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

30:01And all of a sudden, that drops demand for NVIDIA potentially, right? We might need to do a SWOT analysis, John. Yeah. No, I mean, NVIDIA is an incredible company. Jensen's an incredible CEO. They were perfectly positioned for this, you know, multi-decade technology trend. And it was way underpriced at the start of the build. Like the orders really did come in. The training runs really did happen. The question is just, is that next order of magnitude, like the situational awareness from Leopold Aschenbrenner, this thesis that we're going to build a$5 billion cluster, then a$50 billion cluster, then a$500 billion cluster.

30:42Like, is that going to happen or will there be a hiccup? And this is always my question for like the doomers. Everyone was saying like P-doom, you know, what's my percentage chance that it goes bad? and I was like the much more interesting question is P stagnation. What is the probability that something happens and whether it's technological or even regulatory like the if you compare AI to nukes with nukes we had the ability to make nuclear reactors and Humanity as a whole basically just said we're gonna pause And we stopped building them and now we're talking about building them again But if you look at that curve, it is a perfect S curve.

31:23It's like we had no nuclear reactors, then all of a sudden we grew them exponentially, and it looked like, wow, we're gonna have energy too cheap to meter, and then it flatlined. And for a variety of reasons. They're hard to build, then there were regulations, there was just general fear. So there were a lot of different things, and I would always go to the doomers and just say, even if all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct, What is the probability that there's just like if you are successful doomers and you freak everyone out There might be regulation that just says don't build anything bigger.

31:57Yep, or it could be economics It could just be it could be physics as we've talked about with this idea that at a certain point like You can't put more than 100 % of global GDP towards building clusters like it's impossible And so like there should be this like s curve there and that's why all the AI researchers are now focused on the compression of learning and the actual algorithms and getting more efficiency because there should be some sort of top upper bound of the amount that you can build but that certainly hasn't been a thesis broadly in the market. People have just been like, yeah, we'll just 10x computing and then 10x it again and then 10x it again and it probably will happen over a period of time.

32:43Great investment strategy, by the way. You should get a 10x. And then 10x it again. 10x it again. And then 10x it again. Yeah. And last but not least. Oh, you have another one? Almost forgot about this one, but it should be included. The White House meme coins, which feels like very long ago. It was the local top, basically, at the time. It was the local top. Many people were calling the top, just hurling meme coins out of the White House. Yeah. So that's the real question is like, how local is this top if it is a top? Because we've been in the kangaroo market. It could just be, oh, a couple months.

33:27Even the interest rate sell-off, the post-SVV crash, that was like one hard year, right? And then we started building back and we got the AI narrative. And so there's this big question about like, like, you know, Dwarkesh pushed his timelines back, but he's not saying that super intelligence will never arrive. He's not saying that AI will never break through these things. He's just saying that it'll happen a little bit, a little bit further out. And so the question of, you know, like these meme coins being a top signal or all this crazy stuff, it's like, there could be like a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else.

34:05So I don't know. It's always hard to manage these things and predict, but it's certainly fun to highlight all these things. It's good to keep track of them. Yeah, you got to be tracking the top. Keep your own list. Keep your own list. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev. Let's go through some more timeline. Joe Weisenthal says, thinking about the recent episode we did with Charlie McElgott, where he referred to Trump as the human VIX. I like that.

34:37He just creates volatility out of thin air. It really is so true. Yeah, I mean, Trump coin is up 20 % over the last week. I mean, volatility traders have to be doing really well. Although it is down dramatically since... What is the actual market cap of Trump coin? Is it sticking around? The circulating market cap is$2 billion. Fully diluted is$10 billion. The price per Trump is currently... It peaked at$45 and it is at$10 today. Wild. I like this one from I Am Developer. The dumbest person you know is being told, you're absolutely right by ChatGPT. It is funny to imagine that that is somewhat, is the Glazegate deranging society in some way?

35:25Is the fact that everyone's getting this constant positive reinforcement? because if you go to it and you're like, hey, should I go 100x along the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually, for my interactions, you're at the level of Citadel. You definitely could just be a hedge fund manager if you went full-time on it. You could do it. You're definitely not just a retail trader who's going to get hosed this time. Yeah, you're different. You're different. You're different. Tracy Allaway has a funny post this week in a nutshell. Do you see this one? Markets don't like tariffs, but Trump just imposed more tariffs and markets are at all-time highs because markets think he's gonna pull them back It's great.

36:09I mean You know we are just in this cycle of like even even the bad news is just like a catalyst for good news when it's reversed Yeah, and the psychology of the market is just like total up-over credit to grok right now Maybe it really is super intelligence because I asked it should I go turbo long the market right now? Mm-hmm And it says deciding whether to go turbo long means using turbo warrants or similarly leveraged derivatives to bet on rising market prices requires careful Consideration of your financial situation Risk tolerance and current market conditions since turbo long refers to a high risk leverage financial product Anyways, it breaks it down for me.

36:51I don't think it necessarily make a recommendation though It says, not advisable for most investors. Okay. Should I ask it, but what if I'm built different? Well, we're getting that from Rob. It says, haha, love the confidence. If you're built different and ready to roll the dice with a turbo long, let's cut through the noise and get real.

37:15This is ridiculous. Anyways, honestly, it says, if you're going to do it, pick the right asset. Yeah. Okay. Which is good advice. If you're going to invest, invest in the good companies. It doesn't feel like talking to somebody. I would expect someone with super intelligence to have strong opinions. And I feel like none of the AIs really have opinions and personalities. Honestly, this is pretty sound advice. So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy on a demo account. Okay. To see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash. That's good. It does say not financial advice.

37:48Well, I'm going to take it as financial advice. Tyler, have you been playing with Grok 4 at all? I have not. No? All right. Well, sign up, sign up, sign up for heavy. What about the new web browser? Yeah. So I'm using the perplexity web browser. It's called Comet. Okay. How is it? It's pretty cool. I mean, it's so. Pitch me it. Like, why would I use that instead of Chrome? Yeah. So I think the main thing is, like, it can read what's on your screen. Okay. It can also, like, sometimes interact with stuff on your screen. Okay. So I'm in Google Sheets right now. I have this list of names. Yeah. And I'm trying to get like, okay, where do these people work?

38:24And so first I said, just give me a list of people on the screen. Put that into the chat. And then I said, okay, where do these people work? He gave me that. And then it started to like load them in. Like it would interact with the Google Sheet. It would like input them in, which is like super useful. That's pretty cool. But then it kind of started breaking. So it's like, I think the product is like very early on still. Yeah. But, and it's also pretty slow. Yeah. But I think this like kind of paradigm, if it was, if it was like super fast and like much kind of cleaner. Okay. I think it'd be really useful.

38:54So I'm hearing like it saves you a copy paste from like copying the sheet into a different tab of like ChatGPT basically. Yeah. That's the first thing. It basically just moves two tabs into one. How does the search is like, I'm assuming the default search is perplexity. Yes. How fast is that? So that's pretty quick. It's just when it's like interacting with the page, it's like really slow. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. How does it compare to Cluely? Like the, I don't know, the design trade-off of like new browser interacting with like only the website versus like the whole computer. Yeah, I mean, Cluely is definitely more catered toward like the video call or like video input, audio input.

39:39Yeah. It's like, I think it's kind of different use cases. Yeah. Because it was more like proactive, right? Like, like I would ask you a question over Zoom. Yeah. And clearly would just hear that question and automatically query it. Yeah. As you've been browsing around with the perplexity comment browser, has it ever just done something without you take, without you being like, go do a thing? No. No. Okay. It's always like I prompt it. It gives me something. Interesting. Where clearly is like you have it running and then you can, You can query it, but it also will just give you stuff. I feel like this is that debate about push versus pull from AI.

40:20If I have to tell the computer to go do something versus, it does it preemptively for me, proactively for me. I'm thinking about Google Chrome will do auto translation on websites. If you land on a Spanish language website, it will just understand that you want it translated into English. It will translate it and then just re-render it. And then it pops up a little bar at the top. and then you can choose to go back to the Spanish language one if you speak Spanish, I guess. And I feel like chopping down some of those proactive ones. And you see this with, like, when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary for, like, three bullet points from every article.

41:00And they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of, like, where's the right place for the interaction to sit? how expensive or wasteful is it just to do that interaction on everything. But you could imagine a situation where the browser, every time you hit a news website, it's pre-populating the obvious questions, or the extra one layer deeper, or one layer shallower. Like, here's a summary of what you're reading, and then here's extra context on things that are one layer deeper. Because when I go to a website or an article, I'm usually trying to understand, like, give me the high level and then give me like if I went through and clicked on every person in this article and went to their Wikipedia that's usually how I browse and so I guess if it could do that a little bit faster that might be valuable yeah I think it'd be cool I mean there's always a worry about you're basically just like have this like bar on the side that's just full of slop if it's just like summarizing your page but I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results like like Dwarkeash has a post here he says surely this doesn't have any implications for how I use AI and whether I'm fooling myself about how much more effective it's making my podcast prep, right?

42:14And I think that there might be something there where it's like, it's like, I could just read a Wall Street Journal article here, or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article with a sidebar of like, chat GPT summary and also chat gpt extra queries to give me more data but at a certain point like i just have to get the information into my brain one way or another and so giving me like three layers of abstraction on top of it it's like it's not necessarily improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buyout firms poaching young bankers the question is like it's much faster to read a great summary of something but you're going to affect if you spend 10 seconds reading it you're going to retain a lot less of the context and the relevant information if you just spent five minutes reading the article.

43:04So with chat GPT style summaries, do you still need to spend five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of context? I think there's two things. One is that there's just no substitute for spending a full day with a topic, like reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. The more time that you spend on a topic, whether it's searching ChatGPT or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people, it's just the more time you spend with something, the more information you're compressing, whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form.

43:47There's just no substitute for the amount of time that you put into something. Because if you're like, you read a summary of a book that was really good and I read the full book. And I spent five hours with it and you spent one hour. I just have an advantage over you on the information. And then on the flip side, it's like there is an art to summarization. Like the work of a great biographer is to summarize someone's life and to summarize all these conversations that they have about all the people around that person and read all the books about that person. And like when you think about like, you know, David Sendra with the Founders Podcast, like he reads the book, he summarizes it, But he does it in a way that is like 10 out of 10.

44:27And I feel like all the LLMs are very like mid stuff generally. And they do a very 5 out of 10 job, like Dworkesh said. Well, this is the crazy thing. R4Rock on X reported yesterday that this company Headway, which is the number one book summary app, just released a Series A. Or sorry, they just did a Series A. they are at 200 million of ARR growing 2x year over year with 30 % net income. Yes. And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by... So I saw that and I was thinking about Francois Cholet had a tweet about this. Cholet. Am I going to find this? Cholet. How do I spell?

45:13Francois Cholet. Here we go. He had a post here that said, But in my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game. It's completely ineffective at teaching you languages, but it's quite entertaining and great at making you feel like you're learning. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that company is, in fact, less about actually teaching you that information any faster, and more just about repurposing information in an entertaining way, and it's giving you some sort of value that way. and so you're happy to pay for it because it's just a good way to spend your time.

45:50And so I wouldn't be surprised if like there hasn't been any massive breakthrough in how you deliver information to a human being. Like their brain has a certain IO and you have to get the information in. We don't just have like the matrix where you just go, now I know Kung Fu, right? That's not what we've created. Not yet. But repurposing stuff in like a fun and different format certainly seems like it has value to the tune of serious financials for that company. And I wouldn't, and I would say like that is not, that company's success is very much independent of like actually game-changing artificial intelligence.

46:30It's more about the actual implementation of the app and the experience of using the app. Anything else from the browser, browser wars? Get on Dia, try it out. I think I'm just gonna keep playing around with it. Keep playing around with it. Can you download Dia? Yeah, download Dia and let us know which one you'd pick over those two because they're both AI browsers. OpenAI is going to have one in maybe a couple of weeks, I think. That was the Reuters reporting. So we'll have to try that too, demo all these, see what is happening. The browser wars brought to you by Chromium, by Google Chrome. Well, the browsers will definitely be designed in Figma.

47:05Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together, get started for free. We should read through Joe Weisenthal's analysis because he says green shoots for the economy. I was texting with him. I said, there's so many top signals. He said, there's been top signals my entire career. Maybe this time is different. We'll see. He says, it's not just the stock market that's booming. There are signs that the U.S. economy has some wind in its back right now. And this is what was interesting about the ZERP era. even though there was so much froth, so many overfunded companies at 100x ARR, it didn't destroy America because the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well.

