TBPN - Weekly Recap: Taylor Swift Gets Engaged, SpaceX Launches Falcon 9, Dr. Drew, The Labubu Craze

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

(00:00) - Intro (00:04) - Intel's Tricky Dance with Trump (50:05) - Taylor Swift Engaged (54:37) - Dr. Drew (Board Certified Internist) (01:25:11) - SpaceX Launch Reactions (01:33:53) - The Labubu Craze 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

watching TVV. Breaking the U.S. government now officially owns a 10% stake in Intel. The Polly Market jumped to a 99% chance. This broke over the weekend. They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation. They didn't. You know, this is technically Intel Series A. They did a seed round of $2.5 million on convertible debt in 1967.

Inverd debt. Invertech. Arthur Rock, not the anonymous poster, not Rfer Rock, Arthur Rock, the OG. And then they raised 6.8 million in 1970, and that was their IPO. So this is their Series A, in my opinion. Anyway, back then, back then, even if you would, you would round down, right? Yeah. Like if it was going to be 6.9 million, the very Elon code to go with that number. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Decided, hey, let's round down. Yeah, we don't need to. Let's keep it classy. Let's keep it classy. Yeah, so over the weekend,

the Wall Street Journal reported, president says U.S. will take big stake in Intel. President Trump said the government is taking nearly 10% stake in Intel, capping a two-week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the trouble chipmaker. Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government the stake as part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants. It has received from the 2020 to Chips Act. And to be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet. They've received $2 billion already.

But there was something like roughly $10 billion, maybe $11 billion in grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility. And those are going to be rolling out and they should draw and Intel should be able to draw down on them. But they could always be rolled back if something changes and the Chips Act kind of goes away. And so this is all the art of the deal. This is the pressure. And so it's very funny the way Trump phrased it.

He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company and they said yes, which is not typically how people discuss equity investments. Government grants too. Yeah, yeah. Well, people just don't, people don't say pay us 10% of the company. Like a VC will come to you and say, hey, I want to invest, you know, $20 million and I want a 15% stake in your company. In exchange. In exchange. And if anything, I, you know, I would ask for that stake, or I'm trying to build towards that stake.

I want to build a position in your company. Not, I want you to pay me. But that's the nature of this thing. So there's, I mean, we've all been tracking this. There's been a little bit of back and forth between Liputon and Donald Trump. He originally called for the, for the resignation. We can take you through the timeline. The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well in an article, a deep dive that will go through.

But let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnik video. Let's play it. The Art of the Deal, colon, Intel. And this is from Howard Lutnik, sitting next to Lipputton, in a beautifully appointed room. If we can go full screen here, that'd be great. I'm sitting with Libboo in my office. And at 3 o'clock, we're going to sign a document together in the Oval Office,

where the United States of America will own 9.9% of the great American technology company, Intel. I can't be more excited for America and for Intel that we get to work together. First of all, thank you so much, Secretary. And this is a big, important historical agreement that we can work together. And then more important, I don't need the grant, but I really look forward to have the U.S. government be my shareholder, and we can work together.

Have you ever heard Lib talk? So what happened is Lipu became the CEO of Intel, and he came to see me. And he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company, a grant of $10 billion and we don't need a grant. We're a great company. Maybe not with the best leadership. But now it has leadership.

This video is absolutely insane. He said, you know, and that was the conversation. And then when we had the conversation with the president, he said, look, we don't want to take your money away from you. But shouldn't it be fair? And we agreed that it would be fair that the same money. They're vlogging deals from the White House and your parents. America should have shares for it because it's just fair.

And we agreed together. And then you went to your board of directors. Yes. And they agreed. Yes. And it's a giant public company, so it had to be fair. Yes. Had to be fair.

Had to be fair. There's no other way. And so we did it fair for Intel and for the American people. And I think this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about. I'm really excited that today we get to do the deal together. Thank you so much for your support. What's that? Is that a bad?

Shanahan Shake. What happened there? Whoa. Wow. Lipu went for the Dapup. And Lutnik hit him with the power, the power grab, the power shake. And it just was botched. Interesting. Very telling.

Ben, can we put that in slow motion and play that back? Well, the journal has a timeline here. Liputon was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life. Just five months into his tenure's chief executive of Intel Tan was already fighting for his job. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he stepped down over his past ties. to the Chinese military. The demand sent Intel's leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting,

and Tan flew to Washington huddling with advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10th. His team reassured him that the president would hear him out because, quote, Trump loves meeting with CEOs. Let's go. Who doesn't? Even those whom he has attacked publicly, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. Yeah, yeah. This is WWE.

Trump is bought in WW. This is WWE. You understand. You call it your opponent. You hash it out. You're having the ring. Yeah, it's good. The next day, Tan met with Trump,

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the Oval Office. He sought to convince the president that he wasn't a Chinese spy and that the U.S. government has a long-term interest in bolstering Intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy. The CEO's argument proved persuasive. The president also took a liking to Tan, a Malaysia-born Singapore-raised U.S. citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player

and backed off his demand for the CEO's ouster. Can we get a, Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of Lip-Bu-Can generate an AI image of Lip-Buton dunking on LeBron James? But the truce came with a cost. In return for Trump support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company. It's interesting in that video, they framed it as Lip-Buton was like, you know what, we don't need the money. Why don't you take a stake? Maybe, maybe, you know, it's kind of unclear who made the initial move.

It's kind of both ways. So just for context, last year, Intel brought in $50 billion in revenue, but they lost $18.8 billion. So they did not do well on earnings. They missed on bottom line, essentially. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. And they switched CEOs, obviously.

They've struggled on the foundry side. They're not making chips for, they can't find customers for their foundry stuff. So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they would need the money, but they technically don't. And you can just look at the, you can just look at the stock price. Like before any of this, like it's not like Intel was trading as a penny stock. Like it was still, it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, 40 billion that went into Twitter or something like that. Like I remember thinking like, oh, I would prefer if he bought Intel, potentially, because that one seems important.

but it's always been around $80 billion company. And so, like, if it was truly on the brink of bankruptcy, the shares would be falling even more, in my opinion. So I think Lipu is not being disingenuous there. They actually could get by without the money. But they need to restructure, like, very seriously. And Lipu Town's, like, doing that. Like, he's cutting a ton, he's going to cut more. And if you cut everything that's not additive to that $50 billion, and you just try and hold on to as much of that $50 billion as possible,

and you cut everything that's losing money, yeah, you should wind up with something that actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10 billion of free cash flow. Not a bad little business. No. Intel decided to convert nearly $9 billion in grants, promised Intel as part of the 2022 chipsack into a 10% equity stake in the company,

an unusual arrangement that makes the government Intel's biggest shareholder. Meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for Intel. Once, one of America's most venerated technology companies now stuck in a years-long downward spiral. The company scrambled the control of fallout from the president's demand that Tan stepped down. Ton, triggered by a Fox business network segment underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump.

By the end of the two-week roller coaster ride, Tan's job appeared to be secure in the company's situation more stable. Japan's soft bank group agreed to invest $2 billion seeking to curry favor with Trump on Friday. Intel and the White House officially revealed the terms of the deals. He came in, he saw me, we talked for a while. him a lot. I thought he was very good, Trump said of tan from the Oval Office. I said, you know what? I think the United States should be given 10% of Intel. And he said, I would consider that. Yet a host of questions remain. I think this might be the gong of the day. This might be the

true size gong moment. This is the biggest fundraising. Hit that gong. Clean first hit of the week. It is good to be back. We're calling it 1600 Pennsylvania Ventures. Yep. White House Capital Group. White House Capital Group. Trump and Trump. Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track. Some analysts say Intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers. Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worse financial shape by diluting shareholders.

Trump will likely need to find more ways to support Intel not wanting it to fail on his watch. And that's why Liputon's genuinely excited. Yeah. Because he's like, now you're in. Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel now. It's a new era. Yeah. He has bags.

And so he's aligned. And so if Lipputon needs to come to him and say, hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio. It's not going well. We need you to put some pressure on those governments. We need to line up some customers. We need to line up some customers, all sorts of things. Like in terms of- He's on the board. He's value ad.

He's a value-added investor. He's got audience. Yeah. He's got, he's got, I mean, he's, he's, he's got, I mean, he's, he's a value-added investor. He's got, I mean, he's got his own social media tech giant. True. True. Could be a potential buyer.

You know, maybe truth social becomes a hyperscaler. Yeah. You know, it's happened before. Truth cloud. Truth cloud. Intel needs a lot of help. And the U.S. needs Intel said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor to the think tank, Rand, who focuses on tech issues.

Hopefully something good is going to come out of this. We had Jimmy on the show like two days ago. Yeah. Jimmy. Jimmy, good work, Jimmy. Intel was founded in 1960. by Semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyes, who co-created the modern computer ship and Gordon Moore, originator of Moore's Law, the idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two,

a guiding principle in the tech revolution. By the 90s, Intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers. Its Pentium Line and Intel Inside Marketing Campaign with dancers and multicolored clean room suits made the company a household name. Then came a series of tragic missteps. The company largely missed out on the mobile phone, and artificial intelligence booms by over-emphasizing short-term financial targets, analysts say. Rivals and chip design like NVIDIA and manufacturers such as Taiwan semiconductors surged ahead. It's interesting how you, if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two. You're going to be out of the game. Even Microsoft said, you know, we miss mobile.

We got to get into social media. I mean, LinkedIn. Yeah, you could. I mean, it's a really, really stretched metaphor, but you could say that like, Invin's, I mean, you missed mobile, more or less. Like, they weren't really switching into, okay, let's be the design arm of,

because the iPhone... You were buying enough chips for your gaming. Yeah, yeah. No, it was just a gaming company at that time, mostly in scientific computing a little bit. But there is a graphics processing unit on mobile phones. It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone. And it was never,

and VDIA never really, like, figured out a way to get a piece of mobile. And there's a world where like the cloud rendering stuff happens, but the Nvidia kind of sat that out, but it didn't matter. Yeah. Because they, they crushed AI. So company is still as keen to reviving U.S. manufacturing. How could I video sales much? This is sales by quarter.

And it's just like, and this is what a 30-year-old company is just completely, completely right? Looks like a Ramp. Looks like a ramp. It's crazy. The company is still seen as key to reviving U.S. In his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for $7 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Trump advisors began discussing what became the Chips Act wanting to attract companies such as TSM to the U.S. Has Arizona tried to brand like what they're doing? They have so many different chip manufacturers coming in Arizona.

They need like Silicon Desert or something. Chip City. Chip City. It really feels like like there is a significant center of gravity. Yeah, that will ultimately become like a company town type vibe. Chip City. As discussion on the Chipsacks crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel, Pat, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively, hoping for some of the laws tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the state of the union speech during which President Biden touted Intel's investment plans. While the bill was being negotiated, senators including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushed unsuccessfully for a version

that would see the government receiving equity in companies it backed. Very interesting. This is what Mark Cuban was saying last week. He was saying this is Sanders and Warren's dream. He said it in a little bit less PG language, if I remember correctly. But Intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly 11 billion in grants and about 11 billion in loans for a plant in Ohio, an expansion in Arizona and other projects.

