$9M Buffett Dinner, AI Monets, Patek Scarcity, Late-Career Founder, WSJ Mansion Section, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Rahul Sonwalkar

You're watching DBBN. Today is Friday, May 15th, 2026. Are we live?

Yeah, we're live.

Okay, good.

We're live.

It says we're live. We bumped it. We have a special guest today, Rahul Sunwalker. Introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know.

Hello guys, I'm Rahul Sunwalker, friend of John and Jordy, founder of Julius.

Yeah. How are things going?

I don't personally think he needs an introduction.

I don't think so either, but we're very happy to be joined by you on this Friday. We have a bit of a mellow show, no guests. Where's my camera? Over here? Am I back here now? Am I over here? Okay, we're good. We're figuring it out. It's Friday. Bunch of tech news, bunch of random posts, the mansion section, the—

who is this CEO? They're saying you're not hyped enough. Why don't you go hit the gong?

Go hit the gong, warm up, wake up. Yeah, hit the gong.

Little gong warm up.

Coming to LA, hanging out with us.

All right, you gotta hit it.

You gotta— Terrible.

Big one, big one.

Smash it.

There we go.

That's a good gong, dude. Come on. Another one. CEO Patek Philippe did an interview with the Financial Times we can go into later, but we got to kick it off with Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is stepping out for his famed charity lunch again. He's done these for years. A mystery bidder— I wonder if we'll— if the mystery bidder will be unmasked at some point. Mystery bidder just bid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha. Which would you pick? $9 million in your bank account or lunch with the Oracle of Omaha?

I'm taking lunch with Oracle of Omaha any day.

Any day.

Any day. What would I do with $9 million?

You could buy Berkshire shares. Let him, let him work for you forever.

He— Rahul lives in SF, right?

Yeah. So, oh, you got to add the flight.

You're going to get outbid.

Okay. Yeah.

So what do you do with that?

Well, 9 is down. So if you look at the chart, there was a sort of a slow takeoff in the price of these winning bids. For Buffett lunches. Mystery bidder just paid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha, who last participated in the event in 2022. He took a couple of years off. 2020, of course, COVID took it off. 2021 made a comeback in 2022, and there was massive demand because previously this was a $2 million lunch. Originally in 2003, it was just a couple hundred K, but then it spiked to almost $20 million. And now is sitting right around 9. The year's winning bid is a steep drop from the last time Buffett participated.

All right, but the trend, the trend is quite positive.

I think it's pretty good if you interpolate this. He's still, he's still raising multi-million every year.

So here's what I'm curious about. Yeah, so it's a mystery bidder. Yeah, we have no idea why they bid. Yeah, we just know they want to go to lunch. Yeah, right. We know they want to be at lunch, right?

But delicious lunch.

There's, uh, there's different groups in attendance, right? You have, uh Steph Curry and his wife, Ayesha. And so there's a possibility that this person just wanted lunch with them. They could come in and say, you know, Warren keeps kind of like, he wants to be friendly, right? So they paid a lot, so he's trying to engage. And they're just like, really, dude? I paid $9 million to have lunch with Steph Curry, and you're trying to constantly get a word in. What's going on?

Could happen.

And so, yeah, we don't know if this is just a basketball enthusiast, someone that wants to talk about how the game is evolving.

Yeah, hard to sort of disentangle until you figure out who the mystery bidder is. Are they courtside every game, or are they at the shareholders' conference? At 92, Warren Buffett said he ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker. That's a wild quote from Warren Buffett.

And what about this one?

He said both the money and the message remain important. Wait, whoa, whoa. That's not that crazy.

The money and the message. I mean, if you say it, if you say it like he's selling like a course, then it sounds significant.

Ted Welcher, now a Berkshire investment manager, won the auction twice when he was a hedge fund manager. Oh, so it's sort of like a job opportunity potentially. Like you have to pay all this money up front, but you get to know the big guy. Eventually he cuts you in on the business.

Justin Sun. Was another previous winner.

Interesting. What did he do? Tron?

That was the 20— wait, I don't understand.

He gave Buffett a Bitcoin as well as several Tron, the digital blockchain he had founded during their meal in 2020. I thought there wasn't one in 2020. I guess something around there. 5 bidders participated in this year's auction on eBay, which opened at $50K. Other items were up for sale, including a $1 bill signed by Buffett and sold for $9,100 and a signed Curry jersey that sold for $1,547.99. I thought it was $1 million. The auction moved online in 2003, allowing Buffett fans around the world to participate. The winning price for the lunch has held above $1 million since 2008. I wonder if any tech VCs will copy Warren Buffett, start selling lunches.

Some of them are on, uh, uh, very cool. I was, uh, I had some concerns around doing this on eBay just because of the fees, which can be pretty significant.

They probably waive it for charities though.

But they do, they do. Okay, there you go, there you go.

Okay, well, we have a question for you. So there was an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, "Typing is being replaced by whispering, and it's way more annoying." As a CEO, as a startup founder, I want your take on workplaces that are starting to resemble high-end call centers, only these employees are talking to AI. And so they start with an anecdote about working from home, Normally this couple would be typing on the keyboard, but now they're dictating to Codex and Claude Code. And over at Ramp, engineers sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistants. What do you think? Should the future of the office sound more like a sales floor? What do you think?

I think for— on one side, I'm pro this, this trend of like talking to your AI over typing, because I can audit what people are typing in the office. You know, what are they— what if they're typing on Instagram or a Twitch livestream?

Okay, so if you're just walking by, you can hear someone saying scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

Yeah.

Then there might be an issue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why are you doing that on the company time?

Sure, sure, sure.

If they're like talking to the AI, like, hey, make me like a—

it's more accountability.

More accountability.

Yeah.

On the other hand, it's like, I don't want to hear your prompts.

Sure.

Like, if, if somebody read my prompts, I would be so embarrassed.

Okay.

It's kind of like, you know, what's your— what's your May 2026 approach to prompting?

My May 2026 approach to prompting is I've completely— I've completely given up on like yelling at AI. Like, just freaking do this. I've come to stop doing that.

Okay. And I'm like, it's good now.

Yeah, I do more like cognitive behavioral therapy with with AI now. Like, I do more CBT. I try to, like, reassure the AI.

Oh, like, set it up for success.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can do this. Like, think about— think about, you know, you're, like, Palmer Lucky.

Yeah.

And you can design this, like, new piece of hardware that's never existed before.

Yeah.

So I do more of that. You know, up until 2025, I was more yelling at the AI.

Yeah. I've completely dropped out of the whole, like, don't make mistakes, don't hallucinate. I feel like all that's been either baked into the pre-training or post-training, or it's like even in the system prompt already. Yeah, I used to have the thing that annoyed me for a while was what is it, antithetical parallelism. So it's not this, it's that, or hyphens. Those types of things were just tells of AI-written content. And I had a special prompt that would inject that in everything. It would say, hey, don't use the it's not this, it's that, don't use contrastive parallelism or antithetical parallelism. But I since ripped that out and just went back to default. And it feels like all the firms sort of fixed the base training so that it's not as clankery, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Warren kind of ripped one of the models too, when he said, the spirit is eager, but the body is weaker.

Ooh. I just—

You think Warren's—

He's subtweeting. Yeah.

The models, the labs.

Yeah. What was the quote he said? He said, "It's not just that the spirit remains eager, but also that the flesh has become progressively weaker." No, he said, "I ran out of gas, the spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker." It has a nice, it's a bar. It has some rhymes, rhyming to it.

It's not just about the money.

Yeah.

It's about the message.

I think Warren needs a Drake—

Dude, he needs a mastermind.

He needs a verse on a Drake song. Drake, who just launched 3 albums today. Is that right, Drake? Launched 3 albums.

Isn't it like 6 hours? Are you a Drake fan?

I like some of his music. I'm not a, I wouldn't call myself a fan.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brutal. Brutal.

What about this idea for a gym that's themed like the Rainforest Cafe, and there's even a thunderstorm every minute, every 20 minutes. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe?

No, what is the Rainforest Cafe?

Rainforest Cafe is a themed restaurant where you walk in and there's rainforest all around you and there are statues of animals. And the special thing about the Rainforest Cafe is that it's not just like, you know, you go to some steakhouse and they have some pictures on the wall because showing the lineage or you go to an Italian restaurant and you see pictures of celebrities that came in and signed. It's not purely decorative. It's actually interactive. And at the Rainforest Cafe, every 20 minutes, there's a thunderstorm and it plays very loudly. And it actually draws your attention away from whatever you're talking about. It's a brain rot restaurant, basically. That's what Rainforest Cafe is. I can't believe you haven't been. You should go. Tyler, have you been to Rainforest Cafe?

I have not.

I want to go, though. They really go over the top with the decor. Look at the table. It looks like AI slop, honestly, on the table. Is it still real?

Well, I think it's because many of the leading labs trained almost exclusively on content. Yes.

Yes, from the Rainforest Cafe. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe, Tyler?

No.

Has anyone been to the Rainforest Cafe? Okay, we got a couple Rainforest Cafe enjoyers in the TV panel today. But a gym with a theme, would you go?

I feel like we're kind of reinventing like nature from first principles right now, you know?

You might just want to go to the rainforest to lift.

Yeah, just like lift heavy things, like go outside, like lift rock.

Yeah. Lift rock. So this poster suggests that all the machines would be painted to look like they're made of bamboo, the leather The leather is fake leopard print. Someone get me in touch with the mayor of Miami. This would go crazy over there. Men are allowed, or perhaps required, to wear loincloths, et cetera. It goes other places. And then he starts drawing out what it would look like. The gym that we worked out in today has a little bit of a theme to it, but it's not too on the nose, but there is, you notice the machines have some decorative stuff on it, and it feels like they went one notch further than just the standard gym equipment.

It's a little flamboyant, I would say.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about schemes that are allegedly taking place in Silicon Valley these days. RevSwap.ai. This seems like a joke. This seems like a drop designed to go viral. Hari Raghavan says, in case you're wondering, this is the stage of the market we are at. And the idea is that you trade dollars with other startups, and you book it as revenue. So RevSwap AI is the first— the world's first peer-to-peer revenue laundering platform. See, it's got to be a joke at that point. For SF startups, you give us $1 million, we give you $1 million back. Now you have $1 million ARR. Math. Start swapping.

How risky is this business? Yeah, the problem with these is it's funny for people that are like maybe closer to the inside, but this got half a million views.

Yeah.

So that means there's hundreds of thousands of people that think this is like a real thing.

Yeah, they either think they're doing a startup and they should do this, or they think they're outside and they're like, this is how bad startups are.

Yeah.

I don't think many startups are doing this, but if you've talked to VCs, is like quality of revenue coming up, revenue concentration, circular revenue deals, is any of that coming up these days?