47:49There was just this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy, but the baseline of where mortgages were, how much debt people had, defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 2008. And so that's why we didn't go into a depression after the SUV crashed. We just went into what most people would call a correction, not a depression. So that's interesting. So Joe is breaking it down, and we're going to talk to Sean Frank about this too. The Amazon Prime Day sales data came out. So I completely missed it. Prime Day is in the summer. It's not Black Friday. It's like the opposite time of the year.

48:31It's hard for Amazon to basically be like, we're going to have two Black Fridays. It works. But apparently, Prime Day sales dropped. And he says, well, Prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about U.S. economic momentum. I want to observe the counterpoint and the fact that maybe the economy is seeing some green shoots. But before I talk about the economy, let me talk about the market for a second. Despite all the uncertainty and negative-seeming news developments, the lines keep going up. Trump recently announced 50 % tariffs on Brazil due to the country's treatment of its former president.

49:04Nobody cares. Trump talked about more aggressive tariffs on Japan and Korea. Barely a blip. Maybe the story is that none of these things will have much bearing on the major market growth drivers, namely AI. So they don't matter. Maybe the story is that Trump will cave in the end and so these headlines are just noise. We've seen this before, but I don't really know. Either way, there's... Maybe it's the panicans getting off the sidelines. Yeah, I mean, they'd learn their lesson if they sold at the bottom when Trump was saying, like, don't panic, we're going up. Like, they feel stung by that. And so, you know, people learn the most recent lesson most recently.

49:42But either way, there's just not a lot of sensitivity in the market to all of the latest headlines. Okay, but back to the real economy. Here the picture is mixed because actually some of the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction. So, for example, initial jobless claims, a number I like to track closely, have actually fallen for four straight weeks. Today, Delta Airlines is surging 15 % after the company reinstated its earnings forecast and said that demand is coming back. People are flying more. According to tracking from Civics, which runs a massive ongoing survey online, perceptions about the economy, while still net negative, are at their highest levels in years.

50:19And this is the chart that I think the guys are pulling up. it's a little bit hard to see because it's very wide. But basically, from 2017 to 2020, everyone was very optimistic about the condition of the national economy. Through Inauguration Day, the tax law signed, the stock market dropped, stocks began to decline. But people were still optimistic about the economy. And then coronavirus kind of changed everything. I think there was this massive, massive drop where we were hitting circuit breakers like every day for like weeks. It was terrible. I remember it very vividly. We barely had sports.

50:56Yeah, yeah, we barely had sports. Yeah, the NBA canceling was crazy. That was like the, okay, wow, this is really, really serious. I think everybody was looking around saying, we're living through history right now and I actually don't like it. Yeah, everyone lost their jobs who was in like retail or any sort of service industry. And then the NBA players lost their jobs. They were like, yeah, you can't even play basketball. And so it was a disaster. And since then, the reporting for the last five years from the survey has been net negative, basically. But it's at its highest rate in basically years.

51:33And so all the way through Inauguration Day, still negative, and dropping through Russia invading Ukraine. and then dropped after the inauguration day and the tariff announcement, but is climbing back up, which Joe is highlighting as potential green shoots. So he says, Yesterday the New York Fed released its latest survey of consumer expectations, and it said that respondents are anticipating lower inflation, improving job prospects, and expect easier access to credit. A big theme from a month ago was that the economy was decelerating, but the Fed might hold off on rate cuts because of uncertainty about the ultimate tariff levels.

52:12But it also seems plausible, at least right now, based on a little smattering of data, that part of the story here is economic tailwinds. Oh, and by the way, Citi's U.S. Economic Surprise Index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations, recently turned positive again. It's good news. So, you know, I don't know. All these top signals, it might be too much top signal. It might be too early, you know. We might just be getting started. Yeah. Also, Citi put on a buy rating on one of the companies that you were talking about. Which one? I forget. One of the ones that was like an example of a top signal.

52:50Citi was like, buy it. I forget which one. Maybe, I don't know. Let me tell you about Vanta real quick. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So I want to have a debate. Time for a debate. Time for a debate. The great debate. Sean McGuire versus Augustus Dorico. Good friends of the show. Hung out with them both multiple times. Very interesting PR dust-ups this week.

53:24Very, very interesting how they got in the pickle they got in. The different pickles. And then different strategies getting out of it. And I want to compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so Augustus, we had him on the show Monday, was sort of like being attacked or canceled, but by the right, by the far right, by conspiracy theorists, kind of the tinfoil hat right wing crowd, all around this idea that he was cloud seeding, what, two days before the massive floods in Texas that wound up killing a lot of people. And so it was this very, very serious scenario.

54:05People were dead. It was a natural disaster. And he kind of was just going about his business, like cloud seeding. Oh, someone bought it here. I'm going to go deliver it. Someone bought it there. He's running his business. And then he gets dragged into this thing. And he has to all of a sudden. And to be clear, very fair and good that people were asking questions. Yes. like natural process yeah like they like questions should be asked teach cloud seeding in high school so i think and it's a and it's a scary topic people are gen generally kind of wary of weather modification whether it's from a religious angle or health reasons or chem trails or whatever whatever they sort of subscribe to yeah i think it was right for people to ask questions so many examples throughout history of like there's a technology that's great, it has a promise to do X, Y, or Z, and then there's like a negative side effect that comes out of that.

55:09And so Augustus has had to, he just got sucked into this because there's like this very acute story about the Texas floods, and he's right there. And so he has to go explain cloud seeding and what he does and make his case as aggressively as possible. Sean McGuire, on the other hand, kind of waded into a debate or like a argument over Momdani, the mayor of New York, in a very different world. Like Sean lives in California, is a tech investor, is not directly affected by New York City politics, and could have stayed out of it entirely, and instead was like proactively attacking. for staying out of the man the man loves the debate he loves to fight um and so yeah i think his position generally was you need to uh be vocal and loud about extremism yep and whether or not people believe that so so uh zoran zoran zoran uh zoran not zoran that's the adam sandler movie yes um whether or not people believe that mom donnie is an extremist personally i've seen some of his old posts it seems like it has some very extreme views maybe he's changed maybe he hasn't he's kind of gone back and forth he was saying defund the police now he's saying he doesn't want to do that he did he did and and sean's one of sean's points was that uh mom donnie uh was sort of celebrating the third antifada and i believe that sean brought up that the last Antifada, there was a bunch of suicide bombings.

56:50It's like kind of a crazy thing to promote. But the interesting point is that Sean could have, if Sean hadn't posted, no one would be talking about Sean McGuire, right? But Augustus didn't come out and comment on anything. And everyone was asking him for comment. Like it hit the timeline from other people. Yeah. Sean's crisis started with a Sean post. So it's it's a very different like inciting inciting element creation versus reaction. Yeah something like that. And so my question is like does that necessitate a different comm strategy because they had very different comm strategies. So what did Augustus do?

57:35He went direct right and was posting his side and his data and his opinions and engaging with everyone that was attacking him, quote tweeting them, and doing it in a way that was like slightly funny, but also very serious, sharing as much data. And I think being very diligent about like speaking their own language. Yeah. If he sees a post pop up that's going viral, he's jumping on it. He puts it in the comments and then he also quote tweets it. And then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms. Yes, I have a list here. the critiques were coming from. So he came on our show Monday. Yep.

58:15He had a good conversation. He did like an X space that day too. Yep. And then he proceeded to go on CNN, Fox News, Pirate Wires, Infowars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, and Tim Pool, all within the span of a few days. And those are all conservative outlets, basically. While working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide more context. There's a Washington Post article here now. Yeah. And so he's gone across the spectrum. What's interesting is that Sean has not done any interviews, I believe. And he hasn't, and he certainly hasn't like reached across the aisle to his attackers and said like, I'm going to engage with you.

58:55And maybe that's the right move. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think he's been engaging over and over. I don't think he commented on that Wall Street Journal article. No, I'm not saying he wasn't doing he wasn't taking the sort of traditional media approach, but he's been very active and engaging with people bringing up saying, hey, like basically the key point, the key issue was the definition of Islamist. Many people saw that and thought he was putting all Muslims in a bucket. Yeah, yeah. His intention and approach was to point out extremism, Islamist extremism. And I think that just got, like, oftentimes in a post, context is lost.

59:41And so he was basically, like, trying to set the record straight. also did a 30 minute video talking through kind of the original post and some of the reactions to it. Yeah, so for me it highlights like the two different styles of going direct. There's going direct where you control 100 % of the channel that your content is going out on. So it's your X account, it's a video that you create and you upload, it's a post that you write. and then there's going direct where you're not sending a, you're not sending a liaison to CNN, but you are going on CNN. And that's, and so Augustus did this interesting thing where like he definitely like went direct, but he also did all of the legacy media stuff.

1:00:34Like Fox News is legacy media. CNN is like legacy media and not in the traditional going direct playbook, but there's like this evolution. And I think it's risky. Like it is risky to go into someone else's platform. You go on Info Wars, it's gonna have a certain aesthetic. You go on CNN, they might ask you some really hard question that you're not prepared for. They might try and make you look bad. Like this was the narrative around these, like around the whole move of like just go direct, don't talk to the press directly. Don't let them tell your story, tell your own story. Well, he's doing both and it's interesting because it feels like it's working for Augustus.

1:01:06Like it feels like he handled this pretty well. I would give him a lot of credit. With Sean, it's interesting. He did send out, there have been a few surrogates. So Joe Lonsdale went on TV and defended it and kind of explained it. But Sean didn't. And I think these both might be good strategies. I'm not really like, oh, you know, there's a one-size-fits-all here. They're very different situations. Yeah, Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean. There was a great post from Pat Grady, Sequoia partner. I have it. Pat said yesterday, this tweet expresses a personal view. I'm not very vocal on Twitter and I'm sure this tweet will piss people off if you're looking for drama This is probably not it.

1:01:48This will be very disappointing to people with extreme views of any kind And that's sort of the point the purpose of this tweet is twofold to express my support for the Muslim community and to express my support for my partner Sean McGuire Pat says so my best friends are Muslim. They are warm kind wonderful people. I love them like family They are feeling fear right now fear for the safety of their families. This is not hypothetical These are real people, loving parents and their sweet children who aren't sure if they can live here anymore. He goes on to say, some of my best friends are Jewish.

1:02:16They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They too have felt their fair share of fear over and over again for generations. This is not the experience any American of any background should have in this country. This is not what made America the greatest country on earth. Muslims are not the enemy. Jews are not the enemy. Extremists are the enemy. And when we let them sow the seeds of fear, fear of the other, we are letting them win. So basically it goes on to say that this is really not about different cultures and people. It's more about kind of, yeah, long story short, you don't want to let the extremists win.

1:02:56Yeah, or like put you in the bucket of extremists. Yeah. So anyways, interesting response. Both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing. I wonder what the takeaway is for like with Rainmaker, like the core claim of the controversy was directly about Rainmaker's business. And essentially it was in many ways existential to Rainmaker because there's like proposed bans of the technology, right? And then there's also just the question of like should cloud seeding be done at all or not, right? And that was like the vibe online. That was where the debate was. Whereas people are not debating like, should Sequoia invest in tech companies, right?

1:03:45It's like a completely separate thing. And so maybe it does merit like a different approach in terms of like PR management. I don't know. I think they both handled it well. I don't know that I would recommend anything differently. I'm just wondering if, I guess the big question is like, when should you step outside your core competency? I think it's interesting to think about reach with these new strategies. I would imagine that Sean has actually had more like reach, like actual eyeballs on his content. Interesting. Just kind of estimating based on how viral some of his posts have gone. I would assume he's gotten 50 million views on his posts this week.

1:04:32Yeah. Like a really, really crazy number. Yeah. And Augustus has gone on all these different platforms. But I imagine the actual reach is far lower when you add. And if you go on Fox News on some random show, there might be 100 ,000 people that watch that segment. Yeah, but maybe that's better. Because the people, with Sean, he's trying to fight back against something that's like a general vibe or a general accusation of a bad vibe, which is like Islamophobia, right? Whereas Augustus is trying to fight against like very precise you know pushback against his exact company and like the work that he's doing precisely and so if i'm thinking about like who is sean talking to he's talking to like the broad audience of like people that perceive him as a person in tech yeah and if i think about augustus he's thinking about like how do i save weather modification as an industry in the country Totally, like specific regulators, specific politicians and specific, like, and also like the local people in who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seeding who might go to their city council meeting and say, not in my backyard.

