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

27:50We talked to Doug O 'Loughlin about Intel. We were kind of like noodling on it back and forth as like commentators. And I didn't come away with a super strong like bull or bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price and the valuation of the financials, but it didn't seem like crazy to come up with an expression of your position in financial terms. And it's very clear that Leopold and his team just looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there. You don't need, not every good trade needs to be insider trading people. It's like so ridiculous. Um, and, uh, and yeah, I mean, it's the same thing.

28:28Like, it's like, what, what does he know about Nvidia? Like, is it possible? He just, he just knows that like every, like he's not in Nvidia. What does he know? Is he insider trading or is he just like looking at like, Oh, well, Nvidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into Nvidia. It's like the biggest company in the world. Like maybe not a lot of juice left there. I'm going to go where you get 20%. I'm going to go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And yeah, I don't know. Anyway, in the Oval Office, Tan told the president his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States.

28:58He presented ideas for turning Intel around and investing more in the United States. Lutnick told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda. By the end of the hour-long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism. I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan. That's great. Tan and Lutnik then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel.

29:32It was a complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, SoftBank, led by Masa, suddenly agreed to put$2 billion into the company, part of its campaign to bet on U.S. firms and appeal to Trump. Absolutely. If they were putting together a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for the design of their decks, because they seem to be very PowerPoint-coded, but they still are powerful.

30:07Imagine how powerful they could be if they would, you know, simply get on a Figma slides. Let's see here. Um, did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a soft bank backed company? No way. Yeah. Dr. Drew.com. So Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on kiss FM in 2005. Wait, that's crazy lore. Yes. This is insane lore. So, um, Dr. Drew was a, uh, like a board certified psychologist, psychiatrist, I think we're pulling up this website by the way. And so Dr. Drew during the dot-com boom wanted to start his own like live stream property basically, and raised money from SoftBank and built a team of engineers and hadn't had their own data center racking servers.

31:03And And one of my jobs is like, well, I mean, this is like what it is now. Cause he has like a podcast and stuff. And you don't really need like a necessarily like a venture back startup to be an influencer. But, uh, uh, went to the same high school as me. Uh, and, uh, every single famous person has gone to John's high school. Yeah. It's wild. um but yeah like but well like one of my like you know pop by the summer office was like go in the data center and it was like super cold it was like not like a data center like people think today it was like a room with a couple racks of servers but there was no aws so if you wanted to set up a website you had to like rack a server and like put this put the code on the server and then run it just put the servers in the bag bro yeah the brand was a little bit different back then uh the first show that they were going to green light was this sort of like, it was about a lot of his stuff was like relationship coaching.

32:03So love line, people would call in about their relationships. And so I think, I believe they were going to put two people like, like, like a man and a woman who were maybe dating and they were going to go on a road trip and they were going to like live stream it. Um, and it was going to be like some sort of like new, new media. Well, all I can see is I can see why Masa needed to be in that website. It is, it is incredible lore. Is that part of how you underwrote the internship too you're like look you know i wasn't really like technically an intern i i was i was so young i was just like stopping by the office basically but um but it was cool it was like a true startup environment like a pool table like pretty big office like very much like a pool table yeah pool table amazing it was very it was very iconic of you don't see pool tables in office no now it's like ping pong tables yeah they've taken over um we should do you like pool i like pool okay we should get a pool table back here billiards Yeah.

32:56Um, yeah, it was like the classic, like kind of overfunded, uh, venture back.com, uh, bubble company where like huge staff for something that like would ultimately be, uh, small media, like, oh, so yeah, yeah. A media company that should focus on like the media piece and then, and then like the YouTube should just be like a platform. And so it's like, it's like, it didn't make sense to be in like the middle. You either just wanted to be like the influencer or the platform. Anyway, let's go back. So SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least$100 billion in the U.S. on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club last December.

33:32SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business. Intel and the U.S. soon agreed that the government would use$8.9 billion in grants that have been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10 % stake at a slight discount. The U.S. won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel$2.2 billion in chips, axe grants. That was what we were talking about earlier. Some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, a former partner on the Wall Street firm Watchdoll, Lipton & Rosen & Katz, drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5 % of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business.

34:12It's an underrated naming scheme. I really wish startups would do this. The next AI startup should just be like, No, this is... Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and... This could be totally a new meta. It can only be done once. Yes. By a great team. If we did Coogan, Hayes, Cosgrove, and Kohler, it would be amazing. I mean, at some point, we should just add the whole team. The whole team, yeah. It's just the longest. We could definitely get the.com. Ten last names. Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and Kohler. Just over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision as 5 % at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment.

34:53And this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of... Highly technical projects. Highly technical, complicated businesses. Government famously good at building things. Yes, yes. So if Intel were to give the government another 5%, it would obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So despite the initial optimism, and many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for intel if trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company i think he's going to be able to do both to be honest i think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies he's not going to be like a vc that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates there's one thing one people can criticize trump for a lot of things but he is available the week of august 25th he's online while many allocators he's not a burning man he's not a burning man which is crazy interesting which is crazy you'd think that he's starting to get into venture venture yeah that he would naturally he would go to burning man set up a an oval office camp yeah burning man instead of being at black rock city he might be at black rock that's right doing deals doing deals um that was uh that was one of our good uh there's an early episode of 2bpn where john and i are riffing out black rock city the home of the home of burning man man and wondering if there's a connection to there's almost certainly a connection obviously connection to black rock financial institution uh soft banks 2 billion and the 8.9 billion in government funding that had already been promised aren't game-changing for the chip manufacturing business in the grand scheme of thing it's it's not it's so crazy they lost 18 billion last year like we're not even covering last year's losses but it's better to have and not need i suppose yeah so the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies to work with intel lean strongly encourage uh demand that they are fired if they are not if they do not he's gonna rip some posts tan has met with potential customers including apple ceo tim cook trying to win support for intel's next generation manufacturing process this is not the kind of thing i i see tim being super interested in.

37:02He's like more expensive, less performant. Apple has spent what a decade getting off of Intel and Intel max and going to sell Apple Silicon, which are like so integrated, so perfect for the Apple ecosystem. Like, like now, like you can run, you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. Like it's like, there's a ton of, there's a ton of, uh, like they've been spinning up like the, the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, like the different graphics engines and getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for apple silicon yeah so the journal says many executives say they would need big incentives to use intel for manufacturing given how badly it trails industry leaders like tsmc yeah it is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance the government's stake in intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector.

37:58I mean, what's the craziest thing that they could do? Like Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like kind of fresh start. That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. But I mean, if Amazon can do Tranium and Google can do TPU at TSMC, like maybe there's a world where that happens. I don't know. Anyway, I'm a little foundry who's punching the air right now. anyway they highlight a couple of the other deals it's worth covering to the president when a quote unquote golden share of control over Japan's Nippon steel in return for allowing it to take over US steel these golden shares are in reference to what the CCP I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet which is gold yes and many many of the fixtures in his in the Oval Office yes but in last month Trump struck a deal with Nvidia AMD for the federal government to take 15 % of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports up in early July the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP materials and maker of rare earth magnets days later Apple Which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its US supply chain announced a five hundred million dollar deal to buy MPs products Yes, that's an example of like Trump like acting is you know biz dev basically for the companies he likes I mean, he's really going to make a lot of VCs look bad.

39:26Oh, yeah. Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then kind of. I'll help you ramp your revenue for sure. Yeah, I'll help you hire founding engineers. I know a lot of the top guys. I know a lot of the top guys. I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also want to hire founding engineers. I got you. I got you. But the Intel stake is among the most notable. Notable given Trump called for Tanda to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table. there's this darth vader aspect of the whole thing said guantum makunda a lecturer at the yale university school of management never heard of it who studies innovation and leadership referring to the star wars villain who started as good became evil then redeemed himself um anyways uh so you want to read through this post from the big question is is this socialism MAGA socialism is this MAGA socialism?

40:20A lot of people have been saying this. And, and I mean, I think like my default take is that, uh, like, I don't know that Intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop. I don't necessarily know that, uh, the government is the right board member on this. I really doesn't want Doug from semi-analysis really doesn't, does not want Intel to fail. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I'm, I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate has been raging, like, is this, is this socialism? Um, and so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed the people's line, uh, from Carl, uh, Beher, uh, and Carl says, no, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it.

