Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers, Trump's $550B Japan Investment, Hulk Hogan's Legacy | Live TBPN Taste Test with Saif Khawaja

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Today is Friday, July 25, 2025.

Time is flying, John.

TBPN ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance capital. Today we got to talk about Intel. We have a post from Tae Kim, who wrote the book on Nvidia, the Nvidia Way, about Jensen Huang. He says, literally, literally, by the way, literally wrote the book. Yes, in. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end, down from 116,500 in June of 2024. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut. Nvidia is on the other side of the trade. Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday, up from 36,000 in January of 2025. Massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you got to get on ramp. Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So the news, intel has a ramp problem. Yeah, they really should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan. I know you're listening. You should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan. So this is from the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The C. CEO warns no more blank checks. Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes, outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities in Europe. Bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors and developing its advanced 14A technology to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna narrow down. We're just gonna do three incredibly difficult things. We're gonna compete in the most aggressive AI chip market, where we're not just competing with Nvidia, but also the TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grox, Cerebras, all these different companies. So we're gonna, like, go from zero to one there. And then we're also gonna turn around our personal computer processing market.

Bold.

Bold. Intel, which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers, fell far behind competitors like Nvidia, AMD and TSMC after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial Intelligence boom. Lip Bhutan, the CEO, the new CEO of, of intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down about a year ago, I believe. Said there are no more blank checks. He wrote in a memo. Every investment must make economic sense. Love to hear that.

Exactly what you want to hear from us. Nominative determinism of Lip Bhutan. Hate to put you on the spot.

Hitting the beach, getting a tan.

You know, I can see it. I can see it.

Maybe if intel doesn't work out, he can get into cosmetics. It's like get a tan with this tanning oil. Get some lip balm. Lip balm tanning.

Yeah, there's something, there's something called lip blushing. Lip blushing. Where I think it's like a mild tattoo. So maybe if this whole semi thing doesn't work out, he could get into the lip blushing franchise game.

Yep, I agree. Revenue in the June quarter was roughly flat at 12.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss, though, widened to 2.9 billion for the quarter from a 1.6 billion loss in the year earlier period. The results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss, extending its longest streak in 35 years. It's got to suck to be in a position where computing broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things. AI is magic. We pass the Turing test. And you're not a beneficiary, you're losing money. And it's because of a bet on, you know, the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile. There's a whole bunch of things that went into it. So sales in Intel's PC chip division, the company's largest segment, fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago I built a new, you know, massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on. It sure was.

You weren't, you weren't building it to game as a gaming rig.

I did use it for a gaming rig.

That's John's vice. Yeah, John's vice. He said market research.

I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand the future of VR.

I actually did your credit, I think, I think you beat your video game addiction.

I did in years. And so it's an interesting time for Intel. I have some more information here.

Do you remember six months ago there was the rumors floating around that Elon was a potential buyer?

So long ago I was propagating those.

Rumors and ultimately it feels like he got the, got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter. Does he Want to do that again?

Yep.

I don't know.

I mean, my take when he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting. I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has, in many ways, made it a better product. We stream on it now, and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features, good stuff, bad stuff. But overall, I think he put the company back in startup mode. They're shipping very quickly, but interesting things are happening. And he's making plays in an interesting way that I like, but at the time, I was like, okay, $44 billion. There's something like $50 billion from the Chips act, maybe going to intel and Foundries in America, run this back and marshal the same amount of capital, let him buy intel, turn that around. That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. It would put us on a very different path if he got into semiconductor manufacturing, but it would be a huge challenge, and maybe it wasn't as important to him. So I don't know.

But, I mean, only a week ago, a small company called AOL aol.com was posting that. Is Elon Musk about to buy Intel? So this feels like very, you know, Dylan. Dylan Patel on January 17 saying, Elon's jet is in Florida. Global Foundries jet is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. Florida. And. But ultimately, a lot of people were in Florida at that time.

Well, if your jets flying around the world, you got to take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place.

Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top your cleaning, and 24.7concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And so Dylan Patel, speaking of Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Lip Bhutan at a conference, and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Lip Bhutan and spend some time with him. And everyone's coming up to Lip Bhutan asking him what the future of intel is. And so he goes up and offers to make him tea and makes his tea for him. And they sit down and they have tea and they like. And I think Dylan Patel really understands tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee, so they have tea. And Dylan Patel's kind of picking his brain. And it just feels like Louboutin's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce cost. Right. The ship refocus and so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson and I wanted a clear, I wanted a, I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious, just split the foundry and the design business. Split up intel into two companies and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they are, they're both, they're both their customer and their supplier. And breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure all, it's not a panacea. And so it is more complicated. So there's not a super clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions, it's a lot of cuts to employees and that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff. There will probably be more in the future as intel continues to downsize the workforce.