I think investors deeply care about all of those things, and good investors still do their due diligence when investing in companies, especially when they're at a mid to later stage, right? Sure. But really, where do you draw the line, right? You see NVIDIA investing a lot of Neo Clouds that go buy their GPUs. They help start these Neo Clouds. Neo Clouds, and then you have, of course, NVIDIA investing in AI labs that end up being downstream consumers of these GPUs. And so I think, in a way, yes, it's kind of like a revenue swap where you're investing in a company and then they're kind of buying your product. Yeah. You're kind of just trading dollars. But so I think there's— In some places it makes sense, in some certain context. If you're a founder though, and if you're an early-stage founder, if you're just going for this, you have to ask yourself, OK, what am I really in this for? Am I here to build a business and build a thing that people want, or am I here to just like—

LARP.

LARP, yeah. And a lot of people do play founder as opposed to building a business, building a company.

Yeah, but this is also a crime. So it's not just LARPing. Like, I don't know.

I actually think you disclose it if you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal, you should probably discount it to zero. That's not wire fraud, right? Like, if you're disclosing it, like, the wire fraud is only when you are stating one thing as another, like you're lying. If you're not lying about it and you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal where we pay this company, they pay us, you should probably not give us any credit for that in our valuation.

Their entire life is a LARP.

Maybe.

Should we talk about Monet?

Circular deals, though. There's an interesting anecdote of when they worked out. Do you know this? ASML, 2012, they had a customer co-investment program where Intel, TSMC, and Samsung pitched in $6.8 billion across R&D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography and 450mm wafer technology. And so, The deal would look like an odd round trip of cash from the non-semiconductor pilled, but it worked and the customers effectively financed the creation of a new technology that they wanted and everyone came out just fine. And so we're 14 years in. ASML is a great company. We have EUV technology and it worked even though it was this weird circular deal where TSMC and Intel and Samsung were like, we want you to go make this machine. We're going to be the buyers of it and we'll also be the investors and the financiers of it. So It can work out, but probably not as simple as going to rev— what is it? Revcycle.ai or something.

As long as they disclose it.

Yeah. And this was, this was disclosed both by TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC at the time. And everyone reacted positively because they were working together. We need your take on this. This Monet. This Monet AI.

Can we, can we get this on the big screen?

Let's get this on the big screen because Shloms here says, "I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe in as much detail as possible what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting." What do you think?

Break it down.

What makes this inferior?

Me?

Yeah, art expert Rahul. You're putting me on the spot right now.

I see you browsing through museums on the weekend. Let's see.

He adds the made with AI tag, but there is a community note here and I'll spoil it. This is an actual Monet, Water Lilies.

No, no, no. So let me read some of the responses so far from people.

Okay.

I'm disappointed I have to even point it out. There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lily pads. "with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lily pad algae amalgam is egregiously vague like most AI art." And let's read some of the others. People have started deleting their responses.

No, really.

"The choice of color in places, i.e., the purple around the lily pad sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most Monet. I get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes To the brush palette, almost as if it's an AI. No frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors.

Are you an AI art enjoyer? Do you play around on Midjourney ever for fun? You do your cognitive behavioral therapy? Because a lot of people use Midjourney as sort of like art therapy. Yeah, they'll go in and they'll prompt it. It's less about making an image that they will sell or making an image for a commercial purpose or even sharing their images with anyone else. They just enjoy the game of they have an idea and they want to see it, you know, on the screen. And so they play around and then they are satisfied. It's like playing a video game. Like no one cares that you finished Dark Souls except you. You had fun.

All right, we gotta give some— there's some great feedback here on why it's bad.

Okay.

Fair warning before I dig in. This image is actually a very competent rendition. Oh, it's doing more right than most AI Monet. Okay, you asked what makes it inferior to a real Monet, so here's the honest breakdown. What's missing? The physical object. A real Monet is a thing before it's an image. This is the biggest gap and is not solvable by better prompting.

Huh.

Uh, and it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

It's not solvable with better prompting until that's like in the training data.

Yeah. Also, I mean, I mean, like, LLMs with tool use can just, if you ask for a Monet, they can just go get you the PNG of a Monet.

It feels less lively. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic art, the fine calculated highlights. The AI version is a granulated pixelation and it looks that way. It lacks the mess of humanity. And someone else says, the fact that it looks like S-H-I-T and is S-H-I-T. Slop. Doesn't look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate the style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet's typical choice of colors. Looks dull. So a lot of people are dunking on this. Of course, he posts, this is a real Monet. He baited them all.

It is. Wow. Someone took all of their feedback and turned it into an AI-generated Monet to try and improve it. Interesting. The other, the other AI art thing that's going on, which is very, very funny, is did you see Sony launch this new AI camera assistant with Xperia intelligence to bring stories to life? We have to pull this image up because I don't know what they were thinking. Like, it's, it's like one of the craziest attempts at shipping an AI feature, and I don't know what they were thinking. When you see these images, look at this. Like, this is, I don't know if you can tell on the screen, but like, it's not our camera. Our camera is not, like the camera that you're watching this on is not like miscalibrated on the contrast. It just adds like a ton of contrast and makes everything look way worse, uh, and the sandwich is so blown out. It's just all they did was just increase the brightness. The original looks great, and you have less detail on the right. And I cannot believe this is from the official gold-check Sony Xperia account. Like, this is not a joke. What do you think this is?

The product manager working on Sony Xperia hates AI. They wanted to botch the launch, so they get so much pushback that they don't have to work on AI anymore.

Something like that. Yeah, Mike O'Brien here says, I could be wrong, but I suspect this is a joke. If so, props to Sony for ragebanning the internet so hard. Just look at the sandwich. MKBHD made two videos about this kind of stuff being bad, and Google let out something similar earlier this week. I mean, obviously there are ways to integrate AI up-resing and AI color grading, like, at a much more intuitive level without doing this, but I don't know what they were thinking. How could they possibly approve that post? Maybe they had their, their monitor's contrast set like wildly wrong because to actually ship this, like your monitor would have to be woefully miscalibrated to think that the one on the right looks better. This one is the closest. Like it did sort of amplify the streak of light. This one is, if I had to pick one where the AI camera assistant did not completely degrade the image, this actually does work.

I mean, I can't. I can't get behind that. Look at the, like, what is the subject of the photo? Is it that light streak at the bottom or the flower itself?

I would say the AI camera assistant version is only 10% worse here, whereas the other ones make it like 200% worse. What do you think, Raul?

No, it's way, way worse.

If you had to pick one, but if you had to pick one AI camera assistant image, which one's the least chopped? Which one's the least botched?

Probably this one.

There you go.

But, but, but least you're going with this one.

No way, no way. This is so much worse. This is atrocious.

Here the original looks more AI than like—

It does. Wait, is it some sort of prank? Is this the Shlomes thing all over again where they're like, big reveal, the left is actually AI and the right is out of the camera?

You mean inverted?

Uh, no, no. What I'm saying is that so they, they post— so a lot of people were saying like the tags at the top were accidentally swapped and what if What if that's intentional? What if they're saying like, we took the bad photo on the right that's overblown, over, too contrasty, too bright, and with our AI, we got you to a reasonable photo on the left and big reveal tomorrow or whenever Sony puts this out and says, actually, we were able to restore the highlights, bring the contrast more natural and make the photo on the right look better with AI. That would be, that would be a good pitch.

But I do think they might have actually, I think this might have been an accident. They must have posted it.

Have they, have they commented since? I think they're just following the post about AI camera assistant. We'd like to explain the feature in more detail. It doesn't edit photos after shooting. It suggests 4 settings.

Wow, they're doubling down.

Oh no, the originals look so good by comparison. What are you doing?

Oh, wow.

This is— I don't know what's going on. You can choose any option. How about no option in this case?

Maybe this is like a psyop from Sony to—

Maybe. Well, there was a big reveal with the Swatch AP collab. I know you were looking at some watches earlier today at breakfast. Are you in the market for the collaboration between Audemars Piguet and Swatch?

Oh, absolutely.

With a wristband, you are in the market for this.

We're gonna go stand in line for—

yeah, after the show, right? You're gonna go?

I think that's the plan. No?

Yeah, yeah. Uh, people are calling it the new Le Bubu. You will see this on Birkin's Goyard tweets.

And we don't know yet that this is not an AI wearable. That could be the— that could be the, the missing element here.

Could be.

Yeah, well, so I think this is going to be a hit. I think this is going to be a hit. It's seeming more and more likely that they're not releasing any type of strap themselves. So people are going to do aftermarket straps. I think those will be frowned upon.

Phone case.

Oh yeah, like the Hailey Bieber, you know, like the makeup case.

Yeah.

The thing is, a lot of people are wearing fitness wearables on their wrists, which kind of competes on real estate with these fancy watches.

I know, but you got a lot of arm.

You got a lot of arm and you got two wrists.

You got eyes up.

Yeah, yeah, just keep going up and up and up and up. Anyway, give us the update on Julius. How are things going?

These are doing good.

We're—

we just launched slides last month. Slides is going well. So thank you. So Julius is slowly becoming the platform where you can bring your messy data and then analyze it, get insights, and not just that, but actually do the stuff after it, like create reports, dashboards, slides, and then very soon you'll be able to like email Julius and assign tasks for data work. And so if you work in finance, operations, marketing, you check out Julius.

How do you think about the trade-off between generative imagery for slide generation versus some sort of harness that generates a slide in sort of a, you know, traditional like software platform like PowerPoint or Google or Google Slides?

Absolutely. So The generative imagery for slides was just not great until GPT, the latest launch, Images 2. And the text in the text rendering of the images is so good that actually it completely changes the game. It's not just for creative assets. It actually can now be used for whole slides. And you can actually—

a lot of times I'll go to ChatGPT and I will dictate. I was wondering about the performance of different ETFs as they relate, like as they're more indexed to the semiconductor, as you get narrower from an S&P 500 to a NASDAQ to a QQQ-focused tech ETF all the way down to like a semiconductor ETF. What's the performance of the last year? I just wanted like a bar chart. And so instead of asking for like a table deep research report, I said, go pull all the data, put it together into like an infographic. It did it pretty well. I feel like it's a little bit of a leap of faith because I don't know where the data is coming from. It's a little messy. And then I would be very hesitant about maintaining a consistent style throughout a full presentation. But for something where I just want a one-off thing, so where is the— where's the demand from the customer on slide deck versus single slide generation?

Yeah, so the ImageGen is great if you want a single infographic or single graphic. If you want like a multi-slide deck, a whole story, you want to maintain brand consistency across the deck. And that's where using a code harness—

sure—

like JavaScript or HTML to generate slides is actually much, much more optimal. And so depending on what the user wants, Julius will choose whether to use Image 2.0 or use like a code harness to generate like multiple slides. But to answer your question, like, The image model is really, really good for, like, graphics, single slides, and then you can combine that with, like, a code harness to generate, like, multiple slides.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? Thanks for coming on the show.

It's been an honor.

Yeah. Thank you, guys.