It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law. Laws slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Talk about ROI there. Like, like, Liputon's saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants. And I think he's, like, technically correct. But it's an incredible nice to have. And the ROI on your CEO going to the state of a union and just sitting in a box and, like, taking some meetings. And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than $10 billion.

Right? It was probably less than $10 million. It probably wasn't very much at all. Yeah, and you get a huge friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer or Tesla? How about the banks? How about when a state government offers a tax incentive? Should they get an equity stake in exchange board representation? This is a super slippery slope. And Bill Gurley said, here's my take. If the government is a quote unquote lender of last resort, they should take 100% take equity and arguably 100% of the equity failed. to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United, and other airlines. How do you know if they're the lender of last resort? The company takes the deal. It takes the deal. Which tracks.

Because otherwise, the company would go with a financial investor who says, I'm only on 50% for the same price or whatever. And so it is a good, it's a good point. It's a good point by Bill. So in reference to the original Chips Act, The journal says it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Late last year, Tan, who had been an Intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger strategy. The board also soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out.

Trump's victory presented another curveball. He had bashed in-pitting in protest, deeply underrated. Deeply underrated strategy just in life. Yeah. Yeah. I respect TAN for quitting in protest. And then ultimately getting the job. Coming back for the top spot.

It's pretty, it's pretty sick. Pretty sick. Underutilized strategy. Yeah. Just, I'm out. He decided basically, in the trough of disillusionment, he quit in protest. And then he said, yep, I'll pop back on the roller coaster for the slope of enlightenment. That's where Intel is.

And we're really, yeah, I think we're, I think, I think we were. Who's on the slope of enlightenment? I thought we were doing three colors, me, you, Tyler. I didn't get Tyler on there yet, but you're, on, you're just, you're just rounding. You're just coming up to the peak. I just went to San Francisco. I was talking to AI researchers.

They told me deep learning is undefeated. They told me that pre-training, scaling will continue. And so I have yet to, my expectations can continue to be inflated. I am looking at the trough. You're looking at the trough? You're going to the trough. I'm getting straight for the trough. Tyler, where are you?

I think I'm where Jordy is too. Okay. It's the red one on the other side of the, the downslip? Wow. I thought you were so AGI-pilled, bro. I thought you were so AGI-I-pilled. But I mean, like, okay, even Dorcasch, Dorcas is extending his timelines. Like, how can you, I mean, it's hard to still be... Extending the timelines just means that the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this, but he's still, he's still going up. He's still going up and to the right. He's happy. Yeah, who is that in the slope of the lane? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Y-X's expectations. I don't know. I don't know. Let's just sprint to the plot. plateau of productivity. The real move is that I don't think we're in the trough of disillusionment. How about, how about, I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle. Yes. And the slope of enlightenment, we need to just like. Another, another vertical line. For the fast takeoff scenario. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like we get a bubble, we get a crash, and then we get a fast takeoff. That's the most likely for sure. No, our job is to recognize a diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment and re-elusionize people such that we can get to the slope of the line. I've never been in the trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to the

slope of the light. Exactly. So there's always hope. There's always hope. Yes. But anyways. You know what could have made that video better if it was streamed on re-stream? That's right. Live. One live stream 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Liputon. Howard Lutnik, if you're listening, get on restream. Anyway, continue. Of course. So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden's implementation of the Chipsack, fueling worries that he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether. Intel's financial condition worsened and the incoming administration worried the company might fail. Even with the recent share price rebound in August, followed by reports of the deal with Trump, the company is now valued at $110 billion. A fraction of his dot-com bubble peak. The stock is down roughly 50% since the start of last year. Intel has been left behind, Trump said last Friday. So around Trump's inauguration in January, Lutnik and administration officials began evaluating Chips Act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their U.S. investments in line with the president's goals. They asked semiconductor companies receiving Chips Act awards to increase their total U.S. investment, but they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways.

What's interesting there is that when we talk to like all of them, this is like, like everyone's doing art of the deal on each other. And meanwhile, like when we talk to Doug O'Loughlin at semi-analysis, he's like, realistically, like, all this trailing edge capacity is going to be done in like South America. Like, it doesn't make sense to do it in America. Like, a lot of this stuff is just going to wind up getting offshoreed because it's easier to build some facility that's just copy-paste it down there. And so, uh, it's very unclear like how, like how it can actually work in the long term. And then, and then on the leading edge, like it seems like it's TSM and Samsung, like Tesla's going with Samsung. And those will be

in the United States. And those will be like cutting edge, like PhD level jobs, amazing researchers, like really, really great like American innovation. But like we're kind of already on that path. And Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of. It feels like if you want America to be like the leading semiconductor country, you just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSM and Samsung. Not so. And maybe AMD. Global Foundries a little bit. I mean, Global Foundries is part of Intel now, but a lot of the trailing edge, like, it seems like it might not be a long-term thing that America's ever good at again because it's like it's commoditizing so rapidly. I don't know. Anyway, clearly Trump cares

about it and wants to keep it here. So that's what he's pushing for. The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake. The talks didn't move forward, in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give. Did they want him to take a bigger position? No, they probably wanted like $40 billion in grants or something. Give us more for that. Yeah.

Former banker, Lutnik, had in recent months asked other tech executives, what can be done to help Intel, even asking other chip companies like TSM, AMD, and Micron, whether they would consider potential deals involved in the company. This is what Doug is just generally wanted people with semiconductor manufacturing experience to be involved. the company. And so it's very possible. This seems like a step in the wrong duration, according to his heuristic, because it's like more government people on the board. But, I mean, to be clear, the U.S. government is not

taking a board seat and not having a controlling stake. It's a purely financial stake, which we'll get into. So in March, Intel's board named Tan 65 as CEO, one of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing. Some analysts say Intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs. Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost $3.2 billion in the second quarter. He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand.

In July, Intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end, cancel billions and planned investments and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant. The new rules of the road were no more blank checks. Tan wrote in a memo to employees. TAN's early decisions at Intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground, but the CEO's past work at chip design software company, Cadence Design Systems, thrust the company into the spotlight in late July, July, Cadence agreed to pay $140 million for violating U.S. export restrictions by selling ban technology to a Chinese National Defense University.

The sales happened while Tan was CEO, so, you know, you, like, it seems like he probably had to sign off on that in some way. Of course, it's like, is it a university? Is that, like, I don't know. I don't know how you like steel man this or dig into like, you know. Steel man it. You're a steel man. You're a steel man. You're a steel manning. It would probably be like the export restrictions are just like super complicated and it's

unclear and it's one of those things where it's like there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law and they made some case for, you know, in this particular, in this particular technology did not fit within the export restrictions because the export restrictions might just be like, you know, oh, chips of a certain size or scale and they had and they had a chip that was like slightly under and then they, and then the government like, you know, reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that. Like this stuff happens all the time. Because when these, when these export restrictions get, get, get written, it's easy to say like, crazy. You don't hear much about Cadence design systems. Yeah, by the way. It's a 95 billion dollar public company.

Yeah. And, and that's why people think Liputon. so equipped to run Intel because he took that company to like 100 billion market cap basically from I think like five or 10 or something when he when he joined the company. So he is a talented operator. So a week later, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about TAN's ties to China. Trump was watching, this is wild. Trump was watching Fox Business Network on August 7th when host Maria Bartaromo highlighted. Cotton's criticism at 7.34 a.m. Eastern time. Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his truth social platform. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately.

It's crazy. He's just watching the news and then posting about it. Journal says it was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down. Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO. The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to the Middle East, as senior White House official said, though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post. The president wants to see more such deals in the future. Well, if you're trying to maintain compliance, get on Vanta, automate compliance, risk, group trust continuously.

Vantas's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first. I imagine that will be, we know that Trump is not going to be on the board and not going to be sort of directly pulling the strings on the business, but I imagine one of the first things he wants Lip to do is implement Danto. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Intel stock price has been on a tear. Shout out to Leopold Oshenbrenner at situational awareness. They mocked him. They mocked him. They said, this guy's fun must have already blown up. Yeah. Oh, he's the last 13.F. What a weird non-consensus bet. Oh, well, it paid off. So Trump called for TAN's resignation mid-August. Then Trump met TAN, soft bank invested $2 billion, and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share. And the deal has been announced. So anyway, sorry, I cut you off.

No, I think people were speculating whether Leopold had some inside information or he just viewed Intel as a super strategic asset. There was some post about this, the government wouldn't possibly let fail. There was some guy on X saying like, oh, this is like insider trading. Everyone is insider trading. Even like Warren Buffett made his money on insider training,

very blackpilled. And so he would just be like, there's no evidence of any of this happening at all. And, yeah, wait, what you got, Tyler? I think also, like, this trade, like, him being long intel totally aligns with the thesis of the, of the fun. Situational awareness.

Totally. His whole thing is, they're going to maximize the situation. Yeah. They're going to nationalize, like, AI. Oh, yeah. So, obviously, like, if the U.S. is going to nationalize, like, start a lab, start, like, building computing stuff, they're going to have, like, they're going to take the existing, you know, infrastructure.

Yeah, yeah, I didn't even thought about it from that perspective. I was just thinking about it from the perspective of, like, like, we, we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel. We talked to Doug O'Loughlin about Intel. Like, we were kind of, like, noodling on it back and forth as, like, commentators. And I didn't come away with a super strong, like, bull or bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price of the valuation of the financials,

but it didn't seem like crazy to come up with a, like an expression of your position in financial terms. And it's very clear that like Leopold and his team just like looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there. You don't need, not every good training needs to be inside of training people. It's like so ridiculous.

Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. It's like, what does he know about Invid? Like, is it possible he just, he just knows that, like, every, like, he's not in Nvidia. What does he know? Is he insider trading? Or is he just, like, looking at like, oh, well, invidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into Nvidia.

It's like the biggest company in the world. Like, maybe not a lot of juice left there. Yeah. I'm going to go where, I'm going to get 20%. I'm going to go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And, yeah, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah.

In the Oval Office, Tan told the president his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States. He presented ideas for turning Intel around. and investing more in the United States. Lutnik told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda. By the end of the hour-long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the

criticism. I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan. That's great. Tan and Lutnik then move quickly to hammer out a deal for the deal for the same. the government to take a minority stake in Intel. It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, SoftBank, led by Mossa, suddenly agreed to put $2 billion into the company part of its campaign to bet on U.S. firms and appeal to Trump. Absolutely. If they were putting together like a pitch deck for

SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Yeah. Think bigger, build faster. Figma help design and development teams build great products together. I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for the design of their decks. Yeah. Because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded, but they still are powerful. Imagine how powerful they could be if they would, you know, simply get on a Figma slides. Let's see here. Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a soft bank backed company?

