TBPN - Weekly Recap: Mark Cuban, Kanye’s Wild Mansion Makeover, China Heads to the Moon, Money in Clipping

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

(00:00) - Intro (00:04) - The Big Money of Clipping (14:12) - Meta Smart Glasses (28:31) - Heads to the Moon (34:21) - Mark Cuban (Investor & Entrepreneur) (01:04:46) - Kanye’s Wild Mansion Makeover (01:08:49) - Gabe Whaley (MSCHF) TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow 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 TVPA! Did you see that Cluelly was in the Wall Street Journal? No way. Yeah. So, and in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought was kind of interesting. We do some clipping here, we clip on X, we create TikToks, we create Instagrams, we create reels, all sorts of stuff. But the Wall Street Journal is breaking down the trends and all the big money behind those bite-sized social media videos. Companies are hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram.

Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the examples here is 1X, which we've had on the show as well. Clearly, we've also had on the show. And nothing. We've also had on the show. Three for three with the CEOs of the companies that are using clipping to their benefit. So you know those buzzy vial clips you see on social media? There's an army behind them.

Canoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy young clippers who help streamers, podcasts and startups expand their audiences by making buzzy moments go viral on social media. Cunningham edits down clients long form videos into short clips and then post the shorts on sites like Instagram and TikTok. It is lucrative work in May. Cunningham quit his finance job and now runs a team of eight clippers. He said the operation earns him 20,000 to 30,000 a month. Not bad. Clipping is one of the hottest corners of marketing. Instead of just posting on their own accounts creators and companies pay clippers like Cunningham to saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite-sized videos until they are almost impossible to miss. One technique they use

to grab attention on crowded social media platforms posting provocative or outrageous content. And I think this is one of the issues that people should be aware of if they're going to start clipping is what is the brand line? What is the brand standard? I saw a viral clip from a podcast where basically it made the host, like the host was joking, but the joke was taken out of context and just made the host look dumb, and that went super viral,

but the takeaway for the viewer is... Like great, you got views, did you get, are those valuable views? Yeah, yeah, it's not just, I mean, the, like, the base case for clipping is that it gets no views. The good, the good cases that it gets some, views, but it doesn't really convert many people, because the conversion rates on a million

views is like a few listeners will actually be like, yeah, I watched a, I enjoy that 60 second TikTok. I'm down to listen to an hour of this. That's a pretty low conversion rate, but that's fine because you get the million views, you probably bring some awareness. But the worst thing that you can do is like, create a brand as like the person that gets dunked on or something like that. Yeah. So certain people have productized this, right? So you've also hired like this. person, Mr. Cunningham in the journal, saying the only way to be famous in today's internet world is with clips. I think like he's running his own operation, but WAP has product has this. I do think it's a cool way for young people to make their first money online.

Like if you're in middle school and you want to figure out how to make $100 a day, you can probably do that through clipping. Yep, totally. But I wonder how much, I do wonder how much the social platform. platforms will, like if they see this as a feature or a bug, right? Because part of the strategy is, clueling will spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Cluelly content. Yep.

And they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, just like shotgun approach seeing they'll put out 100 videos. If a lot of them get under 1,000 views and one gets a million, that's a win for them. Yep. And, yeah, just I don't know how long this. will be like the meta, right? Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack, we were talking to Chris Bass and Substack will automatically generate clips.

There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internally Newsmax that does some automated clipping. But actually telling a story around a piece of content. content that's within a larger piece is something that AI is not able. Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally. Yeah, because in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require like human ingenuity. And we saw this with, we talked to Dwar Keshe about this, where he has spent a lot

of time using Anthropic and Gemini and Open AI to create workflows that will go through the transcript and try and find the best clips that will perform. And he says it always comes back at a five out of ten. And so he still has a team that does this and is very good and has a whole bunch of like hard won lessons about what works at a certain amount of time. And we've seen this with our, content that actually winds up performing a lot of it. Like we, we have to do a lot of experimentation. But once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it. And then we commit that to memory and our team commits that to memory and that becomes part of our like continual learning that happens and that just doesn't really happen in when you're when you're automating things with an

LLM. So it is it is it's probably like I think it's a good like base case to start with but a lot of this should be done by the platform. So I wouldn't be surprised. YouTube does it. Spotify does it automatically. Yeah, I don't know how much credit he should get but I do think that Andrew Tate's rise. Yep. Was his business model of paying people to clip his content to sell more courses which he then would recycle some of the proceeds and more clipping

and this was at a period where he was saying I'm the most Googled man on the internet and he would just say that over and over it would get clipped a lot and it naturally had this sort of feedback loop if people were just okay what is this guy saying I need to pay attention but that was also hyper optimized for that

format because he'd be like sitting shirtless in a supercar you know smoking a cigars and and of these like social media hacks they always have like a very narrow window of opportunity like the the the the the the giving away a sport it used to just be just renting a sports car or like owning a Ferrari would be enough for a million views now that then it became you had to give it away and so Doug Jumeiro hit one of his big series that got really big the car

YouTuber was he had a Ferrari 360 modena and it was I think in the the hundred something thousand dollar range. He had to get a bunch of debt to pay for it. It was very expensive. And he made a whole bunch of videos about his red Ferrari. He levered up his content. Yeah. And it was great. It was great content. It was interesting. And of course, it was, he was more like making fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture, but still the, there just weren't that many YouTube videos of like a red Ferrari. So you click on it and people found him that way and he grew. Then it became like the Mr. Beast era of like, I'm going to give away a Ferrari. last person to take their hand off the car wins it.

And that was a big thing that was even more expensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari, pay the monthly payment for a certain amount of time and then sell it and hope that there's not that much depreciation. Like the net cost was truly the full price of the Ferrari. But at least you're giving it to someone. It's like a write-off probably. There's something there.

The most recent Mr. Beast video involving a supercar was him literally shredding a Lamborghini, just destroying it. Like Whistland Diesel has become a huge YouTuber on the back of, on the back of just like destroying supercars and G-wagons and all these crazy cars. Tyler. I think Sean Frank just gave away Lambo. Oh, yeah.

He posts about that. That's working. That's working. So maybe soon he's going to have to start destroying it. I don't know. Yeah. I think giving it away. But yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like this.

That made sense. That was a strata. It was a strata. Very special car. Yeah. No, but the real, the real pinnacle of this was Whistlin Diesel. Yeah. Whistland Diesel took it to the max.

To the absolute max. Ferrari F8, beautiful car. He destroyed it? Completely destroyed it, right? And made a video about it. It's incredibly entertaining to watch anybody drive a car that's normally a garage, a garage queen and have somebody just absolutely take it off, roading all this stuff.

Fantastic video if you haven't seen it. It's funny, I was looking up what kind of Ferrari it was, and Google's AI overview says, Wissland Diesel, parentheses, Cody Coe, destroyed his Ferrari F8. And so AGI has not been a... Add 300 days to the singularity time. At 300 days.

300 more days till AGI. We're not getting any closer. Clipping took off during the early days of TikTok when chopped up snippets featuring internet personalities like Andrew Tate or Mr. Beast would rack up millions of years. I swear Jordie reads the articles before we talk about them on the show. Maybe. Maybe sometimes.

