AI-Designed Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

No!

Who had orange in the chat? Because the chat was trying to guess what color sunglasses Jordi would be wearing today. Is that orange or is that more of like a burnt sienna?

Well, I think it's more of a green, greenish frame with more of— with an orange lens.

You got to drop the line. I'm wearing sunglasses because I'm looking at the future and it's very bright indeed.

I don't know.

No one gets that reference. Anyway.

Oh.

It's great to be back.

It's great to be back. It's Friday. We got a shorter show for everyone today. General partner of Khosla Ventures coming on to talk about their new investment Discovery Loop, founded by none other than Jeff Dean and some of his crew from DeepMind. And then we have Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks. Joining to talk about their new blog post. I promise it's going to be more exciting than it sounds like. No, but they're doing smarter model routing and we're excited to catch up with him.

Very excited. Well, for the first time, scientists have used AI to create entirely new viruses.

You asked for it. They delivered. They delivered. They delivered. They woke up. You know what we don't have enough of?

Viruses that have never existed in nature before. It's marked a milestone that could accelerate biotechnology while also raising long-term biosecurity questions. Of course, nightmare scenario is you go to Best Buy, you get a gaming PC with a couple pretty stock graphics cards, and you're able to run an open-source model that basically walks you through the steps of creating something really problematic. At the same time, there's a lot of really talented and well-resourced organizations that are fighting that tooth and nail. And so We'll probably see a little back and forth equilibrium there. But lots of interesting questions. Important to note that these viruses do not affect humans whatsoever, even these new viruses. They target bacteria. So it's more of an experiment, more of a demo. But you can see where things are going and are working.

That doesn't make me that comforted, to be honest with you.

You like your bacteria and viruses?

Because we naturally have— where there's bacteria that is, it's part of being human, right?

And you would like the bacteria to be unaffected by viruses. Is anyone standing up for the bacteria right now?

Well, it's more so like you have bacteria in your gut.

Yeah.

And the gut is kind of an important part of the body.

Now that bacteria is gonna be suffering from a novel virus apparently. Yeah. Well, in a study published Thursday in Science, researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns in naturally occurring viral DNA. Then used it to generate genetic sequences for brand new viruses. After synthesizing those DNA sequences and inserting them into bacteria, the team found the bacteria produced viable viruses capable of infecting other bacteria. The work does not create a new threat to humans. Be careful. I'm sure that will get cut out of a lot of messaging around this because it sounds really scary on its face. The AI was trained only on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. And specifically excluded viruses that infect humans, plants, animals, and fungi. As a result, the model cannot generate viruses capable of infecting people. While scientists have been synthesizing viral genomes for years to study diseases and develop vaccines, this is the first time AI has been used to design entirely new viruses that function in the real world. And I was going back and forth before the show on, is this anything special? You know, we've been using tools to make viruses for bacteria for a long time. This is just another tool to do it. Or is this some, you know, material breakthrough? That's sort of the debate. Point. It sounds really scary, but also like you've been able to design these viruses in a lab for a long time, so what is the material difference here? I think it all comes back to acceleration and cost. If all of a sudden it becomes 1,000 times cheaper to generate viruses, then that could reshape biotech in a positive way, but also have biosecurity implications.

Yeah, I think a lot of the reaction is just that it feels like a little too soon post-Wuhan. A little too soon post-hugging phase. There's been a variety of events that I think naturally make people a little apprehensive when you see a headline like this.