No way. Yeah. Dr. Drew.com. So Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla. on Kiss FM in 2005. Wait, that's crazy lore. Yes, this is insane lore. So Dr. Drew was a, like a board certified psychologist, psychiatrist, I think.

Wait, we're pulling up this website, by the way. And so Dr. Drew, during the dot-com boom, wanted to start his own, like, live stream property, basically, and raised money from SoftBank. and built a team of engineers and had their own data center, racking servers. And one of my jobs was like to go to the, well, I mean,

this is like what it is now because he has like a podcast and stuff. And you don't really need like necessarily like a venture back startup to be an influencer. But, uh, uh, so Dr. Drew went to the same high school as me. And,

uh, Tyler, that loves. Every single famous person has gone to John's high school. Yeah. It's wild. But yeah. But one of my like, you know, pop by the summer office was like go in the data center

and it was like super cold. It was like not like a data center like people think today. It was like a room with a couple racks of servers. But there was no AWS. So if you wanted to set up a website, you had to like rack a server and like put the code on the server and then run it. Just put the servers in the bag, bro. Yeah.

The brand was a little bit different back then. the first show that they were going to green light was this sort of like it was about a lot of stuff was like relationship coaching so love line people would call in about their relationships and so I believe they were going to put two people like a man and a woman who were maybe dating and they were going to go on a road trip and they were going to like live stream it and it was going to be like some sort of like new new media well all I can see is I can see why masa you needed to be in that website it is it is incredible lore is that is that part of how you underwrote the internship too you're like look you know i was really like technically an

intern i was i was so young i was just like stopping by the office basically but um but it was it was cool it was like a true startup environment like a pool table like pretty big office like very much like pool table yeah pool table amazing it was very it was very iconic of like the dot combs in office no now it's like ping pong tables yeah they've taken over um we should do you like pool I like pool. Okay. We should get a pool table back here. Billiards.

Billiards. Yeah. Yeah, it was like the classic like kind of overfunded venture back.com bubble company where like huge staff for something that like would ultimately be. Small media like. So yeah, yeah, a media company that should focus on like the media piece and then and then like the YouTube should just be like a platform. And so it's like it's like it didn't make sense to be in like the middle.

You either just wanted to be like the influencer or the. or the platform. Anyway, so SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least 100 billion in the U.S. on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club last December. SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business. Intel and the U.S. soon agreed to the government would use $8.9 billion in grants that have been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount. The U.S. won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel $2.2 billion in cheap. chips, Axe Grants. That was what we were talking about.

Earlier, some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, former partner on the Wall Street firm, Watchdell, Lipton, and Rosen, and Katz, drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business. It's an underrated naming scheme. I really wish startups would do this. Like, the next, like, AI startup should just be like, No, this is, this could be. This could be totally a new meta.

It can only be done once. Yes. By a great team. If we did Coogan, Hayes, Cosgrove, and Kohler, it would be amazing. I mean, at some point, we should just add the whole team. The whole team. The whole team, yeah. We could definitely get the dot-com.

Cugin and Hayes and Cogsgrove and just over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision is 5% at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment. And this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of highly technical projects. Highly technical, complicated businesses. Government famously good at building things. Yes, yes.

So if Intel were to give the government another 5%, obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for Intel if Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company. He might be able to do that. I think he's going to be able to do both, to be honest. I think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies. He's not going to be like a VC that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates. There's one thing.

People can criticize Trump for a lot of things, but he is available the week of August 25th. He's online. While many allocators, he's not a burning man. He's not a burning man, which is crazy. Which is crazy. You'd think that he's starting to get into venture. Yeah. naturally he would go to Burning Man.

Set up an Oval Office camp. Yeah. But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at Black Rock. That's right. Doing deals. That was one of our good, there's an early episode of TBPN

where John and I are riffing out Black Rock City, the home of Burning Man. And wondering if there's a connection to, there's almost certainly a connection. Obviously a connection to Black Rock. financial institution. Soft banks,

$2 billion, and the $8.9 billion in government funding that had already been promised aren't game changing for the chip manufacturing business and the grand scheme of thing it's not that money.

They lost $18 billion last year. We're not even covering last year's losses. But it's better to have and not need, I suppose. Yeah. So the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies

to work with Intel. Lean strongly encourage, demand that they are fired if they're not. if they do not. He's going to rip some posts. Tan has met with potential customers, including Apple CEO, Tim Cook, trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process.

This is not the kind of thing. I see Tim being super interested in. He's like more expensive, less performant. Apple has spent, what, a decade getting off of Intel and Intel Max and going to Apple Silicon, which are like so integrated, so perfect for the Apple ecosystem. Like, like, now, like, you can run, you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. Like, it's like, there's a ton of, there's a ton of, like, they've been spinning up, like, the, the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, like, the different graphics engines and getting

developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple Silicon. Yeah. They just, like, rugged, right? Yeah, so the journal says many executives say they would need big incentives to use Intel for manufacturing, given how badly it trails industry leaders like TSM. It is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance. The government stake in Intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions

in the private sector. I mean, what's the craziest thing that they could do? Like Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like kind of fresh start? That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. But I mean, if Amazon can do Traneum and Google can do TPU at TSM, like maybe there's a world where that happens. I don't know. Anyway, I'm a global founder.

He's punching the air right now. Anyway. So they highlight a couple of the other deals. It's worth covering to the president when a quote unquote golden share of control over Japan's Nippon Steel in return for allowing it to take over U.S. steel. These golden shares are in reference to what the, CCP. Oh, I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet, which is gold. Yes, and many, many of the fixtures in his, in the Oval Office. Yes. But, and last month, Trump struck a deal with NVIDIA and AMD for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return

for allowing the exports. Yep. In early July, the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP materials and maker of rare earth magnets. Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressure to expand its U.S. supply chain, announced a $500 million deal to buy MP's products. Yeah, so that's an example of, like, Trump, like, acting is, you know, biz-deaf, basically for the companies he likes. I mean, he's really going to make a lot of ECs look bad. Oh, yeah. Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation and then kind of

I'll help you ramp your revenue for sure. Yeah, I'll help you hire founding engineers. I know a lot of the top guys. I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that. also want to hire founding engineers. I got you. I got you.

But the Intel stake is among the most notable, given Trump called for Tan to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table. There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing, said Guantam Makunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management, never heard of it, who studies innovation and leadership,

referring to the Star Wars villain, who started as good, became evil, then redeemed himself. Anyways, you want to read through this post from the big question is, is this socialism. Maga socialism. Is this maga socialism? A lot of people have been saying this. And I mean, I think like my default take is that like I don't know that Intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop.

I don't necessarily know that the government is the right board member. Do you trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want Doug from semi-analysis really doesn't does not want Intel to fail. Yeah. I don't know. I'm still like on the fence about it. But so the debate has been raging like, is this socialism? And so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed the people's line from Carl Beher. And Carl says no, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. This is interesting because obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal. And they're saying, this isn't socialism.

What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals. And this is an America first agenda project. The Democrats are saying, oh, wow, Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough.

It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling stake. So Carl says, former Obama Undersecretary of the state, Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Trump's strong-arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of. Once the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector, look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism. So, Carl, continue.

couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap on Trump's acquisition of Intel shares. Yes. Which was surprising given that back in the Biden admin era, they were pushing for this. Yes, but the key discussion that's going on right now is, is financial ownership versus true control over capital, and that's what Carl's going to get into here. So he says, anyone old enough to remember the phrase, government motors, this is from the era of the takeover GM, should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the U.S. government a 61% equity stake in general motors,

and the rights backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business. That proved the left's enchantment with socialism. John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy, and in the end, that's pretty close to socialism, that so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism, Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively

ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think this will score points against Republicans. There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this case, I would say wrongly, Stingles' definition of Marxism, as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons. But here are the most salient that, but here are the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company.

But as Intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10% control, quote, the government's... 9.9%. But no, no, so there's more. The government's investment in Intel will be a passive ownership with no board. representation or other governance or information rights, the government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialist would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production, a major function of modern finances

to sever the relationship between those two. To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given a lot of capital. In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of intel, which is what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you a 10% non-voting stake in their company is very different thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership and control, and that's why socialists have an interest in this fight. If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain

that he isn't even doing socialism. He's not doing enough. He's not doing enough. And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like, it is not with a goal of socialist, but at the same time, it reaffirmed that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting

on what Intel should do. Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSMC, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Traneum. Like, it just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that.

It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialists, but I have no, I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51% voting stake in Intel, then we would get a better outcome here. Well, the better outcome people were talking about this on the timeline would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls. That would be fantastic. maybe that's a good outcome.

Yeah. But it'd be odd to have like, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like, you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we going to do three nanometer? Like, decide. You decide. Like, yes or no. Like, I think it's, I think it's a waste of money. Or just have the, the, whoever's the Intel CEO, just have that as, you know, an elected official.

Yeah. Like, let the people vote on who should be running. Yeah. I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want? You can vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic. We have ballot measures for all sorts of things.

We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level. We have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. But if you really play out the direct democracy, socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not Intel launches a GPU. Like, Intel, like, hey, we miss mobile. What should we do about that? Okay, let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box. Like that is the conclusion, which is kind of crazy to me. Should Intel launch energy drinks?

Yeah. It's not really in our wheelhouse today, but, you know, big, potentially large opportunity. Yeah, it just, it does seem, it does seem fraud. It doesn't seem like, it seems like they're, they're, it's potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country. Well, I don't know. This is saying that like, we're, like, like his point is that this isn't, this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control. It's purely a financial instrument.

Yeah, but the Intel board said the government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So what are the exceptions, right? I'm not sure that we know. But anyways, the timeline. The timeline says it's a bad idea. We can vote against you. That's the exception. Anyway, First step, I would vote for if I was in a democratic socialist society, I would vote that Intel gets on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Can or in the chat says I think Intel needs to launch short form content. Well, make sure your voter registration is up to date because President AOC might just make it happen. You never know.