Great hanging out this morning. We'll talk to you soon.

Likewise.

Yeah.

Have a good rest of your day.

We'll see you soon.

Another one. The big news today is, of course, Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced a bill to pause all AI data center construction. I want to know within this bill how they are defining AI data center. Of course, uh, GPUs are graphics processing units. You wire a bunch of them together, you can do AI, you can do machine learning, you can, uh, you can render CGI films. There's a lot of different uses, and I wonder how they're grappling with that definition. But, um, 300 local bills have been— 300-plus local bills have been filed. Half of planned 2026 data centers are facing delays or cancellation. Each one brings billions to local economy, says Gary Tan. The people who say they want American jobs are trying to block the biggest job creation engine since the interstate highway system. Sanders and AOC are straight up sabotaging the economy, says Nick Davidov, "No spy or rival country agent can achieve what local useful idiots can." And so people are going back and forth about the data center construction ban. I wonder how this will pencil out. Elizabeth Warren says, "A single AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and utility companies are passing the upgrade costs to you." not to the trillion-dollar tech giants. That, of course, was attempted to be addressed by the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, but it is early days. And so we'll have to see how that pans out.

Yeah, and this is the same bill that was introduced in March, but it's continuing to pop up again, obviously, as they try to move it along. Mm-hmm. But it hasn't— —passed committee yet. It doesn't obviously have like bipartisan support. Yeah. Very unlikely.

And there's a lot of geopolitical considerations. Anthropic put out a big essay today around different resolutions to US-China competition in the age of AI. Some very, obviously they are very aggressive about don't lose the lead, continue to build data centers, The nimbyism, the noise complaints, the environmental concerns, like all of these things do have to be addressed in a democratic society if we are to move along smoothly. Tyler.

Yeah, so just for like the definitions, how it's defined. So a data center is defined as a building that has more than 20 megawatts maximum power capacity or total peak power that are used to deliver 20 kilowatts or more to a single server rack, or to use liquid cooling to individual hardware components. Mm-hmm.

So yeah, I'm just wondering if we're gonna get some weird, some weird workaround where, okay, instead of like one big building, you get a thousand smaller buildings that are also—

it also says like a building that's contiguous or adjacent to another building. That's okay.

So I think they got that. So I have to put some like trees in between them or something. I don't know. I just like every time there's a law You know, if you make a law, people will find a way around the law. And so I'm very interested to see how this winds up changing. It could change it for good. You know, it could be like, okay, yeah, like clean energy and it's underground and it doesn't, it's not noisy and it doesn't create, it feels like the real issue at debate is like passing the cost onto people who don't benefit, a negative externality, which the government has been internalizing negative externalities since its inception. And so there's certainly a good outcome, but it will be—

Almonds are catching some heat from J-Cal. Oh yeah. He is showing almond production versus data center water consumption from 1999 to 2026. And yeah, everyone has been saying for years, even prior to the AI boom, just how much water almonds use. This was particularly top of mind when California was in a massive drought. You drive through different parts of California and it's just almond trees as far as the eye can see. And so anyways, almond, almonds catching strays.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you look at this and you think about the growth rate in this year, like you can see that the blue line is ticking up, and you can see that the red line for almonds is flatlining. And so if you are extremely aggressive about counting the ooms and you project this out a couple years, you could see these two things flip. But of course, there are ways to avoid situations like that with water use increasing, such as what Blake Scholl proposes, which is closed-loop cooling and booms superpower turbines that don't need any water, and you can avoid all of that. But the whole water debate seems like not the focus of the Sanders-AOC proposal. It seems much more focused on generation and upgrading the grid, which is expensive and is real. Everyone knows that data centers do use a lot of power. No one's saying that the high energy intensity is fake news, even though the water climate change debate was a little bit thrown, you know, it was sort of quickly debunked. The energy debate has not been debunked. And so there is a need for more clean energy, more power, and more grid upgrades that are not visited upon local communities. The big question that we were trying to answer, and we're gonna try and get someone on the show maybe next week to talk about this is like, What is the, if you were attempting to build a data center that had 80% approval, like what would that look like? What is the Ezra Klein abundance vision for a data center? It's probably powered by clean energy. It's probably somewhere very remote. Brandon was talking about the 40-minute commute. The 40-minute commute is something that many Americans do and it is not, insurmountable. And he was just reflecting on if you've ever driven in or around Las Vegas, if you drive 40 minutes in any direction, you get to a lot, a lot, a lot of empty land where certainly a big building is not gonna be an eyesore. You're not gonna be able to hear 60 decibels from 20 minutes away. And there is a lot of land, but that hasn't been the default construction methodology for a lot of data center constructors.

Yeah, this is like the, the TSMC plant in Arizona is like basically 30 minutes north of like central Phoenix. Yeah, it didn't seem like that. Yeah, so you basically go over a little like hill and then it's just like completely empty land. Yeah, there's a massive, uh, fab.

It's sick. I like that. I learned an interesting fact, which is that Apple has a secret fab. They have a silicon fab in Silicon Valley. They bought a fab for— I sent you the, uh, Where did I pull this up? I had to fact-check this because I saw it and it was framed as like this secret, like, you know, terrible thing. It was not that, it's not that scary. They bought it for $18.2 million. It's a 70,000 square foot facility owned by Maxim previously. They bought it maybe in 2015. And it was controversial because they were fined by, I believe, the EPA for some mislabeling of waste and air emissions controls. But it was a pretty small fine. It was something like a couple hundred, maybe $200,000. And it seemed like they might've just had a mistake.

They brought down the hammer on them.

Yeah, well, I think it was like, the air conditioning duct was slightly misconfigured. It was not like a nuclear waste spill, like destroying the whole town, but it was controversial obviously because Apple wants to be as clean and environmentally friendly as possible, which is why I lean into, they don't want a massive, like they're not even a scaled chip manufacturer. This is a prototype facility. They manufacture between 600 nanometers to 90 nanometers, way different than what's happening at TSMC with 2 and 3 nanometers. So it's not a secret facility in the literal sense. The secret fab framing comes mostly from critics and whistleblower coverage, not because it was unknown to government or industry with license. The EPA says the Apple facility on Scott Boulevard, so maybe that's your next trip, Tyler. You're going over to, where is it? It's in Santa Clara, in Santa Clara, on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, generated hazardous waste and had RCRA violations in 2023, 2024, which they made fixes for and they paid a $261,000 penalty. It's 3250 Scott Boulevard. If you're in Santa Clara, go stop by. Let's give it up for Scott.

I didn't know you had a boulevard named after you. It's very funny.

So the interpretation at the time was that it could support prototyping, testing, or heavy R&D, not mainline production. So your iPhone is not made in Santa Clara. It is made abroad.

It is made right here. Right here.

Tyler's desk. Tyler, yes. Apple designs the chips while TSMC and Samsung manufacture actual advanced processors. And the acquired fab does not necessarily mean Apple would manufacture its own chips. So interesting story.

Anyway, we covered this a little bit yesterday, but Figma crushed their Q1, 46% year-over-year revenue growth accelerating for the second straight quarter. They had net dollar retention rate of 139%, our highest rate in over 2 years, and they raised their 2026 revenue guidance. Yeah. Dylan says, design matters more than ever. I agree. Yeah, I agree.

Everyone's going to be building more software. At some point, we're going to need to make our websites look good.

At breakfast this morning, we were looking at a website. I showed this website to Rahul, and he said, oh, that's the classic, like, taste is the new moat website. Just like the website that looks— the tasteful-looking website that looks like every other website, which inherently means it's not— Yeah.

The prompt was like, make it look tasteful, and it like ripped some shameless thing. It didn't feel inspired. And it is interesting.

Figma is up 14% today, back up to $12 billion. Yeah, there we go. $12 billion.

Fantastic. A year ago, FIG would be trading at 30x rev on those numbers, but since all the algos have zeroed out terminal multiple, it's only up 8%, says Dollybolly. And yeah, people are going back and forth on this. But two guys making sandwiches at the Wawa loudly discussing their profits on semi trades just now. Is that a top signal? I was looking back through the timeline and Martin Shkreli called the top on semis, I think May 1st, something like that. And Tyler's shaking his head. He thinks we're still going up, up only, right?

I mean, he was effectively wrong, right?

I mean, it's been 2 weeks. It's like, yeah, if you call the top, I expect you to call the top today. Like, you know, he's like, it's a rough call. Yeah, I think you get like, uh, you get like plus or minus a month. That's a long plus or minus like 2 months even. Yeah, 2 months. Yeah, I mean, like the big, the big macro narrative on semis is like, uh, is like a multi-year.

End of June is, is kind of the cutoff.

Yeah, and end of End of June, I'd be like, you need to update this. You need to give us an update on whether or not you still think the early May was the top of the semiconductor cycle. There are some companies that are in semis that are trading ahead. I mean, Intel is, we were talking about with Doug O'Loughlin yesterday. Intel has a lot of good news and good plans, but now they have to like actually execute. There are a bunch of other semiconductor stocks that are essentially the multiple on forward earnings is actually compressing. So Micron, I think, was one that's up 790%, but forward earnings are up 2,000%. And so they're going to be growing a ton next year. They have a ton of demand. And so the market's moving on that, but they haven't realized that yet. And so, I mean, I think that they will. But the question is, how far can they go? How far can they take it?

Well, we're waiting for the situational awareness Q1 30F. Did it drop? Not yet. Okay. Not yet, but— Have to figure it out. Should be in the next few hours.

Well, xAI co-founder Egor Babushkin is planning to raise up to $1 billion at an up to $5 billion valuation for a new AI research startup with General Catalyst, possibly leading. Why is Tyler laughing so much?

Raul had a good post earlier. Oh yeah, okay. GC has a very high moral bar, so I don't think Igor will be continuing to work on Ani. Maybe. And some of the other features that the xAI have been pivoting on.

Might be pivoting. I think that, that, that whole debate did sort of quiet down. Like we were wondering if there was gonna be an escalation, if we were gonna see Reggie and Eric like going at it or Hamant jumping in. But it's sort of, you know, it felt like a lot of the A16Z folks came out and put the line in the sand.

Let's say you've never closely followed a rap battle before, 'cause there can often be a 1 or 2 day gap. They're in the studio. They're in the lab. They're in the lab. They're in the studio.

Cooking up the next one. Response video. I would love the new meta to move away from the vibe reel, the podcast appearance, the tweet, and the 1-minute polished scripted ad firing back attack ads. This is great. I do think we should get more into just straight up political attack ads. Like Mark Andreessen wants to fund a robot dog. He wants to put your dog out of business. General Catalyst is funding "for real dogs and Andreessen is for fake dogs." Vote, like raise money from general catalyst.

Mark Andreessen wants to shut down your local veterinarian, turn it into a dog robot workshop.