1:05:52So it's like, it's people that are, I feel like the pushback against Sean was very like broad and just like bad tech guy vibes, like just like negative broadly on the left and the folks that support Mumdani, they all like kind of just broadly don't like Sean right now because of what he said. With Augustus, it's like there are a few people who were completely animated by by the theory that he was responsible for the floods. And so he had to address them really deeply. Yeah, he was defending his business, his industry, his actions. Yeah. The question for me is like, there are times when someone needs to like step up or stand up outside of their core business.

1:06:40And this kind of bridges to the Brian Armstrong piece at Coinbase about being like mission driven, which was basically like, in that context, it was like Coinbase is not going to be commenting on all of the current things that are happening in the world, all the different politics. We're gonna be focused on stuff that's related to crypto. And that was really well received. Then the question is like, for venture capitalists, should they only step up and start talking about politics when it's like a ban on an important technology, or a change to the way carried interest is handled? Or should they go as far as to say, you know what, I care about what's happening in New York City even though I don't live there?

1:07:26I don't know. I think that's like, it's certainly like the riskiest, like you're the furthest away from something where you'll immediately have everyone in your industry rally around you or everyone in your, because it's like, well this is very core to their business. But at the same time, it's like, you know, there is some value to just being like, this is less of just like an investor, this is just like a person, and they have opinions about everything, and so I'm interested to talk to them and work with them. And also, I mean, in the original post, like, he did throw up a massive flag that was just like, I'm pro-capitalist.

1:07:58That's pro-America, right? And so the question of like, does this hurt Sequoia, I think we were talking about this earlier, it's like, no. Because the people that were really bothered by this or didn't get through this nuance and understand the Pat Grady response and understand him unpacking it, probably we're not going to be in the Sequoia portfolio. So, I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.fm. Get your golden retriever set up on Linear.

1:08:33It's one of the greatest gifts that you can give them. What else is in the timeline we should go through? There's so many good stories. We should go through this story in the mansion section. Let's do that. There we go. Finally. There's a bunch of stuff. A California ranch is for sale for about$50 million. I really like this. There were two very interesting houses in the mansion section today, and they're both being sold by tech founders who I've never heard of. And some of them don't. One of them doesn't exist online. So this guy, tech entrepreneur Don McKinney found himself at a crossroads in 2014 after four consecutive startups.

1:09:16Crazy. Including one that sold to Lucent Technology for billions of dollars. I give him permission to call himself a serial entrepreneur. He's the Don. If you started four companies and you sold one for a billion, you can put serial entrepreneur in your bio. Billions. Billions. Yeah. I need to figure out exactly the whole deal here. I think this is, yeah, they have it here. So he basically, instead of doing another business, he basically retired and started building a crazy house. He chose the latter. He purchased roughly 1 ,100 acres of ranch space in Sonoma, California for$12 million and painstakingly restored it, spending$33 million over the years.

1:09:54Now McKinney is looking to sell the ranch, which has multiple residences, two lakes, four greenhouses, and a custom wood shop for around$50 million. known as Sonoma Summit Ranch. The ranch is perched at the top of Sonoma Mountain about an hour from San Francisco. That is prime, prime realism. Great, great option for a, you know, a GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity. I was about to say, you know, is it really worth spending half of your bonus as an AI researcher on one house? Yeah. Or is that, is that unresponsive? Well, in many ways, your full bonus post-tax. Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

1:10:33That's some ordinary income right there. That's really, really rough. Anyway. A Florida native, McKinney started his tech career in Silicon Valley in the 1980s as a founding vice president. Let's give it up for all the vice presidents out there. Of sales at Silicon Graphics. That was a storied firm. Which worked on 3D imaging. In 1991, he founded International Network Services, fantastic name, which was acquired by Lucent in 1999 for$3.7 billion. $19.99 selling? What are you doing, buddy? What are you doing? I think he timed it. Are you selling the top? I think he timed it perfectly. You hold onto that stock for two more years.

1:11:10International Network Services. They don't make names. They don't name companies like this anymore. I mean, actually, they do now. People are bringing it back. Really? What was the company we talked about earlier this week that was like, it was Wisconsin? Oh, yeah. That was just a fan writing in. Yeah. No, but it's just real company. Yeah, yeah. Real company, but not like hyped company. Well, soon to be hyped. Soon to be hyped. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Let's look at this. By the mid 2000s, McKinney, a conservation advocate, was looking for a ranch to preserve when he heard about an available thousand acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years.

1:11:41Wow. By sheer coincidence, McKinney and avid fishermen had caught a 1 ,119 pound marlin. Oh, so I have to actually I have to correct this. So the ranch was 1 ,119 acres. and by coincidence he had caught a 1 ,119 pound marlin in a fishing tournament a few years earlier. He took the parallel as a sign and bought the property. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? I've never been big into that world. No? I don't think I've actually ever. I've caught 150 pound halibut in Alaska. There we go. And I did it when I was a kid. It weighed more than me at the time. Wow. It was the biggest boost to my ego of all time.

1:12:20I conquered an animal that was bigger than me. every person should do that at least once for sure i gotta do that a thousand pound marlin that is a huge huge fish so the ranch hadn't been touched in years mckinney said he relished the opportunity to dig in after tackling the ranch infrastructure he turned to the main house originally built in the 1950s many windows didn't close it was not clear where the front door was located he took the roughly 4 240 foot square house down to the studs and rebuilt it one by one he rebuilt the other outbuildings he said including the circa 1930s cottage and a horse barn which is now a party barn there we go let's go uh a skilled woodworker he also added a 5200 woodworker he's building his own this is legend this is like the dream so the interesting thing here the interesting thing here he bought this property uh when so he he bought the property in the mid-2000s Was it 2014 or the mid-2000s?

1:13:19Oh, I guess he started working on the... The remodel. The remodel, yeah. So he's$45 million into this property, selling it for 50, but he bought it in the mid-2000s. Yeah. So on paper, probably did not get the S &P. Not the best return, but the memories are probably priceless. But he probably had such a fantastic time with it. Returns on family memories. He also has a home in the Bahamas. Family memories. And he is selling. so he and his partner have more time and resources to devote to philanthropy. We wait until, why wait until we kick off and then have our estate dole it out, he said. Let's participate now.

1:13:55That's great. The market for prime ranches is strong thanks to liquidity among other high net worth buyers. Probably those AI researchers unironically. There's a lot of people hedging in land. Yeah. If you're worried about the top signals, buy some land. Buy a ranch. Anyway. Get on Numeral too. numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. So there's another story in the mansion. The official sales tax compliance platform of John Coogan. It is. I use it. There's another tech person who has a$50 million home or just slightly under 49.5 million.

1:14:32This is an 8 ,000 square foot, nine bedroom home with a tennis court and a pool. And you're going to love this. I don't think you read this yet. Not yet. Okay, I'm going to blow your mind. So a circa 1930s estate, just a few houses from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is coming on the market for$49.5 million. The roughly 8 ,000 square foot, nine bedroom estate was the longtime home of the late inventor, Ronald Katz and his wife, Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones and for making breakthroughs in credit card technology.

1:15:08so if i'm hearing this correctly sort of sort of like ai agents for exactly sort of like you know a vintage version of fin yes yes uh the i mean i'm i'm very excited to be hanging out with own in a few years uh hopefully he's patented fin fin.ai the number one ai agent for customer service number one in performance benchmarks Number one in competitive bake-offs. Number one ranking on G2. But yes, so this guy has a whole Wikipedia page that we can pull up. We're looking for Ronald Katz. I think I have it in here somewhere. Let me see. They got so much stuff here. Ronald. We're not getting through any of this.

1:15:50Where is it? Ronald Katz. Okay, Ronald Katz, yes. So his inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology. He has more than 50 patents covering his innovations. Patents, I know so many people who have like generational wealth from patents. It's crazy. And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist in our generation. It's a lost art. It's a lost art. Toll free numbers. We don't know how to patent in this country anymore. We don't know how to patent. It's completely a lost art. Actually, the person who bought my first company was a patent guy. He went to college and studied like chemical engineering and built a bunch of patents for like lubricating petroleum as it flows through oil pipelines.

1:16:33And he came up with some chemistry, patented it. And then he was like, yeah, in college, I was getting like 100K a month from licensing my patents or something like that. Like sick. Yeah. There was a time when it seemed like the play was to develop technology, patent it and license it out to companies. And then now if an entrepreneur comes to you with an idea it's a bad signal and they say yeah like i'm working on patents it almost always is a huge bear signal yeah it's like it is such a lost art we don't develop something and then capitalize on it yourself yeah because it is like that you can you can definitely if you get it right you can make a lot more money from yeah delivering the technology or whatever it is uh via your own product and capturing that incremental margin Yeah.

1:17:21It's interesting because you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents, right? They'd be like, just become the world expert in a certain field, get a PhD in it, spend 10 years researching the frontier, and then develop an innovation, patent it, and then just cash flow free lifestyle forever. I do have one friend that had something like this where he developed this supplement and effectively licensed it to a company and has just been getting millions of dollars a year for coming up on like 15 years. Did I tell you I have a patent? A big patent guy. Maybe it's not a lost art.

1:18:03I don't make any cash off of it, though. But I have a patent for breakers. The capsule. I can hear that. I don't even have the IEM. I can hear you. Yeah, I have a patent on the capsule pouch, the capsule nicotine pouch. It's fantastic innovation. Invented. John Coogan, the inventor. I love it. Anyway. Mr. Marlboro. Not quite the portfolio of Ronald Katz. I'll take you through a little bit of his history. It's interesting. So born 1936. In 1961, he co-founds Telecredit with Robert Goldman. It was the first company to enable merchants to verify consumer checks over the phone using an automated system without the assistance.

1:18:43of a live operator. So this is 61, 61, like totally pre-internet. Someone says, I'm gonna write you a check. How do you verify that they have it? You have to call the company and say, do they have money in their account? It's an agentic workflow. It's an agentic, it literally is, because it cut out the live operator that was the telephone operator. It's actually an agentic workflow. You're 100 % right. I know you're joking, but it's true. And so in 1988, he forms a partnership with Amex to provide call processing services. That partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz Technology Licensing.

1:19:25And I feel like First Data, isn't First Data huge? First Data is the layer below Stripe, right? I'm pretty sure. There's a layer below Stripe? Yeah, I'm pretty sure Stripe uses First Data for acquisition of credit cards. I'm pretty sure it's the first processor of Visa and MasterCard. And so I don't know if they use, that might be misinformation. I don't know if Stripe uses First Data still, but I remember that there is a lower level below Stripe and First Data was one of those. But Ronald Katz, where was this founded? Yeah, Nebraska. So he so Katz gets in there anyway He also had the patent portfolio that for companies using automated call centers over 150 companies have taken a license to patents the technology licensing company that he has earned approximately a billion dollars in license fees Such as suing accused infringers who take a license He also founded telebuyer LLC a privately held company that commercializes inventions he made relating to electronic commerce and network-based monitoring systems.

1:20:36In the early 90s, Katz developed a computer-controlled video system for monitoring remote locations and an advanced scheduling and routing system for telephone and video communications. Katz leveraged his knowledge and work in these areas to create an electronic commerce system to help businesses reach customers in remote locations. I love all these words. B2B SaaS founder. Absolutely insane. It's wild. So anyway, his house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy Mansion. The home resembles an English country house with tennis court and pool. It sits on roughly one and a half acres in Holmby Hills overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club on Mapleton Drive, one of LA's most storied streets.

1:21:17It's also adjacent to the Spelling Mansion. You know Spelling Manor? Spelling Manor, have you ever heard of this? Aaron Spelling, he was a big TV guy. He built the largest home in Los Angeles, something like$100 million. It had a dedicated room for present wrapping. Because you're gonna wrap so many presents at that level. Like there are levels to this for sure. Oh, actually when I moved into one of my first apartments, I got, when we started making money young, I moved into, it was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it had no walls or anything because it was like open floor plan because it was just studio and I'm just one guy.

1:21:58and I had a, there was room for a washer dryer but I didn't have a washer dryer because we like send out the. You made it a present room? I made it a present wrapping station and I put a little table there and you could like work from it but it was like in the bathroom and I was like this is my version of a present wrapping room. Spelling. Yeah, it's like I'm aesthetically living in spelling manner. So the cats have spent years renovating the estate before moving. Normal story here. The couple filled the home with art and collectibles from around the world. The game room includes antique billboards, billiards table, and vintage arcade games.