I could see it. I could see it. possible. I mean, the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla, because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they'd taken advantage of. You could make the same argument. You put the screws to them and you say, hey, we need, we need voting shares for this. For the years and years. This is what Andrew Sorkin was saying. Yeah. He was saying, like, yeah, like, where, like, where do you stop? And I understand that, yeah, there is this, like, slippery slope. But to Bill Gurley's point, like, Intel could have said no. They could have said like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine without the Chips Act money. And so we don't want, we don't want an equity stake. Although,

Lip Bhutan is sitting there just on fire. And you should be like, you don't need to help, you don't need to help put it out. I'll be good. I'll be good. Flames. You're just, just, it's like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm good. I'm good. I'll cut more. He's like, I don't want to, I don't want to give the president the ick. I'm just act all like. Hey, I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe Intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like all we own is, we're real estate and we just lease to TSM. And that's it. We're completely out of. Probably a decent business. In other news, Taylor Swift is getting married. The private jet enthusiast. Well, I feel like

most of our audience would know her for her Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014, where she said, Taylor Swift, the future of music is a love story. Where will the music industry be in 20, 30, 50 years before I tell you my thoughts on the matter? You should know that you're reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist. One of the few living souls... Yeah, one of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying. It's just coming alive. There are many, many people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not

one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is and will continue to be based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work and the financial values and the financial value that artists and their labels place on their music when it goes into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing, and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically. And every artist has handled this blow differently. In recent years, you've probably heard the articles about major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away. for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the future, not just in the music industry,

but in every young girl I meet is that they all realize they're worth and ask for it. Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free. And my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is.

I hope they don't underestimate themselves or underestimate or undervalue their art. So did she get this right? To date? Not really. I think she got, the thing that she got right is that what an album is can be extremely monetized if you continue to think about what, like the album is scarcity. Like you either have it or you don't. And the internet kind of reduced that scarcity to zero because you could stream it.

You could pirate it. But there is still scarcity to be created if you are an artist, if you are a musical artist. And so the way she does that now is when she releases an album. She goes on a tour that becomes so big that, again, there is scarcity because there are only so many tickets at Sofi Stadium. And you have to be there. Yeah. Because it's a moment. One of the best monetized.

Yes. Recording artists of all time. Yes. Yes. And so she gets the long tail eventually. And eventually her music is essentially free and played in, uh, In grocery stores. I'm going to read you something from their Instagram caption announcing the engagement.

Yes. It's not just a marriage. Dash. M. Dash. No way. It's the perfect love story. No way.

No way. On X is calling this out saying, claiming that Taylor and Travis are one shot it. No way. What did you got, Tyler? What was that? No. I was going to say something about her like monetization.

Like, Kyle Scannon has this good post. She said, Taylor Swift's engagement is actually very relevant to monetary policy because she is the most powerful stimulus tool we have. Oh really? How so? Well, I mean her tours are like massive. Like you can see the like rise in consumer spending. Yeah. Ooh interesting. Especially like smaller countries. It's like very. Yes. Yes. But but how does her being married like she could just go on tour and be single, right? Is she going to sell more tickets because she's married now? Does it allow her to tour more? You could also see it in a lot of people are talking about birth rates, right?

So maybe a new boom, baby boom. Catherine Boyle just posted a picture and just said, with the captioned, their picture, pictures just said American dynamism. I do think this will be good for the birth rate. It's also going to be some, for anybody that's in a longer term relationship in their late 20s, early 30s, pressure is now on. These photos are going to be getting sent around. They're setting a new bar.

quite the floral display by Travis. Got to give them props there. How many kids do you think she'll wind up having? She's 35. She's 35. She's got to get going. Oh, yeah, 1980. And hopefully a ton, right?

I mean, I think we'd like to see. It is the last luxury status symbol, apparently. I'd like to see at least 10. Yeah. It'd be great. Oh, wow. Looking sharp. You really, you really undersold.

As you said, you were just going to do a phone call, and now here you are. No, I thought I did a full Monty here. This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize. I completely botched the story of Dr. Drew.com. In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as a kid. But please break it down for us. It's so funny.

The only thing I found disturbing was how, how miserably you did with my credentials. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let me start with that. Okay, please. I'm a physician. I'm a board certifying internist. I'm a board certified dictionalysis.

I'm a fellow with the American Board of Medical College of Physicians. I was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist. Okay, yes. We did you love Llein back in the day. I loved Loveline. I sincerely love Lovine. I wish I listened to it constantly.

It was amazing. Well, it was very popular, and it served a function back in the day. But this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history. Incredible. A good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School. Yeah. We went off to Amherst College and then he went to Harvard Business School.

I went to medical school and I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine and then doing radio and he shows up and he goes, I want to show you how to form of business. We're going to do a dot-com company. Of course, I was hearing about all the dot-com stuff in the wind and he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County like a million dollars. And then he put together a little board. And he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to Sand Hill Road.

And we sat at softback, soft bank, rather. And he just said, follow me. I go, what are we doing? What do we create? I had no idea what we were doing. I didn't know how to start a business. I didn't understand. Had you bought your dot com, by the way?

Had you, like, gone out? Probably had done something like that at that point. I don't think we're sitting there without that. Yeah, exactly. And he just goes, follow me. And I was like, okay, so I followed along and they go, what do you want to do? And I'm like, I'm, blah, you know, I don't remember what I said. But the six or seven soft bank VC representative marched out of the room.

And my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, okay, $10 million. That was that. Let's go. We went down and we built the company exactly as you described it. And in fact, drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here?

Why aren't they working? It shouldn't be this nice an environment. But most of that was for the tech team. And you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You got that part exactly right. But the part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was. And so we had an editorial staff. We had a medical staff.

We had a marketing team. And they envisioned, I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen? Why you're building this really great magazine. But with a chat room and with some feedback. And they kept all these sort of trigger words back now were interaction. Sure. And I didn't understand.

I saw no value in any of it. I kept saying, I kept saying, we had 120 employees. and we had a board of directors from from northern California who were demanding we quote get big fast this is interesting get big fast yeah this guy this I came to our first board meeting I said look I I I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money how to make this profitable or what we should be doing or how to you know did they tell you don't worry about that don't worry about that worse than that this one guy goes if he was manic as hell and he goes if I thought you were so stupid I never would have been on this

board and he jumps up and he goes here's how you make money a dot com company and there was a giant white board and he wrote in huge letters get big fast and they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast so that became the weird is the weirdest thing I ever seen in my life but the one thing I got right I kept saying it's going to be video why else do we need this thing it's going to be video but look what we're doing right now right yeah yeah and And I just kept saying that and we put together a one night a week television show that was really a high quality show. We still have some of the tapes from it and everybody came in, Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee, everybody came on that one night a week show because it was the cool thing to do because there's this new idea, this dot com company creates a TV show and nobody could watch it. You know why?

Because you couldn't stream it. Because nobody had stream. Nobody had broadband. Broadband. You needed broadband back then. That's how far ahead of the technology we were. Sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show on a subscription? Like, what did that? Was there any business model? Was it any revenue model? No. Just eyeballs. Just eyeballs. So Get Big fast didn't mean revenue or profits. It meant eyeballs.

Eyeballs. Get Big meant money, bent number of people. And they kept talking about how the you know how the ascetic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff. And we literally, this was a company, I mean, had lots of traction and engagement and stuff. People were kind of intrigued by it. So people were stopping by and looking at this thing. I'm not sure. We did lots of interviews with celebrity. It was sort of like E meets, Teen B meets, you know, it was all these different things

all together in one site. And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was March 19th, 2010, when was that? I'm sorry, 1989 or 2000. The day the NASDAQ fell apart. Oh, sure. The day. We were sitting in Goldman Sachs and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30 million on a $110 million valuation for a company. that had never made a penny.

Wow. And I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw, but I knew it was tulips the whole way, and one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam 1680, it's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts, or are you going to grow tulips? What are you going to do?

I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips. Well, it's interesting to think back, and if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you, in your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment. but that wasn't a good dot-com story. It was why we got the money, though.

In fact, as an ink article on my wall here, I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera, but it'd be almost impossible to do it. They were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing. But it was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands. And I don't think they really knew that,

that was not a fully developed thought at that time. Yeah. So what was the conclusion? It was like going to business school, I saw the entire, the entire from seed to dissolve. Yeah. I saw the entire business cycle in one year. So did you eventually take over the site again yourself or what? Oh, Dr. Coop bought the site.

Remember Dr. Coop? You wouldn't. You're too young. He was the attorney general. And then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute. Did he just redirect the website or was he still using Dr. Drew.com? No, no, he was a redirect. Okay, cool.

Dwarbed everything. And he went bankrupt, as everybody did. Yeah. And we were able to weasel it back. I forget how we got it back, but we had to do some sleuthing or we finally got it back. So, yeah, what, what, how did the shape of your business evolve then? And, like, what, like, how do you think about packaging everything that you do now? You know, there's, I was listening to you guys talk and I was thinking, boy, I don't have any framework.

This is all very interesting to me, but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do. My stuff is always an improvisation. Sure. Right? When I started radio in 1983, I had no designs on radio. I was, leave me alone so I can practice medicine. I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service. That was my little notion in 1983 when I started doing radio.

Then some television guys came along. I'm like, how do you do a TV show? I've never, I don't even know what you're talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the dot com. My good friend comes to me and goes, we're going to do this. And I thought, I don't see it. I don't get it. But I think we might be able to do something with it.

It would be interesting. This was a hell of an education. And you're asking how I frame everything I do now, now? Yeah, I was wondering. Well, it's just been interesting how many technology friends from the dot com to podcasting, but it all comes back to radio and TV. Yeah, like over the past

you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the, hey, let's do a crypto thing? Or let's do an AI Dr. Drew. Or let's do an AI thing. Is this coming, is it rearing its head again? That has been, that has been, I've had conversations like that. Yeah, of course. Of course. Exactly what to do with it. Nobody knows.

Nobody, right? But it's part of the exploration. I'm doing, streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell. Wait, where you put it up there.

I'm going to talk to my webmaster. I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization. For sure. It made me want to click. I think your person is doing a good job. Not meant to be showing other people's shows, I guess.

But, you know, that's been interesting. It happened. That all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID. Oh, yeah. And that,

caused me to just stop doing everything and I had somebody who said hey you should do a streaming show I was like what's that again that's sort of my that's where I start every one of these projects yeah you had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like if if I make the show you're sure people are going to be able to watch it but well no more confidence this time no no I know I knew it I already knew that I already I saw what was happening with videos I just kept we just kept we just kept saying we were so early we just we could have been who knows what we could have been you God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of have been the first to really advocate for this kind of platform.

But we were way early and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as I was. And so the streaming thing has been very interesting. I'm in my own, my kids' playroom doing this. And it's the same thing. Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth at CNN. And now I just do it from here. So the efficiencies are fantastic. And so I do television out of the studio.

I do podcasting out of the studio. I do streaming shows. And it all started because I got canceled. And my webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon. I said, let's try that. And I wanted to talk to all the people, other physicians who have been canceled. One of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now. And so I had the sense that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing

was some sort of bizarre aberration, certainly in science and medicine. Had you gotten, you know, the opportunities that you maybe lost due to the cancellation, have you gotten invited back in the last year or so? Or is it just a different set of opportunities? Yeah, are you looking at totally different? Or do you not even want to go back to kind of the old? Those are great questions. I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position

that my opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform anywhere. what has happened in the meantime is, you know, well, I used to do say all the news outlets, all of them, all of a sudden the only people that would have me on was Fox. Now, just last week, CNN called. So I thought, okay, good, this is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able to schedule.