Exactly, exactly. Like there's a certain aesthetic to the political attack ad that we all know and love, and no one has taken that and appropriated it as a form form of marketing. So greenfield opportunity over there. Well, the research startup from the xAI co-founder is called River AI. I like that name. I think that the— Drop the AI. The recursive, the general intelligence, applied intelligence, accelerated intelligence. There's one that's like indescribable, ineffable intelligence. Like it was getting a little crowded in that namespace. Unconventional. River. River just sounds good. I like it. I think it's a good name.

How about conventional intelligence? Conventional intelligence.

Midwit intelligence. No one, you know.

Mid-curve intelligence.

Yeah, you do sort of have like, you know, more left-leaning AI labs, more right-leaning AI labs. There's no, there's no like, you know, good old boy Southern intelligence. Like a model that's explicitly trained to focus on like a cold beer, a lifted truck. That's true. You know, getting your boots in the mud.

That's true. Like kind of like country intelligence.

Country intelligence. Country intelligence. Country intelligence is an opportunity.

Where it just constantly, it can't stop talking about cold beer. Yeah, yeah. Like it'll just slip in like—

Cold beer on a Friday night.

You did great on that task. Why don't you go have a cold beer? You deserve a cold beer.

No one's working on country intelligence. It just can't stop.

It's like goblins, right, or telling you to go to bed. It just is like, how about that new F-150? Yeah. It's like, what does that have to do with what we're working on? Yeah, exactly.

It's like Dario talks about having a country of geniuses in the data center. I want country geniuses in the data center.

What about a country of Ford F-150s in a data center? Exactly.

Exactly, I want country geniuses. Well.

This is an interesting data point from David. He says the entire NIH annual budget for neuroscience research for all scientists across the US is about $3 billion a year. Now there are something like dozens of Neo Labs that have all raised zero to a billion within months of being founded. And they are all doing the same thing. I guess the solution here is to give $3 billion to a neolab working on neuroscience. The solution is always more neolabs.

You know, when I went from nonprofit to for-profit, has anyone thought about going the other way?

Well, I do think a lot of these neolabs could end up being nonprofit.

Potentially, potentially, you never know. Well, you know what's not a nonprofit? Benchmark Capital. Because when Benchmark invested $6.7 million— eBay. In 1997, the auction company's valuation was $20 million. By next spring, the company was valued at more than $21 billion. The value of Benchmark's stake had grown 100,000% in less than 2 years.

I'm doing the Chad sound effect.

I know, I can see, I can, I see it. I know, I, I, I know what's happening. It's actually better without the IEMs.

Somebody commented on Spotify yesterday that somebody needs to talk to Jordy about the soundboard. And then a bunch of other people commented and said, yeah, that he's not using it enough. Yeah! Sorry, sorry. What do you think about that? That's like asking a musician, like, hey, don't make music. Yeah. You know?

How would you react if some enterprising author, journalist came in and said, "Hey, we wanna write the definitive story about TVPN. We're gonna profile Tyler and Jordy and John, Ben, Brandon, the whole crew. We're gonna tell the story." And you're like, "That sounds amazing. I would love to be in a book. That's so cool. Like what we're doing is so important." And then you're like, "What's the book gonna be called?" And the author's like, "I'm gonna call it E-Boys." Would you be down for that? Or would you be like, "Oh, Dammit, I kind of was hoping you would refer to me as a man. I like this title. Or an adult. You like this?

Yeah. Also, the subtitle. The subtitle's hilarious. The Six Tall Men? Why is that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of you had me in the first half there, but then the subtitle comes back, 'cause it's the true story of the six tall men who backed eBay, Webvan, and other billion-dollar startups. It's the book about Benchmark by Randall Stross.

I've read this book.

If you haven't read it— It's probably been—

—a review. 6 or 7 years. I've read it.

Benchmark's financial exit on eBay was known as a kegel in the VC industry. That's like the term triple-double being associated with Oscar Robinson because of this historic season average. In June 1997, when the internet auction site was in its infancy, the executives each pledged 6.9 million shares as collateral for two $750,000 loans from Benchmark Capital. 'The stock wasn't yet publicly traded, and the shares were valued at 11 cents apiece. I remember meeting Bob Kagle at Benchmark in 1999,' says Trent Griffin, 'and talking to him about eBay. He believed in early that online marketplaces could be important.' Yeah, I'd say so. 'Investing in a category creating business required variant perception. Consensus doesn't identify unknown unknowns a priori.' Anyway.

All right. Interesting. Let's pull up this video you posted this morning. That is completely flopping. Yeah, it is flopping, but it's funny to me.

We got one, Nick. Thank you, Nick Carpentino said, uh, Carpenito says, banger.

Can we put it on the big screen?

If we play this, we're gonna get demonetized and we're gonna have to cut it out. But, uh, you can just go enjoy it on my timeline.

I can send the without the music.

Nah, it doesn't hit then. Anyway, uh, it's Fast and the Furious plus Jerome Powell. It's fun. Anyway, moving on, uh, uh, Who was, Scott Bessant was on CNBC talking about meeting with the Chinese Vice Premier. They're saying it's one of the wettest and purplest appearances in television history, I suppose. I'm not saying that, but Uncle Doomer is, I guess. We're going to talk about forming a board of trade for the bilateral trade between the US and China.

And we're going to talk about the board of investment that will be responsible for investment in non-sensitive areas.

That's a lot of jargon. Look, being purple on CNBC, that's on CNBC or whoever his lighting technician is for this call-in. If you're calling into a television show or TVPN, check your lighting. Put a big light off to the side right here. Make it nice and soft. Make sure you look normal. Adjust the white balance. These things can be fixed.

Ask ChatGPT if you're having trouble. Yeah, is this on— Air Force One?

Yeah, it's probably in a very temporary setup, like just curtain, flag, what else do you need? Like, it's not that much. But also powder. I don't do this because we have a temperature-controlled facility and we're, you know, like, take showers before the show and dry off. But if you are moist, you can use some sort of powder that a lot of people put on before big interviews. It's sort of one step away from like a full hair and makeup setup, but it is recommended if you are moist and you're doing press. These are the things you learn from doing content. Anyway, the CEO of Patek Philippe, Terry Stern, says you don't come to Patek Philippe because it's more expensive. Well, why do you come to Patek Philippe? We will have to figure it out. It's in today's Financial Times. I want to read it on paper, but you can follow along on the actual article. So— oh no, this is the wrong one. Here we go. You don't come to Patek because it costs—

John, what's up? Chat's loving the casual show today. Yeah, they're saying you should order food. Oh, should we try not to eat? We try not to—

eating doesn't really work here. You get a lot of dead air. It doesn't quite quite work. But, uh, you know what does work? Going to Patek Philippe, but not because it costs more, but because of their approach to retail and production. Apparently, uh, they— these are stormy times for luxury watchmakers. We've talked about this with Quaid from Bezel, talked about, uh, all of the tariffs and whatnot, but the waves have not yet crashed into Patek Philippe. Uh, do you say Patek or Patek? It's great. Great. It's supposed to be Patek. I think the real ball knowers say Patek. But the war is there. But we are still selling, says Terry Stern. Stern is the fourth generation of his family to lead Patek. The privately owned high-end watchmaker does not report on its financial performance. And the 55-year-old Swiss scion of the Stern family is not about to break with convention and go into detail. But Morgan Stanley estimates its revenue has jumped by more, by about 25% over the past 2 years to, how much do you think they're making per year? Gross revenue? Gross revenue for Patek Philippe in a full year, what do you think they're making?

Wow, I actually have no idea. Is it like $5 billion? Not bad.

$3.2 billion is the estimate from Morgan Stanley. You divide that by what, $100,000 on average for a watch? 'Cause they have a lot that are higher, they have some that are 60, 50 or something, but, uh, not moving a ton of watches. But don't forget, Patek Philippe doesn't produce that many watches. Patek produced about 75,000 watches last year and expects output to remain at the same level. We have good balance around the world, and we have been very cautious about allocation. If one part of the world doesn't work well, we can always shift the watches. Patek is clearly active in securing its own retail footprint. In March, it acquired the multi-brand retailer Beyer Chronometrie for an undisclosed sum. Beyer, a Zurich-based jeweler founded in 1760— overnight success there— is thought to be the world's oldest watch retailer and oldest Patek dealer. Stern said it would become the brand's fourth owned and operated boutique-style salon, adding outlets in Geneva, London, and Paris, and will only sell Patek watches. But he's quick to quash suggestions the move marks the beginning of a retail grab in the same vein as Rolex's acquisition of the luxury watch retailer Bucherer in August of 2023. I'm a watchmaker, not a retailer. I still need the retail. Patek has taken a strategic approach. Are you doing those voices on me? I imagine you are. I like made one joke about it being too much and And people were like, "Oh, John doesn't have a good sense of humor about it." I'm fine. Don't worry. According to analysts at EveryWatch, which I guess is the semi-analysis of the watch industry, the Rolex move generated revenue of almost $600 million last year for Switzerland's largest watchmaker. This is the certified pre-owned business model that Rolex launched in 2022. 10% of the global watch market for secondhand Rolex watches. Is everyone— when everybody started, they thought they could make a lot of money. Then they realized it's not that easy. Stern doesn't rule it out though. I'm thinking about something, but it's too early to talk about it. So vague posting. He's vague posting about potentially financial certified pre-owned Pateks at a retail store. You go and you buy something, can't afford, can't get an allocation, the latest watch, or something comes in that's special and needs to go on the secondhand second market, uh, he can take a piece of that. For now, he seems content with the shape and strategy of the business. Morgan Stanley's figures indicate that the top 4 privately owned Swiss watchmakers— Patek Philippe together with Rolex, AP, and Richard Mille— control about 50% of the luxury watch market last year, up from 37% in 2019. There's consolidation in the market. Smaller players are fighting for survival. I don't need to have more brands sharing this market, but he does recognize the problem. I don't want anybody going down either, but a lot of people will be out of business. What a wild quote. Look, it'd be a shame if my competitors were destroyed and burned to the ground. I don't want that, but— But it's very likely. It's gonna happen. Some of those struggling with increased competitive pressures have already turned to new markets to generate sales, particularly India, and also the Swatch collab might be an answer to this. Stern won't be following though. Why should I go there? It's too early. Most of the Indian clients that want Patek are living in London or traveling to Geneva in the Middle East, so it's not my priority. What access they might have to his watches when they, when they travel is also unclear. The tourist doesn't really have the chance to buy a Patek, he says, the retailer has to sell to the local client. So he's like, the folks in India who want a Patek can just go to Switzerland, but then he's like, but also I will never sell the tourists. You have to be a local. So I imagine he's talking about like Indian billionaires that have homes in the Middle East or Switzerland or Geneva or London.

Yeah, if you have an enemy that's into, that's getting into watches and they don't really know the game yet, tell them to book a trip to Geneva. Because all the major brands are present there. Yeah, watchful. And stores, and they should just go there if they want a nice watch. They should just go there and ask for one. I'm sure they'll be very successful.