1:22:35Also on display was Madeline's collection of pigs, stuffed animals, ornaments, sculptures, and paintings. It started with just a few pigs and grew to become her thing. Two friends and family kept adding to the trope. The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this? What's it called? It's like it's like the elephant problem or the giraffe problem. There's a name for it where where you make golden retrievers your thing and then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you? Oh, you like and then it snowballs and then everyone gets you so many that over 20 or 30 years You develop like this massive collection of trinkets for you.

1:23:12It might be horse accessories. I got you those horse electrolytes Just more and more so you're not the first person to get me horse stuff I told you David used to get me mane and tail the horse shampoo just as a joke because I'm built like a horse I guess he thought it was very funny I loved it that's great so yeah maybe maybe maybe maybe it's a pain and tail well by the way great truman sax is really into the horsepower metaphor you know he he's like obsessed with horses and stuff you know everyone's gotta have a brand anyway what were you saying oh I said nice new haircut oh yeah the horse could never a horse could never the horse hair is strong it was breaking the scissors.

1:23:51We broke multiple pairs, but we did get it cut. It's thick hair over here. But you know who else has like the, what's it called? It's like the grandma elephant problem or whatever. This woman who has this house has like an insane collection of pigs because she started collecting pigs. Everyone gave her pig stuff. Somebody said that Peter Thiel has the same thing with Tolkien. He named a few companies after Tolkien and now everyone's like, everything you do must be Tolkien referenced. Like if you are at all involved or whatever, like I'm getting you another copy of Tolkien. And, and, and, and like, you know, this person was kind of commenting like, you know, like he might not watch the movie every night, you know, he might just be like generally a fan of that.

1:24:33And then also a fan of other things, but you can be a fan of multiple things. But people tend to collapse the meme around you down to just like, oh, you're, you're not just you're not just into Tolkien and other things you're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff yeah so well in other news we have a post from uh brother Reggie James has been on the show before he says I need tbpn to bring back cougar night at the rosewood it hasn't gone anywhere someone needs if you're in Silicon Valley go to the rosewood and report we gotta ask we gotta ask praying for exits because he might be aware he gives some good coverage on yeah he might be aware but we were when we were at the Rosewood for what staying there the night before YC demo day you remember overhearing this like the most the most there was a there was a man and a woman like a table away from us having the most deranged conversation the most Rosewood coded conversation of all time where I think she was divorced or going through divorce talking about like breaking down loudly breaking down their entire financial situation and being like basically like i'm good because we have carry in this fund that's that's definitely gonna hit in the next never have i wanted clearview ai more are you really clearview ai like the software to identify yeah you take a picture of someone and it scans the internet it tells you immediately who they are and it's like very controversial and people are like oh this is like you know total like surveillance state stuff but I would have loved to know who with what BC she was talking about yes it was an absolute about there was other stuff it was like oh yeah I've been checking our credit card and we're just seeing like he's hitting no in every city absolutely wild well Ryan has a good story here responding to Reggie's post this is one time in 2012 my co-founder and I crashed and burned so hard in a pitch on Sand Hill the partners wrapped with look it's it's cougar night you guys would actually do pretty well there

1:26:40so that's the beauty of sand hill road you could crash and burn i don't even get this i don't get this post like why why would they do well if they're well like maybe maybe like they're just crashed and burned oh oh oh oh like the company has crashed and burned or something they didn't do well on the pitch okay so he's like maybe you can marry rich yeah that's what he's like okay I got it. That's hilarious. A couple of studs, head over to the Rosewood. Anyway, underrated strategy. Go to the Rosewood. Talk to the Cougars. Sell them your product. If you're an SDR, just go and pull out Adio. Custom relationship magic.

1:27:18Adio is the 8-8-8-8 of CRM. Having Adio on deck for Cougar Night is crazy alpha. Do you keep the Cougars in the CRM? No. But there are potential leads, right? Yeah, for sure. If you're selling to a VC and there's a cougar there who's, maybe you could sell SaaS to that VC and it would re-inspire him to grind harder and save the relationship. Save the relationship, yeah. It's possible. Anything can happen. Anything can happen. Nothing like the joy of implementing a new B2B SaaS product in your workflow, in your everyday workflow. If you do that, that could just reinvigorate your entire life. Yeah, you're just at cougar night, I just can't stop talking to the cougars about agentic workflows for saving your marriage.

1:28:03No, you're just like, why would I want to go on a bender and go to Nobu when I could be grinding? I've been reinvigorated. Many people are saying that. Well, we talked about the top signals. Whether you're long, whether you're short, you make your own decision. You do your own research. Then go express it on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing. Industry-leading yields. trusted by millions. Let's talk about the VW bus. We had Dylan Parker from Moment yesterday talking about his fix. He raised the Series B for his fixed income platform. And he mentioned that they power Publix fixed income products.

1:28:40Very cool. Let's talk about the VW bus. So the electric bus. The Wall Street Journal claims that it is a failure. We're going to figure it out. How Volkswagen's electric bus went from American flagship to flop. The German company's This hyped reboot of its iconic vintage van has been stunted by a luxury price tag, Trump's trade war, and an embarrassing recall. And so this Wall Street Journal article goes through the kind of story of the ID Buzz, the new crazy name. We should talk about so much here. First off, I do not understand why a change in the powertrain requires a new brand name, for product.

1:29:25It should be like trim level. I think it shows lack of conviction. Yeah. I mean, BMW is doing this with like the i4 instead of the 535i. The i5 is going to be the electric one. And it just is more confusing. We know somebody that if BMW were to touch the M series, they would make Jan 6 look like a children's birthday party. They'd be very upset about that. But so it was always confusing. Why didn't they just bring it back as like the bus and now you can get it with an electric powertrain? But then also it's like this fun, kitschy, nostalgic vehicle. And what was the price tag on this thing? It was like 70 ,000 or something like that.

1:30:14So much money. Yeah, so even before the recall, the luxury sticker price of the ID Buzz, which starts at about$60 ,000, kept a break on sales as consumers pivoted to more affordable wheels in the U.S., where the vehicle became available toward the end of last year. Just over 3 ,000 had been shipped to dealers by the end of March. And then there was a slowdown in EV sales. The tax credits are going away. And President Trump's tariffs have caught automakers off guard. Very, very rough. Yeah. So in Dallas, European car enthusiast and parts supplier, Autry McVicker, said he was dead set on getting the buzz until his dealer told him that the Palmello yellow and white version he had his eye on would cost around $72 ,000, far more than he expected.

1:30:59Yeah, this feels like premium SUV territory, so 45K, 50K maybe, $50 ,000? $55 ,000? $72 ,000 feels crazy for this. And it seemed like, I don't know why they couldn't get the price down. Do you think it's something to do with just the actual manufacturing complexities of electric vehicles? Because Elon is able to sell a car that's similarly capable, although the Model Y has way more range and features. And so it's hard to go up against, if you're comparing the the buzz to the Model Y in a spreadsheet you're gonna get okay buzz is like cool and different looking but am I really willing to sacrifice so many features and pay twice as much yeah it is interesting I'm seeing a original 1973 Volkswagen bus yeah it's for sale for sixty five thousand dollars it's got 85 ,000 miles on it.

1:32:01So it's seen a lot. But it's possible that, you know, who knows what went into kind of pricing it. But they might have said, hey, we're making this bus, like, for that category that wants just kind of like a fun leisure vehicle. It's not super functional. You're not going to drive it to the snow. You're maybe driving it around town, going to the beach, things like that. But it doesn't feel like a – it just doesn't look like a car that somebody is going to daily. Yeah. And that feels like a huge problem. If it's 65K, the average American might, I don't know, I probably shouldn't say the average American, but middle class family might say, hey, let's get the Volkswagen bus as our daily family car.

1:32:45But it doesn't, it just looks kind of funky and loud. It just sticks out. I mean, so in this article, they say that the ID buzz in Germany, like the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car, like a halo product, which is, it sounds funny when you compare it to like the Audi R8, of course, but they said the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms and they're not really planning to sell in great numbers. So you're like, oh, that ID buzz just does look different. When I go to get my next car, I should, I'm just sick of having like the same plain white SUV that looks like everything else.

1:33:21But then you go in and And you're like, wait, how much is it? And is it really that much better than features against the VW Atlas, I guess, is their full-size SUV? And so you walk out of there with an Atlas, which is probably around$55,$60, I guess. I actually don't know where the Atlas is. So you can get an Audi Q8, which feels much more like a premium product for the same price. Yeah. And it's just a lot more functional. How much did that Cullinan sell for in cars and vids that was like, it had like 200 ,000 miles. Did you see this? The one that we were recommending people get is like a call booth for their office.

1:33:59We were recommending that? I don't remember that. Probably. I mean, we broadly were recommending, you know, picking up an old Continental GT instead of a phone booth. Yeah. Okay. So a Rolls-Royce Cullinan black badge, 2020, so it's only five years old, sold for$170 ,000. dollars, just barely twice the price of the ID Buzz, but it has 114 ,000 miles on it. Can you imagine? Can you imagine putting 114 ,000 miles on the Rolls-Royce Cullinan in five years? I can. I would love to. I would love to. I mean, that's so, so many miles. But people were debating this, saying like, okay, yeah, if you're putting that many miles, it has to be highway miles.

1:34:45so they're not hard miles. It's probably fine. And Rolls-Royce has a bad reputation as being in the shop all the time, but if it made it this far, maybe it'll make it another 100 ,000 miles. And it actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steel of a century at 170. Who knows? Could have been bombing around in a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Anything else on the VW bus thing? I still think it's... I just think it's... It is hard that they priced it so high. Maybe the opportunity is more like Tesla just needs more different trim levels, but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices.

1:35:29Because how different is the world if the Cybertruck is cheaper? Does it even need to be? Should it stay up there and be this halo car? Is the Cybertruck operating as a halo car right now? As somebody who lives, I live in Malibu. Yeah. I bought a Mercedes Metris because I wanted like a family van, something I could drive around surfing with, et cetera. And I have zero interest in the Volkswagen electric bus. And that's an issue. The other thing is if I was thinking about a car, if I wanted to surf like a car just to like trash and take to the beach and take surfing, you can get a Raptor for like 70.

1:36:10It's like obviously very different. but if you're a dad that wants like a kind of a car you can like beat up and do a lot of things in and throw the kids in do you want to drive this like novelty vw that's going to depreciate like 50 in a year or get a raptor i think it can be a very cute mom car and and it can definitely like if you look at volkswagen's but does a mom really want just do they really want the the buzz over like a q7 no but isn't audi a volkswagen product too yeah so there's totally a flow where you go in for the buzz thinking like maybe i'll get the quirky thing and then you walk out with a q7 or you walk out with an atlas which is basically a q7 too or you upgrade you get an urus which is a qian turbo gt is that a volkswagen product too yeah porsche's volkswagen At least the Cayenne GT looks different, you know.

1:37:06But part of the reason that the VW bus is like so legendary is like it was an icon. And they spent a lot of time building that brand. They ran a lot of out-of-home advertising. They probably would have loved AdQuick back in the 60s when they were pushing the buzz. I mean, they would have killed for AdQuick back then. AdQuick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And let me also tell you about Wander.

1:37:35If you're wandering around with your ID Buzz or your car, summer, you've got to find your happy place. It's 12.39 p.m. Pacific. You can book a Wander today with inspiring views. Yeah. Five-star amenities. And you can... Hotel-graded amenities. Of course. Dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Go get on and wander. And we have our guest in the studio. What are we doing, Jordy? Deep Diving Tropics? A bunch of things. So let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? There he is. It's great to have you in the temple. What's the latest?

1:38:14What's going on? I hope you don't mind if I do a shot before we start. Do it. What are you drinking? Brian Johnson olive oil. Oh, Brian Johnson. Olive oil shots. Okay. There we go. Is this a performance? That's insane. I love it. How does it taste? Yeah. Give us a taste review. It's spicy as olive oils go. It's spicy, but it's super tasty. Spicy. Okay. Yeah. Is this a short-term performance enhancer? Like you're on the show for 20 minutes right now. Are you going to get a boost for the next 20 minutes? Or is this more like you do it daily and then it improves your performance? It's less of like a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing to do just to get really good fats in.