Nature's healing. Nature's healing, yeah. We've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media, where all the value either accrues to the platforms, like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the Dr. Cruz, and that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle.

Would you agree with that? Would you, is this something that you've kind of experienced? It feels like something that... No, I absolutely concur with the, on the talent side. Yeah. that because it used to be i would require to do what we're doing right now yep there'd be an executive producer there'd be a segment producer there would be a director in the studio in the satellite booth there'd be somebody directing in the other end at the satellite booth there

would and then you got the unions the unions the unions every sales forces there'd be executive structure now it's me yeah that's it yeah so it's so much more efficient and it drives that world crazy. So when Colbert gets fired for losing $40 million a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah. That's going to happen to all of them. This is just not a model. Yeah, and our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the overhead. 100%, but they are, they are, you got to know how that world thinks. They're very spoiled. They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure.

and dozens of writers and this is this the world we're living in right as we have this interview to them look sort of cheap and dumb and people who aren't talented do that the real people people back back us with infrastructure and money that that just just not so this the other side of the barbell yeah which i'm wondering how you see it i just see it as largely non viable so much of it has got to shrink dramatically and it's resisting yeah it's resisting like crazy Yeah, I mean, I would almost put the traditional media corporations like in the center. When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks.

And they actually accrue a ton of the value. And it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. If you do, you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer. And you probably at this point have the backing of like a state. government because that's the only way TikTok got going was, you know, so much energy and capital flowing in to actually, you know, break through. The ship has sailed on starting like new platforms for the most part, in my opinion. I think that's probably right. And they're, and they don't need

to buy talent. No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% of the revenue or whatever. Yeah, we would rather, we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio. Yep. And you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you. and we don't have to be, we just get to focus on making content and not, not focused on talent management. But the interesting thing is, you just have to wonder, is there, are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation? And when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of, I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right? Yeah, what was that new left-wing substack publication that just announced?

So they're living out or something, remember this? Yeah, what are the... Anyway, there's like a collection, the argument. So there's a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left. And we were kind of debating, will they have leverage over different platforms

because they're all together, or does it actually make more sense for Matt Eglacius and Derek Thompson to just have their own substacks and go direct? And then, you know, and then on the far other side is the platform and there's really no one in between. But we're still early in the, in this development of the argument. Well, there's something very strange. It says there's a weird

confluence of worlds right now. Yeah. My son just texted me and he's, he's been trying to get to you guys. Really? No way. Does he want to, does you want to? Does you want to hop on? We'll send a link. Yeah, yeah. You can join right after you. You're listening. Maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the microphone here. Let's do it. Let's do it. He's consolidating the ad department, you know, the management, the, the lawyering, the ad services, the distribution. He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team. Sure.

Because these things aren't necessary. All this stuff is not needed anymore. Yeah. You need an ad agency. Yeah, this is amazing. The chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy with this. They're calling, they're calling your son, the prodigal son.

The question. I'm going to see if I get him to call me. He said he emailed. He made his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys. Okay, okay. We'll have to follow up, but they're having huge success. And he's the one to start talking about AI. He's in the middle of all of this, the tech influencers, the Google store, the TikTok store, all of everything.

But all of that is more efficient, more efficient, more efficient. Yep. Right? And what you have is the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on. They're like they're like going into the foxholes yeah as opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what what it is they do They are just Insisting the things continue to be done the way that they've always been done and it's it's it's it's I guess a classic business mistake right? Yeah, totally yeah I have one I have one one one one health one health one health question for you

Yeah, what are the uh John John and I are starting a what we hope? hope to be multiple decades run of daily live streaming. What would you have done when you were earlier in your career health-wise to better sell, you seem to be doing incredibly well now? So what are the key things to look out for health-wise to make sure you can do this for decades?

Be hypomanic, helps, which a lot of successful business people are. Yes. You're going, as I hear many of the podcasts, you're going to suffer, you're going to work hard, you're going to lose sleep. I wish I'd pay more attention to sleep, but if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did. I'm trying to pay attention to sleep now. And, you know, you've heard it all before. It's not, this is not new. Trust your instincts, explore.

Don't be afraid to fall down. For me, the big, as I look back on all the things I did, it's just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. Oh, he's calling now. Let's go on. We got the sun on. I don't know if they can hear. I'll have to translate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But on speakerphone. Hey, how's it going, guys? How you doing? What's happening? It's not obviously, but we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back. Okay.

We rep Roberto Nixon. Oh, no way. I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay, yeah, we got to get in touch. My dad was on the air. Fantastic. I'm flying back from Seattle.

Okay, yeah. Okay, I do it. So we did have a little exchange. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's follow up. He's going to keep talking, okay? He can't. I'll tell him what you said. He can't hear you.

He's talking, Douglas. I was going to say that I, so Rob and Jake are going to an oasis concert next week in Pasadena. And I was going to ask you if you could meet Rob in Pasadena. Okay, yeah. His sister also, her kids are going to Polly. And Douglas went to Polly too. That's amazing. It's a little reunion.

Like you said at the beginning of the show, only famous people go to Polly Techniques. Yeah. that's fantastic um no i just wanted to say hi and uh show you that we're not like uh the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to to build a relationship it's it's very funny that this all happened in a strange way so yeah this is amazing incredible i actually have to take a call for this car name cork he's a gen a i creator cool because he's in dubai and i you know just trying to get on the you got to get on with dubai we know we know how that goes All right, get going.

I call these guys because they butchered my, my, uh, my, uh, dot com. And I did get some great. John is that, which one's John? I'm John. John, John was actually at Dr. Drew.com when he was like 10 years old. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I was in the very cold data center. Yeah. Okay. Rock and servers. That's the catcular. So there's, there's a long history on, on, on all fronts.

Andy went to Paul. So, okay, we'll talk later. Yes. Andy went to Paul. Amazing. Okay. Okay. I have one more question on the health side.

For you, for you. Okay. Sorry, later, Douglas. Later, for you. Last week,

we had Mark Cuban on the show. He said that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done. Yet, is there anything too bad? I'll go on the record. I drink a leader of raw milk every day, every day for two years straight. And they were fined?

Yeah. What's the, did he explain why? He didn't. didn't give any underlying rationale. I doubt he knows why. He was just saying that the LLMs might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario.

You can get brucellosis. You can probably get Tuilemia. You can get Listeriosis. And we can treat that with antibiotics. No problem. But they can make you very sick and they're very rare. I wouldn't do it, but I don't. The fact that, look, there's a,

is something terrible going on where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are and the reality that we are going to die that they are afraid to live yeah living well is the goal not living forever not living perfectly free of illness it's living a good life and we are off of that i can't great we are so far off that it is disgusting and for for a non-physician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me. The same thing was when people went after hydroxychloroquine,

the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So it's all, we are so out of whack with this gonna live forever, fear of death, illness, infection, oh shit, yes, we are, we, my generation of physicians, We walked into illnesses that had 100% fatality. AIDS had 100% fatality and we did not know what we were dealing with.

And we didn't cower in the corner. We marched in. It's the right thing to do. I don't know what's happened. I can't understand this at all. But here we are. We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period. Did you predict?

Biological stuff comes up may. Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption? Hmm. I did not. It's not. It's falling off a cliff, right? Yeah. Yeah, I did.

That's still surprising to me, but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing. That was a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing. You know, the people are starting to understand it's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever, but it makes me also, I mean, what happens? When did we become such pussies?

When did that happen? That's my question of days. When did that happen? I don't know. Have you ever said something like that on CNN? This is why you've got to stay off the networks. You just got to do your own show. I guess I've been through so much lately.

I've just lost all inhibition. I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many stories. I'm not happy about this flag-burning thing. Freedom, freedom is what I'm all about now. I will pitch you one possible explanation. I think that the fear of very, you know, consequential but low probability events, like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk

or the risk from COVID is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever. Like biological immortality, like science will cure this and let you live forever. That's just one way. to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality and your legacy.

If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children and also through the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven.

And if you don't believe in any of those modes of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do,

wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has the has an incredible, incredible penalty. And so you, you discount it very, very high. I agree with you, with a couple of caveats. I do agree with you. Yeah. Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making. If the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife, whatever, Whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful. It does not have to include an afterlife. You can also include just creating a good life for my children. That's why I'm here.

To do that, that kind of thing. But people are here for their narcissistic needs, and that's when things become fragile. Yes. Because we are not the beginning and the end of everything. We just are not. And if we think we're all there is is what's happening to me, man. And then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that. And that is disgusting.

Yeah. So what about, have you been tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts there? I hear about it. I don't believe it. I'll make a bet that it's way overblown. It was somebody who's already psychotic and, you know, whatever. not that the AI relationships are necessarily going to be good.

I worry about that. But this psychotic episode, I don't know. I don't know if you remember back in the 90s, there were news stories every night about- I wasn't born, sir. Okay. Do you have to rub that in? You just said, no, I don't remember.

No, no. Later 90s, I got into the action. But there was news reports like every night, like, oh, these parties where all the parents throw their kids, keys in a bowl and they just they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night. Oh, sure. Sure. The press, the fake, I don't think people were sensitive to fake news. We have to be very sensitive to report in these days. So much of what's being reported is fake and it's just to catch your eyes. It's just to get your attention. They, they, the person that wrote that article was a 23

year old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of any meaning. It just becomes something that they catch on the line or they saw other people report it they report it it's ridiculous yeah i mean the the my my read on it is is it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take iwaska some of them are going to have some type of psychotic break of sorts and and maybe they were prone to to or or had some some underlying issue that that enabled that but you're The issue with... You're right. They already had a psychotic illness

and they just happened to break when they're working with AI. But you're raising, you're making a very smart observation that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca,

which I tell you it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career, scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that. Did you ever consider, yeah,

if you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to, to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning Man, by the way? No, we got friends. Keep trying to get us to go. It's not my jam. Exactly. It's not my jam either. Well, you could go there and try to, try to, you know, talk people out of it. How about we stick to the bud light, buddy. Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers. Have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining.

Come back on any time. We appreciate this. We'd love to have you guys. You guys are great. I learned something just listening to you guys, talking about the baseball cards. That'll fascinating. You guys have a great, you're obviously extremely well trained in your respective fields. And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things. And I leave with one caveat. Please. If you don't call my son, he's going to kill me.

We will definitely. We're going to go to this concert with him. We will. Exactly. It's in Pasadena. Yeah. I live in Pasadena now. You live there now?

I do. I live over there. Rose Bowl. Rose Bowl is literally walking distance for me. So do I. Amazing. There we go. Okay, we should...