Interesting. So the US is shifting away. Patek's US retailer network has been reduced by two-thirds to 38 stores, but it still accounts for 16% of of the company's total revenue, so they're not doing too poorly. There's a certain category of clients who may be like this, he says, when asked about the perception of his watches as elite status symbols. But you don't come to Patek because it's more expensive, he says. His family's company is not aimed at the kind of customer who wants to flaunt an expensive watch to command attention. This is not me. They won't be doing the iced out from the factory anytime soon, I suppose.

Does he talk about the Cubitus?

No, almost two decades. No, dodged entirely.

Doesn't, didn't talk about it. Well, they're not asking hard questions at the Financial Times.

Yeah, real missed opportunity. I don't know, the Cubitus, I feel like the Cubitus was advertised in here though. Isn't it on the back of this? I feel like I saw it in this Financial Times. There's a lot of ads in here. I don't know. Nozina. Louis Vuitton. I feel like I saw an ad for Cubitus.

Yeah. How many ads? We got a lot.

You have a Cubitus ad over there? What about this? In here? In here? No? What about in the journal? Is it in the journal? I feel like I saw that for the Cubitus somewhere. Anyway, we should go over to the Journal because the Mansion section, uh, has a very interesting story today about a 40-year marriage built one gut renovation at a time. If you want a successful relationship, buy 10 houses over 4 decades and constantly be renovating. I think there's a lot of truth in this. Let's read the story. I'll give you my take. So One Oklahoma couple spent decades and roughly $14 million buying, redoing, and selling 8 properties around Tulsa. For their 9th production, they've built from the ground up. They say for them, it's an adventure. Ann and Mark Farrow are real estate wildcard, always at home, never settled. Over 40 years, they've gutted and lived in 8 houses around Tulsa. They built, the 9th they built together. Their house transactions have totaled about $14 million. A portfolio market by— a portfolio market by reimagined floor plans and high-end finishes. Their latest, a 7,200-square-foot build, draws on everything they have learned since their first renovation in the 1980s. Now even the pharaohs wonder whether the journey is over. This house would be hard to duplicate, says Mark 67, 67, hmm. The Wall Street, Brain Rot Journal at it again.

Turning 67 in 2026 is brutal.

Nightmare. They also profiled an entrepreneur who's 67 who just started a company, weird, but company's ripping, doing well, never too late to start a company. Let's get him some, let's have him on the show. We'll read that later. Yet resisting another fixer-upper won't be easy for the couple who rejected being called flippers, instead identifying as serial renovation lovers. "I go through withdrawal without a home project," says Ann, 63, who's retired. While 9 home projects would send most couples into mediation, the Farrows view logistical nightmares as a shared thrill. Their secret, radical honesty and speed. For us, it's an adventure, Mark says.

These are real operators.

They're— no, no, this is a team. This is— you're looking at the Collison brothers, the family business builders of real estate. We should scroll through the actual images of the house because they got started pretty small. $86,000 in 1986, they bought the starter home. They sold it in 1993 for $97,000. Held for 9 years, only made 10%. But that was where the adventure began in 1986 with a Cape Cod-style house. It was 2,000 square feet. Interior was complete with lavender Formica countertops and a wet bar. Their first construction project closing in an office to make an extra bedroom. Interesting. You know how alcohol sales are falling off a cliff? Yes. And there's like, oh, who was it? Derek Thompson had a good post about this, and he sort of enumerated all the different reasons why alcohol is falling off a cliff. He posts a lot. He posts a lot of good stuff. Where can I find it? Alcohol, alcohol. Wow, he does post a lot. He said something. I'm like dazed by, okay, here we go. So off the top of his head, secular anti-alcohol trends, GLP-1s, post-1970s rise of helicopter parenting, although I feel like you can drink on a helicopter as long as you're not piloting it, reaction to the binge drinking spike of the late 20th century. There was a binge drinking spike in the late 20th century? Oh, that was like the CKY, Johnny Knoxville era, I suppose, that probably led to a lot of that.

There's also a power law in binge drinking, right?

Yeah, they say what, 1% of the binge drinkers do 99% of the binge drinking, something like that?

No, I think it's actually like 10% of people that consume alcohol consume like 90% of the alcohol.

This is true even for the, like you think about like the market for Budweiser or beer brands. And you think about like the college party getting a 30-rack, but in fact, the vast majority of the revenue is driven by the like Johnny Six Pack, which is like a guy who gets off of work at 5 and picks up a six-pack on the way home, on the drive home, and doesn't go for, doesn't buy in bulk because if he gets the 12-pack, he won't be able to stop drinking after 6 and he'll be hungover for the workday the next day. And so it's six-pack every single day, and this was like a thing in America for a very long time, but it doesn't seem to be happening.

Andrew Huberman said—

You gotta keep those agents running at all times. Huberman said, "All right guys, let's cut it out." And let's see, so phones are apparently killing teenage partying because everything's on video, I suppose, so you don't wanna be in compromising situations in the surveillance state, supposedly. Surge in young adult of fitness, dancing clubs down, running clubs up, and the general rise of health-maxing culture among both liberal yuppies and maha devotees. So huge collapse in drinking among high schoolers. It fell in the 1980s, it was 92% of 12th graders who had ever consumed alcohol. This year, 47%. That is remarkable. There's also a substitution effect between alcohol and cannabis. Significant proportions of cannabis use led to less alcohol, sort of mixed bag there. And I think non-alcoholic beer is getting pretty good as a small part in this too. So there are lots of reasons why it's down. And I wonder if we will see the next generation of real estate development stay away from the wet bar. Like you, like, as you look at houses, wet bar is not at the top of a lot of people's lists. You know, they want home office because of COVID work remote. They want sauna, pool, playroom, maybe movie theater even. Nah, I think I'm weird on that one, but wet bar.

Clearly movie theater's still pretty early.

I would say movie theater is above wet bar for most people. Yeah. But wet bar used to be like, you gotta have it. Like it was in a 2,000 square foot house. Like it was in like a starter home that cost $86,000. And the builder or whoever lived in this house was like, well, we gotta have a wet bar here, so let's do that.

2026 was the year that wet bar and home data center swapped.

Oh, you think the home data center thing is gonna take off? The tiny boxes are gonna be stacking up. Yeah, yeah. I was watching a reel from Markiplier. Home cluster. Yeah, yeah. Do you know—

Cluster in the basement.

Do you know the story of Markiplier? No. Okay, YouTuber, filmmaker, online— I know he had a crazy head movie. Exactly. So Markiplier, he does these let's play videos for indie horror games. So he would essentially like a Twitch streamer, but on YouTube and would upload the full let's play. He was listed by Forbes as the third highest content creator on the platform in 2022, won 4 Streamy Awards, spun off his YouTube fame into a notable media career. And then in 2023, he signed with UTA and starred in a series called Edge of Sleep and then made his theatrical debut directing, producing, writing, and starring in and basically financing horror film Iron Lung in 2026. Which was a breakout hit for a $3 million budget. The box office is $51 million. Real narrative violation on can YouTubers cross the chasm. They can if they bring their audience into the theater, but Hollywood doesn't wanna play nice with them at all. Because he still had to sort of go around in this like weird way where this seems like an obvious thing if you were a studio executive that you would have been able to predict this, but they didn't. In this case, and he financed it himself. Anyway, Markiplier was talking about the process of doing one particular visual effects shot with, I think, a lot of blood, like, pouring everywhere. And so, he's not in the AI era. He's also not in the practical era. He's going to be using visual effects for this simulation of fluids, which is extremely computationally intensive. You have to create the the system that shows with the gravity, simulate the gravity, simulate all of the different 3D meshes, where the geometry is, where the blood will be spilling in this particular scene. And he was working with an outsourced visual effects house that was very, very costly. And most importantly to him, it required a lot of back and forth. And there was, he mentioned, uh, it was an international group. So there was a little bit of like lost in translation where he would say, I want "Okay, I want the blood to be more red or darker." And then they would say, "Okay, we'll re-render." And that would take days. And then they would come back and he'd be like, "No, I actually want it to be splashier or, you know, thicker or something like that." And so those notes were going back and forth and he wound up converting a bathroom in his house to a supercomputer. Like he basically got a whole bunch of racks and a whole bunch of GPUs and wired them all together and was able to do the rendering his own, and he actually put in 220-volt power into his bathroom, like it's where you charge an electric car. And he said that the electricity was actually somewhat expensive, but it sped up the development so much that even though this bringing it in-house process was extremely expensive, it was still worth it. So I think get rid of the wet bar, put in a home data center. If you're building a new house and you want it to— if you're doing a flip, It's going to be the hottest trend of the next couple of years. A place to stack up Mac Minis. IT cabinet, otherwise. So they moved on to the Heartbreaker. They were moving up. 1992, they bought a house for $173,000. Sold it 2 years later for $225,000. A little bit more of a bump. 3,000-square-foot traditional brick house. Then they get into the Rambling Ranch. They actually stepped back in terms of price. This one was only $140,000. But they sold it in 1999 for $250,000. Then they move into the architectural anchor. Then there's something interesting. They were in this estate, Mark bought a house, I bought a rose garden. They paid $785,000 in 2007. That's right before the housing collapse. They were probably underwater for a little bit, but they wound up getting out with a good gain in 2014 for $1.675 million. 2,600 square feet. House needed a gut renovation. They added the best of everything, included basement sports bar. They went back to the bar. No data center back in 2007. 4 televisions. I don't know. Local compute existed then. You could have a LAN center. You could be LANing. You could be playing COD. You could be playing Rust. Outside, they enlarged the rose garden then in 2014. Said, "Why did I even answer the phone?" 6 hours later, their real estate agent brought an innocent looker by the house, and they committed to a sale. Then, they dramatically downsized. In 2014, they moved into an apartment for $320,000. They sold that for a gain of $375,000. Then, they moved to the penthouse in the same building, got renovated again, and then finally, they moved to the Tulsa Picasso, and then they built their massive new home, which they actually bought the land for just $740,000, but then they put a construction budget of $5 million, a huge ratio of house to land prices, but they have paid for everything, prepaying for windows and HVAC units a year in advance just to stay ahead of the supply chain. The result is a home that balances grand scale with the warmth that has become that have become the Faros trademark. The interior has walnut floors, mahogany trim, and a dramatic marble fireplace with graphite and amber veining. Though it does have what Ann considers her biggest ever design blunder, a swim jet, which creates a current for swimming in place in the pool. It's a treadmill pool, and she doesn't like it. She says, "I just don't like using it." Have you ever used a swim jet? Swim jet, have you ever felt the urge to go on a swimming treadmill?

I've never been a big swimmer. I did rent a house at one point that had—

More of a surfboard guy. What about wave pool?

That would be an option. Yeah, there is this company that makes a device that allows you to mimic paddling on a surfboard.

But you can't stand up and actually surf?