It sparked a new generation. I don't know how you read 400 pages of documents before we get on. When I put this together, 10 minutes before we jump on. It sparked a new generation of creators who realized they could pay their way into virality by hiring hordes of clippers, paid per thousand views to flood the internet with the creator's content. Anything that can be clipped, a podcast, debate, social media montage, even movies. Startups such as lovable, an app that builds software from plain English prompts, humanoid robot maker

one-ax and consumer electronics company, nothing, have hired clippers to multiply their content across the internet through clips of product demos, podcast appearances, and YouTube streams. You're stupid if you're making an hour-long podcast and only posting it in one channel, said Roy Lee,

the 21-year-old founder of Cluelly, an AI note-taking startup, which hires clippers to plaster its promotional content across the internet. The only way you can ensure a viral moment is to post it across thousands of different accounts. thousands. Thousands of counts is a lot.

That's a lot. This is also happening in music. I heard that people, when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. But people are saying like when Drake drops an album, he'll have the clippers, like, clip all the music and it goes out and it gets a lot of views that way. There is something just about like, it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral. So just like spamming everything out kind of gives you the opportunity for lots of like, you know, Happy accidents. Lottery tickets, lottery tickets, basically.

But I still think a better strategy for most people will be what Dwork Cash and David Senra are doing, where you have someone who really understands how to create something beautiful, even though it's a new format and people think of 60-second short form as like slop. It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated. It can be thoughtful. It can be designed. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service.

They're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, and they have a number one ranking on G2. That's right, folks. Cluly's clipped contents generates around 800,000 views a day on platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, according to Lee. Lovable and nothing said they were always looking for ways to reach new customers. Online marketplaces have developed to connect brands with clippers in the virtual markets, brands post the rate they will pay, and freelancers sign up to make clips. Clippers are paid anywhere from 50 cents to $2 per thousand views. them to find the most shareable moments. Nathan Resnick, a 31-year-old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees

businesses in insurance, wedding planning, and real estate service pays the diversity. The diversity of five. The five-frippers he finds online roughly 15,000 a month to create and post-short-form videos promoting his company's businesses. It's not really that crazy when you consider we were spending $250,000 a month on Google and meta to drive traffic to our websites. That's a good point. Again, this is like the ARB.

Like this eventually will get competed down. A lot of this will be taken by platforms, opus clip, or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it. You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook and it will make the clips itself. But right now there is a huge, huge arbitrage. Yeah, 1X has generally been sharp here. If you remember, they got their robot on Kai Sonat. Yep.

Yeah, they really understand the culture. A friend of the show, Dar Sleeper, Total Sleeper. marketing sleeper. Yeah, he says, people in the company were like, what the heck is this kid doing? A week later, their little cousins were talking about it at the Thanksgiving table.

There we go. Anyways, it's cool. It's cool. I think it's probably, like you said, a moment in time, probably not going to be like a, it's hard to see it as the most enduring strategy that works right now. And a lot of businesses would be able to.

It was an insane, insane, Arb for Andrew Tate and that it became like sort of commoditized but we're still very early and I think that there will be a lot of I mean it does feel I think I think the the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them and that's what Andrew Tate did for sure yeah no no no I'm saying no no not just on the buying side actually on the content side like like when he would get on Mike he would say crazy things that would go viral yeah And so he made it very easy. And whereas, like, if you are, like, an enterprise SaaS company and you hold a webinar,

like, you could hire a billion clippers and, like, you're probably not going to rip. Like, like, and that's why Cluelly is, like, both doing stunts. Somebody should test it out. Test it out. Adio. Let's test it out. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native... Clip this.

That builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. Clip this right now. Clip this right now. Meta smart glasses with a display is incoming. Codename is Hypernova. Priced $800 down from the expected $1,300. Zuck is cooking for real, for real, says Nick.

Meta, so the price is going down. And, I mean, they're taking a real shot at the Apple Vision Pro, which, of course, was, what, 3,0004? And I don't think we can say, I don't think we can say much else, but I think we've, have we not used this product? Well, so Orion is a different product. Yeah.

Orion is what was demoed and has been displayed, and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. But we're not exactly sure what Hypernova is. It could be a per, I mean, it's listed here in this article is a precursor to full-blown augmented reality glasses. And so there has been a, there's been a third like option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart classes market, there's maybe a few different products.

So the meta ray bands and the meta oaklies have been successful. Like people are actually buying those. They're wearing them. They're taking pictures with them. They're also using them as an AirPods replacement, wireless headphones. They use them for speaker for music while they're running. Like they definitely have adoption. It might not be the biggest product.

of all time yet, but it's definitely working. And so they're scaling that up. Then you have the VR headsets, the Quest, the full virtual reality. There's some pass-through, but in general people think of that as a virtual reality headset. Of course, first created by Palmer Lucky at Oculus, sold into meta and Facebook, and now rebranded as the Quest. The Quest has been selling pretty well, but still probably suffers from charge. turn. We see the chart spike on Christmas where everyone gets a new Quest VR headsets because it's a great gift.

They try it out. They download the app. They install it. And then they stop using it for a while. I was talking to Tyler about this. We gave him a Quest 3 Pro, Quest 3 Mini, something like that. Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Quest 3S Xbox Edition. He played Call of Duty on it a little bit, played Halo on it. Yeah, for like two weeks. Then ultimately churned. Yeah. I'm just not that much of a gamer. Yeah? But you're supposed to be, like, it's supposed to be in everything device. You're supposed to be able to watch movies in it. You're supposed to be able to code in it. It should, in theory, replace your screen set up. to be able to cluel in it. But the fact that they weren't able to find like a killer use case for someone like you means that they're still in that like hunting for the killer use case phase. Then there are the full augmented reality glasses where you're passing through the reality through glass.

You're seeing the real world. That's what we tried. That's what a lot of influences have tried. Those are very much not ready. Well, the challenge is there's what are the technical capabilities of the product. and then what are the experiences available for that product? Yep. And they clearly both need to improve.

Totally. In order to get to the point where Tyler, we got to be like pulling the, pulling the goggles off and being like, Tyler, it's time to come to work. Yeah. Yeah. So my take, when I had the Apple Vision Pro, it was too heavy. It was really expensive and felt like, oh, I would churn for this eventually.

So I returned it. but the one thing that I did enjoy was I watched movies in it and I watched all of Citizen Kane in it from start to finish. And Citizen Kane is a great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler? I mean, it's not that long.

That's not like a long movie. It is a, it is a challenging movie. Like it's not, it's not Mission Impossible Dead Racketing 2. It's not even two hours long. The final reckoning. It's not, it's not like, you sit down and you're just like, wow, this is so engaging. Like, it is the type of, it is the type of movie

that if you have modern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like, let me check Twitter. For sure, for sure. Like, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is as close as you can get to, like, cracking open a buck, in my opinion. I could give you movies closer to that.

Okay, yeah, something really, something really dense. But, but it's a slower-paced movie. It's something that, I mean, it's even, it's even in like four by three, so on a modern TV, it's not a render property. It's like UFC 319, right?