Yeah, a lot of people are like, you know, the Eliezer Yudkowsky reaction of, ah, like, this is bad. But we'll see where it goes. If the approach proves effective across other classes of viruses, it could become a powerful tool for medicine and biotechnology. Viruses are already widely used as delivery vehicles for gene therapies and other medical treatments. And AI-designed viruses could eventually expand that toolkit. At the same time, the research highlights how advances in AI are making it increasingly important to build safeguards alongside new capabilities, which I'm sure the Ark Institute is working on. And there's also other AI-driven neo-scientific labs. I mean, Geoff Dean's, one of those was advancing, one of the goals of his new company is to work on biotech broadly. He has a very broad remit, but there are more narrow projects like that new company that's focused on finding a cure for the common cold. There are a few other projects that are more narrowly targeted, as well as all the biotech companies that are working on stuff. If we're going to get advances in viruses that deliver gene therapies or medical treatments, we gotta rebrand virus. We gotta come up with a new word. Just like GLP-1 peptide, that felt very safe. It was like, you're not doing steroids. You're not on gear.

What's the lizard?

You're doing a peptide.

You're not doing Gila monster venom.

Gila monster venom. Exactly. Exactly.

You're not doing Gila monster venom. No. It's some Chinese peptide.

The Chinese peptide was the rough go. But in general, I think the fact that it was like just a peptide, it felt much more welcoming as opposed to being in the world of the steroids, the performance-enhancing drugs. And it became easier for people to jump in Oh, I gotta learn about peptides. Oh, there's naturally occurring peptides? Cool, I'm into that. But virus has such a bad connotation post-Wuhan as well as just everything. You're never like, I got a virus, and someone says, a good one or a bad one? Like, it's always bad. It's never good. But so they need a new brand for that if they're gonna commercialize that for sure. But we'll see. Anyway, there's a whole article in the New York Times about it. This AI just created viruses not found in nature. The new study published Thursday in Science goes well beyond duplicating viral genes. Scientists at Stanford University and ARK Institute taught AI to recognize patterns in— of DNA in nature and then use that DNA to write recipes for entirely new viruses. The viruses dreamed up by AI do not pose a threat to humans because they are all similar to a naturally occurring virus called Phi X174, which can only infect bacteria. Really hardcore name for something that's not that dangerous. Phi X174 sounds like an offspring of Elon Musk. Governments and scientific organizations have been slow to develop guardrails that could block the creation of a deadly virus even as the science races ahead. So I don't think they'll be open sourcing this anytime soon. But there is other news. Uh, Mark Gurman's been reporting on OpenAI's first consumer device. Uh, it'll reportedly look like a hockey puck-sized Donut. Mark Gurman, the Germinator.

Oh, the Germinator.

The Germinator.

Yeah.

OpenAI's first consumer device will reportedly look like a hockey puck-sized donut and cost roughly $300 to $400. What a funny form factor.

Love hockey pucks.

Yeah.

Love donuts.

Okay, so you're in.

I like where this is going.

There's also a rumor that it has mechanical pieces on it, so I think it can, like, undulate potentially. The speculation is all over the place. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the Germinator, as you put it, The battery-powered device is essentially a portable smart speaker without a screen designed to be carried around the house or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter. It will include speakers and microphones along with cameras and other sensors that allow its AI to perceive what's happening around it. The device is intended to work much more like a much more capable version of ChatGPT's current voice mode, learning about its owner over time and using that context to make conversations more personalized. OpenAI is also making the hardware itself feel more expressive. The device will reportedly include lights and parts that physically move as it responds, with the goal of making it feel more alive than existing stationary smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The product being developed by Jony Ive's design team is expected to arrive in 2027. Feature request.

Feature request.

And envisioned as the first in a broader family of OpenAI hardware. Long term, the company reportedly hopes to develop AI devices capable of taking over some of the functions now handled by smartphones.

Jordi.

Feature request. Yes. Rolling flashbang. Flashbang. That would be a good feature request.

Yeah, it says it has lights, it's got sound. You should be able to use this as an on-the-go flashbang.

Yeah.

So you're going to hang out with some friends.

Yeah.

You want to prank them a little bit.

Yeah.

When you're, when you're kind of coming in.