Did you guys just become best friends? I don't want to ask my address, but I'll swing my mile for you. We live over by Anadale. We live by Anadale. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right over there. Okay, so... Just up late to Vista.

No excuse. I don't want to get too... I don't want to get too precise show up with people on the front door. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Great hanging. We'll talk about. Cheers.

Bye. Massive news from SpaceX last night. They did it. They did it. flight 10 made it back took off from star base south texas the uh the booster landed in the ocean and the i think the gulf of america technically that's absolutely right and the actual starship executed a successful flip maneuver deployed a mock payload of a bunch of uh non-functional starlink satellites uh survived re-entry just barely, as we'll see.

It was a really dramatic video. It was amazing. And then splash down on target in the Indian Ocean. It was a full send. It was a full send. It was a crazy, crazy video to watch. Yeah, let's watch the recap video that the Wall Street Journal put together. This is pretty interesting.

Star Base, Texas. This is yesterday. They scrapped two attempts on Monday and Tuesday because of some problems with the vehicle. but they got it off the ground. Look at that. They lit the candle. Stunning. Going to space.

I wish we could get a better sense for just how massive it is from those angles. And so those are the dummy Starlink satellites. You can see that little motor conveyor belt on the left. Yeah. Just the number of things

that have to go right to actually release something from this rocket. It's insane. And then this is the crazy part. There's just a bunch of debris. That's not what we want to see. Where did the stuff come from?

Just take it. We clearly didn't need it. You would think that as soon as I saw it, I was like, okay, it's over. The whole thing's going to blow for sure. It definitely doesn't make it back because if it's like losing parts, like every part should be important, right? Like what's going on here? And so, and they're also the whole time they were like testing the flaps, like really pushing them to the limits going farther. There it is splashing down.

Yeah, you were mentioning earlier. There's a soundbite of them saying they were actually testing. They were going further than they needed to. So they were doing things like, like, okay, let's stress it. And then boom. Convenient cut, you would have thought the journal and the legacy media would have let that a little bit longer of the massive explosion. Yeah, I mean, the vibes going into this were rough, honestly.

Lots of people with the Elon's been distracted by politics take. Lots of people with the Elon too focused on AI romantic companions take. We covered that. You can imagine the conversation between Elon and Anni yesterday, right, before the watch. You got this, babe. I mean, you know that, you know that Ani, apparently, allegedly, the original Anni romantic companion model runs on the non-reasoning model, just GROC 3, I guess. Just pure love. Pure love. And if there's any evidence out there in the just market of AI chatting and

companions is that you don't need a reasoning model when you are chatting with a romantic companion. So a lot of like the backlash to the GPT-5 launch was something like, you know, people were using it, not just as a romantic companion, but just as like a life coach, somebody to talk to. It was very conversational. And that quick back and forth was what people actually enjoyed. They liked the tone. They didn't care that it wasn't, you know, incredibly good at solving hard math problems or like the IMO or whatever. What you got for me, Tyler? I think there's also something to be said for like reasoning models kind of mess with the vibes. Yeah, totally. It's like the music thing where sometimes you want a friend that's not going to think too hard.

They're just going to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the musical, like, taste thing, all the reasoning models gave like these weird answers because they would like subtly prefer, you know, artist names with numbers, stuff like that. Although, I mean, I think the reasoning models actually had the best taste of all, but that's a bit of a hot take. Well, we've got to pull up this post from Red Bull Futurists. It's very important. He says super heavy.

The effing goat. Wow. And I just needed to highlight this because obviously Red Bull, some of Red Bull futurists work actually has went into this. Yeah, of course. It's amazing. So absolute legend. A win for Red Bull, really. For sure.

For sure. Yeah. It's actually surprising that Red Bull and SpaceX haven't tried to collab yet. You'd think that Red Bull would just be like, we'll give you millions of dollars if you just put Red Bull branding over this. Yeah, yeah. That'd be so cool. it'd be good, it'd be good for both parties. Even the, even the explosions feel like on brand for Red Bull.

Totally. Red Bull's down for the crazy risk taking. I could see Elon going with the white monster. Don't go. You really good. Yeah, you really should do that. But I mean, the basic brand is special and maybe you don't want to delete that. Are you, would you go so far to say the white monster brand isn't special?

Would you say that Red Bull? It would be added. It would be added. Yeah. They, uh, the reason I was bringing up the reasoning models was because apparently, um, Elon wanted Ani to use the reasoning model. Like the AI companion has to be able to do the hard math problems, which is funny.

So maybe she really was in use making, doing rocket science and calculating the last final decisions before this rocket went out. But it was a huge success. The Walser Journal has kind of the play-by-play here. SpaceX pulled off a smoother test of its Starship rocket managing a more complete mission. After setbacks earlier this year, the Starship spacecraft flew through space after launching from the company South Texas Complex Tuesday around 7.30 p.m. ET. The vehicle successfully deployed a batch of dummy Starlink satellites and reentered Earth's orbit, facing intense heat and forces before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. This is the 10th launch of Starship. I believe this was the, this was ship like 37 or something. They've built a lot of these. Not all of them have launched. Some of them have been scrapped. Some of them blew up in the test stand. Like they really really. push these things super hard. So it's a 403 foot tall rocket. They started testing this in 2023. There's been a series of explosions, mishaps,

previous test flights that have been cut short. Elon Musk has much riding on the rocket envisioned to one day carry satellite, scientific devices, and eventually astronauts. Just to put this into context, the White House is 70 feet tall. Wow. So this is... Yeah, it's like the size of the... isn't it closer to the Statue of Liberty? I think it's like around that tall, 403 feet.

I'll have to look that up. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet. Oh, mocked. Absolutely mugged. A extra 50 feet on that. For now, the company is pushing to show it can consistently fly Starship and experiment with his design, SpaceX set up Tuesday's mission to stress test parts of the starship spacecraft.

We certainly saw that on display with the parts flying all over the place, seeking to give engineers information to continue developing the vehicle. basically the calculus here is like, how cheap can you make this thing? If you use duct tape, will that work? Will you, if you use tinfoil? They really are pushing these things like crazy, crazy hard. I think the other way to put this into context, not everybody is fortunate to be able to launch, build and launch rockets for a living. But anybody that's built software knows that even if you're launching a relatively simple feature, it'll oftentimes break and have issues and bugs and things like that.

And it's a little bit, you have a little bit more leeway to ship stuff and make changes on the fly. Yep. In this case, they're doing it in this incredibly public setting where the internet is going to have a very strong reaction one way or another.

So the pressure is just insane. So Musk wants both the Starship booster and spacecraft to be fully and rapidly reusable, more akin to an airplane than a traditional rocket. SpaceX has made major strides with reusability with its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, which are powered by boosters. It can be used many times. SpaceX faces self-imposed and external deadlines with the much larger Starship.

Musk wants to launch an uncrewed version of the vehicle to Mars next year, but has said meeting that goal will be tough. Of course, there's a Mars transfer window that only comes up, I think, every 18 months or so. So it's really critical to hit it in 26, or else you've got to wait until 28, I believe. In 2027, a lander variant of Starship is supposed to be ready to come. carry astronauts on a NASA moon mission through the agency's Artemis exploration program. That's going to be really hard because I think they have to refuel in orbit and then also make it safe enough that astronauts can fly on it. Like they have a lot to do there. This is why we need

to get ony to be able to solve complex physics. For sure, for sure. Today we are talking about Labuboos and the story of Pop Mart, which to me really stands out as a similar, like in the dot-com boom, there was this, the Beanie Babies went on a similar run. Incredibly popular built on the back of dot-com technology. I remember going over to a friend's house and Loading the beaniebabadies.com website and it was so heavy because it had all these images It take like minutes to load? It took minutes to load because they like whoever built the website Just didn't kind of think about how long it would take, but even then it was like this is so cool. Yeah It takes 30 minutes to go to the store. Exactly. Oh,

If it takes five minutes to load all down. And so, yeah, the page would load, the HTML would load, and then slowly one image after another would load in. And you can really feel the difference at the time. Many people were on dial-up, which was 56K, which is like a staggeringly slow speed compared to what you get even just on like a plane. And then DSL was one level up. Daniel posted that United has star length now.

Yeah, and I think it's 300 megs per se. second, 300 megs. So that's, that's what, uh, 6,000 times faster than what we were experiencing back in like the mid 90s. Yeah. And so, um, then you could upgrade to DSL. Ds was between 256K and 1.5 megs. Uh, I had a friend who had a T1 line, which was like enterprise level internet in the 90s. It was one meg up and down. So you could get equal upload symmetrical line. Um, and he could still, he could load the Beanie Baby website faster. anyone. It was like true status symbol at the time. Yeah, it was alpha. His parents were very successful. What was the the most expensive Beanie Baby transaction ever? Do you know? I don't know. I do know

that prices peaked throughout just, they perfectly tracked the dot-com boom. So in 1998, Ty, which is Ty Warner, his company is called Ty, T-Y, they make Beanie babies. They made $1.4 billion in sales making it one of the first. fastest growing toy companies in history. Two years later, the market crashed almost overnight. Prices on the secondary market plummeted a supply overwhelmed demand and speculative buyers exited. So people were in the habit of, yes, age in the chat is correct. eBay was a major, major driver of Beanie Baby's growth because people could buy them and then the secondary market was way more liquid than ever before. Before, it was like, okay, if you buy some, some

drop or some limited edition thing and you want to go sell it. You have to go to like a trade show that maybe happens every once in a once a year. You have to find maybe your local shop. There's not that much liquidity. Remember when we were talking to our friend about the the collectible card market, Beatles memorabilia. He was saying like, I only need two buyers. It's very easy to find two buyers if you're if you're if you're interacting at internet scale. It's harder if you're in some town and you have a rare beanie bag. and you need to see, are there any other crazy Beanie Baby fans in this town? So eBay was a huge, yeah, Beanie Baby is the original or unicorn startup, essentially. I mean, it was an overnight success in the sense that I think the business was gone for about a decade before the boom. But they rode the wave of the internet. Interestingly, the most expensive Lubbubu ever sold was $170,000 in June of this year. Yep.

And the most expensive Beanie Baby ever sold was something around. half a million dollars. Half a million dollars. Oh, we got room to run, baby. We got room to run in the Lubbubu market. So my question's like, what is driving the Laboubu? Yeah, in, enjoy your victory lap. Get out there, get some exercise, do some push-ups halfway through the lap.

Aidan. Enjoy it. Belt ski. Did we see that right? Belt skis. Yes. Belt skis? We said your full name now.

There we go. Thanks for watching. The, yeah, so Laboo, clearly, clearly a beneficiary of the, social media boom of TikTok of the unboxing culture, Timo culture, live shop culture, flex culture. Because people put them on, you know, their purse. Interestingly, not, even though it's like, it's like money is cheap right now. Everything is going up into the right. The market is booming.