I couldn't agree. agree more exactly like that. So my, but my, my, my takeaway was that like, like, the, the killer app, like, the rumor was that the person who worked on the Apple Vision Pro was previously at Dolby and had worked on the Dolby immersive cinema project. And so if you wanted to understand,

like, the, the viewpoint of the team behind the Vision Pro was that it was a home theater on your face for, that you didn't need to buy an extra room for. And I felt like that was what it delivered on very well, except it was too heavy, too hot, a little bit too expensive. But the actual killer use case, I felt like it was there because if you love a movie

and you throw it on, like the content is solved. Like you can watch a great movie and be like, that was a good movie. And you're letting the movie, we talked about this with Mark Andreessen where I was like, the iPhone was a good iPhone,

was a good phone. And he was like, no, it wasn't. Which is maybe a good take. But eventually it was like, copy and paste. No, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you're like the Motorola Razor V3 didn't have copy and paste, but it could make reliable phone calls. And so my take was like, yeah, it's just worth remembering that it had some extreme shortcomings and it was frustrating to use. Yeah, but it was, but it was easy to justify pretty quickly as as a device that replaced another experience. Whereas it's, it's much harder. It's like the Apple Watch works for those people because they're like, I want to know the time on my wrist. I'm used to wearing a watch. That's easier. It's much harder to be like pendant. Not a lot of people.

pins all the time, it's a harder, it's a harder, the activation energy is higher. So I was always saying that going to, uh, uh, making the movie experience really, really strong would be, uh, like in an obvious but killer app. I don't know if people agree, but, um, Mark German's talking about this in context of the Apple Vision Pro. He says Apple Vision Pro is suffering from a lack of immersive video. Apple has slow walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro. The company's AI and smartphone, smart home roadmaps have come out. But when you get down to the core of the problem, Apple's Vision, Apple's Vision Pro headset isn't selling well for two reasons. One, it's $3,500 price tag and a lack of sufficiently compelling features. There are other issues

like a limited array of custom applications, the device is weight and a cumbersome setup process. But those are less important. Developers are continuing to release apps. And there are now accessories that make the device feel lighter on your face. I'm going to try those. Apple has also dramatically approved its operating system, the latest version of the Vision Pro software, Vision OS 26, now offers widgets and has been well received. But none of that matters for Apple if people don't buy the Vision Pro.

By all accounts, the device remains an extremely niche product. I'd venture to guess Apple has sold well under 1 million units in the U.S. since launching it a year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a pro. priority for Apple on the company's last earnings call. I wonder how many of those units have been returned. That's a good question. I mean, I would assume if you're quoting sales, you have to not include returns.

I wouldn't be surprised if they've still sold a million. You can count sold. That's very sketchy if they include that. Well, no, but he's guessing. I'm just saying, I just wonder what the return rate is. Because didn't you return your... Yeah, I think it was probably like 50%. They probably sold 2 million.

They wound up, like, leaving 1 million out in the market, basically. I mean, they have so many Apple stores and it's such a device and, you know, it's such a moment. Like, it took over the timeline. It was the current thing for like three days. People were talking about it. A lot of people tested it out. A lot of people kept them. A lot of people have the disposable income.

But yeah, one million does even seem high. Yeah. This is interesting. So German says, moreover the headset just doesn't feel like a priority to Apple on the company's last earnings call. CEO Tim Cook almost seems surprised when a Wall Street analyst quizzed him about the device and the company's strategy. Thanks for bringing it up, he said before. delving. Mark German is delving.

Interesting. Before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we really believe in. So, German says in the near term, Apple isn't going to dramatically improve the Vision Pro. The next version coming as soon as this year will mostly just get a faster chip. That's a necessary upgrade. The current M2 chip is outdated for such a processor intensive device, but it's not going to change the way that people think about the Vision Pro.

The bigger upgrade is coming in 2027 when Apple will roll. release a model that is both cheaper and lighter, he's reported, but that's a long time to wait, and there's a risk that the category simply dies out by then. I think that I know a lot of developers that were super excited to capitalize on the release of Vision Pro. They had all this energy and excitement around getting access to the product, starting to build applications for it, and I don't know that any of them are still building for the product, which is a problem. It's sort of like chicken and egg problem. Apple, so he provides a couple examples of like how little immersive video Apple has really released.

Apple is still featuring a highlight reel shot in immersive video of the NBA All-Star game from 2025, to be clear, from 2024, to be clear, the 2025 All-Star game played a year after the one Apple is showcasing took place six months ago. And there's no immersion, immersive vision on the Vision Pro. Like, you would assume they shouldn't have just said, hey, let's go shoot one immersive video of the All-Star game. It's like, what is our NBA strategy? What's our immersive video schedule? Yeah, and what is our strategy to get 1% more content onto this device every single day, forever?

Yeah, or just have a big release every Friday. Yeah. Like you sold a $3,500 device to a million-ish people. Yes. You should probably figure out how to deliver them content that makes it valuable. If you look at the number of minutes that are being uploaded to YouTube every day, Like that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company, basically. Like, it's just slightly more every single day.

Sure, they probably have a few down days. But in general, like social networks, the amount of content on them should be growing every single day. Any sort of media device, I'm sure Netflix is not like, oh, yeah, like, you know, next year we're going to have less content on Netflix. That would be insane. Yeah. So apparently the immersive content shoots are extraordinarily expensive and resource intensive. So that is crazy because I looked into how expensive it is to shoot an immersive video and I feel like it's actually not that expensive.

Like, yes, you need this fancy black magic cinema camera that actually just came out with a special lens, but you can just set it up. If you can film for 45 minutes on one like, you know, SSD basically. And and you can just upload that. The problem is that you can't, if you're doing CGI and you're doing editing and you're doing like scripting and storytelling and all that, like the, the killer use case needs to be take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere cool, and then allow people to watch that, like, in Vision Pro. And that needs to be it. And so this was, this was, Ben Thompson's taking, it feels like there's so much,

just put it at them. You could take immersive video behind the scenes for the F1 movie. Yes. And make that available to people. It's like you can buy, buy this, you can watch F1. You can watch. behind the scenes with the actors, producers,

directors. There's just a lot that they could do, but I think there needs to be something for users to really look forward to if they're going to invest in this device. And right now it doesn't really... Yeah, the other thing is like they should have... I feel like they should have done more...

Like, there was a little bit of like revealed preference in the fact that when you open up the Vision Pro, the app that's in the top left corner, like the first app if you are reading left to right, like a book, is the Apple... TV app. Like, it's very much, like, you should go watch a movie right now.

You should click on this. And then there's some other stuff, but mainly it feels like they're pushing that. But they should have done more to really make it like a movie watching environment, something that people really, they're really focusing on that narrowing instead of trying to do like seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for, like, educational content? Is it for this prehistoric planet thing and these like dinosaur stuff for games or collaboration?

They had FaceTime in there. They just like threw a lot in there. And I feel like none of them were breakout instead of just like chopping it down and being like, okay, this is going to be the best place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. And so like you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know. Maybe it won't even work if they pulled that off. But it'll be interesting because meta is going to fire back.