41:10And this the Trump camp is very pro this deal. And they're saying, this isn't socialism. What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals. And this is an America first agenda project. The Democrats are saying, oh, wow, Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling stake. So Carl says, former Obama undersecretary of the state. Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10 % equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel.

41:46This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Trump's strong arming Intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of. Once the GOP believed in the laissez faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector, look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism. uh so carl couldn't find any evidence of elizabeth warren or bernie sanders taking a victory lap on trump's uh acquisition of intel shares yes uh which was surprising given that back in in the admin era they were pushing for this yes but the key discussion that's going on right now is is financial uh financial ownership versus true control over capital and that's what carl's going to get into here.

42:34So he says, anyone old enough to remember the phrase government motors, this is from the era of the takeover GM, should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the US government a 61 % equity stake in General Motors, and the right's backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business. That proved the left's enchantment with socialism. John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy.

43:12And in the end, that's pretty close to socialism. That so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism, Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think this will score points against Republicans.

43:51There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this case, I would say wrongly, Stengel's definition of Marxism as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons. But here are the most salient that, but here the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10 % would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company. But as Intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10 % control.

44:25Quote, the government's - 9.9%. But no, no. So there's more. The government's investment until it will be a passive ownership with no board representation or other governance or information rights. The government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialist would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production. A major function of modern finance is to sever the relationship between those two. To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital.

45:04In that light, it isn't clear that 10 % ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of intel, which is what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you a 10 % non-voting stake in their company is very different. thing from getting a 10 % voting stake, let alone a 51 % voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership and control. And that's why socialists have an interest in this fight. If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism.

45:34He's not doing enough. He's not doing enough. And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like it is not the goal of socialists, but at the same time, it reaffirmed that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what Intel should do. Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSMC, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Tranium. Like, it just doesn't seem the government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that.

46:09It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialists, but I have no, I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51 % voting stake in Intel, that we would get a better outcome here. Well, the better outcome people were talking about this on the timeline would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls. That would be fantastic. Maybe that's, maybe that's a good outcome. Yeah. But it'd be odd to have like, uh, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we going to do three nanometer?

46:45Like decide, you decide like, yes or no. Like, I think it's, I think it's a waste of, or just have the, the, whoever's the Intel CEO just have that as, you know, an elected official. Yeah. Like let the people vote on who should be running Yeah. I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want? You can vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic. We have ballot measures for all sorts of things. We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level. We have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. And, but if you, if you really play out the direct democracy, socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not Intel launches a GPU, like Intel, like, Hey, we miss mobile.

47:26What should we do about that? Okay. let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box. Like that is the conclusion, which is kind of crazy to me. Should Intel launch energy drinks? Yeah. It's not really in our wheelhouse today, but you know, big, potentially large opportunity. Yeah. It just, it does seem, it does seem fraught. It doesn't seem like, it seems like they're, they're potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country. Well, I don't know. This is saying that like we're like his point is that this isn't this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control it's it's purely a financial instrument yeah but the intel board said uh the government also agrees to vote with a company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions so what are the exceptions right uh i'm not sure i'm not sure that we know but anyways the timeline analysis says it's a bad idea we can vote against you that's the exception anyway uh first step i would vote for if i was uh a uh in in a democratic socialist society i would vote that intel gets on graphite.dev code review for the age of ai graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster get started for free can or in the chat says i think intel needs to launch short form content well uh make sure your voter registration is up to date because, uh, president AOC might just make it happen.

48:52You never know. I could see it. I could see it possible. Um, I mean the, the, the, the real wild one is yeah, Tesla, because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they've taken advantage of. You can make the same argument. You put the screws to them and you say, Hey, we need, we need voting shares for this for the years and years. This is what Andrew Sorkin was saying. Yeah. He was saying like, yeah, like where, like, where do you stop? And I understand that. Yeah, there is this like slippery slope, but, uh, to Bill Gurley's point, like Intel could have said, no, they could have said like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine without the chips act money.

49:28And so we don't want, we don't want an equity stake. Although Lip Bhutan is sitting there just on fire and you should be like, you don't need to help. You don't need to help put it out. I'll be good. I'll be good. Flames. Like, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'll cut more. He's like, I don't want to give the president the ick. I'm just going to act all like. Hey, I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe Intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like all we own is real estate and we just lease to TSMC. And that's it. We're completely out of.

50:05Probably a decent business. In other news, Taylor Swift is getting married. The private jet enthusiast. Well, I feel like most of our audience would know her for her Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. Right. Where she said for Taylor Swift, the future of music is a love story. Right. Where will the music industry be in 20, 30, 50 years before I tell you my thoughts on the matter? You should know that you're reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist. One of the few living souls. Enthusiastic venaire. Yeah. One of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying.

50:41It's just coming alive. There are many, many people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is and will continue to be based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work. And the financial value that artists and their labels place on their music when it goes into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing, and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically. And every artist has handled this blow differently in recent years You've probably heard the articles about major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away For this promotion or that exclusive deal my hope for the future Not just in the music industry But in every young girl I meet is that they all realize their worth and ask for it Music is art and art is an important is important and rare Important rare things are valuable valuable things should be paid for It's my opinion that music should not be free And my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is.

51:45I hope they don't underestimate themselves or underestimate or undervalue their art. So did she get this right to date? Not really. I think she, I think she got, the thing that she got right is that what an album is can be extremely monetized. if you continue to think about what, like the album is scarcity. Like you either have it or you don't. And the internet kind of reduced that scarcity to zero because you could stream it, you could pirate it. But there is still scarcity to be created if you are an artist, if you are a musical artist. And so the way she does that now is when she releases an album, she goes on a tour that becomes so big that again, there is scarcity because there are only so many tickets at SoFi Stadium and you have to be there because it's a moment.

52:39One of the best monetized recording artists of all time. Yes, yes. And so she gets the long tail eventually and eventually her music is essentially free and played in grocery stores. So I'm going to read you something from their Instagram caption announcing the engagement. Yes. It's not just a marriage dash, M dash. No way. It's the perfect love story. No way. No, I'm on X is calling this out saying Taylor Travis or one shot at no

53:13I was gonna say something about like her like monetization like yeah, Kyle Scanlon has a good post She said Taylor Swift's engagement is actually very relevant to monetary policy because she's the most powerful stimulus tool We have oh really how so well, I mean her tours are like massive like you can see the like rise in consumer spending Yeah. Ooh, interesting. Especially like smaller countries. It's like very noticeable. Yes. Yes. But, but how does her being married, like she could just go on tour and be single, right? Is she going to sell more tickets because she's married now? Does it allow her to tour more?

53:46You could also see it in a lot of people are talking about birth rates, right? So maybe a new boom, baby boom. Catherine Boyle just posted a picture and just said, with the captioned, their pictures just said American dynamism. I do think this will be good for the birth rate. It's also going to be for anybody that's in a longer-term relationship in their late 20s, early 30s. Pressure is now on. These photos are going to be getting sent around. They're setting a new bar. Quite the floral display by Travis. Got to give him props there. How many kids do you think she'll wind up having? She's 35. She's 35.

54:27Just got to get going. Oh, yeah, 1989. And hopefully a ton, right? I mean, I think we'd like to see. It is the last luxury status symbol, apparently. I'd like to see at least 10. Yeah. It'd be great. Oh, wow. Looking sharp. You really undersold this. You said you were just going to do a phone call, and now here you are. No, I thought I'd do the full Monty here. This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize. I completely botched the story of DrDrew.com. In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as a kid. But please break it down for us. It's so funny. The only thing I found disturbing was how miserably you did with my credentials.

55:08Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let me start with that. Okay, please. I'm a board certified internist. I'm a board certified dictionologist. I'm a fellow with the American College of Physicians. I was an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry and practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist. Okay, yes. We did do Loveline back in the day. I loved Loveline. I sincerely love Loveline. I wish I listened to it constantly. It was amazing. Well, it was very popular. And it served a function back in the day. But this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history.

55:41Incredible. So a good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School, we went off to Amherst College. And then he went to Harvard Business School. I went to medical school. and I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine and then doing radio. And he shows up and he goes, I want to show you how to form a business. We're going to do a dot-com company. And of course, I was hearing about all the dot-com stuff in the wind. And he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County, like a million dollars. And then he put together a little board and he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to Sand Hill Road.