No, it's just for— Oh, that's brutal. It's just for training this motion. That's the worst. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty, yeah. They pitch it as like you live, you don't live near the beach and you're going on a surf trip and you want to be in peak.

Oh, so it's truly for working out. Okay. But okay. Well, anyway, did they do a wet bar? Let's find out. I don't think so. They did a baby kitchen for catering, a wine room, leveling up, and an office that feels perfect perched in the trees. The couple remains unsentimental about the bricks and mortar. We'd never move back into a house we've sold. We're always looking to what's next. For now, they say they're having too much fun with their current house, hosting parties, golf friend get-togethers, board meetings, and even a wedding to think about what's next. Those who know them best are skeptical. I give them 3 to 5 years. There is this one elusive neighborhood that keeps slipping through their fingers, I predict they will do a house project one more time. Famously, there was Bob Hope in—

Adam in the chat, "I used a swim jet. It was like trying not to drown in a controlled manner." Yeah.

Doesn't sound good. He, Bob Hope, was a radio star, talk show host, traveled the world, did USO tours, always on tour, world famous. Must have been very difficult for his relationship with his wife, but they worked together for decades. And I think part of the secret was that they were constantly renovating this massive estate in Burbank. And they would renovate it from start to finish, back and forth constantly. And he had this amazing office there with a vault that was— that you could walk in, and he had every joke that he he'd ever written cataloged in filing cabinets there and had a whole studio basically where his writers' room could come to him. And then eventually when they got older, they built an elevator. And this whole time they had a project that they could work on while he was also doing his project and everything else. So never bored, and it stood the test of time. Anyway, have you heard of Smashbox Cosmetics? No. Has anyone heard of Smashbox Cosmetics. What is the story of this company? Because the co-founder has one of the greatest names I've ever heard. His name is Dean Factor. Dean Factor. It's a powerful name. And he is selling an estate in Los Angeles for just shy of $50 million. It's in Sullivan Canyon. It was inspired by the architecture of classic California ranches, including San Ysidro Ranch, where John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned. I didn't know JFK was up in San Ysidro Ranch. Cosmetics Scion, Dean Factor and his wife Shannon Factor knew they had their work on their— work cut out for them in 2011 when they purchased a neglected piece of property in Los Angeles' Sullivan Canyon. The modest, dilapidated house on the roughly 8.5-acre parcel— that's a huge parcel for this part of town— was filled with asbestos. The driveway was cracked, the landscaping was barren and dry for 6 years. It was kind of used as a dog park, so it was just beat up. Oh, do you think robot dogs would do more damage? 'Cause they're heavier, right? And also the EMF might fry all the local fauna, all the local bushes are just getting roasted by the Boston Dynamics radio waves. Just as it's stepping through the grass, the grass is just wilting and dying around.

You could put a microwave on top of the robot dog, plug it in, just be running it constantly.

Yeah, they're like, "It doesn't pee on the grass. There's gonna be no damage." Have we studied it? Do we know that that's the case?

Have we looked at the data?

Have we looked at the data?

So we looked at the data.

We looked at the data and it's actually 10 times worse than just having a dog running around. I don't know.

The robot dog's only 75 pounds. Okay. So that's like a big dog.

It's half my dog. Yeah, there's dogs that are bigger than that. Okay, are there any other environmental damages that could happen from letting a robot dog run wild on an abandoned property? Let's figure it out. Uh, undeterred, the Factors bought the land for $8 million according to property records. Unable to salvage the home, they kept knobs, fixtures, and other hardware, using it in the new roughly 17,000-square-foot home with a private lake. Private lake? That is insane. Fruit trees and and medicinal herb garden. Now, with the two oldest of their five children in college, they are listing the property for $50 mil, or $48.5. Dean's great-grandfather co-founded the cosmetics company Max Factor. What are we doing here? Whoa. That is an insane name. Dean co-founded Smashbox Cosmetics, which Estée Lauder acquired in 2010. He's now a private investor. Wow. The factors spent years rehabilitating the land, installing irrigation, regenerating the soil, replanting seeds, and caring for trees.

It looks fantastic.

Their 8-bedroom home was inspired by the architecture of San Ysidro Ranch, which we mentioned. It does look fantastic. So, ooh, the downstairs is pretty cool. The basement-level entertainment hub, they call it the lounge. It has a wet bar. It also has a pool table and a game center. Nice little rustic vibe. This feels straight out of like Montana or something, and the rest is very, very modern California. Uh, really, really nestled in there. The property has indoor and outdoor fireplaces, private hiking trails, and a sports court. Over the years, every inch of the house and land has been enjoyed by the children, friends, and many animals. So they're letting the animals run wild. No robots on, on site. We needed extra quiet spaces for studying and working. Other amenities include a gym and elevator and a massage and yoga room. And this last one, the Treehouse, magical little inspiration portal set in nature. This thing's cool. I like a big— that, that is— that even a treehouse? That's just a house that's adjacent to a tree. I feel like a treehouse needs to not touch the ground and be built entirely around the tree to qualify. Slurping, right? Yeah, that— because you see these houses where they put the tree inside the house This is like, this is more that than a full treehouse.

It looks like the tree's going through the porch. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I, I think there's a little bit of false advertising. That's a tree porch. This is a tree porch. This isn't a treehouse. This is a house that's built adjacent to a tree. Uh, nice try, nice try.

Could be a great place for a home data center though.

It could be, it could be inside of a tree. Uh, Do you think, you know how like with AI a lot of people are building like useless stuff? Like you see a lot of things, this happens all the time where someone will like vibe code something and you'll be like, but I could just use the real thing. Do you think like during like the metallurgy revolution, people were like, I made a tree out of iron and people were like, but why can't I just use it? Why can't I just have a tree? People were like, it's an iron tree. And then they had to explain like, Oh, we're gonna have to be more creative here. We're gonna have to do something new with this. And then people were like, okay, like rails for trains or boilers for steam engines. They were kind of doing that.

They're like, I made wood out of metal. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that.

You gotta be, there's a lot of when a new technology comes around, you just sort of reinvent everything. This was the same thing with a lot of, you see it in media all the time where the new platform comes and it's the old thing on the new platform. Form doesn't quite fit.

But did you see, yeah, that Matthew McConaughey once exiled himself from Hollywood and lived as Mateo in Peru? No, is this real? For 22 days without electricity. Ooh. He said, I needed to get my feet on the ground, so I clicked out. Boom, go to Peru. I needed to find it to check the validation. I knew I had it. I just had to go prove it. Hmm. I wonder. But I did question, now that I just got famous, I've got all this affiliation for this and that and the other, and I'm trying to decipher which part's real and which part's BS. I needed to meet people who knew me as Matteo. And at the end of 22 days, the tears in their eyes and the tears in my eyes and the hugs we had on the sadness and happiness of saying goodbye were all based off of the man they met named Matteo, who had nothing to do with the celebrity. It reaffirmed my own identity that, oh, I still got it. This is based on me. There might be alpha in going to Peru, adopting a fake name, and living for 22 days without electricity. Yeah. Because every time I hear Matthew speak, there's always some wisdom that comes through. How did he pull this off? Tyler, you missed your opportunity to go to China this week and just simply post a picture and say, uh, thank you for— thank you to, uh, China for allowing me to be here in your incredible country during this incredibly significant visit. But it's not too late to go to Peru.

When did he go to Peru? Do we know what year this was? Let's find out. Because he's married with 3 kids. I'm imagining it's a big ask to be like, "Honey, I'm gonna be gone for a month and I won't have electricity. Good luck with the 3 children." But clearly worked out, they're still together, so, you know, it landed. Wait, it was in '97? Okay, that was before he was married. Anyway, another option, If you're feeling burned out at 67, you don't want to renovate your house, start a business. This entrepreneur started a business at 67, says it's been much better than retiring. So many of my retired friends are bored, but I'm constantly learning new things and meeting new people. So my late father-in-law, this is a piece by Daniel Oxte. He says, my late father-in-law loved to organize.

They're saying Matthew is LARPing, Matteo. He was just LARPing around. Actually.

Just LARPing it up. My late father-in-law loved orchids, and in his decades-long passion, he built and maintained two large greenhouses. At an age when most people were retired or worse, he was still breeding new hybrids, knowing full well that they wouldn't blossom for years. He wasn't a man to sit idly in death's anteroom awaiting the Grim Reaper. I take heart from his example when I wonder in moments of doubt or exhaustion, why in the world have I launched a demanding business in what otherwise might have been a leisurely dotage? In some ways, the nature of our undertakings is similar. Mine is a publishing venture, but when I— but I was more motivated by the flowers, which is to say, the books we bring forth, than any prospect of financial gain. Some, oh, so he's launching a Stripe Press competitor? Whoa. Shots fired. Call Tammy Winter, tell her to double down because there's a 67-year-old who's coming and he's gonna eat Stripe's lunch potentially. No, it seems like this is more of a labor of love. Starting a business is a lot of work, but for an older entrepreneur, that can be more of a feature than a bug, he says. Some of my friends retired from work from impressive careers now find themselves bored or underoccupied. Meanwhile, I deal with a continual barrage of challenges, great and small, most of them welcome. People assume that I'm the one keeping my little business going, but the opposite is probably equally true. Starting a business in retirement may sound like an oxymoron, but the idea has quite a few virtues. First of all, it's up to you if you want to do it. You don't have to apply for a job. You don't need, you didn't You shouldn't worry about age discrimination unless you plan to fire yourself in favor of someone younger and cheaper. You can decide for yourself whether to keep things small and casual or build yourself a modest empire. Either way, you'll be just as busy as you want to be. Wasn't Workday founded by a senior citizen? I believe the founder was 60-something when he founded that company. There are a number of breakout companies that have been— How old was he? Workday founder? I said senior citizen, I think. 65. 65, so yes, he was a, he was, I don't know.

Dave Duffield.

Do they move the senior citizen designation when they move the national retirement age?

Dave was born, the founder of Workday was born in September 21st, 1940. Wow. Imagine being born during World War II and having the opportunity. To build enterprise SaaS. To build enterprise SaaS. It's electric.

Electric. It's like, you see the moon landing when you're 30, and you're like, in 50 years, I'm gonna make it easy.

I'm gonna do my own moon, my version of the moon landing.

My version of the moon landing to pay employees. What age does senior citizen start? Let's see about that. 65, okay, so that has not been changed, but senior discount—

If you had started PeopleSoft at age 40, 1947. Wow. Legend. Legend.