Yeah, I do. I was reflecting on the DeepMind story of, you know, the departures there and the question of, you know, how the models are progressing versus the commercialization of those models. There's some real strong points. There's some weaker points within the rollout of Google's AI strategy. And I was thinking about what happened to Notebook AI because that was heralded as a very magical technology. You would give it some sources, a particular report, and it would just generate a podcast talking between two different people, much more conversational. And a lot of people like consuming information that way. So you could just go read a deep research report on the history of how bacteriophages work if you want to get up to speed on that because you're trying to understand what the Ark Institute is working on with these new viruses. You could go to NotebookLM and say, hey, why don't you generate me a podcast of two scientists explaining this at you know, high school level and take it into college level.

Tyler in the YouTube chat says, "Loves NotebookLM. Use it weekly." Use it weekly. I always thought that I would have used it when I was in college.

Yeah.

And I needed to, let's say, write a paper on something and I wasn't super prepared. I could say, generate me an hour-long podcast about this set of topics and then I'd listen to that and then I could probably rip the paper.

Yeah.

I did that for a history exam. Wow. It was like a vocab lesson and went through.

Okay.

Yeah. Middle age history, I think.

Wait. Oh, you used NotebookLM?

Yeah. It generated a podcast. So I basically fed in a vocab list of like dates and various things. Then I had it.

Wait. And was it just a general podcast?

How did you do on the test?

It was really easy. I think I probably aced it.

Wow. There we go. He needs a better confidence monitor. I'm a big fan of that new trend that's like asking old people like, how did you write a 5-paragraph essay without AI? And then the answer is like, buddy, we wrote a 5-paragraph essay without even reading the book. Because you just go to SparkNotes or something. But I was interested in the evolution of NotebookLM because it's this like— there's this collapsing of capabilities where Sam Altman was recently sort of dragged a little bit for saying like, He would use ChatGPT Work to generate a podcast about what's going on on his calendar and the family life and stuff. And people are like, how about you just talk to your kids? But the more interesting technical point on that is that do you even need ChatGPT Work to generate you that podcast? Or will the voice mode and the memory feature have enough context to just sit there and talk to you like it's a podcast on the fly?

Like live voice.

Yeah.

If you're trying to learn about a topic, for example.

Pretty good.

Is probably better than just generating a podcast because a podcast assumes like some certain understanding. Yeah. Maybe it's—

And it's rigid.

Maybe it thinks you understand too much.

Yeah.

Too little. Whereas voice, you can be like, go down this like—

Exactly. Exactly. It's a choose your own adventure. It's an expert call. It's instead of NotebookLM, it's TegusLM, basically. I mean, you're talking to an expert and you can just, guide the conversation wherever you go. So will be interesting to see where this goes, what the reception is like. I mean, huge, huge delta divergence between like the, the social media pushback for ChatGPT versus like the App Store ratings. Like there's like a billion people using it. A lot of people just like the product and then they'll be like someone dunking on it to the tune of a million likes on Instagram. And so How do you measure those two things when it comes to an actual consumer product? If it's delivering something good, if people are like, if the stated preference is like, I don't like AI, but the revealed preference is like, it's kind of nice to have this thing around the house. It's kind of useful. Interesting to see where it goes. The launch of this device will be very, very interesting to see like how things come together. Like you can see the ChatGPT work, ChatGPT Codex, ChatGPT like coming together into one product., but there's a world where this product launches with voice mode and it's not really capable of linking to a cloud codex instance and writing you software and doing the more advanced things that are required just to accomplish some tasks. Like you can go to ChatGPT and ask it to pull down an image from the internet, restyle it, change it, but you can't really tell it to do like 40 of those or like every day forever do a whole host, a whole workflow. But you can in Codex and you can talk to Codex, but it has to be running on a computer. And I would hope that by the time this launches, there's full, like full context. Like I was doing some work in Codex and I had the output and then I wanted to like generate an image based on that and take it on the go. But I wanted to be able to close my laptop and not— and still be able to access it. So I had to like copy the context window into ChatGPT, just the normal app, so then I could like access that information and continue to transform it. And that was something that is like a very, very temporary thing that feels like it's going to be fixed in like a couple of weeks. But there's a whole bunch of these little minor integration issues that probably need to be fulfilled before this product launches and delivers like the full capability of what you can do. Because so many things, so many tasks instead of just knowledge retrieval require actually firing up a browser, scraping it, writing some code, downloading things, you know, setting up an actual service and workflow as opposed to just something that can be done within the context window of a single LLM interaction. Last top story, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay more than $900 million and impose new restrictions on how minors in the state use Facebook and Instagram. This is a continuation of the social media addiction If you're watching this clip on Instagram, let us know in the comments. Are you addicted to TVPN Reels on Instagram? It's not our fault. Apparently it's, apparently it's Facebook's fault. If we, if we got you hooked on this stuff. The ruling requires Meta to establish a $567 million fund aimed at addressing harms linked to its platforms on top of a $375 million in civil penalties previously awarded by a jury. So they're up $900 million. They're very close to $1 billion. And the numbers are going to get bigger from here. Yeah, at least, at least they're going to try.