56:17And we sat at SoftBank, SoftBank rather, and made it he just said follow me i go what are we doing what do we i had no idea what we were doing i didn't know how to start a business i didn't have you had you bought your dot com by the way had you like gone out probably had done something like that at that point i don't think we're sitting there without that yeah exactly and uh and he just goes follow me and i was like okay so i followed along and they go what do you want to do and i'm like i'm you know So I don't remember what I said, but the six or seven SoftBank VC representatives marched out of the room.

56:58And my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, OK,$10 million. That was that. We went down and we built the company exactly as you described it. And in fact, it drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here? Why aren't they working? It shouldn't be this nice an environment. But most of that was for the tech team. And you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You got that part exactly right. But the part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was.

57:37And so we had an editorial staff. We had a medical staff. We had a marketing team. and they envisioned, I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen? Why you're building this really great magazine, but with a chat room and with some feedback and they kept, all these sort of trigger words back then were interaction. And I didn't understand, I saw no value in any of it. I kept saying, we had 120 employees and we had a board of directors from Northern California who were demanding we, quote, get big fast. This is an interesting story. Get big fast. This guy, I came to our first board meeting.

58:20I said, look, I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money, how to make this profitable, or what we should be doing, or how to, you know. Did they tell you, don't worry about that? Don't worry about that. Worse than that, this one guy goes, he was manic as hell, and he goes, if I thought you were so stupid, I never would have been on this board. And he jumps up and he goes, here's how you make money at dot-com company and there was a giant whiteboard and he wrote in huge letters get big fast and they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast so that became the weird is the weirdest thing i ever seen in my life but the one thing i got right i kept saying it's going to be video why else do we need this thing it's going to be video but look look what we're doing right now right yeah yeah and i just kept saying that and we put together a one night a week television show that was really a high quality show we still have some of the tapes from it and everybody came in paul rudd uh tommy lee everybody came in on that one night a week show because it was the cool thing to do because there's this new idea this dot-com company creates a tv show and nobody could watch it you know why because you couldn't stream it because nobody had stream nobody had broadband yeah broadband you needed broadband back then that's that's how far ahead of the technology we were how were you guys sounds like you weren't making a ton of money but were you selling the show on a subscription like what what did that was the was there any business model or like any revenue ads no just eyeballs but so so get big fast didn't mean revenue or profits it meant eyeballs eyeballs get big meant money been number of people and they kept talking about how the curve you know how the asymptotic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff and we literally this was a company i mean had lots of traction and engagement and stuff people were kind of intrigued by it so people were stopping by and looking at this thing i i i'm not sure we did lots of interviews with celebrity it was sort of like e meets uh team b meets you know it was all these different kinds of things uh all together in one site.

1:00:33And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on I believe it was March 19. 2020 to 2010. When was that? I'm sorry, 1989. The day the Nasdaq fell apart. The day we were sitting in Goldman Sachs. And the woman across the table was contemplating giving us$30 million on$110 $110 million valuation for a company that had never made a penny. And I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw. But I knew it was tulips the whole way. And one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam, 1680. It's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts, or are you going to grow tulips? What are you going to do?

1:01:19I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips. Well, I mean, it's interesting to think back. And if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you and your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment, but that wasn't a good.com story. Dan Hennessey It was why we got the money, though. In fact, as an Inc article on my wall here, I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera, but it'd be almost impossible to do it. They were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing. But it was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands.

1:01:56And I don't think they really knew that. That was not a fully developed thought at that time. So what was the conclusion? It was like going to business school, I saw the entire, from seed to dissolve, I saw the entire business cycle in one year. So did you eventually take over the site again yourself? Dr. Coop bought the site. Remember Dr. Coop? You wouldn't, you're too young. He was the attorney general and then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute did he just redirect the website or was he still using dr drew.com no no he was a redirect okay cool and um and he went bankrupt as everybody did yeah and we got we were able to weasel it back i forget how we got it back but we had to do some sleuthing we finally got it back so yeah what what how did the shape of your business evolve then and like what uh like how do you think about packaging everything that you do now Um, you know, there, there's, I was listening to you guys talk and I was thinking, boy, I don't have any framework.

1:03:05This is all very interesting to me, but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do. My stuff is always an improvisation. Sure. Right. When I started radio in 1983, I know designs on radio. I was leave me alone so I can practice medicine. I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service. That was my little notion in 1983 when I started doing radio. Then some television guys came along. I'm like, how do you do a TV show? I've never, I don't even know what you're talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the.com. My good friend comes to me and goes, we're going to do this.

1:03:37And I thought, I don't see it. I don't get it, but I think we might be able to do something with it. It'd be interesting. This was a hell of an education.

1:03:46And you're asking how I frame everything I do now? Well, yeah, I was wondering, well, it's just been interesting how many technology, how many different technology friends from the.com to, you know, podcasting, but it all comes back to basically radio and TV. Yeah. Like what, what over, the past, you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the, hey, let's do, let's do a crypto thing or let's do an AI thing? Is this coming? Is it rearing its head again? That has been, that has been, I've had conversations like that. Yeah, of course, of course. Exactly what to do with it. Nobody knows.

1:04:20Nobody, right. But it's part of the exploration. I'm doing streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell, wait, wait, you put it up there. I'm going to talk to my webmaster. I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization. It made me want to click. I think your person's doing a good job. Not meant to be showing other people's shows.

1:04:46But, you know, that's been interesting. It happened. That all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID. Oh, yeah. And that caused me to just stop doing everything. And I had somebody who said, hey, you should do a streaming show. I was like, what's that? Again, that's sort of my, that's where I start every one of these projects. Yeah, you had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like, if I make the show, you're sure people are going to be able to watch it? But a little more confidence this time. No, no, I knew it. I already knew that.

1:05:16I saw what was happening with videos. We just kept saying we were so early. We could have been, who knows what? We could have been you God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of been the first to really advocate for this kind of platform. But we were way early and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as I was. And so the streaming thing has been very interesting. And I'm in my own my kids playroom doing this. And it's the same thing. Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth booth at CNN. Yeah. And now I just do it from here. So the efficiencies are fantastic.

1:05:51And so I do television out of the studio. I do podcasting out of the studio. I do streaming shows. And it all started because I got canceled. And my webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon. I said, let's try that. And I wanted to talk to all the other physicians who have been canceled. One of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now. And so I had the sense that these people had something to say. And the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration. certainly in science and medicine. Have you gotten the opportunities that you maybe lost due to the cancellation?

1:06:29Have you gotten invited back in the last year or so? Or is it just a different set of opportunities? Yeah, are you looking at totally different? Or do you not even want to go back to kind of the old? Those are great questions. I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that my opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform anywhere. what has happened in the meantime is, you know, what I used to do is say all the news outlets, all of them, all of a sudden, the only people that would have me on was Fox. Yeah. Now, just last week, CNN called.

1:07:02So I thought, okay, good. This is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able to schedule it. Nature's healing. Yeah. We've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the interviews, and that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle. Would you agree with that? Would you, is this something that you've kind of experienced? It feels like something that, um, no, I, the, I I absolutely concur on the talent side.

1:07:46Because it used to be I would require to do what we're doing right now. There'd be an executive producer. There'd be a segment producer. There would be a director in the studio, in the satellite booth. There'd be somebody directing at the other end at the satellite booth. And then you got the unions involved. There'd be unions. There'd be sales forces. There'd be executive structure. Now it's me. That's it. So it's so much more efficient. And it drives that world crazy. Yeah. So when Colbert gets gets fired for losing 40 million dollars a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah, that's going to happen to all of them.

1:08:20This is just not a. And our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the overhead. One hundred percent. But they are they are. You got to know how that world thinks. they're very spoiled. They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers. And this is this the world we're living in right as we have this interview to them look sort of cheap and dumb and people aren't talented to do that. The real people, people back back us with infrastructure and money that that is just not.

1:08:57So this the other side of the barbell, which I'm wondering how you see it, I just see it as largely non viable. So much of has got to shrink dramatically and it's resisting. It's resisting like crazy. Yeah. I mean, I would almost put the traditional media corporations like in the center. When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, Meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks, and they actually accrue a ton of the value. And it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. And if you do, you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer and you probably at this point have the backing of like a state government because that's the only way TikTok got going was so much energy and capital flowing in to actually break through.