I can't find a, yeah, I can't really find a bridge between like the AI boom and the, and the, and the booboos. It seems like it's just the social media boom. that we're continuing to see. Yeah. It's the fart coins, the Labubo. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, there's a little bit of that.

There's a little bit of just like gambling culture has infiltrated everything from sports betting, obviously, is legal in more states and has been on a tear for a long time to folks, big gambling on crypto and stocks and out of the money options all the way to, you know, the collector culture on all sorts of different plastic. platforms like there's a big there's just a broad boom happening here and then there's also the china angle which i think is interesting um we were talking about this yesterday that china hasn't had a major cultural export um and this might be sort of the first one more or less like tick to tick to count's in some ways but tick tock i see it as like a bucket that fills up with the local culture of the people that open the app like if you're in it doesn't you're in l a you see l a yeah exactly but But you can certainly access that if you wind up in that filter. If you search the right keywords and then you can go there. Yeah, same with Instagram. But by default, I don't see TikTok as a uniquely, a uniquely Chinese cultural export. It's an export, not a cultural export. It's a technology.

It's a technology. And of course, China has been exporting, like, manufacturing technology and manufacturing prowess for a long time. And so my... Got a real win with the demon dolls. They do look crazy, right? I just, I don't like them. I, I, they just rub me the wrong way. I, I don't know.

There, something is weird, but I'm just not into it. I don't know. That's why we bought one for Bill Bishop's dog. Tashi. We're excited for Tashi to rip it apart. Rip it apart. Yes. It feels it just, it's not a good look.

I don't like the aesthetics at all. It's very odd. Anyway. I would not buy one for my child. The bigger question that I have that I think we want to answer. So we're going to dig into the history of Pop Mart, take you through some of the history of Lububus. The question that I have is like,

the horse is out of the stable with like gambling on toys, clearly. Think about the TikTok story. There was a big discussion, nationwide discussion a few years ago. Should we ban TikTok? Is it spyware? Is it influencing our culture?

Is it causing brain rot? Where did we land on that as America? We said, yeah, that's fine. We're good. The answer was YouTube will compete in shorts. and Instagram will compete in reels. And, you know, TikTok will be out there and, you know, buy or beware. Like, you know what you're using and you're an American, you're a free person.

And if you want to use that app, you can. And if you want to come over to a different app and you trust Mark Zuckerberg's team or Stated versus revealed preference. People are like, I just want to follow my friends. Yep. The, you know, feeds that are algro driven get to use more. And so my pitch and what I'm kind of digging into what I wrote about in the newsletter this morning, you should subscribe at Substack to our Substack.

TBPN.substack.com is is the conclusion to the TikTok debate was the YouTube team and the Instagram team need to launch direct competitors and take it very seriously. And Mark Zuckerberg invested like tens of billions of dollars, I think, in like data center build out to actually support reels and the Algo feeds and they took it really seriously and they executed very well.

So what's the conclusion to the Lubu story? Well, it's probably like Thai the maker of Beanie Babies or Mattel, the maker of Barbie, getting into blind boxes. Like, that's the only answer. That's where the arrow of progress moves in one direction. They want to gamble. And so I think that that's the end state here.

And I'm just, I'm, that's the situation that I'm monitoring. I'm not holding my breath being like, oh, yeah, Labouos are going away anytime soon. Yeah, sure, there might be like a bubble and then it subsides. But in general, I think that the future is like more mystery. boxes under the Christmas tree generally broadly in American culture like we love gambling we love freedom pick your poison that's somebody gambling is a gift is crazy you buy you this blind box you never give someone scratchers give someone scratchers it's great we should give the team scratchers

send them off into their three-day weekend everybody I'm I'm into scratchers I had a friend in college who was into scratchers really you know the thrill of a scratcher I bought one lot of ticket in my life and it was electric. I was like, I'm going to win. Like, it's going to happen. And then it didn't. And I was like, okay, I'm never spending two dollars ever again. But anyway, this is what happened with video games. They went free to play plus micro transactions, the whales drive everything, price discrimination and everything. We see this with only fans. We see this with the future of romantic companions. Price discrimination is key and this will probably unlock some of that. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.

But I think if you're a tooy maker, you've got to get into mystery boxes, unfortunately. Maybe unfortunately, but that's where the culture's moved. Late stage capitalism. Pretty much. Which I would say we're just getting started. Pretty much. Anyway, let's go through.

Brandon Gorell has a fantastic thread on Pop Mart, and Tyler has the story here. Full history. Do you want to take us through the history? Yeah. Tyler, what's you got for us? Can we pull this up on VHS, Ben? I think this is going to be important.

There we go. There we go. Clear is dead. It is. So I think we should first. I just love the way this looks. I can't help it. Okay.

Let's first go through some big, big numbers here. So Pop Mart, public company currently at, what, like around 55 billion? Yes. Hong Kong markets. Wang Ning is now the 10th richest person in China. He's worth $28 billion. Wow. Pretty, pretty.

Pretty crazy. And a lot of the data sources here are Chinese, and we tried to double check everything by translating, but there might be some details that are wrong. So, yeah. Okay, so yeah, they have almost 600 retail stores, 2,500 vending machines, revenues at 1.8 billion. Vending machines, that's fantastic. Yeah, that's really the big thing.

That was big. It kind of, so the kind of main story of Pop Mart is that they basically took a lot of things that were first in Japan and then brought them to China. and then exported them basically worldwide. But yeah, the revenue is 106% growth year over year, and then 700 million of that is just overseas. Yeah, the stat was crazy. I think in the first half of this year,

they beat last year's total revenue. And they're already like a scale, that's pretty huge company. Is that good? I think it's better than Nvidia. It's the backbone of the economy. Okay, so it takes through some history. Yeah, so 2010 in Beijing, Wang Ning starts it.

Originally, basically, it's just like retail store for these little collectibles. They don't, there's bunch of stores that do, like, license other people's IP. So there's like, I think they originally started with some marble. Okay, yeah. But then really, I mean, the majority of the revenue is just from like their custom IP that they basically license from artists they find. Yeah, so that's the nature of like Pop Mart. Like it's like pop culture market. Yeah.

And Brandon says, started as a single variety mall store, thinks Spencer's are Hot Topic. They couldn't get investment at the time because no one thought adult toys would work. Now he's the 10. And when Wang was growing up, his parents ran small shops. So it was in the DNA.

Family. Okay. Yeah. So then 2014, this is when they basically bring over these sunny angels. These are the Japanese, like, figurines. Yep. And this is when they start the blind boxes. this is like really the main thing that spurs the rest of their growth.

Yep. Wait, wait, before this, this is actually crazy. Brandon has some extra context here. So he starts the company in 2010, a year out of college. He had an undergraduate degree in advertising and a short stint at the Chinese version of Twitter. His single variety store in Beijing in a Beijing mall is essentially a reseller. His seven employees spends two years selling third party stuff on thin margins, trying to scale with debt.

But it's hard to finance because investors don't get selling toys to adults. He managed to raise $320,000 equivalent in R&B, and then $1 million around there in 2013, which he uses to open three new mall shops. And then in 2014, he hits his first lick, finds a repeatable format blind boxes. So take us into that. Okay. So they start with that. These are still different figurines from Japan.

Yeah. These sunny angel blind boxes that look kind of like 90s troll. Balls. Interesting. Yeah. And then... Yeah, and I don't think we already covered specifically what a blind box is. It's you're going in, you're paying a generic price for something and you have no idea what's in it.

It could be the super generic one of, you know, 100,000 item or it could be ultra, ultra limited. And so you just get this massive, buyers get this massive dopamine rush when they're buying it. They're paying and that whatever item they unpack might immediately be worth like some significant multiple of what they paid. Yep. Kind of like angel investing. So it has, it has, yeah, but, but way more condensed.

It's like, I buy this and then I immediately figure out, am I going to get crazy a crazy turn? But unlike angel investing, I think there's like a floor, right? Angel investing easily go to zero. Labuboos like have, you know, somewhat stable. Yeah. Like, it has some market value. So if you're trying to like gamble less and you're addicted to angel investing,

maybe, you know, downgrade to just Labubo's and meat boxes. A big attraction of, especially the little booze, which you can get into later, is like they have like these sets that come out. So it'll be like 10. And you would collect the full set. Yeah, it's like 10. And then they're basically all the same except like the color of the fur is slightly different or something. But then people are trying to create a complete set, which will then sell for more. Yeah. But obviously if there's 10, you can't just buy 10 of the boxes because you're probably not going to get all of them.

Do you think that Porsche should get into blind boxes? Imagine if you just, imagine if like a 9-11s only with, you could just buy 9-11s only with, blind boxes. It's like, it's like 200K. You might just get a base. You might get a career T like super base model. You might get a G2RS. You might get nasty.

Wow. Yeah, yeah. There might be something there. I don't know. I mean, people would be, people would be sending it on those. I think so. Yeah.

I mean, and you just work out the expected value, right? So you just charge whatever the expected value is. There isn't quite enough of a delta. They need to throw in like a, Carrera GT as well, a few of those as well. Yeah. You used to see a similar thing in the sneaker market when that was like a really big thing.

On eBay, you would see these like a third party like mystery boxes. Oh, eBay would just do it. Interesting. It wasn't, no, no, no, no, people on eBay, but that's crazy because like, that's even like less regulated because they can just totally like cook the box. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Versus like a real company that has probably some sort of oversight. Yeah, I mean, you don't really know how many people were actually buying it. It was just like for YouTube that they would make the videos like, oh, I bought this $500 mystery box. I remember I bought a mystery box of cords on a woot.com, which was an electronics reseller that was bought by Amazon. That's so Kugan code. It's incredibly, just buying a box of cords.

It was just electronics, electronics. It was like, so Woot.com would go around and find like a bunch of electronics that have been discounted. I bought a, I bought an HD projector that was probably like three grand for like 600 bucks because like they were like going out of stock and they just needed to like liquidate. And so we would go and buy the liquidation and then put it on the website. And you could just buy it, but it was limited time. They would just do one daily deal every day. And one day, they just did a mystery box

and you could just buy, they would just maybe like, literally like whatever was in their facility, they would just pack up for you. And who knows? I got like, oh, this is like, HDMI to DVI cable or something. You can probably trace back to something like, do you remember Storage Wars, the show?

Yeah, yeah, very similar. You can't go in, but you can just see the front and then you can try to estimate the value. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, so there's probably some lineage there. That's great. So when did China figure out that this was gambling? Because they banned the sale of Lubbubu's to kids under eight years old. Yeah. But that still means you got 10 years before you're legally adult here in the U.S. at least where gambling is, I don't know how many like actual eight-year-olds are going to the store and buying it. It's not their parents. Yeah. So it's kind of unclear.

Well, if you're worried about your employees gambling with your company funds, get on ramp.com. Time is money save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay me. accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp. Very easy to set a rule in ramp. No Pop-Mub. No Pop-Mark. Anyway, continue.