Okay. So last time we really covered something from this ongoing saga, there was a verdict on March 25th. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google/YouTube negligent for designing platforms harmful to young people. A woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child was awarded $6 million, $4.2 million against Meta and $1.8 million against Google. And again, at the time we had this lawyer on, he was giving his opinion. He was like, this is just the start.

Yeah.

We were like, I was like, no way. The jury has a verdict. Yeah. To say, you know, talking to the biggest companies in the world, you must pay $6 million.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

It was nothing. It was like this tiny amount, but it was to one person.

Right.

And so you can imagine as these cases evolve. This, this new one is in New Mexico.

New Mexico is not the biggest state in the union. It's not the biggest.

But there was also one in May 2026. So just a couple of months ago for $9 million to a school district in Kentucky. Yeah, same sort of issue. The lawsuit accused Instagram of deliberately using addictive features that contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other problems among students, forcing schools to spend more on mental health services. The district had sought more than $60 million, and I guess the total payout was $27 million because it was split between YouTube and TikTok and Snap. Yep. And in that case, there was no admission of liability and no required product changes. So I think it's time to start thinking about what the sort of battle that social media has ahead of it, kind of in cigarette terms.

Sure.

Tell us about Tobacco Masters Settlement Agreement. Yeah, exactly.

So the tobacco companies wound up getting sued individually initially. And there were a whole bunch of court hearings, very similar to the Senator We Sell Ads moments, but more focused on the cancer-causing nature of cigarettes. And the question was, who is ultimately being harmed economically? And you would think it's obvious. The person that saw an ad that made smoking look cool, they picked up a pack of cigarettes, they started smoking, and then they got cancer and their life was cut short. They are the victim. They should be paid by the tobacco company. That's what would be very logical. That's not what happened. In fact, the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement landed in 1998, and it was agreement between all of the major tobacco companies. There's more nuance to this. One of them broke loose and like testified against the others. It's a crazy story, but that's for another time. In 46 states, I'm the good cigarette company, basically. Yeah. And so they don't have to pay. They're not part of the settlement, so they don't have to pay because they basically snitched on all the others. It's crazy.

Are they still in business?

Oh, yeah.

Cigarette company.

They're doing great.

Who are they?

Liget Victor.

I've never heard of it.

Yeah.

Last name Victor.

Yeah, they were literally—

they won.