1:09:47The ship has sailed on starting new platforms for the most part, in my opinion. I think that's probably right. And they don't need to buy talent. No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50 % of the revenue or whatever the time she was. We would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio and you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you. And Axe makes money on their ads. We just get to focus on making content and not focus on talent management. But the interesting thing is you have to wonder, are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation?

1:10:24And when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of, I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right? Yeah. What was that new left-wing sub-stack publication that just announced? They said they're living out or something. Remember this? Yeah. What are they? Anyway, there's like a collection, the argument. So there's a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left. And we were kind of debating, will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together?

1:10:58Or does it actually make more sense for Matt Iglesias and Derek Thompson to just have their own sub stacks and go direct? And then, you know, and then on the far other side is the is the platform and there's really no one in between. But we're still early in the in this development of the argument. There's something very strange. It says there's a weird confluence of worlds right now. Yeah, my son just texted me. And he's, he's been trying to get to you guys. Really? No way. Does he want to hop on? We'll send him a link. Yeah, yeah. We'll send him. You can join right after you. If you're listening, maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the microphone here.

1:11:37Let's do it. Let's do it. He's consolidating the ad department, you know, the management, the lawyering, the ad services, the distribution. He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team because these things aren't necessary. All this stuff is not needed anymore. Yeah. You need an ad. agency. Yeah, this is amazing. The chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy. They're calling they're calling your son the prodigal son. I'm gonna see if I get him to call me. He said he emailed him. His partner named Jake emailed one of you guys. Okay, okay. We'll have to follow up but they're having huge success.

1:12:15And he's the one that he's the one that started talking about AI. He's in the middle of all this attack. The Google store, or the TikTok store or everything. Yeah. But all of that is more efficient, more efficient, more efficient. Yep. Right? I mean, and what you have is these, the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on. They're like going into the foxholes as opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what it is they do. They are just insisting that things continue to be done the way that they've always been done. And it's, I guess, a classic business mistake, right?

1:12:53Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I have one health question for you. What are the... John and I are starting what we hope to be a multiple decades run of daily live streaming. What would you have done when you were earlier in your career health-wise to better You seem to be doing incredibly well now. So what are the key things to look out for health-wise to make sure you can do this for decades? Be hypomanic helps, which a lot of successful business people are. You're going to – I hear many of the podcasts. You're going to suffer. You're going to work hard. You're going to lose sleep. I wish I'd paid more attention to sleep.

1:13:45But if I had, I couldn't have done most of what I did. I'm trying to pay attention to sleep now. And, you know, you've heard it all before. This is not new. Trust your instincts. Explore. Don't be afraid to fall down. For me, the big, as I look back on all the things I did, it's just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. Oh, he's calling now. Let's get him on. We got the sun on. I don't know if they can hear you. I'll have to translate from you. Put on speakerphone. Hey, how's it going, guys? How you doing? What's happening? It's not obviously, but we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back.

1:14:24Okay. We rep Roberto Nixon. Oh, no way. I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay. Yeah. We got to get in touch. My dad was on the air. Fantastic. With you guys right now. I'm flying back from Seattle. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So we did have a little exchange. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's follow up. He's going to keep talking. Okay. He can't. I'll tell him what you said. He can't hear you. Okay. Keep talking, Douglas. I was going to say that I so Rob and Jake are going to an Oasis concert next week in Pasadena and I was going to ask you if you could meet Rob in Pasadena his sister also her kids are going to Poly like you said at the beginning of the show only famous people go to Polytechnic School that's fantastic no I just wanted to say hi and show you that we're not like uh the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to build a relationship it's it's very funny that this all happened in a strange way so yeah this is incredible i actually have to take a call for this all right named roach heath who's a gen ai creator cool because he's in dubai and i you know just trying to get on this you got to get on with dubai we know we know how that goes all right get going i call these guys because they butchered my my uh my dot com and i had to get some free john is that which one's john i'm john john was actually at dr.com when he was like 10 years old yeah yeah i was in the very cold data center yeah okay racking servers that's spectacular so there's there's a long history on on all fronts and he went to pollen so okay we'll talk later yes anyway um okay i i have one more question on the health side for you for you okay sorry later douglas later uh for you uh last week we had mark cuban on the show he said that uh drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done yet i drank i drank i'll go on the record i drank a liter of raw milk that day every day for two years straight refined yeah what's the uh he didn't he didn't give any underlying rationale yeah i doubt he knows why he was just saying that the llms might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario you can get brucellosis you probably get tularemia you can get listeriosis okay and we can treat that with antibiotics no problem.

1:16:54But they can make you very sick. And they're very rare. Yeah. I wouldn't do it. But I don't. The fact that P look, there's something terrible going on. Yeah, where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are. And the reality that we are going to die, that they are afraid to live. Living well is the goal. Not living forever, not living perfectly free of illness. It's living a good life. And we are off of that. I can't. We are so far off of that. It is disgusting. And for a non-physician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me.

1:17:43It's the same thing with when people went after hydroxychloroquine, the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So we are so out of whack with this going to live forever, fear of death, illness, infection, oh, shit. Yes, my generation of physicians, we walked into illnesses that had 100 % fatality. AIDS had 100 % fatality. And we did not know what we were dealing with. and we didn't cower in the corner. We marched in. It's the right thing to do. I don't know what's happened. I can't understand this at all. But here we are. We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period.

1:18:27Biological stuff comes what may. Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption? I did not. It's falling off a cliff, right? Yeah. That's still surprising to me, but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing. That was a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing. You know, people are starting to understand it's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever. But it makes me all so, I mean, what happens? When did we become such pussies? When did that happen? That's my question of days. When did that happen?

1:19:09I don't know. Have you ever said something like that on CNN? This is why you've got to stay off the networks. You've just got to do your own show. I guess I've been through so much lately. I've just lost all the strength. I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many sources. I'm not happy about this flag-burning thing. Freedom, freedom, freedom is what I'm all about now. Please be speaking my mind. I will pitch you one possible explanation. I think that the fear of very consequential but low probability events like the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever.

1:19:56Like biological immortality, like science will cure this and let you live forever. That's just one way to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality in your legacy. If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children and also through the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven. And if you don't believe in any of those modes of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven.

1:20:27or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has an incredible, incredible penalty. And so you discount it very, very high. I agree with you with a couple of caveats. I do agree with you. Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making is if the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife, whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful. And it does not have to include an afterlife, you can also include just creating a good life for my children.

1:21:12That's why I'm here to do that, that kind of thing. But people are here for their narcissistic needs. And that's when things become fragile. Yes. Because we are not the beginning and the end of everything. We just are not. And if we think we're all there is, is what's happening to me. Yeah. Man, and then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that. And that is disgusting. Yeah. So what about have you been tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts? I hear about it. I don't, I don't believe it. I'll tell you, I'll make a bet that it's over way overblown.

1:21:53It was somebody who was already psychotic and you know, whatever. There's not that the AI relationships are necessarily going to be good. I worry about that. But this psychotic episode, I don't know. I don't know if you remember back in the 90s, there were news stories every night. I wasn't born, sir. Okay. Do you have to rub that in? You just said no, I don't know. No, no, no. Later 90s, I got into the action. But there was news reports like every night like, oh, these parties were all the parents throw their keys in a bowl and they just they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night.

1:22:30Oh, sure. The press, the fake. I don't think people were sensitive to fake news. We have to be very sensitive to reporting these days. so much of what's being reported is fake. And it's just to catch your eyes. It's just to get your attention. The person that wrote that article was a 23-year-old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of any meaning. It just becomes something that they catch on the line. They saw other people report it, they report it. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, my read on it is, it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take ayahuasca, some of them are going to have some type of psychotic break of sorts, and maybe they were prone to or had some underlying issue that enabled that.

1:23:23But the issue with - You're right. They already had a psychotic illness, and they just happened to break when they're working with AI. But you're raising, you're making a very smart observation that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca, which I tell you it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that. If you're listening, if you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning Man, by the way? No, we got friends keep trying to get us to go.

1:23:58It's not my jam. Well, you could go there and try to try to, you know, talk people out of it. How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy? Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers. Have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining. Come back on anytime. We appreciate this. We'd love to have you guys are great. I learned something just listening to you guys. This talking about the playing card, the baseball cards. That was fascinating. You guys have a great, you're obviously extremely well trained in your respective fields. And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things.

