. It's like if you're 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 C, a polymarketer market of the next CEO of X. Okay. It only has, X would be like the social app.

Yeah. Unclear if there would be, if Elon just becomes the CEO broadly, there's no new CEO because, you know, for whatever reason, they just don't backfill Linda. But then Sri Ram, Krishna, 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 Yoccarino's leadership teams such as John Nitty, global head of revenue operations and ad innovation at X. Angela Zepeda, X's global head of marketing, or Monique Pintorelli, 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. Potential guest. Posters in control. Not one of these business people. Although we forgot to highlight this, but Linda Yaccarino, 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 and networking and negotiating chops, the Velvet Hammer because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad. The Velvet Hammer. You got to always have attire 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, like, you know, pull them out of a hat.

They need to really be evocative. And the velvet hammer tells me exactly what she's up to. Definitely. Dress to the nines. Going to 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, Higalian e-girl, Claude, Laboo-Boo-Boo-Boo.

I still don't know how to pronounce that. I just see it written everywhere. Grockfor, Prime Intellect, Calamaze, that guy who claims, to have implemented auto fills and OTPs. We somebody, 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 hotly debated whether or not he was lying. Like obviously at Apple like multiple people work on every project. So people were like, yes, well, technically someone else has a claim, but also this person might have a claim. And there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the right to claim it anyway.

Anyway, we are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this. And we're just 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.

Log off. Get some sunlight. Get some sunlight in the morning. Five minutes. Five minutes. Three to five minutes. That's enough. Don't do more than that.

Yeah. Yeah. Get back inside. Dooms Girl. Have a great weekend, everyone. Leave us five stars and Apple Podcasts and Spotify. For Monday. you on Monday. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Cheers.