1:38:51But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys. So I'm just going to pop on a glucose monitor here. Okay. You're really maxing the apps. Just to find out if Kugan raises my blood sugar or not. Take us through the rest of the stats. What else are you doing? So some context on this. Farb's a buddy. He's also here in LA with us. investor. But the real reason I wanted to have you on is because I feel like you have consistently been maybe two years ahead of me on various different types of health, biohacking experiments. And I've always felt like I was somewhat ahead. Like in 2020, I had a...

1:39:35You're like 20 years ahead of Normie still. He's two years ahead of you. farb you would have loved this i had a um a cold plunge just in my bedroom in college no this is 2020 okay okay a year and a half dorm room didn't you tell me the college the dorms it's like six dudes in one unit well you uh ucsb will have like 15 guys in a house not the ideal biohacking environment no but i would on during sex they say um but anyways uh you you've impressed me with how at the frontier you are. So I want to have you on to talk about everything, get the update on how you're thinking about GLP ones, peptides.

1:40:16We can talk about a bunch of other things, but why don't you give a quick intro yourself and then we should start with like your stack, what you're running today, and then we can get into some subtopics. Great, great. Farbud Nivi, sort of health nut, entrepreneur, investor, have a new project that we're just getting off the ground right now. It's called protocols. And hopefully we'll have some big news to share on that in a few weeks. So yeah, I guess that's my intro. What's the stack? Yeah, let's start with what you're running today. Or what do you think you do that has like a power law outcome on your health?

1:40:56Because like sleep, diet, exercise seem like the most important. And then you get down into like, I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight. And it's like, is that really going to be the 90 %? Or Pharma's doing gene therapies and stuff like that. So walk me through what's important and then what's more experimental. I've done tons of experimental stuff. I've been doing blood work for well over a decade. I got folistatin gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here. No way. They're probably getting near the end of their lives because they last a year or two. And I mean the crazy thing is like despite being a health nut I kind of found myself at the end of last year beginning of this year sort of overweight depressed and pre-diabetic And you know, I'm 48 now.

1:41:43So these things creep up on you You can't do what you did 20 years ago and get the same thing 20 years later And so I kind of sat back to figure out like what's wrong with my stack, right? what's what's wrong with my routine um and really what it came down to is that i don't really have a routine um and i i'm sort of making it up every day uh i think shane paris was on chris williamson uh and said i have this great point like a person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day and i'm like that hit me really hard i'm like oh wow we're doing self negotiation every day we're like reinventing what it is to be a human being on a daily basis.

1:42:24What do I eat? Should I exercise? And I'm like, I'm really bad at routines. So that was actually the problem that I set out to solve. And in doing that, I actually ended up stopping taking TRT. So I don't take testosterone anymore. I stopped taking... How was coming off that, by the way? That's super interesting because I feel like everyone, the narrative is like, once you're on it, you can never get off of it because your body stops producing it naturally. And you're like, Like you're either on it forever or you should never touch it. That's like the common narrative. This was like another problem with my routine.

1:42:56I would take TRT. I would do it for a month or two and then I'd stop. So if you do it super consistently, it takes a while for the boys downstairs to turn off. So you can do it for a month or two and stop and they'll come back. And so I did a ton of blood tests actually. And my most recent one, which I just did with function, I did a huge function panel. My testosterone is like 600, 700. My free testosterone is above 100. It's pretty good. That's great, yeah. Impressive. So yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well. And we can kind of get into a little bit of that. I've done peptides for probably seven, eight years.

1:43:37And so my stack right now is more. And how are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious. Yeah, okay. It's up and down. And also, I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is like glucagon-like peptide, like GLP-1, and that's generally not seen as a peptide for guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about like what peptides even drew your eye or were interesting or like what was even the goal with those? Yeah, I mean, I like to experiment. So, you know, seven, eight years ago, I'm like, let's see what these peptides are about.

1:44:16And peptides are just like short strings of amino acids. Like a protein is a long string of amino acid. The peptide is a short string. And they're used a lot in signaling in your body. So you can take one peptide that tells your body to make more human growth hormone. And that's kind of interesting because it's that BPC. Is that BPC-157? Yeah, BPC-157 is different. BPC-157 is like this sort of broad ranging peptide. You actually make it in your gut. And if you just give yourself a lot more, it seems to help with healing in general. But other ones increase growth hormone. Other ones improve deep sleep.

1:44:55And if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it. And to your question about, like, how was I getting it? In the years that I've done peptides, you could get it from a doctor. You couldn't get it from a doctor. You could get it from a doctor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. kind of in limbo now and all these sites they sell it for research purposes and which you're actually using for research purposes research purposes yeah but it's not for human consumption the GLP's which are another type of peptide are the ones that you get like Monjara was epic and that was really getting crazy too because we know the brand name of Zen pick but like those empty is old news um the the current one is trisepatide yeah that's right um and then reddit trutide is coming next um and there's two or three more after that do you think those will break into kind of like athletic men who are maybe sitting at like 13 body fat or is it already got a micro dose or or do you think it will remain as just like a powerful tool for for weight loss well yeah the the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around you know glp1s or trisepatide helping with like willpower broadly so imagine just having 20 extra willpower but then there's the there's a counter example of like it makes you less risk on and so like uh wilmanitis has that post that's like what is the effect of capital allocators broadly being on glp1s like will we be less risk on society.

1:46:32They're not going turbo long. They're just like, will we have less volatility? Maybe that's how we save the T-bill. It's like people are just like, yeah, I'm fine to just earn 2%. There's a bill in the house for testosterone? What are you talking about? I'd love to have one. I'd love to see it. We should get one in there. Minimum. Yeah, I'm investing in T-bills. I'm taking the majority of my bills and paying T. People microdose these things. Sure, sure, sure. And they seem to have like a lot more than just weight loss effect, blood sugar regulation. They seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of studies.

1:47:06So there's even, you know, some people just micro dose them. Like sometimes when I was doing it, I was taking a really small dose, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what the even starting dose is. Do you feel like a plateau, though? because it feels like, you know, I remember the first day in college, I tried caffeine, I had coffee, I actually didn't have caffeine until college. And it was like amazing. And I've had that experience a lot of things. And now it's like, okay, I kind of just need a bunch of caffeine to get back to baseline. And I imagine that you you maybe experienced that with your journey on peptides and testosterone.

1:47:43But then is it like, is it like once you get to the plateau, you pull it out and then kind of reset the baseline. How do you think about that? I used to think nonstop about that and do it all the time. And I kind of don't anymore. Now I have a routine that I stick to. It's like light first thing in the morning. Hugely important. Like on your phone, right? Just max the brightness out. Yeah, just like light and hold it there. VR headset, AI slop in the morning. That's hugely important. And it actually sets your bedtime when you get light in your eyes in the morning outside. Okay. It sets your bedtime like 16 hours later.

1:48:26And what counts for getting light? Like I walk to my car in the morning at 530. Does that count? I'm outside for a minute and then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess. Yep. That's the light. But, you know, maybe it gets three to five minutes. Three to five minutes. So I should like kind of walk around the block or something a little bit. That's right. Well, this morning, this morning, I got up like you got to my house. You're driving into the office and I was running like five minutes behind. So you kind of had five minutes just putzing around out there. I did. That was for your health, John.

1:48:57Thank you. You did it. Whether or not you knew it, that's helping you. That's helping your health. Yeah. And then I usually, you know, do the morning stuff, pound a lot of water in the morning. I learned this from a buddy of mine, Jack Dreyfus, who has this sort of morning ritual about not using his phone and chugging water. and those are actually sort of life-changing um you don't want to blast social media into your eyes in the first hour um it really changes your neurology if you don't um then gym uh getting vitamin d walks outside a whole list of supplements what do you like in terms of gym what do i do for gym i do like 15 minutes every other day okay wow that seems like short um yeah yeah i feel like i'm I'm recovery maxing.

1:49:39Okay, recovery maxing. Interesting. I mean, all your gains come in recovery. Yeah, so how have you noticed? I'm assuming you went through a period where you're just like bro split. You seem like you've done CrossFit. I don't know. I'm just throwing stuff out. No, I'm like the last guy you'll see doing CrossFit. Yeah. Okay, but have you ever done it? No. Never. Never. But were you ever running a bro split like chest back legs, chest back legs, rest on Sunday? Did you ever do that? I'm kind of like light version of that now. To me, the thing I've learned is that like a little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference.

1:50:18Interesting. And so like having a routine where you kind of do these things regularly, that actually makes a bigger difference than going like crazy on one thing, which kind of puts your health lopsided. And that's actually the, you know, I was mentioning protocols earlier. It's a little app we've been building that kind of makes all this easy. We call it health maxing with friends. So you can basically do these little routines. You can build a stack for yourself, and then you kind of do it with friends. They do them too. You see their faces appear as they get them done throughout the day. And that has honestly made the biggest literal difference in my health of anything I've ever done.

1:50:58Not even close. That makes sense. Talk about microplastics in glass. I know you've been diving into this. That study came out. Everybody was like, wait, this feels like some propaganda from big plastic that says, yeah, even your glass water has plastic. Yeah, big plastic propaganda. Well, that was the, remember, there was a talk at Hereticon about that. Remember? It was like, how would you get people to use more glass or something? Well, that was more of an exercise. Yeah, it was a mental exercise about how to get people to use more plastic. And it was like, one of the ideas that people threw out was like, make glass sound bad.

1:51:33Yeah. And like, here we are. Here we are. Somebody ran the. Here we are. What is the actual data? Well, the study was done by like, I think, a French organization. So we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or actual science. So, you know, we have to put it to the test. So basically they found there's more plastic in glass bottles than in plastic bottles. And the culprit is like the cap at the top of the bottles. bottles, they have like a little plastic inside the cap of the glass bottle. And it seems like that's the plastic that's getting into it. So I'm actually replicating the study. I found a local lab that will do the analysis.

1:52:13I'm going to get a bunch of different waters and just send it in and see what the results are. Do you know how big the study was in France? Because I feel like the whole difficulty is like, do you test like what's the variability how do you get the actual size are you testing like hundreds of water bottles thousands or like the other thing is the big thing with plastic and people don't say it as much but it's kind of started there is like don't leave your plastic bottle in the car sure because when it gets hot it leeches yeah yeah that makes sense so i don't know if they're comparing it you know to a leeched plastic bottle versus a glass one that's not going to um another one how uh what are you doing around cholesterol right now?

1:52:57I know you were running experiment there a while back. Yeah, this was actually kind of an accidental experiment. I take most of Brian Johnson's stack just because it's like everything I want and it's easy and I trust him. So one of the things he has is his red yeast rice. So I'm like, whatever, I'm just taking the red yeast rice. And then I just sort of happened to do a blood panel before and after. And my cholesterol has always been pretty high, including some of the bad ones, as they say. And all of a sudden, everything just went green, and I have this peak cholesterol panel. And so I had to kind of look back through my app and chat with our little AI and figure out what happened.

1:53:40And basically, it was just like immediately, it was the red yeast rice, because red yeast rice is basically a statin um so monoclon k is one of the statins and that's what red yeast rice has and so i just kind of basically taking a low dose statin for a while it's kind of crazy six years is that something you'll cycle going forward or just effectively do consistently probably take consistently some people i i pair it with like a good dose of coq10 um because some people um statins or red yeast rice they experience like some muscle soreness um and it seems like the taking a good amount of coq10 basically takes that away which for me it does um makes sense uh how are you have you have you been playing around with hyperbaric oxygen chambers at all i'm sort of anticipating that that is the next version of the home sauna or the home ice you know cold plunge it feels like Like we're maybe a couple of years out from more commercial or more consumer friendly versions of those products because they're showing tremendous benefits.

1:54:44But if you actually look at buying one, it's like this like thirty thousand dollar machine that looks like it's out of a hospital and it looks really kind of scary. But I want to be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of. Very mixed branding, too. Like the first time I heard about a hyperbaric like sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber is Michael Jackson. And then I'm pretty sure that's like the first time it entered my mind as like something that you could do. Although extremely valuable for scuba divers because, you know, if you get the bends, like you need to be in the hyperbaric chamber to recompress.

1:55:19And so it's like a life saving technology for in the scuba diving world. But then it was like used as like this odd, this odd, crazy health hack. But then Brian Johnson has been talking about it a lot. So, yeah, what's your take on the hyperbaric chambers? I'm actually in the process of finding one to purchase and put here in the office. And it seems like it's basically one of the best things you can do for longevity and health. And the thing is, you need to get up to about two atmospheres. So they have they have ones that are like one point three atmospheres of pressure, one point four, somewhere above two.