1:24:34And I leave with one caveat. Please. If you don't call my son, he's going to kill me. We will definitely. We'll go to this concert with him. We will. We will. Exactly. It's in Pasadena. I live in Pasadena now. You live there now? I do. I live over by the Rose Bowl. Rose Bowl is literally walking distance for me. So do I. Amazing. There we go. Did you guys just become best friends? I'll swing file for you. I'll bring you a 30 rack of Bud Light. We live by Annadale. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right over there. Okay, so there's no excuse. I don't want to get too precise. Show up with people at my front door.

1:25:11Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Great hanging. We will talk to you guys. Bye. Massive news from SpaceX last night. They did it. They did it. Flight 10 made it back, took off from Starbase, South Texas. The booster landed in the ocean in, I think, the Gulf of America, technically. That's absolutely right. And the actual Starship executed a successful flip maneuver, deployed a mock payload of a bunch of non-functional Starlink satellites, survived re-entry just barely, as we'll see. It was a really dramatic video. It was amazing. and then splash down on target in the Indian Ocean.

1:25:59It was a full send. It was a full send. It was a crazy, crazy video to watch. Yeah, let's watch the recap video that the Wall Street Journal put together. This is pretty interesting. Starbase, Texas. This is yesterday. They scrapped two attempts on Monday and Tuesday because of some problems with the vehicle. But they got it off the ground. Look at that. They lit the candle. Go into space. I wish we could get a better sense for just how massive it is from those angles. And so those are the dummy Starlink satellites. You can see that little motor conveyor belt on the left. Yeah, just the number of things that have to go right to actually release something from this rocket is insane.

1:26:44And then this is the crazy part. There's just a bunch of different stuff. That's not what we want to see. Where did the stuff come from? Just take a hit. We clearly didn't need it. You would think that as soon as I saw it, I was like, okay, it's over. The whole thing's going to blow for sure. It definitely doesn't make it back because if it's like losing parts, like every part should be important, right? Like what's going on here? And so, and they're also, the whole time they were like testing the flaps, like really pushing them to the limits, going farther. There it is, splashing down in the ocean.

1:27:14You were mentioning earlier, there's a soundbite of them saying they were, they were actually testing the flaps. They were going further than they needed to. So they were doing things like, like, okay, let's stress it. And then, boom. and then the convenient cut you would have thought the journal and the legacy media would have let that yes a little bit longer massive explosion yeah i mean the vibes the vibes going into this were rough honestly uh lots of people with the elon's been distracted by politics take lots of people with the elon too focused on ai romantic companions take uh we covered you can imagine the conversation between elon and ani yesterday right before the launch you got this babe i mean you know that uh you know that ani uh apparently uh allegedly the uh the original ani romantic companion model runs on uh the non-reasoning model just grok three i guess just pure love pure love and and if if there's any uh evidence out there in the just market of ai chatting and companions is that you don't need a reasoning model when you are chatting with a romantic companion.

1:28:20So, uh, a lot of like the backlash to the GPT five launch was something like, uh, you know, people were using it not just as a romantic companion, but just as like a life coach, somebody to talk to was very conversational. And that quick back and forth was what people actually enjoyed. They liked the tone. They didn't care that it wasn't, you know, incredibly good at solving hard math problems or like the IMO or whatever. What you got for me, Tyler? I think there's also something to be said for like, um, reasoning models kind of mess with the vibes. Right. It's It's like the music thing where sometimes you want a friend that's not going to think too hard.

1:28:54They're just going to... Yeah, yeah, 100%. In the musical taste thing, all the reasoning models gave these weird answers because they would subtly prefer artist names with numbers, stuff like that. Although, I mean, I think the reasoning models actually had the best taste of all, but that's a bit of a hot take. Well, we've got to pull up this post from Red Bull Futurist. It's very important. He says, super heavy, the effing goat. Wow. Wow. And I just needed to highlight this because obviously Red Bull, some of Red Bull futurist work actually has went into this. Yeah, it's amazing. Absolute legend.

1:29:29A win for Red Bull, really. For sure. It's actually surprising that Red Bull and SpaceX haven't tried to collab yet. You'd think that Red Bull would just be like, we'll give you millions of dollars if you just put Red Bull branding over this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why not? It'd be good for both parties. Even the explosions feel like on brand for Red Bull. Totally. Red Bull's down for the crazy risk-taking. I could see Elon going with White Monster, too. Don't go with that. That would be really good. Something here. You really should do that. But I mean, this basic brand is special, and maybe you don't want to delete that.

1:30:05Would you go so far to say the White Monster brand isn't special? I guess it would be additive. Red Bull isn't special. Yeah. The reason I was bringing up the reasoning models was because apparently Elon wanted Ani to use the reasoning model. Like the AI companion has to be able to do the hard math problems, which is funny. So maybe she really was in use doing rocket science and calculating the last final decisions before this rocket went out. But it was a huge success. The Wall Street Journal has kind of the play by play here. SpaceX pulled off a smoother test of its Starship rocket, managing a more complete mission after setbacks earlier this year.

1:30:48The Starship spacecraft flew through space after launching from the company's South Texas complex Tuesday around 7.30 p.m. ET. The vehicle successfully deployed a batch of dummy Starlink satellites and reentered Earth's orbit, facing intense heat and forces before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. This is the 10th launch of Starship. I believe this was ship like 37 or something. They've built a lot of these. Not all of them have launched. Some of them have been scrapped. Some of them blew up in the test stand. They really push these things super hard. So it's a 403-foot-tall rocket. They started testing this in 2023.

1:31:23There's been a series of explosions, mishaps, previous test flights that have been cut short. Elon Musk has much riding on the rocket envisioned to one day carry satellites, scientific devices, and eventually astronauts. Just to put this into context, the White House is 70 feet tall. Wow. So this is... Yeah, it's like the size of the... Isn't it closer to the Statue of Liberty? I think it's like around that tall, 403 feet. You'll have to look that up. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet. Oh, mogged. Absolutely, mogged. Mogged. Got an extra 50 feet on that. For now, the company is pushing to show it can consistently fly Starship and experiment with its design.

1:32:02SpaceX set up Tuesday's mission to stress test parts of the starship spacecraft. We certainly saw that on display with the parts flying all over the place, seeking to give engineers information to continue developing the vehicle. Basically, the calculus here is like, how cheap can you make this thing? If you use duct tape, will that work? If you use tinfoil, will that work? They really are pushing these things crazy, crazy hard. I think the other way to put this into context, not everybody is fortunate to be able to build and launch rockets for a living, but anybody that's built software knows that even if you're launching a relatively simple feature, it'll oftentimes break and have issues and bugs and things like that.

1:32:43And it's a little bit, you have a little bit more leeway to ship stuff and make changes on the fly. In this case, they're doing it in this incredibly public setting where the internet is going to have a very strong reaction one way or another. So the pressure is just insane. So, Musk wants both the Starship booster and spacecraft to be fully and rapidly reusable, more akin to an airplane than a traditional rocket. SpaceX has made major strides with reusability with its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, which are powered by boosters. It can be used many times. SpaceX faces self-imposed and external deadlines with the much larger Starship.

1:33:21Musk wants to launch an uncrewed version of the vehicle to Mars next year, but has said meeting that goal will be tough. Of course, there's a Mars transfer window that only comes up, I think, every 18 months or so. So it's really critical to hit it in 2026 or else you got to wait till 2028, I believe. In 2027, a lander variant of Starship is supposed to be ready to carry astronauts on a NASA moon mission through the agency's Artemis exploration program. That's going to be really hard because I think they have to refuel in orbit and then also make it safe enough that astronauts can fly on it. Like they have a lot to do there.

1:33:54This is why we need to get Ani to be able to solve complex physics. For sure. For sure. Today, we are talking about La Boo Boo's and the story of Pop Mart, which to me really stands out as a similar, like in the dot-com boom, there was this, the Beanie Babies went on a similar run, incredibly popular, built on the back of dot-com technology. I remember going over to a friend's house and loading the Beanie Babies dot-com website. And it was so heavy because it had all these images. Did it take like minutes to load? It took minutes to load because they, like whoever built the website just didn't kind of think about how long it would take.