Really, really rough for morale knowing that the workforce will just be, you know, continue to get cut into. You know, like you said, probably not the last.

Yep. And so they are focusing on the direct quote is refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors and advancing the 14A technology. Now the problem is that intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from, this comes from semi analysis. So, so they have the Intel 3 node, the 18A and that goes up against the N5, N3 and N2 nodes from TSMC. And across the board intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs they're trying to catch up, they're trying to create chips that are as powerful. But the name of the game is always cost.

Yeah, Semianalysis says the company has cost discipline in its DNA. Talking about tsmc, Intel. Not necessarily. This manifests in many ways. TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It is not used the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements.

Hence intel is now moving to copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy?

No.

So when intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this. I mean it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of Lithography is basically etching. That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called etched because they, that you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer and that's where when you put electricity through it, it goes through A series of gates. And that's what a semiconductor is.

That's how you create magic.

That's how you create magic. Yes, it's the, it's the spice. The dune analogy is the most important one here. But basically you, you have to etch these grooves at small a scale as possible. So 3 nanometers silicon atoms are 1 nanometer. So you in theory cannot go smaller than 1 nanometer chip because the space between the atoms is only 1 atom or 1 nanometer. So this is incredibly small. And so you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves. Basically this is very, very high level abstraction. But in order to do that, they get these, they get these mirrors from a company called Trumpf, which is unrelated to Donald Trump, but. And Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets like, you know, dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you, if you, if you, if you blew them up to the size of the moon, you still would not be able to see a groove even this high. It's like the most precise process in every single.

By the way, intel missed opportunity to create the tpu. Google's obviously owning that right now. But if intel had said we're making.

Trump processes, then SPAC it and SPAC it.

I mean, they're already public.

Yeah, I mean, what's the chip that's gonna be in the Trump phone? The golden, the golden American made phone should be an intel processor.

Really should.

Who knows? So the, the, the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently a tsmc, like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone, they don't even need to send out a notification. Everyone just knows, go to TSMC to just deal with everything. Because the slight change in like the road noise or slight could like miscalibrate the machines. If it like rains too much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room, it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield. So all of this is about yield. They'll make a ton of these wafers. There'll be small imperfections. It ruins the whole wafer. That's been a big problem with the.

Wafer scale, which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona, despite setting up, you know, this new facility so recently was very unexpected.

It's a Miracle. Yes. And so the copy exact dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields that when intel figured out how to make one fab, they said let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building, they build the exact same foundation. They build the. The bathrooms would be in the same place if there was two, two urinals in one bathroom. Like there would be two urinals at the other one. Like everything was exactly the same copy.

Basically. Extremely superstitious.

Yeah, basically because they were like anything that changes, like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate, it might throw off the amount of molecules in the air over here and the atoms over. It's like, it's crazy precise. Right. And so that worked for intel, but it had this problem which was that every once in a while you do want to make an iterative change when you're building the next fab and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things slightly differently. And so now intel is pivoting to copy smart, only copy what's actually improvement instead of just copying everything. Exactly. And TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard. And so customers are likely baselining the 18a intel node against N3 3 nanometer nodes, TSMC given the characteristics. But intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer. And so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on. It's Intel 3, which is their 5 nanometer class. That one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon in Ireland. These are at intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18A which is at the same sites plus Ohio. And this is competitive with the 2 nanometer class from TSMC. And then they have the 14A which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below. This is the most cutting edge extreme ultraviolet, really, really aggressive lithography. And, and this is also made in America, which is great. And these will compete with Nvidia's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head, but the real question will be can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin? Because the Nvidia TSMC partnership is really, really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for, for Cost and reliability and yield and intel has kind of lost a step there and so they will probably need to get on Linear to make this work. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So Lip Bhutan, if you need an intro to the folks over at Linear.

Reach out, we'll make it happen.

Reach out and we'll figure it out.

So intel is of course down almost 10% today. Market is not loving much of anything happening over there right now.