And it will be, so there will be a small screen for mini apps and alerts on the right lens. And the spectacles can be controlled via the neural. accessory. So think about it like meta raybans plus Google Glass basically. So you have to look up here and you can see notifications. You can see a little bit. There is a, there is a different, there's a different set of companies that are building basically movie theater watching glasses. So it's just a big screen. It's not VR, AR, it's not positionally mounted. It's just a screen on your face at a much lower price. I haven't tried them. I don't think that they're fully there in terms of resolution.

A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple Vision Pro to commoditize to the point where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff, giving like actually doing all the testing. And then Apple will ultimately like take that back. Thank you. Yeah. It was like I'm pretty sure like the multi-touch screens like those were out there in other like the technology existed in other phones, but it just was poorly implemented.

And Apple was able to come in and do it. like the virtual. There is an article from Eric Berger saying after recent test China appears likely to beat the United States back to the moon. This is the case of hammer point. Eric says, I went there because it's because at this point it's difficult to come to any other conclusion. And he is writing this article to explain. Eric Berger is an enormously bad for the United States. So in recent weeks, the secret of Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030. On August 6th, the China Man Space Agency successfully tested

a high-fidelity mock-up of its 26-ton lan-you lunar lander. The test conducted outside of Beijing used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as a vehicle, fired main engines, and fine-control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there. The test, said the agency, an official statement represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a manned spacecraft. As part of the statement, the Space Agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before 2030.

Then last Friday, the Space Agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, pretty hard name, successfully conduct. did a 30-second test firing of the long March 10 rocket's center core with its seven YF 100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit. These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Meng Ju spacecraft in June. A version of this spacecraft is planned for lunar missions. Thus, China's space program. is making a demonstratable progress in all three of the major elements of its space program,

large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, orbit plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade. For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this. For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program, been there, done that. Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that is strikingly resembles the lunar module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program

was canceled because it was not sustainable. With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop in-space propellant storage and refueling technology allowing for lower cost, reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise. But recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origins Mark II lander,

indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. So it's now probable that China will, quote unquote, beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race to put this in perspective, ours connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China, space policy and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition. Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point. Only Wall Street can save us. The solution is make

the moon estate, as Mike Solana suggested, create mortgages on the moon, and then securitize them. And once Wall Street is going, once black, Black Rock owns 75% of the moon. Then we're in business. Yeah. Yeah, they've been getting, Wall Street's been getting pushed back on owning single family home. They own 99% of that capital. Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now. They own all of them. They bought my house for me. I didn't want them. I didn't want them to. They just bought it for me. I didn't have an option. Yeah. They were like, sale and lease back. You rent now. You will own nothing. You will be happy. Yes. That's exactly what happened. No, they actually own.

like 1% of how much. But Dean says the land new lander is significant because it's part of the usual China Chinese crawl walk run approach to a major space project. The People's Republic of China can benefit from other people's experiences. Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecraft themselves. So the test of the Lanew lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process. So anyways, important to flag.

We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently. and it's tough it's tough to bootstrap an economy like it is an incredible milestone and yet america's done it so there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first it's not superlative and then the question for space x is are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more starlings and just making more subscriptions like uh it is it is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage it takes a long time uh maybe you need a new uh government program, some sort of incentive. I mean, fortunately, like, we, firefly's been to the moon, Blue Origins planning, SpaceX is planning. Like, there are a lot of competitive American companies

that are working towards it, but the underlying incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now that might be higher value, although it will be a very weird moment if, if China's just up and back on the moon constantly running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon. We got to get back. You got to get back. Welcome to the stream, Mark. How are you doing? Good, guys.

How are y'all? What's happening? Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you. Where should we kick it off, Jordy? Where should we start? Do you dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising? Sure.

Maybe you could set the stage for us. What set off your alarm bells? What triggered your initial worry about this idea of ads in LLMs? Because this isn't the internet, right? It's not just a normal digital platform. It's a platform that, depending on how it's trained, depending on what pre-promps you put in, it could be very manipulative.

And there's not really age limitations at all. There's not really any limitations whatsoever. And normally, let's just be laissez-faire, right? The market is the market. But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbits. holes and you know other people being told you know to kill themselves and you just you just don't know what can happen so if i if if i build a model and it becomes popular even if it's only a

niche model right just like there's headspace and there's calm let's just say i build the calm AI large language model and i have millions of millions of users and i want and i have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever, right? And they're trying to get more sales, and I need the money. I can easily, easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do. And that's my concern. And so if we just want to put up, you know,

just little ad traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all, you know, put them into the, chat list on the left hand side great you can do all the display ads you want you could do video there all you want but if it's in the response that comes back from the model boy you're you're going to have lots of problems yeah i think mark i think sam altman said something to this effect saying that artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent it will be very good at convincing people so it is reasonable what do you think of uh sam altman's uh latest commentary on how OpenAI might get into this world that the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be

would not be monetizable, but if it made a recommendation to buy a product, and then you said, hey, I want you to go check out for me. It sends out your agent. It's already doing that, right? Yeah, it's already doing it. Is that okay? Yeah, it's already doing it. You know, it's, you know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate. It's a whole not, the thing when there's a search query. Yeah, right? We get a lot of traffic from OpenAI chatchipT for cost plus drugs.com. In fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs and I don't

want to take the time to look at the latest price list, I'll just put what's the price for, you know, Derepram, whatever it may be and it's right there. And so yeah, of course they can extend that, but response is a whole and models are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query versus influencing and engaging in a chat. I guess the question is like that. Yeah, I mean, I think to double down on what you're saying, an example, if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent and maybe doing some product

research and you have ads and you have, you know, organic listings or web pages, that's one thing. But if various AI models are seen as trusted advisors, if you compare that to a situation, if I ask John, what kind of car should I get? And John starts giving me answers and saying, like, I really think you should get this car. It's really nice. And then I buy it. And then later I find out John was getting a 10% kickback. I'm like, hopefully I like the car.

But if I didn't, what are you doing? And this happens in a business context, too. You might, you know, people get in hot water all the time because they're taking referral. Yeah. In this particular case, it's really easy. Just like, you know, there's, you know, a emoji for sources or just says sources. You could put a dollar sign just to show they're being compensated. Sure, sure, sure.

And do you think that needs to happen at like the FTC, FCC level or are you, do you think that these people are. I don't know the legal aspect of it and not, you know, hopefully it's self-enforced, but you know there's the idiots and assholes who don't self-enforce. Sure. particularly for medical stuff. I mean, is the easier to chat GPT about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to sometimes. But does that call an example you gave matter?

Because I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here. And yes, I could set up a search engine that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads. But how am I gonna take market share from Google? People are gonna go to Google and Google does say when it's an ad. And so, like as long as the, power law winner is a good actor, we kind of get a good outcome.

There's also an interesting thing where there's this self-enforcing sort of positive effect, which is if people rely on chat GPT, for example, to help them do product research and buy the right products, and you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the product that they're getting paid the most. Eventually, I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize, I'm not going to use this app anymore. I wouldn't agree with that, that Chorty because I think people are primed for misinformation these days. You see it in healthcare continuously. You know, you saw it with COVID vaccines. People under deathbed saying, I wish I had taken the vaccine, you know, and you see it now with, you know, raw milk, where now there's more

people who have, you know, there's examples of people who have died and people just don't care. Yeah, yeah. You know, they just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, chat GPT is woke, so I'm using right GPT and that's because those are the kinds of answers I want because you know there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group when it comes to the product decisions just like we saw the anti-bud light and that kind of builds and you see pro right wing products I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another. source. There's just so much personal identity and how we use technology. That's part of my concern.