1:34:37But even then it was like, this is so cool. Yeah. It takes 30 minutes to go to the store. Exactly. Oh, if it takes five minutes to load all down. And so, yeah, the page would load, the HTML would load, and then slowly one image after another would load in. And you can really feel the difference at the time. Many people were on dial-up, which was 56K, which is like a staggeringly slow speed compared to what you get even just on like a plane. And then DSL was one level up. Daniel posted that United has Starlink now. Yeah, and I think it's 300 megs per second, 300 megs. So that's what, 6 ,000 times faster than what we were experiencing back in like the mid-90s.

1:35:20Yeah. and so um then you could upgrade to dsl dsl was between 256k and 1.5 megs i had a friend who had a t1 line which was like enterprise level internet in the 90s it was one meg up and down so you could equal upload symmetrical line um and he could still he could load the beanie baby website faster than anyone it was like true status symbol at the time yeah it was alpha his parents were Very successful. What was the most expensive Beanie Baby transaction ever? Do you know? I don't know. I do know that prices peaked throughout just, they perfectly track the dot-com boom. So in 1998, Ty, which is Ty Warner, his company is called Ty, T-Y, they make Beanie Babies.

1:36:08They made$1.4 billion in sales, making it one of the fastest growing toy companies in history. Two years later, the market crashed almost overnight. Prices on the secondary market plummeted as supply-overwhelmed demand and speculative buyers exited. So people were in the habit of, and yes, the chat is correct. eBay was a major, major driver of Beanie Baby's growth because people could buy them and then the secondary market was way more liquid than ever before. Before it was like, okay, if you buy some rare drop or some limited edition thing and you want to go sell it, you have to go to like a trade show that maybe happens every once a year.

1:36:50You have to find maybe your local shop, but there's not that much liquidity. Remember when we were talking to our friend about the collectible card market, Beatles memorabilia, he was saying like, I only need two buyers. It's very easy to find two buyers if you're interacting at internet scale. It's harder if you're in some town and you have a rare Beanie Baby and you need to see, are there any other crazy Beanie Baby fans in this town. So eBay was a huge, yeah, Beanie Babies, the original unicorn startup, essentially. I mean, it was an overnight success in the sense that I think the business was gone for about a decade before the boom, but they rode the wave of the internet.

1:37:29Interestingly, the most expensive Lububu ever sold was$170 ,000 in June of this year. And the most expensive Beanie Baby ever sold was something around a half a million dollars. Half a million dollars. Oh, we got room to run, baby. We got room to run in the Lububu market. So my question is like, what is driving the Lububu? Yeah, Aiden, enjoy your victory lap. Get out there, get some exercise. Do some pushups halfway through the lap. Aiden. Enjoy. Belt ski. Did we say that right? Belt skis. Yes. Belt skis. You said your full name now. There we go. Thanks for watching. Um, the, yeah, so Laboo clearly, uh, clearly a beneficiary of the social media boom of tick tock of the unboxing culture, Timu culture, live shop, like culture, flex culture.

1:38:19Because you, these people put them on, you know, their, their purse. Interestingly, not even though it's like, it's like money is cheap right now. Everything is going up into the right. Um, the market is booming. i i can't find a yeah i can't really find a bridge between like the ai boom and the and labubus it seems like it's just the social media boom that we're continuing to see the yeah it's the fart coins the labubus yes yes yes yeah there's a little bit of that there's a little bit of just like gambling culture has has uh infiltrated everything from sports betting obviously is being is legal in more states and and and has been on a tear for a long time to folks big gambling on crypto and stocks and out of the money options, all the way to

1:39:09the collector culture on all sorts of different platforms. There's just a broad boom happening here. And then there's also the China angle, which I think is interesting. We were talking about this yesterday that China hasn't had a major cultural export. And this might be sort of the first one more or less like TikTok counts in some ways, but TikTok, I see it as like a bucket that fills up with the local culture of the people that open the app. Like if you're in, it doesn't feel like you're in LA, you see LA. Yeah, exactly. But you can certainly access that if you wind up in that filter, if you search the right keywords and then you can go there.

1:39:48Yeah. Yeah. Same with Instagram. But by default, I don't see TikTok as like a uniquely, a uniquely Chinese cultural export. It's an export, not a cultural export. It's a technology. It's a technology. And of course, like China has been exporting like manufacturing technology and manufacturing prowess for a long time. And so my - Got a real win with the demon dolls. They do look crazy, right? I just, I don't like them. They just rub me the wrong way. I don't know. Something is weird, but I'm just not into it. I don't know. That's why we bought one for Bill Bishop's dog. We're excited for Tosche to rip it apart.

1:40:26Yes. It feels, it just, it's not a good look. I don't like the aesthetics at all. It's very odd. I would not buy one for my child. The bigger question that I have that I think we want to answer. So we're going to dig into the history of Pop Mart, take you through some of the history of La Boo Boo's. The question that I have is like, the horse is out of the stable with like gambling on toys, clearly. Um, think about the TikTok story. There was a big discussion, nationwide discussion a few years ago. Should we ban TikTok? Is it spyware? Is it influencing our culture? Is it causing brain rot? Where did we land on that as America?

1:41:04We said, yeah, it's fine. We're good. The answer was, uh, YouTube will compete in shorts and, uh, Instagram will compete in reels and, you know, TikTok will be out there and, you know, buyer beware, like, you know, what you're using and you're an American, you're a free person. And if you want to use that app, you can. And if you want to come over to a different app and you trust Mark Zuckerberg's team or Senator Pajai's team. Stated versus revealed preference. People are like, I just want to follow my friends. The feeds that are algo driven get used more. And so my pitch and what I'm kind of digging into what I wrote about in the newsletter this morning, you should subscribe at Substack to our sub stack.

1:41:44TBPN.substack.com is the conclusion to the TikTok debate was the YouTube team and the Instagram team need to launch direct competitors and take it very seriously. And Mark Zuckerberg invested like tens of billions of dollars, I think, in like data center build out to actually support Reels and the algo feeds. And they took it really seriously and they executed very well. So what's the conclusion to the Lububu story? Well, it's probably like Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies or Mattel, the maker of Barbie, getting into blind boxes. That's the only answer. That's where the arrow of progress moves in one direction.

1:42:21Children want to gamble. They want to gamble. And so I think that that's the end state here. And that's the situation that I'm monitoring. I'm not holding my breath being like, oh yeah, the boo-boos are going away anytime soon. Yeah, sure, there might be like a bubble and then it subsides. But in general, I think that the future is like more mystery boxes under the christmas tree generally broadly in american culture like we love gambling we love freedom pick your poison that's where somebody gambling as a gift is crazy like i bought you this blind box you never give someone scratchers give someone scratchers it's great we should give the team scratchers send them off into their three-day weekend i bet some of the boys are like i'm i'm into scratchers i had a friend in uh college who was into scratchers really you know the thrill of a scratcher i bought one lottery ticket in my life and it was electric i was like i'm gonna win like it's gonna happen and then it didn't and i was like okay i'm never spending two dollars ever again um but uh anyway this is what happened with video games they went free to play plus uh microtransactions the whales drive everything price discrimination and everything we see this with uh only fans we see this with the future of uh romantic companions um, price discrimination is key and this will probably unlock some of that.

1:43:38Uh, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. But, um, I think if you're a toy maker, you got to get into mystery boxes. Um, unfortunately, maybe, maybe unfortunately, but like, that's where the, that's where the culture's moved. Late stage capitalism, pretty much, which I would say, we're just getting started pretty much. Anyway, let's go through a Brandon Gurell has a fantastic thread on Popmart. And Tyler has the story here. Full history. Do you want to take us through the history? Yeah. Tyler, what you got for us? Can we pull this up on VHS, Ben? I think this is going to be important. There we go.

1:44:14There we go. Clear as day. Oh, man, yeah. It is. So I think we should first. I just love the way this looks. Yes. I can't help it. Okay. Let's first go through some big, big numbers here. So Popmart, public company currently at what? Like around$55 billion. Yes. Hong Kong. Wong Ning is now the 10th richest person in China. He's worth$28 billion. Wow. Pretty, pretty crazy. Where credit is due. And a lot of the data sources here are Chinese, and we tried to double check everything by translating, but there might be some details that are wrong. So, you know. Okay. So, yeah, they have almost 600 retail stores, 2 ,500 vending machines, revenues at$1.8 billion.