They won. Yeah, there's more nuance to it than that, but that's like one way to tell the story. Anyway, so a bunch of the big tobacco companies versus 46 of the United— of the US states, the District of Columbia, and several territories. The states agreed to end major lawsuits against the tobacco companies. So the same thing was happening where all the different states were suing, and they were suing because the negative externality of cigarettes causing cancer was driving up medical bills in the states. So the states have healthcare and they assume, hey, okay, we're gonna spend this much on doctors, this much on radiology, this much on x-ray equipment. And then all of a sudden they're starting to look at their populations and saying like, wait, everyone's getting lung cancer. We're not equipped to deal with lung cancer. We need to hire way more oncologists and cancer doctors who specialize in lung cancer. We need equipment, we need drugs that treat lung cancer. There's a whole bunch of other things that we have to spend money on. And so you got to pay us because you, the tobacco company, are responsible for us running out of money for our health care system. And so that was the nature of these, like, the battles between the states and the big tobacco companies. You would think it would be the individuals who got the cancer. That would be very logical. But that's not actually the structure of this deal. And so in return, all the states said, hey, we'll drop all those lawsuits. You won't have to— we won't be nickeling, nickel and diming you across every single state. Instead, the companies will make large payments and follow new limits on advertising and business practices. So the end result, the headline number is $206 billion, which feels like small relative to today's standards of like hyperscalers and social media. Facebook generates roughly $200 billion in revenue every year. Although if they got hit with a $200 billion fine, that would be existential. But what happened with the master settlement agreement with the tobacco companies was that there wasn't just one fixed payment. Instead, it created a system of annual payments that continue indefinitely. They will actually have to pay forever, as long as they are in business. They have effectively a special tax paid to them. And the amount changes based on cigarette sales, inflation, market share, and other adjustments. So if cigarette sales fall, the total payments usually fall, and that's a big reason why there's like a shift to non-cigarette products.

Well, and that just naturally makes sense. If less people are buying cigarettes, less people are going to have health issues.

Exactly. Exactly.

So, yeah, so, so I brought it up because I think that we could be heading in that direction.

Yeah.

With social media.

There's also a fascinating dynamic because these states now have an indefinite revenue stream that will be paid to them. And you can model that out financially, and you can financialize it, and a lot of people have. And so investment firms and banks and financial institutions have come in and said, okay, you are the state of New Mexico, for example, and you are expected to get $300 million from big tobacco this year, and then next year we think it'll be $297, and then $298, and then it'll go down. And we can model that out, and we can just give you $4 billion right now in exchange for that revenue stream or a piece of that revenue stream, and then those states can take that lump sum of cash and build a new bridge or something like that, whatever they need to do. So there's been a lot of financialization on top of it. Each tobacco company pays a share of the total amount. Its share depends mainly on the share of cigarette sales among companies that participate in the MSA. The settlement then divides the money among states states using fixed allocation percentages. Uh, some states later borrowed against these future payments by issuing bonds backed by MSA revenue. The MSA also limits tobacco advertising and marketing, especially marketing that could reach children. In simple terms, the agreement created a permanent system. Major tobacco companies received protection from many state lawsuits while states received continuing payments and new enforcement powers. The result is not just a legal settlement, it created the this long-term financial and regulatory structure built around cigarette sales. And it's now the 10-year anniversary of starting Lucy, 2016. August 8th, technically, was the day. New regulation.

You know what I'm going to hit.

Overnight success. Yeah, for sure.

The exact opposite, slaving away for years in obscurity.

But very, very interesting industry to have operated in for as long as we have.

Semi Analysis chimed in on the DeepMind news. Not just chimed in, I think the term's posterized. Grave digging?

No, not grave dancing.

No, they're great.

They're digging the grave. Yeah, and then they're dancing on it at the end.

Uh, anyway, Semi Analysis says, for all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab due to large numbers of departures from their RL teams poor compute allocation. Google will continue, continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of ever reaching state-of-the-art again have dropped to zero. Damn it. Google is now simply unable to retain top AI talent. Again, this is what I was saying the day that the news broke. It's like researchers want to work with great researchers, right? And so, uh, the more talent density The easier it is to recruit. Yeah, Gnome leaving earlier was like a canary in the coal mine. Obviously, these are not the actions of people excited about Gemini 4 Pro. Jeff, Sanjay, Kwok, and Oriol are just the latest in a long string of high-profile departures from DeepMind. Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean is the undisputed GOAT of Google engineering, co-founded Google Brain, and started the TPU program. Google, on the other hand, decided it was totally worth it to sell enormous amounts of compute to Gemini's fiercest competitors on long-term contracts without any hope of ever returning it to DeepMind. More than 20% of total TPU shipments from third quarter '26 to fourth quarter '27 are being sold directly to Anthropic.