How worried would you say you are about AI broadly? I think over the last few months, the industry has woken up to, you know, a year ago people were kind of laughing about AI safety, right, and thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios. Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well-being. If you just give hundreds of millions of people, you know, unlimited access to these tools, you know, they are going to, there is going to be some effect. Some people will be good. Some people will be bad. But what's your high level read? Well, it's changed a lot. We went from Fear of the Terminator. Yeah. To fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect because they're such good communicators, right? We can't

talk to other people or we feel, you know, shy or not open in communicating with, other people, experts or friends or otherwise. But this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time and depending on how its program will compliment. What a great question, Jordy. What a great. That is a really interesting approach. So a lot of things to be concerned with there,

particularly because AI is not smart. Yep. Right? AI is just statistical right now and I'm of the mindset that that's not gonna change for a long time. You know, one of the reasons, that you don't see full self-driving cars that are just everybody using no matter what is because it's it's easy there's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car you know we have um uh Australian many Australian German Shepherd or a million Australian Shepherd right talks and about six years old I trust talks at an intersection to know when to cross before you know that he's never been to before before I trust a car and that's the whole

point with AI because they're they're just rules and laws and latencies that they that it can't account for it's all text some graphics some video but it's always behind and then that's part one part two we're I think we're going to see a groundswell in how intellectual property is dealt with a groundswell change and how IP is dealt with because there was for a long time it's been publish or perish. Get your stuff out there. Get it into journals. Make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert. Well, the minute you do that right now, it's going to get absorbed into training data for these models and you've lost everything you've just created. Well, what if I want to, what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk and I want to get people

and so I should just write as much as I can about how great it is? Yeah. People are going to use bots to try to influence to post this. things to try to influence like the robots. Text for AI, you know, for AI, you can structure it in ways where you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all why raw milk is amazing, right? But the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death. AI doesn't understand pain.

AI doesn't understand context. AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago. It doesn't know that there was a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened, right? AI can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it, you know, this ball fell off the table, what happened next, right? It's just not smart. And as long as it's not smart, A, can be influenced. And B, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't, it doesn't have judgment.

So what would you tell the folks at Open AI and the other Foundation Model Labs on how to structure their business? It feels like a firewall between there needs to be some sort of. truth-seeking organization that's focused on on delivering the highest quality results and then on the flip side you have a monetization team no i mean you can't check for quality that's a possible yeah of course you can you like you can you can always like benchmark these things or just like vibe test them with the with the with the audience you know jordy was given me shit on how i was given jordy shit online yeah yeah yeah but that's going to be completely different right what what i'm saying is like is like google google does try

and try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query. And then separately, they have an ad auction function that adds as an ad platform. And those two teams are separate. And so like if your age is showing up as one of those like knowledge boxes on Google, you can't just pay to have them change it. Like that's a separate business line and it's a separate team and they are separate products in the UI. Yes, they exist on the same page, but they're separate.

And that's fine, right? I mean, to me, the bigger questions are, what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today, or at least as I understand it today, right? I don't see AI getting smart. I look at AI and I think it's the world's best library. Let me explain it in another way. We all have that one friend that remembers everything. Yep. Everything, right?

Hey, what did we do that one day back in college? remember when you know our one buddy oh yeah this is da da da da that's a i they'll it'll remember everything it'll give you the you know if you give it a b and c it'll figure out d e and f right but it doesn't even know xyz exists just like you're right so it is just like the world's biggest library it's just like a meeting of of the minds of just regurgitation and so knowing that then you you have to there's going to be so much competition between the models that is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation right because there's not there'll be five six whatever it is foundational models before there's consolidation but beyond that there's going to be millions of models

millions of millions of models and every brand is going to need a model particularly like in health care like if you are Stanford medical right if you are Mayo Clinic if you're MD Anderson you're not going to just you know put out all your IP from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that chat chief PT can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge so it remembers everything that that all your doctors and scientists did you're going to keep that to yourself and so in terms of the business models these guys are going to have to start making decisions are they start going to start paying a lot of money for content because it's

As much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits, right? You're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they could cover. They're paying for a ton of content, to be clear. I mean, they pay Reddit, they pay the New York Times, they pay all sorts of ways.

Yeah, we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog. I was like, I assumed you already scraped it. But think of it if you're, I mean, let's talk about it from the government perspective. Sure. So they just cut all these NIH grants, right? All this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs, which they have, right? Foundational research, basic science.

Right. All this research. Yep. If the government really understood AI, they'd be like, okay, we're going to keep on investing in this research. And then I'm going to make it available to the biggest bit, the highest bidder, whoever in their model. Privatize it. I like that.

Make some money off of it. Right. It's not even just to do it. monetizing it yeah but monetizing it monetizing it i like this this is good mix of money off of that nonprofit research are you that's the way things are working right now right and i don't have honestly i don't have a problem with that at all if it gets us more solutions but or do our own you know the government do its own model and making that available for a fee yeah those decisions from business perspective that all these models are going to have to make otherwise how do they

keep on adding more training data because there's no way to synthesize all that shit you're not synthesizing you're not creating synthetic data that all of a sudden is going to you know you could tell you give it all the backstory you want that you're a doctor that you invented this that you did that it ain't going to invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent yeah at any point during the AI hype cycle so far did you think that this time might be different there was i would say a year ago the common a common line was this isn't like the internet bubble because there's real revenue you know these companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly this is different this time is different meanwhile and and i wouldn't lean on this too

heavily but mit had a report this week saying that you know 95% of of gen a i pilots in the enterprise are not turning into uh not creating real value i'm curious what your read has been I've been through every single technology, you know, event and evolution. And this blows them all the way. Now, how you implemented in business is a whole different issue. Like literally when I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, well, son, I got this receptionist right there. I got that secretary.

I'm never going to need that shit ever, right? And but then, you know, my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage. Yep. There are going to be integrators that particularly young kids, like when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21 or 1921, and kids going in school, what should I do? What should I do? I'd be like, learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies, right? Because to your point, companies don't understand. how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage.

You got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything's going to be customized to your unique utilization, right? Or usage. Who's going to do it for them, particularly small to medium-sized businesses? There are 33 million companies in this country. 30 million of them are solopreneurs, right? Single-person enterprises.

There are only, you know, there are millions of companies that have one, five, 10, 50, 100. 500 people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts. This is where kids getting hired coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity. If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school, even, whatever it is, your excess time, and you're learning the difference between SORA and VOO and you're learning how to do all this video. You're learning how to customize a model so that then you can then walk into a company and say, I understand.

understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store, and selling shoes online. Let me show you how to benefit you. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school because every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI. And that's what people don't understand. Yeah, we hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built product. instead of saying, hey, here's what I can do. They just showed us.

They took a day and just built something. We said, that looks pretty good. They went to chat, GPT or perplexity, whatever. Well, the bear case, John was joking about this, though. I thought this was interesting. We had one of our interns built this product. It's tbpn.com slash guess. It's this guest directory transcript tool.