1:44:56Vending machines. That's fascinating. That's really the big thing. That was big. So the kind of main story of Popmart is that they basically took a lot of things that were first in Japan and then brought them to China and then exported them basically worldwide. But yeah, the revenue is 106 % growth year over year and then 700 million of that is just overseas. Yeah, the stat was crazy. I think in the first half of this year, they beat last year's total revenue. And they're already like a scale, that pretty huge company. Is that good? I think it's better than NVIDIA. It's the backbone of the economy.

1:45:32Okay, so take us through some of the history. 2010, in Beijing, Wang Ning starts it. Originally, basically, it's just like retail store for these little collectibles. There's a bunch of stores that do license other people's IP. I think they originally started with some marble, but then really the majority of the revenue is just from their custom IP that they basically license from artists they find. Yeah, so that's the nature of Pop Mart. It's like pop culture market and Brandon says it started as a single variety mall store. Think Spencer's or Hot Topic. They couldn't get investment at the time because no one thought adult toys would work.

1:46:16Now he's the 10th. And when Wang was growing up, his parents ran small shops. So it was in the DNA family. Okay. Yeah. So then 2014, this is when they basically bring over these sunny angels. These are the Japanese like figurines. And this is when they start the blind boxes. This is like really the main thing that spurs the rest of their growth. Yep. Wait, wait, wait. Before this, this is actually crazy. Brandon has some extra context here. So he starts the company in 2010, a year out of college. He had an undergraduate degree in advertising and a short stint at the Chinese version of Twitter.

1:46:48His single variety store in Beijing in a Beijing mall. It's essentially a reseller. He has seven employees. Spends two years selling third-party stuff on thin margins, trying to scale with debt, but it's hard to finance because investors don't get selling toys to adults. He manages to raise$320 ,000 equivalent in RMB and then$1 million around there in 2013, which he uses to open three new mall shops. and then in 2014 he hits his first lick finds a repeatable format blind boxes so take us into that okay so then so they start with that these are still uh different figurines from japan yeah these sunny angel blind boxes they look kind of like 90s troll dolls interesting yeah and then yeah and i don't think we already we covered specifically what a blind box is it's you're going in you're you're paying a a generic price for something and you have no idea what's in it It could be the super generic one of, you know, a hundred thousand item, or it could be ultra, ultra limited.

1:47:51And so you just get this massive, uh, buyers get this massive dopamine rush when they're buying it, they're, they're paying. And, and that whatever item they unpack might immediately be worth like some significant multiple of what they paid. Yep. Yep. Kind of like angel investing. So it has, it has, uh, yeah, but, but way more condensed into like, I buy this and then I immediately figure out, am I, am I going to get. put$100 ,000 in, 10 cap. But unlike angel investing, I think there's like a floor, right? Angel investing easily go to zero. But boo-boos like have, you know, somewhat stable. Yeah.

1:48:24Like it has some market value. So if you're trying to like gamble less and you're addicted to angel investing, maybe, you know, downgrade to just la boo-boos and loot boxes. A big attraction of, especially the la boo-boos, which you can get into later, is like they have like these sets that come out. So it'll be like 10. And you would collect the full set. Yeah, it's like 10. And then they're basically all the same except like the color of the fur is slightly different or something. So people are trying to create a complete set, which will then sell for more. Yeah, but obviously if there's 10, you can't just buy 10 of the boxes because you're probably not going to get all of them.

1:48:53Do you think that Porsche should get into blind boxes? Imagine if you could just buy 911s only with blind boxes. It's like 200K. You might get a Carrera T, like super base model. You might get a GT3 RS. You might get an ST. Wow. Yeah, there might be something there. I don't know. I wouldn't do it. I mean, people would be sending it on those. I think so. Yeah, I mean, and you just work out the expected value, right? So you just charge whatever the expected value is. There isn't quite enough of a Delta. They need to throw in like a Carrera GT as well, a few of those as well. You used to see a similar thing in the sneaker market when that was like a really big thing.

1:49:40on eBay, you would see these like a third party, like mystery boxes. Oh, eBay would just do it. Interesting. It wasn't people on eBay, but that's crazy because like, that's even like less regulated because they can just totally like cook the box. I feel like versus like a real company that has probably some sort of oversight. Yeah. I mean, you don't really know how many people were actually buying it or if it was just like for YouTube that they would make the videos like, Oh, I bought this$500 mystery box. I remember I bought a, uh, a mystery box of cords on a woot.com, which was an electronics reseller that was bought by Amazon.

1:50:12That's so Kugan code. It's incredibly. Just buying a box of course. It was just electronics, electronics. It was like, so woot.com would go around and find like a bunch of electronics that had been discounted. I bought an HD projector that was probably like three grand for like 600 bucks because like they were like going out of stock and they just needed to like liquidate. And so woot would go and buy the liquidation and then put it on the website and you could just buy it. But it was limited time. they would just do one daily deal every day. And one day they just did a mystery box and you could just buy, they would just be like, literally like whatever was in their facility, they would just like pack up for you.

1:50:48And who knows? I got like, oh, this is like HDMI to DVI cable or something. You can probably trace back something like, do you remember Storage Wars, the show? Yeah, yeah, very similar. Where it's like they open it, you can't go in, but you can just see the front and then you can try to estimate the value. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, so there's probably some lineage there. That's great. So when did China figure out that this was gambling? Because they banned the sale of little boo-boos to kids under eight years old. But that still means you got 10 years before you're legally adult here in the U.S., at least, where gambling is okay.

1:51:20I don't know how many actual eight-year-olds are going to the store and buying it, and it's not their parents. So it's kind of unclear. Well, if you're worried about your employees gambling with your company funds, get on Ramp.com. Time is money to save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Very easy to set a rule in RAMP. No PopMart. No Lububu. No PopMart. Anyway, continue. Okay, so let's go back. So 2015 is when Lububu first appears as, it's in a picture book. So this has nothing to do with PopMart. It's just this other artist, Kai Sing Leung.

1:51:52And then 2016, this is PopMart's first real IP that they created that went super viral. Yes. In 2016, Ning tries something new. He flies to Hong Kong and meets with artist Kenny Wong, who had created the trendy toy figurine Molly in 2006 and was a big designer in the toy niche. There, he negotiates an exclusive license with Wong to develop and sell Molly products and blind boxes. Interesting. So I think this was, it's done around$800 million in revenue since 2016. Let's go. So selling Molly not only gives Ning more control and capitalizes on trendy toy plus blind box signal, but it capitalizes on Kenny Wong's fan base and leads Ning to his next big unlock, betting big on controlling existing toy IP with a built -in fan base instead of selling third party.

1:52:45so in 2017 sales of molly are going nuts total uh 22 million by end of year for molly pop mart rolls out vending machines reducing rent they had to pay in malls and establishing way deeper reach with fandom company begins repeating great it's replicating the molly unregulated slot machines yeah basically uh and then they uh uh pucky pucky is another hong kong artist derivative that they launch and then they launch a Seder. You know, it's like half like goat legs, which is very odd. They're getting - Not beating the Antichrist allegations. Yes. If you've been at the PT lectures in SF for who the Antichrist is, I think we got a lead here.

1:53:28I think we got a lead. Did you already write that? Yeah, this was already there. You already wrote that. That's amazing. There's a lot of allegations here. I mean, it's unclear whether, you know, what's the original - I think we solved it, folks. Yeah, we've solved it. wait, is there really a star on them? Is that a thing? No, I just do that. A pentagram? Okay. Well, that's why, yeah, question mark. Max over in the substack chat says, we need to tokenize the Labubus. I think that's how you get the next leg up. That's obviously happening next. We know that's going to happen. We know that's going to happen.