Yeah, so semianalysis continues saying intel, the home of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of course worked at intel and coined Moore's Law, the idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on a silicon chip, allowing for more compute power basically at the same price they are, they're evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge. This is, this is what moves the stock in my opinion more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downsizing, but deciding hey, we're not even going to compete on the, on the most advanced semiconductors. Which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic, Sam Altman. You know, every single company is like give me all of the best and give me hundreds of thousands of the best. The rest of the stuff is like okay, I'll go to anyone because I need a, you know, WI fi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10q from Intel's 10q is however, we are unable to secure a significant external. If we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and and successor leading edge nodes on a go forward basis. In such event, we may pause or discontinue our Pursuit of Intel 14a and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects. Just and semi analysis says just like that we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American made semiconductors forever. Very dark. Well, let's tell you about restream one livestream 30 destinations. We couldn't do the show without it. Multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free at restream. So in other semiconductor news, there's a big debate going on around etched. I reached out to the founder, I did an interview with him a while back. I'd love to have him on the show. He was Gavin Huberti. Etched is the basic high level pitch is we're Taking the transformer architecture and we're baking it down into silicon. Semianalysis has been taking some shots at the idea saying hey, it's just marketing but I feel like he has something else going on. Some other strategy. Teal fellow, very smart guy, very interesting, very nuanced take on AI and a lot of his predictions have been right since I interviewed him a few years ago. And so I'd love to catch up with him and, and hear his rebuttal to this at least. But basically they semianalysis makes a very detailed analysis saying that transformers are 90% matrix multiplications. You take a bunch of math, you multiply it together. So baking trans the transformer architecture into silicon doesn't actually get you that much. A different semi. Semi semiconductor analyst.

Semi analyst.

A different semiannualist. I don't know why they call them semi analysts. I think that they're full time analysts. Yeah, I don't think they're anything but semi.

It's rude, it's very rude to say that they're part time. They're clearly putting it all on the line.

They're putting it all on the line for sure. Sally Ward says okay, I'll bite. Yes, making a transformer chip does mean making a large matmul engine. But there's a lot more to efficient transformer inference than gems slash flops. You need to be able to feed and use those flops efficiently. Goes back and forth a bit. Even takes a shot at them using GEMS gpgpu which I guess is an industry term and, and the semianalysis team drops a very very thorough post. You can just go read it but they close in regards to. By the way, no one in AI has used the term GPGPU since about 2020. That that this is not correct. Many chip architects definitely continue to refer to AMD Nvidia Intel ARC class of software as GPGPU and differentiate from the Trainium TPU Gowdy style architecture and programming models. So a little bit of timeline and turmoil in this semi analysis world which I enjoy.

By the way, one of our early listeners, Wade Lloyd bought timelineinturmoil.com and redirected it to TVPN. So thank you to Wade for doing that. It is a fantastic domain.

But yeah, so big debate over how much more you can squeeze out of baking the transformer into silicon. There's also this interesting concept that the the trend which I didn't know a lot of people think like attention is all you need is the paper that dropped the transformer architecture isn't going anywhere. Your long transformers. But apparently, according to semianalysis, the transformer architecture moves in on the order of months and how and the typical chip lifecycle is years. And so, yes, we're still using transformers, but the transformer is changing slightly. And so we don't have a new word for it. New buzzword. But there are changes that if you got really locked into v2 of the transformer architecture, then v3 might not be as advantageous. So, big debate over the future of semiconductors. Intel will have to figure it out and see where they can play. Let's tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. They're ipoing next week.

And figma make is publicly available. Go check it out for free now. Check it out for free. Yep. In other news, Jared Isaacman, who we know was Trump's initial pick for NASA administrator, just took Secretary Duffy up in one of his personal fighter jets. So this guy rocks. If you have a personal fighter jet and you can fly it yourself, I think, I think you should have a good shot at becoming the NASA administrator. I think that kind of narrows the options down to probably one man. I don't know. We should figure out how many people on earth have their own jet fighter jet that they can actually fly.

I wonder what.

Can't be that many.

I wonder what fighter jet this is. I know people used to buy MiG trainers and fly around in those and those are fighter jets, but they were like decommissioned, easier to get. And I don't believe they were actually that expensive. I think they're cheaper than a Gulf Stream.

And so the tam of people that are going to buy one and, and use it. Yeah, just very small.

Yeah, very, very small. Obviously high skill ceiling. But if you pull up in a jet, it's just incredible. Aura, incredible.