And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it. So that was a bullcase for software engineers still having a job. job. But you don't even have to be a software engineer, right? You just have people are afraid to ask the models the right questions. They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that they can't they can't answer. Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow-ups and their ability to prompt, they have more skilled in everybody and every major corporation with under a thousand employees, right? So I completely agree with jobs for everybody.

This feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and explore, learn, implement things at businesses. If all of a sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge AI box. Well, Mark saying he's cool with display ads. He's cool with a Laboo showing up in the sidebar. Yeah, on the side.

That's fine. But think of it. Okay. There's a death war going on with the frontier. models yes war yeah it's throw some game in their minds not all will make it some will get consolidated maybe one goes out of business yeah right and so for the next however many years however long there used to be a time when excel cost 499 to buy a spreadsheet now it's free you know it's not free but like basically yeah google sheets right google docs etc the basic models are always going to be

be free. Because of ads. Like the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business. When was the last time you saw that in Google Sheets? No, you don't, but the reason that they can subsidize is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash, they don't care about monetizing it. Yeah, but in the case, I mean, to take Mark's side here, I mean, a subscription product also subsidizes a free product. Yes, that's exactly right. So you're going to have tears, right? Free, your college, your kids version, and those those those versions are going to have more constraints because they know high school kids you know seven-year-old kids are going to use them yeah so there'll be all kinds of limits build in yeah but then you

get your $20 version and chat gpt is doing what $12 billion annualizing growing quickly yep that's insane love you know lovable all these guys were just crushing it and it's like I was the first investor in a company called syntheia which does you know talking to have a bit I don't know if you know these guys. Oh, yeah, cool. Yeah, they're killing it. That's great. Killing it's just up into the right.

Yep. You start them off with, it's just a whole freemium model, right? That's been around forever. And I think that's going to happen. But as, you know, we talked earlier about buying IP, you'll see things go into different directions. So you'll have a chat GPT slash healthcare, and if you want that, it's an extra five bucks a month.

You'll see chat GPT programming or math or, or, or foreign language dual-lingual version right and it might be an extra 50 cents a month or a dollar a month whatever it may be and then there'll be you know entrepreneur version and it'll have all the integrations into all the the states so that you just you know fill in these forms and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated because all the agents will do all the work all that stuff you can upsell yeah and so but if they're not using your model in high high school they ain't going to use it in college if they ain't using it in college when they go for that to that company they're not going to use you and i think that is a big deal but i can't say it enough

all these people were in a transit transition period right now for kids coming out of college whether you have a computer science degree or not but you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree it's probably not the right way to go going to to any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete, there'll be more jobs than people for a long, long time. Because there's going to be two types of companies in this country, in the world, those who are great at AI and everybody else. And this is not, AI is not intuitive. You're not going to take a 40-year-old who's worked at a company for 15 years and say go play with chat GPT and figure out how we can improve our productivity and improve our

processes some people will put in the time to learn it but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agents start doing things and then you know writing software unlovable or whatever and having all it's going to be intuitive for digital natives and gen z who are going through school and graduating with that that is going to be jobs left and right for sure totally agree uh wanted to get your we were just on with Vlad from Robin hood and yep that's my guy is he's super excited about getting uh everyday investors access to great private markets uh for great companies in the private markets wanted to get your general read on that you've obviously been part of shark tank for a long time you imagine if you were watching you could be

like i want to invest that seems extremely yeah and a lot of people have taken crack i'm sure people have pitched you this exact thing yeah i'm curious because because you're you You obviously, I can see you being, yeah, it's great when company, if retail can get into the next Figma, but there's, you know, not making a lot of Figma. I've been anti, not sweat equity, crowdfunding, right? Crowd equity programs against it because there's no liquidity. People love a company, the next Figma, and they put in their life savings because they know Figma's going to the moon, baby. And they can't, they can't get out. And they got to wait.

That's the problem. And so that's part one to the problem. Part two and more of a systemic problem, there's just not enough IPOs. I mean, it's like watching some of these IPOs, they're like meme coins now. Bam, they take off. And then it's musical chairs to see you can get out the last but first, right? And if you don't get out first or near the beginning, you're getting crushed. And so is there a way, whether it's token.

or other approaches to that probably, but it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker. If Vlad or whoever is a market maker so that there's always some liquidity within X percentage of the last trade, great. Then everybody can do it and everybody's protected to a certain extent as long as they're not doing deals where the people are just out and out lying, right, or misrepresenting it. At which point, hopefully the CFTC or the SEC, whoever happens to end up in charge.

It's not enough just to bring access. You also have to bring liquidity. Last question. If Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president? I mean, it's easy to say yes right now, but that's probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider.

Because otherwise, I don't wanna do that shit. Not my dream to be president. I'd rather argue with you guys about this. Yeah, yeah. It's my dream. come back on the show you'll be too busy if you're in the last last question for me are you excited about the the the american taxpayer uh potentially taking a position in intel oh interesting you know what it's a great question jordi so you're sounding you're sounding like an a i you're sounding like an ai you're

sound right you know what you don't know is i have chat gpt listening yeah yeah yeah yeah clearly it is a progressives dream this is the bernie sanders dream the a oc dream because and i'm not saying i agree with it but if you think about it it's asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires So when you take 10% of Intel, and first let me add, the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think is awful because it was meant to be a grant and that was the deal that United States of America made. And now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country. I think that's bad. But generally, if this was, okay, we'll put in more money in order to take and we want 10% of Intel.

Obviously, they can say yes or no. Just like Nvidia and AMD had the option to say yes or no on the H20 chip. just like material whatever MP on had the other else yeah to give a politician politicians have gotten so good at trading stocks maybe we want them let them running our are federal my no you don't but at the same time yeah but if you're going to generate if I if I was running right and I would say Donald Trump did the same thing he got this one right now the only question is will he do it at the right time because would you I rather take more money from taxpayers the average

who might need to pay more, or even the billionaires, the oligarchs, according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates from 37 to 39 or 41? Or can I just take it this way, right? Take it before it even gets to them. It's a progressive's dream. I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops. And Elizabeth Warren, yes, yes, yes, and make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles,

along with every other supporter. because those guys are if they got excited about it he might reverse course yeah well of course why they're being quiet because they don't want him to reverse course this is 40 maybe that maybe you're 40 yes on both side the aisle everyone's playing yeah i mean but don't you guys agree isn't it just like a progressive's dream yeah like and you know so tariffs which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitch is when you can convince 30 plus percent of people in this country that that that tax that paying with increased prices is an attack somebody else is paying it amazing sales job right so now that's

360 billion dollars towards the deficit and everything and if you can start doing these other deals that aren't piggish right meaning they're they're fair to the companies that are involved and they're not across the board like tariffs and start banging down on the deficit in the way that is the ultimate progressive approach he's turned into bernie sanders yeah he literally has You know, only get a better salesperson. You're great at this. This is fantastic. I mean, I give him credit though.

I'm not knocking them, right? I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers because he is, he is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves. Yep. This is great. Well, thank you so much for stopping. We'll have to do this again soon. Yeah, we got to do this again soon. We got to find a new, new topic to argue about, but this is fantastic.