There's another good thing about a retirement business. It doesn't really need to make money as long as it doesn't lose much. In the case of my publishing venture, I considered launching it as a nonprofit, but I didn't want a board or anyone else telling me what to do. Doesn't want to wind up in Oakland in a courtroom dealing with stuff if he winds up coming up with the next generational technology. He doesn't want to defend himself. Running it as a business means you have skin in the game and an easy way to keep score, even if remuneration isn't the primary goal. Whether you make money or not, your business will still deliver all kinds of additional benefits. For instance, nothing could be more educational. Even though I have written lots about business in my career, I was astonished when I launched my own at the age of 67 to discover the range of tasks and skills involved in running a small enterprise. You may think you are a book publisher or soap maker or a dealer in vintage telephones, but inevitably you are also a bookkeeper, a shipping clerk, a marketing specialist, and a navigator of government regulations. Interesting. Well, I like this idea. I think it's a good idea. He says, I wish I had started this venture years earlier, but was busy earning a living and writing books of my own. Now our Children are well launched, and my wife, a passionate lifelong reader, has time to help. Old age, subsidized by Social Security, Medicare, turns out to be an ideal opportunity for a stunt like ours. And never mind the nearness of the end. All of life is lived in the shadow of mortality. Humans have always thrived there, and starting a business can help. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Jordy? I don't know. Hostile takeover, leverage buyout. We make friends with this guy, we bring him on the show, we say, "Oh, we just wanna, we love what you're doing, it's such an inspirational story, we'd love to just like acquire just a small interest in the business." And then we'd like to lever it up.

So, what are your stance on including ads in books? That is such a good opportunity. Well, you know, I've always thought I wanted to maintain the purity of the text, the author intended. Yes, yes. Okay.

Pure, pure slop book. We're gonna use open-source models that are run on commodity hardware. Just let, we're gonna figure out how to run it on that old Xbox and just let it cook for a week to churn out a slop book. And then we're gonna stuff it with ads and monetize this puppy, take it to the moon, flip it, sell it, sell it on to the next, to the next person. Sorry about your business.

I really do, I joke about it, but I really do think that ads and supported business books is a great idea. Specifically, I think it'd be a great idea for one company to release a bunch of books and basically charge, you know, a dollar a book or whatever the actual cost, and then print it around the book. So you can imagine like— Sort of a book jacket. It's like e-boys, but it has a ramp jacket.

Oh, okay. Right? Yeah. Maybe you could get old run books that are out of print, bring them back in some sort of anthology or something. I'd be interested in that. Well, I need your review of the new Lamborghini. Lamborghini says they are proud to announce the Lamborghini Fenomeno, Fenomeno, I cannot pronounce this, Roadster. It's the most powerful open top ever created by Lamborghini, limited to 15 units. Let's look at this, Jordy. Tell me what you think. I'm looking. Uh, okay. Uh, powered by an iconic 1080 CV— sounds like an NVIDIA graphics card— uh, naturally aspirated V12 hybrid HPEV. Sorry about that, got a little bit too much Diet Coke. Uh, engineered with an aerospace-inspired carbon fiber monofuselage, advanced active aerodynamics, and capable of zero 0 to 100 kilometers an hour in just 2.4 seconds. The Roadster delivers pure performance with uncompromising driving emotion of V12 symphony.

So pretty odd in 2026 to release a supercar. Yeah. And not talk about onboard supercomputing. Hmm. Okay. Where— what, what, what kind of like models can I expect to run locally? True. While I'm driving, right? So that's the first question.

Unironically, Tesla has great onboard compute and it is a lagging feature. Have we talked about this? Like, it is so crazy that the LLM, like, chatbot race is so intense and you open up the App Store and it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. And then even Groq is in the game. Meta has MetaAI now. Like everyone is training a foundation model and, and or wrapping something and having a chat interface. And every company is like, has a, has an answer, has a solution. Apple is like the most far behind. They still have a ChatGPT integration. They're solving the Gemini thing and they're maybe like a year or two behind in terms of like the knowledge retrieval use case that is in so, in such high demand. And if you have an iPhone, you get the ChatGPT app, the Claude app, the Gemini app, like you check that box really, really quickly, right? And so every tech company, Microsoft Copilot, like every company has had like an answer to like, how are you integrating LLMs? How are you answering questions? What's your chat interface? Like RAMP has a chat interface. It's really good actually, and it works and it's implemented. Invented and they're not 5 years behind, 10 years behind, but every car company is like 10 years behind Tesla. It's crazy that no one has, that they haven't been able to figure out how to just like clone FSD into Rivian and GM has Super Cruise, which is nowhere near as effective 'cause it only works on certain roads. And so you can't just use it on a normal street and then it'll be like, oh well we mapped this part of the freeway and this part of the freeway, but not the traffic transition between those two freeways. So we're disengaging, like every self-driving technology in any other car is just 10 years behind Tesla still. And I don't understand why. Data advantage? Data advantage, I don't know. I mean, just throw the cameras on something and like every other company has figured out how to get data for LLMs, like do a new web scrape, like just go and spend the money on it. But there's something where The LLMs with the super intelligence narrative, the coding narrative, like all these things are much more easy to underwrite. Whereas I think if Ford said like, "We actually need to spend Tesla-level money to get on the trend here," people would just say, "Well, people are still buying Mustangs and they don't really care about self-driving. If they wanted self-driving, they just get a Tesla." But it seems like a huge miss. I don't know. Also, I mean, huge opportunity to just like work with OpenPilot, which from George Hotz, comma, I like that system is better than everything else except for Tesla.

Yeah.

And no one can figure out how to work with it effectively. Maybe it's a regulatory thing. It might be NHTSA.

Tanner says they're laurel maxing.

They are laurel maxing. They are definitely resting on their laurels.

They're blowing it. Yeah, I talked to a guy who owns a couple of Porsche dealerships and I said, do you have clients come in that tell you hey, I love this, I love this car. I love the Macan, but it doesn't have self-driving. And he said, no, right now, which I was surprised by because you look at these like commuter-focused cars and you assume that commuters are gonna start to care a lot. But I think it's very, I think it's gonna be very location-dependent. So there's places like if you live in LA, friends in LA that like can't possibly drive anything but a Tesla because they want to be able to just set autopilot and forget it. But if you live somewhere where you're driving like 5, 10 minutes a day, then it just matters way less.

Yeah, yeah, maybe that's it. Interesting. Well, what's your final say on the new Lamborghini, this limited thing, which I think is just almost like a body kit on the Revuelto, which is the V12 platform. It has all the same specs. So it seems like it's a tuned and modified Revuelto, like they've done before with the Reventon, for example. So this is probably like a million-dollar car. These special Lamborghinis have never been interesting to me. What do you think?

Uh, do you like this one? I think it looks great.

I like it. Better than the Revuelto, though?

I don't personally like roadsters over their counterparts, but I think it's a great car. It's, uh, Not the spec for me, but I'm sure it's a spec for someone. Hmm. Well, someone in the chat said it looks like a McLaren. It sort of does. There's a little bit of that in there. Rear end a little bit.

Also, the colors are doing— if it was a yellow Lamborghini, I think you'd be much more tied to yellow. You tend to see these different colors on McLarens more often. Well, in other car news, Waymo is Maybe going crazy or something. What's happening in Atlanta? So dozens of empty Waymos have invaded an Atlanta neighborhood and circled a cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers. And Brooks Otterlake says, "Oh, so it's wrong for cars to invent religion?" And I don't really get that one. Is that like going door-to-door evangelizing or is that?

No, it's like a cult, like, oh, they're circling.

Oh, they're just circling. In the center. Crazy. Yeah, and then apparently someone put out like a yellow sign to try and like deter the Waymos, and that only made them more aggressive. I don't know what's real here. I'm all over the place with this one, but very, very weird. I thought that Waymo, the ratio is like 1 to 4 or something like that on teleoperators, maybe something along those lines. So you would think that the teleoperators would see this and intervene. So something must have gone wrong in the organizational structure, but these things are bound to happen. At least no one was hurt, but it is annoying if you live there and you just see a ton of workers.

Breaking. What's breaking? From Ragav in the chat. SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline, targets June 11th pricing on the NASDAQ. So they went with— June 12th, maybe. They went with, it says June 11th in Reuters. We're less than a month out. And interesting that they're going with NASDAQ. This would, I imagine, get them allocated into QQQ really quickly. And I know that was a priority. Which ETFs? Yeah, during this process. But let's see if there's any— Oh, can't wait for the filing.

It's gonna be so interesting to dig into the numbers.

Yeah, is now aiming to flip its prospectus public as early as next Wednesday.

Ooh, that's gonna be a big day.

With a roadshow launch targeted for June 4th and a market debut as early as June 12th. That will be exciting. Well— The process had originally been planned for around late June, around Elon's birthday. A faster than expected SEC review of the company's filing partially drove the timeline forward.

The whole market is selling off. The Nasdaq is down 1.2%. Russell 2000 down 2.18%. S&P down 1% and Dow Jones down 1% as well. The US 10-year sitting at 4.5999999, something like that. Well, Bill Ackman is doubling down on Mag 7 stocks that have sold off. He's Going long Microsoft. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square bets on Microsoft's AI ambitions with new stake. He says the tech company is underpriced and will, will disclose the stake in regulatory filings later on Friday. So Microsoft is up 3.62% today. And Ackman said in a post on X that Pershing has started building a position in Microsoft. We will disclose a new position in Microsoft. Because Microsoft shares are down 15% this year and have lost more than a quarter of their value since they peaked last fall. The drop has been part of a wider software industry sell-off and investor concerns over hefty investments in AI. The shares were little changed in premarket trading. Ackman said investors underestimate the resilience of the Microsoft 365 365 subscription suite given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price-value proposition. So if you look at what's happening with Figma and then you think about how that might translate to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, uh, not that crazy to imagine that there's more resilience here than maybe the market is pricing in. Uh, Ackman cited Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which gives the software giant access to the startup's models and products, which he said he believed Wall Street hadn't factored in the company's interest in OpenAI, which has been valued at approximately $200 billion because of the, because of the 27% stake. And with the trial coming to a close any day now, Jessica Lesson over at The Information was saying that it's all good news for, for OpenAI shareholders. The call sheet has Elon— will Elon win his case against OpenAI? Down at 20% today. on the back of the closing statements, the closing arguments from both sides and Microsoft's lawyers. And I'm sure we'll have more to dive into on the court case next week as the trial wraps up.

High Yield Harry says, I like how Bill Ackman's whole thing now is just buying Mag7 names that have traded off.

And there's a whole thesis on this.

Yeah. So he did this with Meta.

Are you brave enough?

He did this with Meta based around their the response to their CapEx guide. Yeah, he did this with Google during the ChatGPT. Yeah, post ChatGPT.