1:55:53But it seems like two is the spot that kind of gives you the most benefits. It's sort of the sweet spot. I mean, literally improving your DNA, increasing your telomere length. I think Brian Johnson said it was the best skin treatment he's ever done and the guy does a lot of skin treatments. So yeah, I think you're right. It's gonna get bigger and bigger. It's a little bit of a nuisance because you're in there for an hour to an hour and a half. Doesn't he like work? I thought Brian Johnson was like doing emails in there or something. Yeah, he has one that you can kind of sit upright in and get stuff done.

1:56:24Okay. Yeah, I like these more, you know, I think the reason that saunas are so great is that it's passive. it doesn't take a lot of it doesn't take a lot of willpower to say or sorry willpower to say oh i'm here on tbpn yeah it doesn't take a lot of willpower to go and say i'm gonna go and and sit in the sauna for 30 minutes and it has tremendous benefits and i think the same thing for the hyperbaric chamber you can go in there get some work done read a book listen to tbpn etc yeah it's 24 hours. Yeah. It's a wild time. We've got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline. They think they have a shot that will lower your cholesterol for life in one shot.

1:57:07What? That's crazy. Another company that did my gene therapy is working on one that'll increase your IQ. That's insane. Wow. How much data do you personally need to run an experiment on yourself? The IQ one, it feels like, yeah if you got 20 people that that got some benefit maybe faust maxing you know just down for faustian bargains yeah always as long as it's not harmful i'm generally okay with trying and see what it does sure uh last question last question i'm curious where's your how what's your thinking around uh i think i know the answer already but this sort of like ancestral philosophy you know, sort of like consume things that, you know, existed hundreds of years ago versus, you know, something being made in a lab is not necessarily bad and you should take advantage of science.

1:58:07I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's like convenient and easy, but I don't think it's a great heuristic, right? Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it. And those neither of those are great explanations is like, you know, bowing to ancestral ways or to science. If you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works, then you should be kind of suspicious of it. And I don't think either of those are great explanations. You know, you got to take things on their face. Circadian alignment is it? I mean, it turns out that the bro scientists were right on a million things.

1:58:42We thought diabetes type two was literally incurable before the 2010s. Bro scientists always thought you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Finally, in the 2010s, after 100 years of thinking it was incurable, we realized you can actually reverse type 2 diabetes. So in a lot of cases, the bro scientists are right. Got to continue to bro down trust the experts the experts the scientists scientists. Awesome. Well, we'd love to have you back on again when you have more news in a couple of weeks. And yeah, let's let's let's hang. So when you have more when you're running your experiments, whether they're on yourself or water, hit us.

1:59:24We love we love breaking news. So great. Great. Happy to see you. Have a good one. Bye. See you soon. Cheers. If you're looking up your sleep game, head over to AIDSleep.com. That's right. Pod five ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod 5 actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body, and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep. Head over to 8sleep.com. We got Sean Frank in the studio. The man who invented the wallet. Invented e-commerce. Live here. He invented e-commerce, he invented the wallet, and now he invented podcasting with us. Welcome to the stream.

2:00:01How are you doing? It's been too long. Guys, I'm doing great. I heard the 8sleep ad. I got two perfect scores in a row. No way. way yeah yeah that is so hard to do yeah last night posted 100 i posted it on twitter so yeah it makes a lot of sense that that was the intro that i got how many how many one-year-olds do you have at your house uh zero okay i'm kind of playing with one hand or two hands tied behind my back here but yeah congratulations are it's a remix i went through about a year period where my my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly every night eight sleep should make a sleeping bag for a four-year-old that they can't get out of kind of a straight jacket a padded room that's temperature controlled with a lock on the door so the kids can't get up so dark but we're gonna turn this you know how there's like every show is like the manosphere content we need to do the data sphere content you're not a dad yet so it won't really work we'll need different guests for that, but we need to get really hardcore in the dad content.

2:01:03Anyway, let's talk about TikTok. TikTok selling to a US owner to get ready. They're turning down the focus on shops and pushing the ad product again. Shops has always lost money. I didn't know that. And without the parent co-funding it, no one wants to eat that loss. TikTok will be an ad platform again, at least for the rest of the year. Break that down for us. What does that mean? What are the implications? Yeah. Have you guys ever bought anything from tick tock shops no i've never used tick tock dude i love that john you're a true patriot but yeah so so tick tock shops i mean if you talk to people inside of tick tock like high up they do not see meta as a competitor they don't want to compete with meta like it's obviously like they're they both have short form video now they're but like tick tock never really was a social app in the way that instagram and facebook really are i heard this this morning people uh are one of our younger uh friends was saying like the gen z they don't dm each other on tiktok they use snapchat to talk and chat and then they use tiktok as like a youtube style content yeah so like if you talk to people at tiktok they really want to go after the youtubes of the world and they really want to go after amazon right because amazon is this big pot of money it's 600 billion a year in e-commerce revenue yeah that no like amazon's given up trying to grow right so we have prime day going right now it's four days of prime day they doubled the length year over year and they said that it'll grow 20 so each day is down like 40 when you add that up you get 20 growth it's just pure value extraction for amazon at this point there's gonna be more ads like they they've signed up a hundred million prime members that business can't really grow anymore so there's this big pot of money that walmart tries to attack pro natalism might might change that.

2:02:47I expect Amazon to start lobbying for subsidies for young families. We just need to triple the population in the United States. We were laughing earlier about the fact that I believe Amazon makes more in net income than Tesla makes in revenue. Like way more. Way more. It's crazy. There's levels on the mag seven chart. Anyway. Yeah. So, but it sounds like with TikTok going to US owner, like something's changing there break that down yeah uh so they spent probably 24 months and easily 30 billion dollars trying to get people to use tiktok shops right um right now the estimate is that like it's a billion dollars a month in gmv so a 12 billion dollar gmv business that could be high it could be a lot of changes that's not very big like you know shopify's gmv in a quarter is probably double that right so trouble probably does a quarter billion in gmv so they haven't been that successful getting people to actually shop repeatedly um and to get that billion dollars they lit a bunch of money on fire with subsidies wait do you mean a quarter trillion quarter trillion in gmv for shopify probably yeah yeah sorry that's yeah but that's what i meant um and you know we have amazon at 600 billion right so like tiktok is trying really hard their goal this year was to get to 20 billion in GMV, right?

2:04:07So to be like one-tenth of what Shopify's at. And when they launched for the first 12 months, it was aggressive subsidies. So they would come to brands like mine and they'd be like, hey, sell on our platform and we will give customers 50 % off. And then we're like, well, I don't want to sell 50 % off. They're like, no, no, we will fund it. We'll fund discounts. We'll fund free shipping. They made this aggressive push to try to get people to shop there, right? So there was just - And simultaneously, there was this other company, Flip, that was doing the same thing? Is that the right name for it?

2:04:37They were just basically giving away products? It was basically, was it a wealth transfer from LPs to venture capitalists to the American consumer? Yes, selling dollars for 90 cents? For a lot less than that. For 50 cents, apparently. Yeah, and Flip was the same thing. All of them are, I mean, Timu, Sheehan, everybody's coming after this disposable income in America, right? So Flip's like, we're going to take a social commerce attack on it. TikTok was the same thing. Timu is owned by a publicly traded company in China that's worth like$200 billion. And they were losing, I mean, probably$100 million a month to try to get user acquisition.

2:05:18All of them are coming after Amazon. So that strategy would probably continue to play out if Section 321 didn't close. I don't know if you guys covered that. You had Ryan Peterson on. but it used to be that you could ship you know goods via timu from china to the us totally tax and duty free right so why is timu cheaper than old navy or h &m or whatever else is they're paying zero taxes um so we closed that now timu's revenue and their traffic has fallen 50 in like 60 days right they've taken their gas off of customer acquisition same thing's happening with tick They have a really awesome app with a ton of users.

2:05:55And if they're forced to sell to the US, someone's just going to turn that into a cash cow. It's going to get bought by... It's probably going to be Walmart or Applovin is making a bid. All of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there. And if you have users, you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine, which is Google, which is Meta. It'll end up being more of a meta competitor. they're going to abandon the strategy of going after Amazon and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should like you guys do. Yeah. Yeah.

2:06:27Interesting. Yeah. It was, I have a, I had a friend that at the time that the, the tick tock ban was being floated or the app was being removed from the app store. I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on tick tock is he has a, you know, nine figure e-commerce brand. And he was like, Oh, I don't really want it to be banned because I'm making like, you know,$2 million a month right now. And it's pretty good. But it clearly was just like fake and, and, you know, heavily subsidized and totally unsustainable. Yeah. Explain, explain this interaction in the comments to that post. They barely, Ariel says they barely co-fund anything anymore.

2:07:06Hard disagree with this take. And you said, but that's why they stopped co-fund, co-funding things. Is that talking about tiktok's parent bite dance paying this or tiktok co-funding promotions with brands yeah so they've been winding it down for probably the past three months right and i mean this is this is tiktok going to brands yeah so the co-funding is when you run uh tiktok shops to try to get new brands in there to try to get your sales up they are they are going to cover discounts fees and they will give the brand that money so that the discount passes to the customer yeah so tiktok you know amazon gets 15 of all transactions as fees tick tock gets six percent but they take that six percent and they give you 30 of your of your transaction back right that's that co-funding element yeah they started to slow that down drastically in january when they got banned right the writing was on the wall that they're not gonna do this anymore and they've been slowly bringing down co-funding and then if you go on tick tock there's a term called ad load it's how How many ads do you get per post?

2:08:09Right? So, you know, on Instagram, it's like you have an ad load of 33%. One in three posts are going to be ads. TikTok got to 50 % of all ads were monetized through either affiliate. Yeah. So it's natural post, ad, natural post, ad, post, ad, post, ad, post, ad. And the ads are split between monetized via shops, which is, you know, like affiliate posts and normal ads. They have turned that down drastically and made the ads way better. So traditional advertising where I spend money to get people to my website, right? Like what Meta does. It's been crushing on TikTok ever since they made this change like three months ago.

2:08:50So the writing's on the wall. TikTok shop will be drastically deprioritized and the ads are going to start being awesome again. What about the state of live shopping in the US? Were you guys at Ridge? Did you have somebody that was live on TikTok all day long selling wallets? did you ever did you ever go live why do you think sean has that podcast mike yeah yeah yeah no uh you know we we've tried it because amazon pushed it pretty aggressively flip pushed it aggressively and then tick tock pushed it aggressively we've tried all that um it doesn't really work in america without the subsidies right like there's this flywheel on tick tock where you get 50 people to go live they all start selling stuff they push your product to the top then other affiliates want to come in and start selling it because it's a good selling product but that only works when you heavily subsidize it and that hurts your walmart business or your amazon business your whole foods business because nobody likes to be undercut i've had a lot of friends who you know i have a friend who got to 10 million dollars a month on uh tick tock shops but in the grand scheme of things he has like a hundred million dollar a month wholesale business so it's like dude it just it's it was cool it was exciting it was fast growing and they made it profitable for brands but it's all falling apart i i don't think americans really want live shopping i don't think it's ever going to catch on what about uh so so what do you think the future of platforms like whatnot is is it focusing on these sort of like niche collectibles and and auctions and things like that like could it work in subcategories yeah dude and you know to give TikTok credit, they brought affiliates back, right?

2:10:28Affiliate was a bad word in 2021, right? If you were doing affiliate marketing, you were selling like the scammiest product on earth or like porn or Viagra or something, right? And they made more young kids more, you know, be okay with selling stuff on the internet. So they made affiliate cool again. And I think we will see more of that, but it is going to be more, you know, niche. I think whatnot's a great platform if you like pokemon cards or if you like gaming and you could see twitch have more social comments built in but it's not going to be the hundred billion dollar gmb business that tiktok's trying to build it to and in e-commerce and that it is in china right in in asia broadly why does it work there and not here i don't know man i mean customers in america are used to like infinite choice right the other thing is we have just really low e-commerce penetration compared to China, right?