Healthcare. Let's go healthcare. hear my shit with health care. Okay, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it tomorrow. Healthcare debates here. Well, we'll email you. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for joining. Later. Appreciate it. Take care. Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California mansion abandoned by Kanye West. You know this story, right?

This is such a crazy. It's so crazy. So Kanye West bought a, so he bought a mansion on the beach in Malibu and had someone like completely tear it down and it looked like it was going to maybe be a renovation, but then it just turned into a disaster zone basically. So developer Andrew Mazzela was in contract to pay $30 million for the concrete structure designed by Star architect, star architect. They call them Star architects. Tadau Ando West, West, who now goes by Yee, had purchased the house in 2021 for about 57 point three million and gutted it and Mazzela planned to restore the house to its original glory.

Instead, Mazzela's deal is off. Seller Bellwood investments, which bought the Hulking property for $21 million in 2024, is claiming Mazzela was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzela has said a peak under the hood revealed the project would require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated. I'm not a condemn of misleading me. How the idea that a mold, you know, a 20-ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars. I know exactly.

Yeah. It feels extremely like, basically exactly what you should plan for. Look at these pictures. Like, I honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state. Yeah. Just like keep it. Keep it crazy. Like it's almost like a monument to going insane.

Yeah. I'm just to say. It's like, it is. And I never understood the rationale. Was it, was it, feels like, it feels like having this, like incredibly,

this incredible, yeah. You know, brutalist, but beautiful home. And then just destroying. Yeah. And now feels like it's,

it's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of, of art. It's like performance art. Yeah, yeah. Was it performance art?

Or was it more just like Kanye actually wanted to, uh, renovate it and the renovation just went. off the rails because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up and permitting, and then they just have like a cement slab outside their house for 10 months. For 10 years. Speaking from experience here.

Like, it is hard to do renovations. In mid-August, the house went back on the market for $34.9 million, down from $39 million. Designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sachs. The house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms. West listed it in 23 amid a firestorm over his anti-Semitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly $8.5 million restoration project. With fractional ownership model, it raised millions of dollars from investors for the Ando Project.

Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazzela, a commercial fisherman-turned developer who, until recently, was based in Montana. The Malibu Project was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date, but closing was delayed. Mazzela couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a revised offer of 19.5. Of course, this is post-fires. So there were a lot of fires in Malibu.

So basically, H was locked down. It was a bad time. Mosella had a contract to buy the home for a certain price. Yep. Decided at a later date that he wanted to pay less. Yep. And Belmont is pissed because, and he has a quote here, Mazzela turned out to be nothing more than a, quote, unquote, cowboy from Montana who was, quote, unquote, trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence. Huh.

Happens. Gabe, from Mischief, how you doing, Gabe? There he is. Welcome to the stream. What's going on? You are live at the TBPN Ultrodome. What's new with you? How you doing? I think everyone knows you.

Maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation that you're starting. Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Oh, everyone saw that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sure, sure. What do we do this week?

Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency, honestly, like to rewind, where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like a handbag division. There's a footwear division. There's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like more bigger permanent structures.

well you talked about a division you can't talk about so I hit the oh nice nice so we've been operating like that for for a second now and to make that efficient there's been an internal back office that's like normal right like finance legal manufacturing customer support but also like design and marketing and that's a group that not only does design but also applies that sort of like mischief math like viral juice or whatever. Yeah. So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients.

It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is like maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years. What have we not touched yet? And like maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like, cool, we can. Well, it's, it's there, what, what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with, with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with, with startups and scale-ups and things like that.

But what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. There's so much money. Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out, can we partner with a company? It's like, that's just not, there's something special about that, about just like giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways. it's marketing, but it's just like, it's still art and it's cool and it's like unbridled. No, totally, totally, right? Like the way that we look at these is like it's not a service that we're providing necessarily.

Like there are brands and entities and culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that. And we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating. a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways, right? The opportunity is like there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things went. So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural

material, if you come up with just like, I have a great idea. It would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never going to think about this, but I need to, I could, the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have the idea for you, or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideas? I'm going outbound right now. This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine.

Yeah. So let's go. I love that. That would be an amazing project. That's the outbound. That's what I want to do. or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design a bit that you're putting into space.

I love it. We were, look, we were fast companies number one designed in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral, but if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled. So let us,

let's like put some stuff. We got a space play for you with a company that we're very close with. Oh, that's any more. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll talk after the stream.

I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly on the business model of the new agency, is there a world where you would, you know, the standard agency model will be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one-off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like a $10 million of this? and will only price based on success. Is that something you would consider doing? It's totally on the table. And it's not, that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route. Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together.

We both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting though is because of mischief's position as like this artistic entity like in a way like we have a person we have an audience. And so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures. Yeah. That's what I was like. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units. Yeah, over forever. Basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I want the, I want a mischief themed line of kids toys, right? Like I would happily buy those. I would buy a bunch of those, right? And so that's like, if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars.

And I would even pay a premium. Yeah. Because I know it's you guys behind it. Yeah. Another question I have, you know, I've, I've leveraged the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops. And it's because they're inspired by.

mischief and they just see like drops get attention I want attention one drop please sir one drop please the usual sir sign me up no but the thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like I think when companies think they want to do drops what they really want to do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference and so like where where's that line for you and how often are you know would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to do advertising Yeah, just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever. Might be the right thing. Not even forever or like for a few months or a quarter.

Yeah. I would take it even further. And it's like that is the final goal, which is like get a message out into the people, get them talking. Whatever. But like the focus on the drop is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for. for like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise?

And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly, the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry, that's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. and if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop.

But don't get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting. Are our ideas valuable? And if you had to, you know, what kind of think about like a making something new, how much is it, is it the idea versus the execution in your view? Also, yeah, do you hire idea guys and then like operational, excellent people? And they're like a dividing line. Yeah.

And to me, John and I, I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. It ends being super frustrating because you're like, we're feeding you this like incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but poorly executed. poorly executed their negative value. Totally.

I think it's like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where like the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition.

So they lean more on the execution and you see like large, budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like, now if you can dial in both, that's the magic, right? But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to, it's you just, you don't, you want to de-risk on the concept side. John, to your question, I don't hire idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did, I'll give you an example.

A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold an auction for $63,000 at Paris Fashion Week at Borelles, whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer, our general counsel joins brainstorms, our ops lead, wins brainstorms. Because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas.

Being creative just means you're human. You have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also, like, being creative means you're not afraid to, like, look stupid. And I think that's, like, a big defining trade here because anybody can look stupid here, including myself. What, have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing, advertising, stunts? This is something that we end up talking with. I think David Ogilvy said, like, simple ideas are powerful ideas.

That's certainly something I've seen. seen in mischief's work throughout your entire career, but is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept? I think there could be. The line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there are layers, right? Like you appreciate it for the headline, but if you like really dig into it, you're like,

wait up, is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? am i going to get and if i buy it am i a chump or am i a patron of the arts right it's like the layers are good the ambiguity is good but at the end of the day like from a marketing perspective just being practical right now like people's attention spans are so low and honestly like people are just we're all like very distracted so you don't have a lot of window to like nail it so you do got to have that one liner like pretty dialed it how How dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet?