1:53:56CSGO loot boxes walked so Labubu could run that. Brandon in the X chat says, we got to get a bezel box going. Totally agree. Quaid, let's get some blind boxes going. You might get a Nautilus. You might get a Tudor. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay, so where are we? Now, 2019? So now, 2019, LeBouBou is then licensed to PopMart. Yep. So just in 2018, right before this, sales spiked to$73 million on the back of Mali. Around this time, PopMart built its own in-house design team, the Pop Design Center, like a Porsche Design Center. it becomes a powerful pipeline alongside ever more exclusive artist licenses and big non-exclusive entertainment licenses if you want to entertain people on a stream get on Restream, one live stream 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are, continue okay, so they license in 2019 but they don't actually release like the modern Lububu doll until 2023 so it's in the book or whatever, they're starting to build the lore, build the IP, they do characters, they do little figurines but it's not like the kind of modern instantiation so then let's go to 2020 they IPO at seven billion okay in hong kong and then hold on so uh continuing with branded 2019 uh pop mart begins selling labubu blind boxes an exclusive deal with artist kasing lung uh labubu's original character in lung's picture book trilogy called the monsters but was selling his figurines in hong kong by 2015 uh at time of the deal it's only popular among niche toy collectors and we do have some images in the deck by the way guys if you want to pull up the pictures of these monsters.

1:55:35Yeah, if you scroll down a bunch, there are some photos of the Labubus. It has like kind of a street art vibe, very chaotic drawings. Keep going. There's one more. Keep going. One more. Keep going. That's Molly. There we go. That's the first Labubu. The Monsters Trilogy by Kossing Lung. The story of Puka, Pato, and the girl. Miro's Requiem. And so these start selling in 2019. In 2020, Popmart raises$100 million on a$2.5 billion valuation. Hit the gong. I see a large IPO. And a few months later, IPOs in Hong Kong. Stock rips 80 % on opening day. You thought meme stocks were just an American phenomenon.

1:56:19Meme stocks are a worldwide phenomenon. They got them across the pond. Ning's net worth doubles overnight. He's worth$3.2 billion at open,$6 billion at close. Pop Mart has a 12.5 billion market cap at close. That's a big company. That's a big company. So let's continue. Okay, so 2023 is when the blind box, Lububu phenomenon really takes off. So this is, I think, probably it's mostly due to TikTok. You see a lot of this. And then, yeah, 2025, right now, it's like around 55 billion. Now it's at 55. Absolutely incredible. What a run. Should we pull up the Wall Street Journal? video, watch some of that.

1:56:59What do you think? Yeah, let's do it. While they're pulling that up, let's tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Folks, get to figma.com. Design your next Libubu drop. Yeah. I mean, developing real IP this quickly is incredibly impressive. Yeah. Yeah. IP that can do billions of, of, yeah, I mean, it just takes so long. I remember learning about the, uh, the Lucasfilm acquisition that Disney did, even the Marvel acquisition. This is the, these are like, they were big acquisitions at the time, but like single digit billions, low double digit billions.

1:57:39Like, and then they just created so much value as they actually monetize the IP and created like shows and merch and like ran the Disney machine around it. Um, it seems like Popmart's capable of running like a Disney-esque monetization playbook on top of somewhat new IP, which is pretty crazy. Anyway, let's pull up the Wall Street Journal video and watch a bit of that. Aiden says it's nightmare fuel. I agree. Whenever Chinese retailer Popmart dropped a new Libubu designer toy, it sells out within minutes.

1:58:12It does seem like it's truly like a worldwide phenomenon in the sense that it's not just women that are doing it, it's not just men, it's like, it's really people all over. It's not just adults, it's children. Children and adults. Yeah, yeah, you would think it's like, oh, it's just kids. So yeah, their revenue doubled in the last year. ...have flooded social media. Fans flock overseas to buy exclusive products. I mean, it just has the natural hook. Look at Madonna promoting it. I go Pop Mart everywhere. But can the company continue to grow beyond this viral moment that has seen its share prices rocket more than 1200 % since the beginning of 2024.

1:58:49Here, pause it. This is the economics of - Are you rooting for their downfall? Preying on it even. I don't know. I think the bigger question is like, there's something that - So it's easy to say like, these go viral on social media. Like it's a beneficiary of social media. But like, if you actually think about why is a Labubu more viral than, you know, the latest iteration of Barbie or Beanie Babies, like there is a reason and it's directly related to the nature of the algorithm. So when you do an unboxing, it naturally takes about one minute if you edit it down to do it. And the reveal comes at the end.

1:59:36So when you watch it, you say, oh, someone's doing an unboxing. They're introducing what the stakes are. It's good for the creator because they get that retention. Exactly. It drives retention because it has a natural storyline of like, okay, how did I get this box? How much did I pay for it? What are my expectations? Do I have something on the line? Maybe I'm hoping to build a set, right? I want to build a set. I really am hoping for the red one or whatever. And then you're taken on this journey. And I believe when they unbox them, there's like two stages to the unboxing. You take it out of the box and then there's packages.

2:00:10Yeah, so there's a box. The third stage is when you have your dog rip its head off. And see what's inside. What was this? So there's a box. Then there's like a nice like opening. Like you like rip it. It's like nicely packaged. And then inside there, there's a little bag. And then inside the bag is the actual toy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So even that like lends itself to like keeping you engaged for 60 seconds, which is going to drive more virality in the feed. Aaron Frank, partner at Lightspeed, says I have the largest single collection of Labubus in America. No, I'm kidding. He texted me and said, this is hard to watch.

2:00:45This is hard to watch. So sorry, we're forcing you to sit through this, Aaron. Let's play a little bit more of the journal video. Yeah, let's pull it back up. Yeah, keep going. Of Pop Mark. Look at this culture. This is crazy outfits for this. Siobhan Lawrence in the chat says my startup has done 75 million in unboxings. Say more. Yeah, elaborate please. Tamagotchi for real should come back. AI powered Tamagotchi. That's a good business. What we've done is just added our own flavor to that. Yeah. Now the company has more than 500 stores and 2 ,000 venues. in vending machines worldwide. It's Europe, all Southeast Asia.

2:01:28When you decide to splurge on a Popmart blind box, which could cost around$20 to$30, you don't go in totally blind. Take this collection. There are six possible characters you could unbox, and a secret one that you have a 1 in 72 chance of getting. One of the things that the brand can do to keep engagement, to encourage consumers to get a little more excitement out of it, is to label the box. This one says, have a seat. I know people throw the satanic panic around a lot like white monster monster energy drink there's like a whole 666 it's satanic but it's always unclear if it's like the the founders are are like poking fun at satanism like yeah like no one accuses like John Carmack of being satanic by I mean I guess people did when he released doom but in doom it's like you're clearly playing as a as a mortal, like killing the demons.

2:02:24And that's the name of that. That's the virtue of the game. Aaron just sent me the stock chart for Build-A-Bear. Have you seen this? Oh yeah, Build-A-Bear's ripping too. Does Build-A-Bear have loot boxes yet? That could be the next unlock. Build-A-Bear is up 2 ,473 % over the past five years. It's absolutely ripping. Who's clapping? Build-A-Bear blind boxes. no more building just just gambling children just come come into the store yeah yeah if laboo is like the slot machine that you could be pull out of the uh the vending machine build-a-bear should turn it into like a game of like high stakes has anybody a lot done like remote laboo openings so it's just actually like i think i've seen that yeah uh who was it blake robbins posts about this a lot how there's like apps in the app store that are oh it's probably happening Depending on like Whatnot, to be honest.

2:03:14Well, have you seen the claw game? So there is an app that you can download and you can pay real money to use a claw in the real world to pick something out of a machine or like a bucket. And whatever you pick out, you get to keep and they will mail it to you. And so it's not technically gambling somehow. That's some like loophole there. Right now on Whatnot, there's like seemingly hundreds of streams selling Libuboos. Wow. Don't gamble, folks. Don't gamble on compliance. Get on Vanta, automated compliance management risk, proof trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

2:04:02Anyway, the last two years of, what's interesting is the last two years of sales of Lububu have been heavily driven by international expansion. They've definitely figured out how to take the brand abroad. It was predominantly growing in mainland China. And I believe it's still growing. It's doubling in China, but it's also seen maybe a 10x increase in international sales over the last two years. So it's on a tear. It's on a tear. We'll see how people respond. we'll see how the American toy companies respond. I feel like this is like the horse has left the stable. The cow has left the barn. The dog has left the dog.

2:04:48The children yearn for the slots. They do. They're going to figure out how to gamble one way or another. I mean, what's the alternative? Like ban La Boo Boo? Erewhon blind boxes, combo plates. Yeah, combo plates. You might just get the worst slot bowl of your life. How about sweet green blind boxes? You get 12 ounces of blue-beak caviar. You might get a bunch of steak. You might get a bunch of kale. You might get some caviar. Never know.