Wow.

The issue with Google was not Jeff Dean nor Noam Shazir, but rather their extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow, and strategically timid culture. Google will join the ranks of other legendary tech giants like IBM and Intel to Give up on the harder thing and do the thing that will make you more money becomes demoralizing as many of the great technology leads have left. And Tae Kim taking a victory lap. He wrote a piece on July 21st, Google is a secular short, kind of getting a lot of these issues.

So brutal, brutal stuff. This is insane. On the other side, GCP is working. GCP is basically a money printing machine. No wonder Google executives are choosing GCP over Gemini. So although EBIT margins for these system sales are slightly lower than core cloud margins in the low 30% range, we still expect total GCP to deliver mid to high 30s EBIT margins going forward. How investors decide to capitalize the current TPU backlog and any large future sales is an open question. However, given the strong compute demand from the labs, we expect more multi-gigawatt deals to be announced soon. Adding to this backlog. In all, we estimate that over $250 billion additional TPU bookings could be added to GCP RPO in the next coming quarters from Semi Analysis. Very interesting. I mean, there is like a positive spin on this, which is like they seem to be really good at chip development, really good at cloud, like focus where it's working, and you don't have any tensions there because you have excellent teams and then you have the ability to underwrite that build out with the cash machine that is Google Search and YouTube and their ads products and having more of this like barbell approach as opposed to playing in like the middle race is maybe the, maybe ultimately the right thing to do. There are plenty of hyperscalers that have lived that and are doing very well on the back of it. Like Microsoft, Amazon, for example, they've been partners to Labs at various points and,, and are very good at building data centers, very good at scaling, and have not tried to really go on a crazy poaching race and amass the dream team. And, you know, they've been rewarded for it. So I don't know.

Still wild series of events. They obviously had effectively a version of ChatGPT internally. They didn't ship it. Yeah. Thibault, who's now running Chat Codex, was there working on that project. Product, which is really wild.

It just seems like Google leadership has a very different idea of where value accrues in AI than like Demis or the other labs, right? It's not actually the model itself. Yeah. It's the infrastructure, GPUs, cloud business.

It's interesting because you can run back the old Demis quote about when he was selling DeepMind, he talked to Mark Zuckerberg and is like, what are you excited about in the future? Are you excited about AI? And Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, according to this exchange that Sebastian Malaby reported on. Mark Zuckerberg says, oh yeah, I'm super excited about AI. And then Demis is like, I'm going to test this guy. I'm going to see if he's a true believer. What do you think about VR? And Zuck's like, oh, VR is like equivalently as big. And then Demis is like, no.

I don't think he even said that. He was just equivalently as excited.

Yeah, yeah, excited. And he was excited about a few other things. And Demis was like, I want to be with someone who's like all in on AI as a fundamentally different technology, not a normal technology, not like VR. Not like new devices, not like electric cars, not like satellites in space. It needs to be considered as a completely separate development, a completely separate technology.

Yeah, I don't know if Sundar believes in RSI. It seems like he doesn't think that that's really going to—

So the point is that Demis should have probed more and said, well, how excited are you about cloud? How excited are you about— AI overviews. And if Sundar— it wasn't Sundar back then— but if Google was like, oh yeah, we're equivalently excited about cloud infrastructure as ASI, then that should have been Demis's moment to be like, ah, maybe I should—

The only thing is there's a world where he's actually so RSI-pilled that he's thinking, OK, it's over for us. I need to back up the Brinks truck and help Anthropic, right? Putting together this, like, almost a quarter of a trillion dollar financing package.