Do you feel like you usually have a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get? Do you get surprised? Or do you still get surprised often? Totally still get surprised. Like, you always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh, yeah, like, this will work. Because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a friend.

framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is going to work. And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people going to buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did. But no, you know like is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated people are obviously familiar with the boots they're familiar with the uh the the the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects but what what what's your what's your example of a project you're like ah that's still like one of my favorites good question and the reason it didn't really get seen

as much is because to be honest we were a little bit scared okay and so you know buried it in an art show that we did. But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus? Yes, but explain it for the listener. Totally. So it's like, it's this old paradox where I imagine you have this like large wooden ship. And every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship and you are swapping it out. The question is after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? We found that a very interesting question. And so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As one does. How did you do that? Yeah, explain. And so we found the sink. We did recon. We, uh, not me. I'm not, it wasn't me personally with somebody here. I'm names.

But we found, you know, we, we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, uh, ordered exact, like, replica. We ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. And then the next day, do it again and do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw. Just an art enthusiast. I just like art and I go to the bathroom. That's all that I go to the bathroom.

How did you get the big piece through? Isn't there like one piece? That, so that we decided to leave. Okay. That we did not swap out, although we had a plan. We, we, we, we, we, we, we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the scene. I'm telling you, we got, we got a little bit, we were honestly scared. You got a little carried away.

We still, we still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they, they, they have our sink and we have their sink. And ours is now part of like our art gallery. That's amazing. Although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it because as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all the other pieces, people definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom. They should have sexualed it off, turned it into an installation. If any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is. acquire that sink from us and put it back.

Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen, Army. How many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? The painful question. It has to be like a hundred million. Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably.

Probably. And is there, is there, like, there, like, there, I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like there has to be something that makes sense. Like we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did, it was called Helpful VCs where we made Cryptopunks for every VC and then we put them on a website.

And we said, you have four hours to retweet these. Otherwise, we're going to auction them off. And it was like, for like charity, right? We weren't like trying to make money. And that was like one of the ways that we broke through and like shortly after... I think there might be something to do with crypto and like stable coins

where there's not as much gammon. involving involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, you have to remove, you have to make it not like a speculation, you know, based activity. As soon as you leave the, like the people who get the joke are, and then the people who don't get the joke show up, and then, and then they're losing their life savings. That doesn't feel good. Whereas, whereas, like, if somebody, you know, is, is bidding on that handbag, like, they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's not. Yeah, exactly. Look, I think that crypto route for us is, we've often plotted our own death

and I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that road I shouldn't even say because now everybody's going to know well I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys so one I don't think AI is going to take your guys's jobs anytime soon despite it being able to maybe piece together

you know, random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of, for some of these various plays? Honestly, TBD. And I think, I think it's, I do, I will say like unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple years, we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That's like the truth. Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, it is rooted in something real. But we're not in a rush to like use it necessarily, right? If it's going to be here forever, we've got time. Like it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all

of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to, like make use of a format. So we'll see. We just have to see. How do you think about, are there any projects, like time is an interesting variable that you can play with, right? Like part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is, it's just the narrative and the story of like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time.

It was like a very, and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer-term plays, like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years, that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious? But again, take this sort of incredible planning. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that, right? Because, like, if you think about it, we were in. Yeah, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you guys have, have a few investors,

if you told your investors, the first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt. And you're there, you're like, all right, buddy. Like, why don't you put some points on the board first? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you guys, I feel like I've earned it now. Like, I, you know, something like a decade. No. Yeah, because like we've, we've spent basically like, we've only been around for the pandemic and post-panth, like a little bit post-pandemic, right?

And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming, like live day by day, like just survive. Like, thanks for shutting down. Okay, get through to total tomorrow, right? Now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure. And now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what does that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we disappear for 20 years and then come back?

That would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades. and then come back. It's worked for other artists. Yeah. Could you do something? So we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show. I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it.

I mean, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of. His next level. Yeah, like one sentence, you know, pitch that's hilarious. but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade-long stunt. I don't know if you.

Like mischief, like, mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of housing in the United States. I mean, that was the crazy. Like we, if there are any, like, pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive. I can just see like the right RV.

Like there's this RV outside of our gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yellow from the sun. Like the windows are open. Aluminum on the outside. Yeah, Winnebago. It can be a stunt for Winnebago Corporation. What do you, how do you feel about the state of, uh,

social media, like broadly, uh, it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy, even thinking about how durable like Twitter and X have been despite all this change. But what, what's your, and, and do you even, do you feel like you need to use social media? Are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms? Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a love-hate relationship with the, with the platforms, right? Because like, platforms, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting. And now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty-based and more vanity-based. just fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started. Our first

audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phones. The cha-ching. The cha-ching. I am now banned from Venmo for life. Well, PayPal. If you're listening, let me know. PayPal. We'll have the CEO of PayPal on. I think the last company that came on works with Venmo will work on it. We should get this reverse. This is important. We were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot.

The examples were the viral. La boo-boos. Dubu's, Dubai chocolate, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Wisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost. And I was wondering if you're worried about the spillover from internet slop culture into the real world,

just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there. I think I saw it on Instagram, yeah. Yeah. Of course, yeah. Yeah, you probably did a front-facing video talking about it. Or you saw someone to a front-facing video talking about it.

That's like a reaction video. Yeah. I mean, look, it would, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad, thing, but like, what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category. Yeah, I mean, the boots, the boots, right? It's like absurd, absurd aesthetic. And maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that. Yeah, the meta. No, you guys definitely, that, that, it was an era of minimalism and it was like

the Everlane era. Quite a luxury. The boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that absurd aesthetic just like popping imagery off of your screen but then the challenge the challenge with this trend right is if you go back to minimalism it's it actually becomes i mean maybe maybe as like for me right i'm i i became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s i'm in my late 20s now, eventually maybe I'd want some ultra-minimalist, you know, mischief item for my home. But at the same time, like, once you get on the, on the maximalist track, like, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep, like, going crazier and crazier. And, you know, maybe in the internet era, there's no turning back.

It's totally possible, right? Like, we might, we might have built a machine so effective that it's now, our master and like how do you break free from that right but um i'm not too worried like we don't we actually don't think so hard about it we just kind of make the things that we like and then uh if it ever stops working then do something else yeah yeah exactly well i i have an idea to put out in the ether i think next time a an a list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis PR crisis or a scandal they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than than the scandal.

They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you to Bitcoin. And then they actually do it. They actually do it. That's genius. Yeah, that is a one-time get-out-jail-free card. You heard it here first.

Just payoffs. If you, yeah, if you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're caught at a cold play concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide. You'll be good. For sure. Yeah, for it. Awesome.

This is great. Yeah, thank you. It's really great to get the update and just hear you so much clarity on all these different areas that we talk about all the time. Yeah, we can talk for hours. Yeah, we'd love to have you back whenever it makes sense. Yeah, we gave and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll leverage that for your next appearance. I can't. I can't wait for it. Let's do it. Awesome. Awesome. Great to catch up. Cheers.