2:11:21China's at like 40 % of all transactions are happening online and America struggles to crack 15. So yeah, what's the downstream effect of like the ads getting better on TikTok? Does that mean like brands need to be investing more in like actually like, you know, Super Bowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt like the Cluely thing? Like, is it just algorithm hacking, AI slop? Like, what do you think the meta will be in terms of, like, actually having an ad really, really perform on TikTok post-sale to U.S. owner? Yeah. Well, I would start testing this right now. But what meta has pushed, so meta is, like, still the king of, you know, performance advertising, right?

2:12:09130 billion in ads run through that platform. and they spent the past year working on something called Andromeda, which is their new ad engine, right? And all it is, is they want high velocity of creative. They don't care if it looks awesome. They don't care if it's AI generated. They just want high variety, right? And they want you to feed the ad engine as much high variety content as possible. Really focus on short form video still, but like high production, UGC, AI, whatever you want to put in there. And then Andromeda just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time. Like they've really focused on making making sure they can, like, their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person.

2:12:45Take whatever winners you have over there, because Meta's did the heavy lifting for you, and just run them on TikTok. Yeah, I like. Are we completely past the era of, like, it was the Harmon Brothers that were doing those, like, really catchy, really high production value videos. I remember, like, the Dollar Shave Club launch video was kind of like the case study in this, where you could go get, like, a hundred million impressions on one really crazy ad and then do retargeting based on how long people watched? Is that meta just completely dead? Are we no longer going to see iconic ads for particular brands?

2:13:19Yeah, so Harmon Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich Video. Yeah, Sandwich was another one that was really big in that. Yeah, RayDrop is still doing it. The problem is there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend. So if you're going to spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least$20 million promoting it, right? And it used to be that the ad cost could be a third, right? When you're running TV ads, you'd spend a lot of money to make a really memorable thing. And the delivery was only two thirds of the cost. The delivery now needs to be at least 95 % of the cost.

2:13:56And that just drives everything, the investment in creative down. So I think... Yeah, yeah. But is there some sort of like unquantifiable value or in the short term around creating what's called a shelling point. So we all know about the era's tour for Taylor Swift. It was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that. Or like Barbenheimer, or the Dollar Shave Club ad. Everyone has seen it, and so it has enduring value for a really, really long time. And if you're creating a bunch of highly tailored random ads that are just generally out there, where you never create a brand that has like, yes, everyone remembers that particular Nike campaign.

2:14:43Everyone remembers this thing that broke through and everyone was talking about that ad. Like the iPhone or the iPod silhouette dancing campaign. Everyone remembers that one. Like are we just post that type of marketing? Or is there still potentially alpha if you could underwrite it across two decades and you're willing to take this really big shot, go make something great and then be like, yeah, we are going to spend 20 million against this$1 million ad that we shot. It might take us a couple of years to actually deliver it to everyone, but we're going to do it and it's going to pay back over like 20 years.

2:15:15I don't know. My immediate thought is that it's not enough for people to just remember a moment of your brand or remember that your brand exists. It's not going to, it doesn't guarantee to have value 10 years from today. Because like, when's the last time you bought a Dollar Shave Club product despite totally remembering the campaign? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And as long as it's hitting that ratio where 95 % of the dollars are going to creative, so if you have a massive fucking budget where you're going to spend a million bucks on a video and you can support it with 20 million, sure, dude, if that's what you want to do.

2:15:48Like, when Dollar Shave Club made that video, they didn't have any money. Yeah. So it was all organic exposure, right? They made a really good video that, you know, they really gambled on it, where it was 100 % of costs were going to ad creative. and as ad creative costs go down and as the internet gets messier and harder to stand out, like you just need to have that money spent on actually delivering ads. Well, what do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club, like 100 % of the spend going towards the creative? Like Clue Lee just ran this playbook. What's your reaction to that?

2:16:24Like the reason people have seen the Clue Lee viral videos is not because of ad spend. They might be promoting it a little bit here and there, but mostly they're just really good at getting engagement and going viral. And so people are remembering that. Now, maybe Dollar Shave Club is a cautionary tale for them. But is that even a tool in the tool chest that founders should be reaching for? Oh, yeah, dude. Controversy and rage baiting, right? Like we all know about Cluey. Like, yeah, it was a good video, but like it's because they're really good at rage baiting. The other thing is like Dr. Squatch did the Sydney Sweeney bath soap.

2:17:00The bath soap, yep. Right? Like we're going to talk about that because of the controversy tied to it and like the outlandish nature. Yeah. But if you want to make a really beautiful message, the iPod dancing video, nobody gives a fuck. It's like you have to make somebody mad so that they can talk about it. Yeah, it's rough. Yeah, explain to me Dr. Squatch. I haven't used the products or I'm not really even familiar with it. But there's news at the company too. Just tell me everything you know about it. Well, dude, every Sunday, me and Josh, the current CEO of Dr. Squatch, play tennis. So you guys are in LA.

2:17:32If you guys are big tennis guys, you should come play. That'd be awesome. Dude, they're crushing it. It's a great story. So the guy who made it, Jack, in 2016, they were doing$3 million. He had some other partners. And he had the foresight to understand that distribution was everything. He raised like$30 million. He bought all his other partners out. And with$27 million remaining, he's like, I'm just going to put everything into YouTube. He dumped all of that money into YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started. Which was contrarian because every brand at the time said you can't get YouTube to work as a direct response channel.

2:18:11Like programmatic YouTube. Like creator-driven YouTube was working, but that was a kind of novel insight that he had. Yeah, and it was a beautiful raindrop video. That video was still funny, it was iconic, and he's just like, men's soap's a massive category, this should be bigger, I'm going to bet the farm on advertising. He dumped it into it, they ended up getting a huge secondary transaction, Mollus is a great bank, they ran that deal for him, they ended up getting bought by Summit. This was like peak COVID 2021. So then Summit put in a great management team, Josh was there working before there, and then they just scaled the thing.

2:18:50I mean, the numbers are like they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars this year. They just got bought by Unilever for$1.5 billion. And it's a great outcome, right? I mean, Summit's going to make a ton of money. So, you know, we're kind of at the end of the fund cycle for a lot of those D2C funds, right? If you raise money from a brand, it's a 10-year fund. Like, we're getting towards the end where there's going to be a lot of consolidation. Dr. Squatch is a winner, made money all the way up, and now they're going to be owned by Unilever. And they'll be the next, you know, generational men's personal care brand.

2:19:20There'll be the ax or like a bod spray, whatever we had in middle school. That's Dr. Squatch. So seven years ago, they launched this video. Natural Soap for Men has 122 million views on YouTube. Was that the case of just amazing creative and it went viral naturally? Or did they spend money to get that 120 million views? They dumped like 20 million bucks into that video. Okay, wow. I mean, it has 11 ,000 comments. So clearly, like people, even if they saw it as a promoted post, like they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well. So but wow. Yeah. What a crazy arbiter. I'm sorry, Jordan.

2:19:57I guess speaking of coming to the end of fund cycles, what is the state? Earlier this year, we were covering kind of the state of roll ups. It wasn't looking that good. I still think it's not looking great. will there be any real bright spots in that sort of category of investment? Right, right. And I think I sent you this before we got started. You guys had like the last guy on here was curing diabetes, right? Like, okay, if that works,$100 billion company, you know what I mean? Like we talk about Nvidia crossing$4 trillion. It's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Dr.

2:20:34Squatch at 1.5 billion, massive win. I was like, yeah everyone in that group will end up being lps and new funds right but like they're not going to be mark zuckerberg they're not going to be yeah you know 100 billion dollar outcomes right so them there's coming to the we are wild i'm friends with that team they're uh in the uk they got bought by unilever as well so i mean multi-hundred million dollar deal you know if you raise at a five or ten million dollar valuation and you exit for 200 million that's like what venture returns used to be in 2011 or whatever it's a massive fucking win right um that's just the world consumer still in so there there are a lot of winners right poppy getting bought um you know there's every every like two or three weeks right now there's a new either cpg brand or hair care brand getting bought in like this you know one 100 million to 500 million dollar range that's happening a lot right now with that consolidation what's the post-mortem on the build but the actual but but the actual like roll up like roll ups where I'm going to raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of brands and you know uh the hope would have been to IPO turns out it's very hard to make money on a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands like the Thrasio thing Thrasio and then there was the open store but a few others were trying that but it's been I used to get emails for that all the time when I was running e-commerce brand like hey do you want to sell and I'm like no like did you look at crunch base like it's not like that type of business no uh sorry joy i misunderstood the question yeah all of those are fucked i think i got a dm i don't know if this is true or not that open source bankrupt so i don't know if that's been announced yet like they're all like thrasio went bankrupt open source gonna go bankrupt there's like we thought there'd be synergies and like running all of these like small independent islands but like now people still want large brands you can perform revenue right dr squatch is that and like if you can get to 500 million dollars in revenue and consumer it's typically one brand there's typically a lot of profit type to it like hex clad open store dot open dot store which was the url now um reroutes to jack archer.com which looks like a men's uh which was one of their brands wear brand or one of their brands it's a it's a dude it's a jack dude in a polo with some socks which we'd Looks pretty cool, actually.

2:22:50How are you? So earlier on the show, we ran through a list. Trump calling for lower rates while the markets are ripping. Robinhood CEO raising for a math AI company at$900 million valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's giving out stock tips. Harry Stebbings calling for$8 trillion. NVIDIA Circle at 2 ,000 times price to earnings. It's 2 ,000 times? 2 ,000 times. That's 200 times. No, it's 2 ,000. uh satya's being smart doing some layoffs then you have soham parikh masa's uh uh top blasting uh your favorite uh uh fin fin twit uh influencers launching spacks zucks making offers are you feeling the top are you are you worried right now or do you think we got some room to run dude that's a great question we probably got room to run right I mean so let's go we heard it so we have an update on the gong good friend of the show told us that we have not been properly warming up our gong before we hit it apparently there's a risk of breaking it or just making it sound poorly so you have to just give it a couple taps to get it warmed up There we go.

2:24:07There we go. And you can do that. That's great. They'll correct us in the comments. We did it poorly, but we're learning our gong technique here. Anyways, you said we have some room to run. You said go ultra long, sell your house, sell your car. Can we expect an NFT profile picture for Ridge? Is like really kind of the question. It would be an AI agent for Ridge. For wallets. Yeah. No, dude. Wallet coin. So I think it's back to ICOs, guys, official coin offerings. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. How do you, I mean, I think like Ridge has just navigated through so many different crazy cycles that it's probably business as usual, maintain a strong balance sheet, you know, just stay profitable, grow, you know, all the things that a business should do.

2:25:01but how do you plan around, do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was, if he thinks that if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy, there's certain brands that are gonna benefit from that, retailers. But I'm curious how you think about it. Yeah, rates coming down just open up financial markets again, right? So it looks like the IPO window's open. Everybody's fucking rushing to the market. Bitcoin, all-time highs, fantastic. But we're getting a lot of inbound interest from PE groups and banks because they think interest rates will come down.

2:25:44That makes leveraged buyouts work again, right? Okay. Oh, so it's LDS. Yeah, yeah. So private credit has dominated the private equity market for the past three years because it's too expensive to buy stuff. You can lend out money, right? You have this big balance sheet. they want to go back into buying assets and restarting that clock so that'll probably happen on if the economy can rip financial markets look tasty you know what i mean there's a lot of really cool things uh going on but job data still like you know adp put out their june numbers and like it doesn't look good right so i think we do end up getting rate cuts just because like the financial markets are like you know removed away from what's happening you know uh in a lot of businesses right So I think we'll get bad jobs reports.

2:26:29Yeah. What about rates on like buy now, pay later and just like the general consumer ability to like click the checkout button on an e-commerce site? Like is our like in theory, I would imagine buy now, pay later products being highly sensitive to interest rates. And yet it's always felt like don't think about the interest rate when you click this button. Right. Because the whole thing was that the interest rate was obscured. Yeah. Right. Like for a customer in Carolina, they pay a 0 % interest rate and it's built into this payment processing rate that we pay. Right. So like the whole idea is that if I charge a brand 6%, I think ShopPay is like 6%.