Okay, so let's go back. So, 2015 is when La-Bou-Boo-Boo-First appears as, it's in a picture book. So this has nothing to do with Pop-Mart. It's just this other artist, Kai Singh Lung. And then 2016, this is Pop-Mart's first, like, kind of real IP that they created that, like, went super viral. Yes. In 2016, Ning tries something new.

He flies to Hong Kong and meets with artist Kenny Wong, who had created the trendy toy figurine Mali in 2006 and was a big designer in the toy niche. There, he negotiates an exclusive license with Wong to develop and sell Mali products and blind boxes. Yeah. So I think this was, it's done around 800 million in revenue since 2016.

Let's go. So selling Mali not only gives, Ning more control and capitalizes on trendy toy plus blind box signal, but it capitalizes on Kenny Wong's fan base and leads Ning to his next big unlock, betting big on controlling existing toy IP with a built-in fan base instead of selling third party. So in 2017, sales of Mali are going nuts. Total $22 million by end of year for Mali. Pop Mart rolls out vending machines, reducing rent. They had to pay in malls and establishing way deeper reach with fandom.

Company begins repeating, replicating the molly products. It's unregulated slot machines. Yeah, basically. And then they, uh, uh, Puckie is another Hong Kong artist derivative. Uh, they launch it. Then they launch a sater. You know, it's like half, uh, half like goat legs, which is very odd.

They're getting, not beating the anti-crace allegations. Yes. If you've been at the PT lectures in SF for who the Antichrist is, I think we got a lead here. I think we got a lead here. I think we got, we did. Did you already write that? Yeah, this was already there. You already wrote that? That's amazing.

There's a lot of allegations here. I mean, it's unclear whether, you know, what's the original. I think we've solved it, folks. Yeah, we've solved it. Wait, is there really a star on them? Is that a thing? No, I just wrote it. A pentagram?

Okay. Well, that's why, yeah, question marks. Max over in the substack chat says we need to tokenize the Labubu's. I think that's how you get the next light up. That's obviously happening next. We know that's going to happen. We know that's going to happen. CSGO loot boxes walked so Labibu could run.

Brandon, Brandon in the X-chat says we got to get a bezel box going. I totally agree. Quaid, let's get some blind boxes going. You might get a Nautilus. You might get a tutor. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay, so where are we?

So now 2019. Lubbubu is then licensed to Popmart. Yep. So just in 2018, right before this, sales spiked to 73 million on the back of Mali. Around this time, Pop Mart built its own in-house design team. the pop design center like a Porsche design center it becomes a powerful pipeline alongside ever more exclusive artist licenses and big non-exclusive entertainment licenses if you want to entertain people on a stream get on re-stream one live stream 30 plus

destination that's right multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are continue okay so they license in 2019 but they don't actually release like the modern luboo doll until 23 so it's in the book or whatever yeah so they're starting to build the lower buildy IP. They do characters, they do little figurines, but it's not like the kind of modern instantiation. So then let's go to 2020. They IPO at $7 billion in Hong Kong. Hold on. So continuing with branded 2019. Pop Mart began selling Labibu Blindbox as an exclusive deal with artist Kassing Lung. Labubu's original character in Lung's picture book trilogy called The Monsters, but was selling his figurines in Hong Kong by 2015. At time of the deal, it's only

popular among niche toy collectors. And we do have some images in the deck, by the way, guys. If you want to pull up the pictures of these monsters, yeah. If you scroll down a bunch, there are some photos of the Labubu's. It has like kind of a street art vibe, very chaotic drawings. Keep going. There's one more. Keep going.

One more. Keep going. That's Molly. That's the first Labubu. The Monsters trilogy by Kossing Lung. The story of Puka. Pato and the Girl, Miro's Requiem. And so these start selling in 2019. In 2020, Pop Mart raises $100 million on a $2.5 billion valuation. Hit the gong. I see a large IPA. And a few months later,

IPOs in Hong Kong, stock rips 80% on opening day. You thought meme stocks were just an American phenomenon. Meme stocks are a worldwide phenomenon. They got him across the pond. Nings net worth doubles overnight. He's worth $3.2 billion at Open, $6 billion at close. Pop Mart has a $12.5 billion market cap at close. That's a big company. That's a big company. So let's continue.

Okay, so 2023 is when the blind box, Lubbubu, like phenomenon really takes off. I think probably it's mostly due to TikTok. You see a lot of this. And then, yeah, 2025. Right now it's like around $55 billion. Now it's at $55. Absolutely incredible.

What a run. Should we pull up the Wall Street Journal video? Watch some of that. What do you think? Yeah, let's do it. While they're pulling that up, let's tell you about figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams.

Build great products together. Folks, get to figma.com. Design your next Laboooo drop. Yeah, I mean, developing real IP this quickly is incredibly impressive. Yeah, yeah. IP that can do billions of... Yeah, I mean, it just takes so long. learning about the

Lucas film acquisition that Disney did, even the Marvel acquisition. These are like, they were big acquisitions at the time, but like single digit billions, low double digit billions. And then they just created so much value as they actually monetized the IP

and created like shows and merch and like ran the Disney machine around it. It seems like Pop Mart's capable of running like a Disney-esque monetization playbook on top of somewhat new which is pretty crazy. Anyway, let's pull up the Wall Street Journal video and watch a bit of that. Aidan says, it's nightmare fuel. I agree.

Whenever Chinese retailer popmark dropped a new Labu-Boo designer toys, it sells out within minutes. It does seem like it's truly like a worldwide phenomenon in a sense that it's not just women that are doing it. It's not just men. It's like it's really people all not just adults. It's children. Children and adults. Yeah, yeah, you would think it's like, oh, it's just kids. So, yeah, their revenue doubled in the last year. And boxings have flooded social media. Yeah.

Fans flock overseas to buy exclusive products. I mean, it just has the natural hook. Look at Madonna promoting it. I go pop mart everywhere. But can the company continue to grow beyond this viral moment that has seen its share prices rocket more than 1,200% since the beginning of 2024? Here, pause it. So the, are you rooting for their downfall?

praying on it even the I don't know I think I think the bigger question is like there's something that so it's easy to say like these go viral on social media like it's a beneficiary of social media but like if you actually think about why is and why is a

Laboo Boo Boo more viral than you know the latest in iteration of Barbie or Beanie babies like there is a reason and it's directly related to the nature of the algorithm. So when you do an unboxing, it naturally takes about one minute if you edit it down to do it. And the reveal comes at the end. So when you watch it, you say, oh, someone's doing an unboxing. They're introducing what the stakes are. It has a natural- It's good for the creator because they get that retention. Exactly. It drives retention because it has a natural storyline of like,

okay, how did I get this box? How much did I pay for it? What are my expectations? do I have something on the line? Maybe I'm hoping to build a set, right? I want to build a set. I really am hoping for the red one or whatever. And then you're taken on this journey. And I believe when they, when they unbox them, there's like two stages to the unboxing.

You take it out of the box and then there's packages. Yeah, so there's a box. The third stage is when you have your dog rip its head off. And see what's inside. What was this? So there's a box. Then there's like a nice opening, like you like rip it. It's like nicely packaged.

And then inside there there there's a little bag. And then inside the bag is the actual way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So even that, like, lends itself to, like, keeping you engaged for 60 seconds, which is going to drive more virality in the feed. Aaron Frank, partner at LightSpeed, says, I have the largest single collection of Lubbubu's in America. No, I'm kidding.

He texted me and said, this is hard to watch. This is hard to watch. So, sorry, we're forcing you to sit through this, Aaron. Let's play a little bit more of the journal video. Yeah, let's pull it back up. Yeah, keep going. Of potmart. Look at this culture.

This is crazy outfits for this. Javon, Lawrence in the chat says, my startup has done $75 million in unboxings. Say more. Yeah, elaborate, please. Tomogachi, for real, should come back. AI-powered Tomoggi. That's a good business, Daniel Cook.

is just added our own flavor to that. Yeah. Now, the company has more than 500 scores in 2,000 venues worldwide. All Southeast Asia. When you decide to splurge on a potmark blind box, which could cost around $20 to $30, you don't go in totally blind. Take this collection.

There are six possible characters you could unbox, and a secret one that you have a one in 72 chance of getting. One of the things that the brand can do to keep engagement, to encourage consumers to get a little more excitement out of it. It's to label the box. This one says, have a seat.

You know, people throw the satanic panic around a lot. Like white monster, monster energy drink. There's like a whole 666. It's satanic. But it's always unclear if it's like, the founders are like poking fun at Satanism.

Like, yeah, like no one accuses like John Carmack of being satanic by, I mean, I guess people did when he released Doom. But in Doom, it's like you're clearly playing as a, as a mortal, like, killing the demons. And that's the name of that. That's the virtual of the game. Aaron just sent me the stock chart for Buildabair. Have you seen?

Oh, yeah, Buildabar's ripping too. Does Buildabair have loot boxes yet? That could be the next unload. Buildabar is up. It's outperforming in video, I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's ripped. It's absolutely ripping. Who's clapping? Buildabare blind boxes. No more building. Just just gambling, children. Just come into the store. Yeah, yeah. If Labibu is like the slot machine that you could be pull out of the, the vending machine,

build a bear should turn it into like a game of like high stakes. Has anybody a lot done like remote Labibu openings? So it's just actually like on your- I think I've seen that. Yeah, who was it? Blake Robbins posts about this a lot, how there's like apps in the app store that are gambling. Oh, it's probably happening on like whatnot, to be honest.

Well, have you seen, have you seen the Claw game? So there is a, there is a, an app. that you can download and you can pay real money to use a claw in the real world to pick something out of a, out of a, you know, a machine or like a bucket. And whatever you pick out, you get to keep and they will mail it to you. Wow. And so it's not technically gambling somehow. They got some like loophole there. Right now and whatnot, there's like seemingly hundreds of streams selling Labuboos. Wow.

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automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, the last two years of, what's interesting

is the last two years of sales in, of Labibu have been heavily driven by international expansion. they've definitely figured out how to take the brand abroad.

It was predominantly growing in mainland China. And I believe it's still growing. It's doubling in China, but it's also seen maybe like a 10x increase in international sales over the last two years. So it's on a tear. It's on a tear. We'll see how people respond. We'll see how the American toy companies respond. I feel like this is like the horses left.

the stable. The cow has left the barn. The dog has left the dog. The children yearn for the slots. They do. They're going to figure out how to gamble one way or another. I mean, what's the alternative? Like, ban Laboubu? Airwam, uh, airwon, uh, air one blind boxes, combo plates. Yeah, you might just get the worst slop bowl if you're like, how about sweet green blind boxes? Or you get 12 ounces of blue. It's like you might get a bunch of steak. You might get a bunch of kale. You might get some caviar. Never know. I'm