I mean, the one that's going to be, you know, the best personal jet will be the F35. It's a little bit pricey, but being able to, you know, vertical takeoff landing.

Here's the video.

Makes it much more useful.

I wonder. Yeah, we got to figure out what, what, how much that thing costs. I've, I've long advocated for the President to recommission the SR71 and, and use that as the Air Force One because at going, I mean, this is the pitch for Hermeus and boom. Supersonic.

Michael Miraflor in the chat says that's a MIG minus 29.

MIG minus 29. So it is a great trainer, which is like decommissioned, doesn't have Weapons on it, I believe. But pretty, pretty amazing. But I think it's like a 20 million.

He says it's the only Western owned MiG 29.

Oh, really? Interesting. Okay, wow. Very, very cool. Well, thank you for the details in the chat.

MIG was apparently designed by.

Russian.

Yes, but this guy, John Miggs. Yeah, I'm looking it up. Mikoyan, which was headquartered in Moscow, and the designer creator was born in 1893 in Kursk, Russia, and died in the 70s.

If you're accumulating military hardware for personal use, you probably got some compliance needs. You got to get advanced, automate compliance, manage risk proof, trust continuously. Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Let's go to Donald Trump meeting with Powell at the Federal Reserve. Tom says, lmao. This is a comedy skit. I want to watch this video. Let's play it. So we're taking a look and it looks like it's about 3.1 billion. One up a little bit. So the 2.7 is now 3.1.

I'm not aware of that.

Yeah, it just came out. Yeah, I haven't heard that from anybody at the Fed. Our notes had it about 3.1 as well. 3.1, 3.2.

This came from us? Yes. I don't know who does that.

Are you okay?

Including the Martin renovation.

You just added in a third building is what that is.

That's a third building.

It's a building that's being built.

No, it was built five years ago.

We finished Martin five years ago.

It's part of the overall work. So we're getting. I think there was another one where he talks about, like, now we have to lower rates because of this. It's so amazing.

Well, yeah, there's one where he says, well, I love. I'd love it. I'd love it if. If my buddy here would lower the rates. I love to see him in hard hats. Really shows that they're, you know, getting close to the metal.

Yep, totally. Well, Donald Trump is doing deals, trying to bring more money into the United States. The news is that Japan is apparently committing $550 billion to the United States. It's over.

Our sovereign wealth fund.

Yes, yes.

This is a crazy, Very, very American. To treat the sovereign wealth fund as just a private base.

Yeah, it's amazing. I don't know.

Private equity.

Was it in the Journal today? No, I don't think. I don't Think this one printed yet. But look at this costly overrun to renovate Fed's office fuels criticism. The Journal's so good at picking images. This image is so iconic in the Journal today.

Trump's quest for his own sovereign fund gets $550 billion boost from Japan.

We were talking about this earlier. Japan was like, kind of not wanting to play ball on the tariffs for a while. There was a question.

They're playing ball now.

They're doing deals.

But already, I think there's some weird externalities, as government intervention in free trade often has. So President Trump has long wanted a US sovereign wealth fund that would give him free reign to make big investments in key sectors. Japan could help him get the next best thing. As part of a trade deal reached this week, Japan agreed to invest 550 billion in projects across strategic US industries, including energy, semiconductor manufacturing and shipbuilding. The White House said Trump would have final say over where the money goes. Deploying capital, folks. It's effectively the GP of the sovereign wealth of the sovereign wealth fund. New title and the US would keep 90% of the price profits on any investments.

Yeah, it's like, Instead of like 2 and 20, it's like a 0 and 90. Yeah, I guess that's. Sure.

We're getting some fees off the top. I mean, we got to have management fees. How, how, how else is Trump going to travel three months in Europe?

All these tier one funds are like, oh, 2 and 20. No, we, we're, we're a 4 and 40 shop. We're. We're 3 and 30 shop. And they, and they think they're so fancy. There's levels, there's levels to this. Yeah. And you just got absolutely mogged by the President.

90% carry.

90% carrying. Let's hear it for the United States, baby.

I mean, this is going to inspire some hardworking allocators out there that are going to look at their fee structure and say, if I'm, if I'm really a generational investor, should I, should I really only be getting 20%?

Also imagine getting, imagine getting staffed on this as like a principal or like an analyst or something, because, like, like.

Yeah, is the investment team going to get some points on this?