Yeah.

And variety of data center guarantees to enable Anthropic to scale up even though they don't have really access to the debt markets in the way that Google does. Google's ownership in Anthropic is capped at 15%. They, I believe, have roughly 14%.

Weird. Why? Wait, well, how is it capped?

I think Anthropic just did Oh, we don't want you to have— they don't have any voting rights. They don't even— they're not even a board observer. They don't have a board seat. They basically are just a purely financial backer.

A branding mogul's Miami Beach home lists for $68.5 million. Branding mogul Nick Woodhouse was sailing around Miami for his birthday in 2019 when he realized he found his new home. Turning to his wife, Jocelyne Woodhouse, the Canadian-born businessman said, "We have to live here." It wasn't long after relocating from New York in 2020 that the couple, then living in a condo on Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, saw a waterfront lot on a guard-gated La Gorge Island. Is that how you pronounce it? La Gorge? I don't know. Island in Miami Beach from a friend's boat. The property had the foundation of a house that was was just starting to be built. The Woodhouses purchased the partially built home for $17 million in 2021 and completed construction of the roughly 8,800-square-foot, 7-bedroom contemporary house around 2023. It's a 0.4-acre estate, and they're selling it for $68.5 because they're building another home nearby. Nick is the former president and chief marketing officer of Authentic Brands Group, and that's why I wanted to talk about this, Authentic Brands is a very fascinating company. Tyler, you have something here?

Yeah, so it's pronounced Legores.

Legores.

Thank you.

Legores. Well, Authentic Brands Group is a very interesting lifestyle platform, I guess. I don't know exactly what you would call it, but they have—

they have some truly tier one assets.

They own more than 50 consumer brands as well as likenesses and estates of celebrities, including including Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe. But what stuck out to you?

Let's start at the top.

Okay.

Cream of the crop. They own Tapout.

They do.

Iconic brand.

Tapout Tees.

Iconic brand. And if you guys ever run into John on the weekends, he's almost certainly head to toe Tapout.

It was one of their first purchases. Silver Star and Tapout. In January 2011, they acquired the rights to the likeness of Marilyn Monroe. So if you see Marilyn Monroe on a t-shirt, Authentic Brands is getting a check.

They own Ruka, the surf brand. They own Neiman Marcus. They own Prince. They own Brooks Brothers. They own DC Shoes.

Yeah.

Tyler, I know, I know you're still— you're pretty much head to toe Volcom at all times. Volcom, maybe some Billabong thrown in there. Well, they also own Billabong.

Anyway, Nick is the former president and chief marketing officer of Authentic Brands Group, a licensing and managing company that works with companies such as Reebok, Champion, and Brooks Brothers.

He says ABG is a graveyard for iconic brands.

It's the bending spoons of brands.

No, it really is. I mean, it's somewhat sad because a lot of these brands are so, so iconic. And with the right sort of management and investment, they would be back to their former glory. I— a lot of the surf brands and the skate brands are a little sentimental for for me just because I grew up watching so much of the content that those brands put out and following the different athletes on their teams. Those industries have just been impacted— surfing most aggressively— just because kids that don't live by the ocean now, they don't really care about surfing. They care about Chrome Hearts. And so—

Do you think the surfing industry needs a federal backstop?

I would push for one, certainly.

Yeah, a couple, couple billion dollars from the Treasury directly to get Volcom, Quicksilver, Billabong back to the top.

See, we're on to something here. I think this is our new platform.

I think so.

Okay, we'll be back in the UltraDome. We're going to have a lot of coverage this weekend too around— you may have been seeing some of our Getty images. Yeah, you might be seeing some more.

Yeah, we're working on it.

We'll see.

But have a great weekend.

We'll see you Monday.

See you Monday. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpa.com. Goodbye.