2:27:05ShopPay has pay in four, right? These people pay me in four months. I have a 6 % interest rate. You know, it works out to being 20, you know, because they're paying back early. Maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25%. Who really knows? So there's like built-in interest rates that like the brand's really paying. um so if interest rates come down you would you might expect those rates to come down and then and then uh companies are pushing that harder dude if interest rates come down buy now pay later becomes a good business right now it's probably not that good of a business because the payment contracts are locked in right like shopify for the next four years i have to give them six percent or whatever it is of whatever the buy now pay later is and if interest rates come down they're just fucking i mean i can't renegotiate that so they'll just be putting money on that thing uh but look never been against the american consumer we love buying five days four days this year baby four days four days uh last last question need to get the update on what percent like how much value ridge is getting from ai like gen ai right now uh there were some big promises earlier this year from a variety of companies uh but i'm curious like what the actual yeah what what is the core value that you're getting today is it just more diversity of creative being able to test more or is it kind of business as usual yeah so i mean two buckets like data analysis it's fantastic right i'm running all of my data through like a bunch of ai tools it makes reporting way easier it makes getting like what's going to sell inventory buying all that stuff is way easier with ai right i can just upload hey here's the 12 months of sales data what should I buy?

2:28:45And it could actually start doing that for me. And it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have one person director in charge of all that stuff now, but it has replaced people. On the creative side, VO3 is fantastic. So we're doing hooks on VO3. It's really good at if you have still photography and you want to add a little bit of motion, GIFs, whatever, it's great at doing that. And like I said, hooks are really fantastic static images it just makes you we can output way more static images than ever before um but we're still not at the place where like i mean i spent 150 000 on photo shoots last month right like in the desert spend on ai tooling probably in the thousands or something yeah hundreds right hundreds like we have cars in the desert off-roading like ai is not doing those videos yet i don't know if they ever will um it's funny we we made that video for wander and um large amount of people thought that it was AI generated.

2:29:44And I'm like, if you find me the person that is making that one shotting any of those scenes and doing it at that level of consistency, we will invest our entire balance sheet into your company. But yeah, that's good to hear. The data analysis side is interesting. I mean, that's historically just been one of the hardest problems. Like the number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory So that there's like demand there's general demand for what they make and sell they just don't have enough of the right things So just getting better there will make a huge impact All the tools are getting better whether it's like Excel or your analytics tool or your creative tool your Photoshop's getting better Content-aware Phil's been around for a long time now.

2:30:30You have it on you know steroids, but But yeah, still a lot of work to actually get results from that. And so you still have people in the loop. Yeah, dude. And I think AI editing is going to be huge, right? Like, you know, you shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial, right? You probably shot hours, right, to get a one-minute clip. It's going to make editing way easier. So productivity gains are here and they're coming. We probably another two years before humans are not actually pulling out cameras. two years that's pretty fast dude i mean if you ask fucking sam altman i mean we'll see if open eye is going to be around in two years dude there might not be anybody left there might not be anybody left that's true yeah i don't know i think people will probably be still be doing photos in a few years i'd probably take the over on that one but uh certainly there will need to be more of a behind why there's a photo taken?

2:31:28Is it of someone that you know exists? But if it's for something generic, like the stock photography will truly go away. Yeah, we're moving from the, you know, you can't trust images online because of filters, just like Photoshop, to you can't trust a photo because it may or may not be real entirely. Like it could have just been a hallucination from a machine. But does it matter if you just wanna see a picture of a forest generic trees in the background to you know tell you to give you a vibe of what this dr squatch smells like you know it's fresh forest i'm gonna make a plug there's an ai artist on twitter it's uh i think the handle's like this photo does not exist okay they've produced some amazing photography right like that actually like it's art it makes you feel something a lot of it's soulless but these guys do a great job so check that out this photo does not exist yeah i mean that's definitely like the pitch in mid journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like leaving that inspiration that the that the like the human brings to the tool uh to create something new but it's very hard for someone to just go and say make me a viral video make me a beautiful image like that's not the prompt yet that's not yet but we'll see anyways anything else it's great to see you wallet man let's hang in person very soon yeah let's hang out soon tennis guys so i'll see you have a great friday bye cheers on the ai note um we should we should cover some of the back and forth around grok 4 versus 03.

2:33:03tim sweeney founder of epic games says grok 4 feels like artificial intelligence to me it's clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections but it's drawing fairly deep insights on problems i hadn't seen before in ways i haven't seen elsewhere here's an example and it's a very detailed example. The biggest shortcoming I see is the adoption of confused musings from online forums as facts, coupled with the inability to derive deep insights from intermingled prose and graphics and sources. It needs contextual skepticism and more multimodal visual learning. Also, I bet there are hundreds of thousands of topics where a human professional could write a definitive guidebook on topics that online forum posters frequently confuse, and that could be used to fine tune a lot of the low quality user content driven nonsense out of AI models, out of current AI models.

2:33:51So bullish on the fine-tuning labs that are generating data. What's interesting is Tyler Cowen says O3 is still better, so he's still in the O3 camp. And more XAI news. This is breaking as of 10 minutes ago. Elon Musk's XAI seeks up to$200 billion valuation in next fundraising. Wow, okay. Early talks. Yep. Early talks. Early talks. to boost its value from as much as 10 times from last year. They're on the frontier. Let's see how much money they can make from this API. This is the highest value that's ever been applied to X, Twitter, the everything app. Well, it's not pre-revenue now. They're making money.

2:34:30Yeah. Right? There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Amjad says, I suspect it's part of the reason they crush benchmarks. Truth-seeking is an all-or-nothing proposition, and it's crucial for general intelligence. Will Brown says, I think it's probably more the 200 ,000 H100s for RL and inference than the don't be woke system prompt. I do think this is some pretty marketing, pretty clever marketing sleight of hand by XAI. Grok has been in the news lately for being edgy. Grok is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things are deeply related.

2:35:02That they figured out how to scale RL like this in such a short amount of time is in fact an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's related to the willingness to say controversial things other than via the absence of efforts Typically spent on guardrails. So yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just just, you know, training RL Let's hit this as hard as possible And we covered this that the RL spend was apparently the same as the inference spend for this training run So kind of new new attempt and obviously a great model but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make like a an anti-woke model specifically just the fact that it's it's a lot of great math going on well more breaking news the u.s geiger capital is reporting on x the u.s just posted a surprise surplus of 27 billion for the month of june total receipts for 526 billion total outlays for 499 billion that's a free cash flow for the United States of America.

2:36:03Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Well, more breaking news. You can go to biggetbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. This is the time to develop a strategic reserve of Daytonas. For sure. The Daytona Reserve. And, I mean, we shouldn't break this, but a good friend of the show is becoming a watch guy. And we're very excited to break the news when it goes live. We'll have to have him on. First day on the road. with the hitter. Mark Gurman is talking about Tim Cook. The rhetoric that Tim Cook should be replaced is just nonsensical.

2:36:35Replace him with who? Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs sadly isn't walking through that door. I thought this was a good take that I've agreed with for a while. Is that Tim Cook is such a large organization, so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain. He is the one who built that supply chain. He is maybe missing the mark on AI. Might have to partner with some folks. Might have to spend a bunch of money. but fundamentally he's running the core business very well. And that relates to the new plans for 2026. The first half they're gonna release a flurry of new products. Mark Gurman has a story in Bloomberg.

2:37:10He says Apple plans an M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, A19 iPhone 17e, new Mac external monitor. That'll be interesting. I wonder if they're gonna refresh that crazy display. The, what's it called? Not the Apple Pro, the Apple Pro display XDR. That's the one that's like 5K. Yeah, if they make just a 55 inch version of that, it's game over. Like people would definitely mount that on the wall. But right now, I think it's like 32 inches, pretty big. Great for like, you know, working. And then we have the studio displays over there that are also very good. But they haven't refreshed the Pro Display XDR in a long time.

2:37:48People still love it. They're also launching new low end iPads and an M4 iPad Airs as part of the flurry of new products. I think this is all kind of expected, but interesting what else michael la fram boys is doing some market research he says would you pay for a mini archimedes that plugged into a wall and killed mosquitoes cool concept uh i didn't know what an archimedes was this must be like missile battery yeah it must be but lasers or something i think something like that i mean this is this is the future that we want this is this is you know making also bringing oh we had so we had michael we had so aurelia systems we had him on the show a long time ago and yeah this is we need to take the best defense tech and and use it to yeah this is like Matt Friedman coded meets yeah we're lucky coded yes I'm rounding the two things together just like tiny robotics for like specific use cases but defense code very cool anyway we should debate this question from Ben South or this the this historical anecdote if distribution were really the only moat.

2:38:53We'd all be using apps from celebrities. He calls out Bizzle, which was apparently Justin Bieber's product. Bizzle. It's not clocking to you, John. Not clocking to me? What does that mean? You're so offline. So Justin Bieber launched a new album today and he leveraged the kind of crash out that he had in front of Nobu when he said, it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business. Oh, standing on business. Yeah. Okay. but we got to bring Bizzle back. Okay. It might still be in the app store. Probably not. And then there was the camera app. Yeah. What was it actually called? I forget what it was called, but disposable.

2:39:31Was it just Dispo eventually? Because it was originally launched with David's Disposables. It's interesting. It's like, yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth, like the true, what's it called? The R-naught. the viral coefficient. If the viral coefficient isn't actually greater than one, you'll just need to continually be refilling the top of funnel and it just will never grow. Underrated, there's like many more celebrity apps. The Jeremy Renner app, are you familiar with that? It was like a clone of Instagram, but it was just Jeremy Renner content.

2:40:06It's pretty sick. Interesting. It was just for like Jeremy Renner fans that could just see his private Instagram feed, basically. Pretty funny, but yeah, it's interesting. It's like, it begs the question, what is the ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology? I'm still very bullish on Saquon Barkley's strategy of just like invest in power lock companies that are already kind of deemed successful and ordained by the tech industry and the tech complex and just get in, as opposed to trying to all of a sudden become a tech CEO or a co-founder of something that you're just kind of taking weight on the, you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it.

2:40:47It's like, if you're good at being a celebrity, just focus on that and then, you know, invest separately. Anyway, interesting. What else? Well, I wanted to highlight a market. There's a market up now of the next CEO, a poly market of the next CEO of X. It only has, X would be like the social app. It's unclear if Elon just becomes the CEO broadly. There's no new CEO because, you know, for whatever reason, they just don't backfill Linda. But then Sriram Krishnan sitting at 17%. Oh, no way. It's a very, very, very low volume. Nikita's up there, too, at 10%. But I think the company, I think the social app of X now that it's, you know, a combined entity, it still needs a figurehead.

2:41:41It needs a core champion. So I'm hoping they find somebody new there. There are some contenders that were highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if they're on this market particularly. Contenders could include members of Yoccarino's leadership team such as John Nitti, global head of revenue operations and ad innovation at X. Angela Zapita, X's global head of marketing, or Monique Pintarelli, head of Americas at X, industry insider set. So those are kind of the rumors that the Wall Street Journal is talking about. But it'd be way more fun to get a poster in there. A potential guest.

2:42:21Posters in control. Not one of these business people. Although, we forgot to highlight this, but Linda Iaccarino, during her 12 years at NBC Universal, she had the nickname, The Velvet Hammer, which I think is amazing. She earned a reputation as a hard-charging executive with networking and negotiating chops. The Velvet Hammer, because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad. The Velvet Hammer. You've got to always have attire that's so iconic that it works its way into a nickname. We were talking about nicknames this morning, and they need to come from specific stories. You can't just pull them out of a hat.

2:42:58They need to really be evocative and the velvet hammer tells me exactly what she's up to Definitely dress to the nines gonna get the ad deal done. Well, this is a good post to end on from San call You are terminally online if you know more than five of these TBP and high agency Hegelian e-girl Claude code Love boo boo. I still don't know how to pronounce that. I just see it written everywhere. Grok for prime intellect Cal Calamaze that guy who claims to have implemented autofills and OTPs. We somebody's a friend of the show sent us that guys making that claim. And then I noticed that it was getting community noted because the guy was just like lying because that's like, I mean, it's a great.

2:43:44I think it was hot. I think it was hotly debated whether or not he was lying. Like obviously at Apple, like multiple people work on every project. So people were like, yes, well, technically someone else has a claim, but also this person might have a claim. and there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the right to claim it. Anyway, we are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this and we're just diving into a conversation about it. Of course. Well, it's Friday. It's Friday afternoon or evening, depending where you are in the world. And try terminally touching grass this weekend.

2:44:14Yes. Go outside. Log off. Get some sunlight. Get some sunlight in the morning. Five minutes. Five minutes. Three to five minutes. That's enough. Don't do more than that. Yeah. Yeah. Get back inside. Doomscroll. Have a great weekend, everyone. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Excited for Monday. And we'll see you on Monday. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Cheers.