Did you see the new feature that Meta launched on Instagram Reels or Instagram something or other? It's called— it's in the DM tab and it's called like instance disappearing photos, no viewer list, reactions and replies are private. So they made something that's like more disappearing than stories, I suppose. So you can click through this stack of instance and the whole idea that Adam Massary was pitching was that they launch a product, it's very authentic. This was the original Instagram. It was like, oh, photos of the run clubs, right? And just like photos from your life. People would just hard post them on the grid 'cause that's all there was. Then Snapchat came out with stories, and all of a sudden stories were more ephemeral, and Instagram, of course, cloned stories into the top feed with all the circles, but then those became places that were monetized and places where people were more thoughtful about what they posted there, and so you wound up with this, again, the same anxiety over, are you gonna post that photo? Is it polished enough for the stories feed? And so by launching Instants, Instagram's trying to rebuild that casual sharing of their user base so that people don't just purely consume or pick between, do I never post or do I go full editor, professional camera setup, scripted, like full post? Because that's what's happened to Stories. Everything is very, very calculated. But I don't know. Another reason to be bullish on Instagram Instagram. Ben Thompson had a bunch of takes about why he's a perma bull for Meta, is that every pixel of their entire family of apps is monetizable. They just have to choose to monetize them. And he opines that Mark Zuckerberg has never been that interested in ads. He likes products, he likes new technology.

But he's willing to— post some ads to serve his other interests.

Yes, yes. And, and, I mean, he's been fantastic at launching ads and monetizing, and everything's going well, but it just feels like it's not the core. Like, there are some CEOs that would get up every day and say, not just Senator, we sell ads, but every day on the— or every quarter on the earnings call, talk about only ads and say, oh, the VR thing, yeah, we'll, we'll address That one we can advertise in it because we are an advertising company. That hasn't always been the ethos of Meta, for better or for worse. But what else is in the timeline that you wanna go through, Jordy?

Another from High Yield Harry. Everyone loves the DocuSign has a quarter million employees bit.

We don't, by the way.

But can we talk about how Accenture has 786,000 employees? This is true. The first one about DocuSign was not true. Was not, but Accenture does actually have 786,000 employees. That's a lot. That's a city's worth.

Yeah, there's this interesting, the latest bear thesis on the AI boom has hit the timeline. I think Axios summed it up well here. AI can cost more than human workers now. This is a quote from Unusual Whales citing Axios. And there's an interesting bit here where if you look at the token spend at some of the tech companies and then you match that with their stories about AI efficiency and layoffs, they've— they're actually growing their total OpEx. So they might be saying, okay, we're going to lay off thousands of employees, shrink the headcount 5%. That will save us $2 billion in OpEx a year. A year, but then you look at their token bill and it's $5 billion. Hopefully they're doing more. I think a lot of CEOs are starting to ask the questions about ROI on the token spend, and that will probably be the next big hurdle, the next big question on, were you just running useless scripts overnight to token max, or did you actually ship a feature that moved the needle? And is conversion rate up? Is retention up? Is revenue up? Is profit up? This is the key question. Key question for anyone whose organization has flipped to the token maxing meta. It is very funny to imagine, like, when you think of KPIs, anything that is a cost, the KPI should usually be going down. And token maxing really flipped that, a slight aberration. But you would never, at a startup, say, one of our KPIs that we're tracking is headcount and we want it to go up. You would never say one of our—

Oftentimes founders can get a little too, yeah, sort of tying their own.

Yeah. Oh, I run a 200-person company. Oh, I run a 500-person company. And it's like, OK, well, is that the right size for your business? You want to be maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.

If every single person in San Francisco left, and Accenture brought their entire team came to San Francisco, you would actually need to build more houses. There would actually be overflow. There'd be overflow. If every person had basically one bed that currently exists in San Francisco.

Wait, there's only 750,000 beds in San Francisco?

809,000 people live in San Francisco.

Wow, that's not a lot. I always think of San Francisco— That's not a lot. I always think of San Francisco as like a city of 10 million people. But that's obviously the greater Bay Area. Yeah, the greater Bay Area. Well, there's some bad news for the US dollar. Hedgeye says the US dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power over the last 6 years. And Brian says, "Damn, that's what I purchased my stuff with." I love this one.

Speaking of purchasing stuff, ChatGPT launched personal finance features. Yes.

Plaid's in partnership with Plaid, right?

Yeah, I think Plaid's under the hood.

This is really cool because we were talking to Zach.

I'm gonna play around with it.

We were talking to Zach about, we were like, oh, like I have to imagine that a lot of people are starting to use Plaid alongside LLMs to suck in all of their personal financial data and sort of understand what they're spending things on and doing a lot of the, you know, there's a mint.com, there's different things different services that can do little pieces here and there. There's a whole service that just figures out if you're subscribed to multiple things. I have two Netflix subscriptions, let me consolidate that down. Even just knowing, okay, you're spending a lot on gas now or groceries, is this what you expected? All that can be helpful. And Zach was sort of quietly admitting that he has clearly been, very AI-pilled in conjunction with Plaid and had been wiring up all of his personal finances to dashboards that he's been building. And so I imagine that a lot of that was brought into this product. So excited to see people play around with it and ask questions.

There is a new partnership between Stadguy and Bentley. Really? Yes. He introduced the Chalet Edition.

Okay, what is this?

Is this— has this— has— can you think of a time where a creator partnered with a major car manufacturer for a special edition car? Yes, I can think of like the, the, you know, McLaren Senna, right?

Yes, I was gonna say, uh, the Dale Earnhardt Edition Monte Carlo. Oh, all right, we'll pull up the Chalet Edition and then pull up the 2009 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt edition.

John Coogan was in LA around Coachella. It's possible that his alter ego Colton was going to Coachella. We were trying to get him on the show, but the timing didn't overlap because he was podcasting himself with his own show.

Explain the alter ego thing. Is he one of these single creators that runs two accounts?

No, it's It's one account. One account. Oh, but he plays a character. But there's this dad guy, and then, you know, this sort of like elevated kind of character. And then there's like Colton, who's like the new rich, you know, new money character. But I think they did an excellent job with this car. A lot of wood and and tan leather interior.

So is this something that you can, like, is this limited allocation?

Yeah, they're making 25 of them. Wow.

And he's going to sell 25 Bentleys. And how much does he make off of this?

25? Good question. I bet this looks more like a— Like a million-dollar brand deal? Not a— Yeah, but probably a million-dollar brand deal, right? Yeah. 25 cars for a while. No, but it's a really smart— I think it's great for full.

I think it's a little derivative of the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt Edition, but. Yeah, let's pull up that. Yeah, if I had to pick one, I'm going Dale Earnhardt Edition probably.

You know what I'd pick.

We'll see. Yeah, pull up the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt Edition. Is that it? That does not look like it. No, no, that's an AI image or something. Something. That is— that doesn't have the right wheels. Google it again.

Gabe says, when TVP and Nissan Murano cross cabrio line?

Oh, that would rip. I'll put this in here. Yeah, this is the— this is the image. Here we go. Stahd guy. Uh, yeah, the McLaren Senna. Has there been another one? I feel like I've been waiting.

I've been waiting for the for the Murano Cross Cabriolet to fall in value and they're holding strong. Holding strong. John, guess the price on this. 87,000 miles, 2 owners. It's a 2014.

$20,000. $16,000. $16,000. They hit the floor and they're only going up from here.

You can get a white one. You can get a white one, a 2011 Okay. It has 137,000 miles for just under $7,000.

There were rumors of a collab that might, I don't know, I wanna know what you think if this would be a great partnership, but Lewis Hamilton driving for Ferrari now, famous Mercedes F1 driver. He has been spotted multiple times. In his reveal that he would be joining Ferrari, he posed in front of the Ferrari F40, an iconic supercar. There have been rumors about a bespoke Ferrari project, dubbed the F44, which was supposed to be a modern V12-powered manual-shift tribute to the legendary F40. It's allegedly been scrapped. It's still only in the rumor. It's been potentially canceled. But do you think that would work? Do you think that would— be successful with him still racing, him still, you know, in the throes of his career? Would he need to retire? Would he need to, would this need to be like a posthumous tribute at some point? What do you think it takes for a Lewis Hamilton Ferrari special edition car to be successful?

I think you would have to win a championship. With Ferrari? Yeah. Otherwise.

Okay. Hmm. Can't just aura farm with Kim K on '80s vibe reels. You've seen that video, right? Yeah. So sick. Yeah.

I think you got to win.

You got to win. Well, what else is going on? Is there anything else? We talked about a lot of this stuff. There's some bigger articles, but we can get to them tomorrow. All the longer articles we need to get to.

2014 Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet for $9,000. It's only— only has 116,000 miles on it and one accident.

How are you modifying it for the TVPN edition?

You got a 4-owner 2011 with 109,000 miles for $8,000. I mean, these things are a store of value. I think we're actually kind of at the bottom of the J-curve and we'll start seeing it tick up from here.

Well, there's one more post here we should go through. There might be a few. YouTubers be like, wake up at 4:00 AM and run. That's alpha. No, it's not. Look at apex predators. They're all lazy. Bears hibernate, lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4:00 AM and runs? Squirrels. Don't be a squirrel. Hibernate, sleep all day, work like a lion. Naval Ravikant said it best.

Yeah, it's good advice. But depending on where you're at in life, sometimes you do have to wake up early. Sometimes you got to wake up early and you got to work really hard.

Yeah, but 4 AM, maybe not, maybe not always optimal. Depends on your flow. Um, but in general, I think the, the YouTubers that say like, get some energy in your life— I, I heard, uh, one of these inspirational guys talking about like, if you want some If you want something, you need to use more of it. If you want more of something, you need to use more of it. So if you want more energy, you have to use more energy. If you want more muscle, you have to use more muscle. And it was sort of a pithy— doesn't apply to everything, but sort of you've got to spend money to make money philosophy.

Yeah, the issue is if you wake up late, you don't get to start winding down when the sun goes down. You haven't earned it yet.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Night owl mode. Some people go night owl mode. Night owl mode. Some people go squirrel mode. Some people go bear mode. Just depends. To each their own. I like this cartoon from Dilip Rao. In-context learning and LLMs. Tyler, you can probably explain this. So the man walks out with his robot to paint the fence, paints 2 full planks, starts painting. Painting the third plank, gives the paint bucket to the robot and says, "Continue." The robot says, "Got it." And as you scroll down, what did the robot do? Repeated the patterns perfectly, not painting the third thing. You think this is solvable?

Yeah, it doesn't generalize. It doesn't generalize.

It's a joke, I guess. Do you think this is possible? Do you think this is solvable?

Yes. Yes. What time do eagles start hunting? What time do eagles start hunting? I don't know. Just after sunrise. What time do sharks start feeding? Just after sunrise? Dawn. Dawn, okay, okay. So if you want to be a shark or an eagle, get up and get after it.

Well, so what is PE? Penis enhancement?

Andrew Reid says, send this to all your private equity friends immediately.

What is the— 'cause they asked what is PE? Yeah. And he says something about penis enhancement.

Something that's uncouth.

All right, well, that's a great place to end it. Yes. Is the flashbang working? I think so. Perfect. Thanks for hanging out. Yeah. It's been a really classic show. This feels like a fall 2024 episode. We hope you enjoyed it.

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We hope you have a wonderful Monday weekend.

Another one. Rolling flashbang. Yeah! Goodbye.