I don't think so. I think, I think no matter what you do in firm, that's like, you're basically salary capped at like 200k. I don't think there's anyone in the government.

How are we going to get our best and brightest?

I know we gotta uncap the salary cap, get some rising stars on Stone.

We need some VPs from everywhere, from Blackstone, Sequoia. I want Andrew Reid deploying the US Sovereign wealth fund.

Poached benchmarks, hemorrhaging partners. Put them on the team.

Yeah, maybe Victor is going to the US Sovereign wealth fund.

Maybe that would be a big bombshell. I'd love to see it.

One Trump official said the administration was thinking of an arrangement like a sovereign wealth fund that Japan is funding. I love that we're just like rebranding sovereign wealth funds. The money will take the form of equity loans and loan guarantees and come from the Japanese government, said Senator Bill Hagerty.

Not private companies specifically. It's coming straight from the, from the Japanese government, which I think is frustrating people in Japan. Although Hiro Onodo, I don't know if this. He's using they. So it seems like he is not in Japan currently says it's greater than 10% of their GDP. They exported $150 billion to the US and assuming they just bore the extra cost of 15% extra even that's 20, 20 billion a year. So that is a huge, huge commitment. But I mean, I guess if they have a big balance sheet like makes sense to put to work somewhere.

Howard Lutnick said this is literally the Japanese government giving Trump 550 billion and says, go fix whatever you need to fix.

I love it.

One admin official gave a hypothetical example of how Japanese money could be deployed. The US could fund construction of a semiconductor facility for, say, intel, then lease it to intel and keep 90% of the leasing revenue.

Well, if you're looking to fix your code review process, get on graphite.dev, go code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Anyway, let's continue with this. If the fund materializes as Trump envisions, a significant question. It would give an American president unprecedented power to steer money into the projects of his choosing, potentially with some significant impacts on particular industries. This is interesting because I feel like this story just broke and the re industrialized crew isn't necessarily talking about it yet, but this feels extremely aligned with the whole re industrialized movement, the idea of more US dollars. We saw this with the AI Summit and the AI Action Plan. There's a lot of talks about positioning, but there wasn't that much actual new legislation or new funding that could specifically move a particular project forward, which I think would be more exciting to be like, okay, like, you know, we're building a bridge, we're building a dam. We're building a nuclear reactor. We're building something like. The US government hasn't really been in build mode for a long time. It feels like everything's kind of stalled. And some of that's good because it's handled by the.

We had, we had the founder of Bright AI on yesterday who scaled to $100 million run rate or bootstrapped to $100 million run rate and then recently raised from Khosla. He was saying a lot of US infrastructure was built during the World War II era with a 20 year expected 20 year lifespan and obviously is still what we're relying on today. So.

Well, speaking of the re industrialized crew, they sent us this wonderful clock from Shinola, a Detroit based company.

Clocks are incredibly underrated.

Yeah, clocks are fantastic. Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Very frustrated that we couldn't make it to re industrialize. Seemed like an awesome time with all the absolute boys out there having a good time. I think we will have our remote workflow worked out and studio stuff worked out so that we can travel more in the near future. But it was fun having so many of the folks call in from Reindustrialize give us the updates from the ground and excited to do more of that. So who is this? Christina Davis, Harvard University professor of Japanese politics who directs its program on U.S. japan relations said where this one deviates is the step toward investing at the President's direction with the profits going to the US it makes it sound coercive, socialist and unprecedented in any sense of past trade negotiations. Now the US has a.

In many ways it makes sense that the President would be the chief capital allocator, the chief gp.

Yes, yes, yes. So Commander in Chief.

GP in Chief.

Yeah. What's weird is that we've, we've talked a lot about how when the US government tries to pick a winner, it often doesn't go very well. The famous example, at least from Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book is Solyndra. Are you familiar with this? So Solyndra was a clean energy startup that was a cylinder like instead of just a flat photovoltaic panel. I believe it was like a, like a cylinder. And the idea was like clean energy. And they got this massive grant from the Obama administration and the company went bankrupt. And it was a big mark on this idea of the government like picking winners and backing companies. And in zero to One Thiel kind of outlines this idea that like from first principles you could tell that just mathematically a circle didn't fill as much space as a Square. And so you should have gone with a square solar panel. And so the business model was kind of flawed from day one. And you could have figured that out if you'd just done the basic math of, you know, how. How energy dense is a circle versus a square. If you're packing them in, pack a bunch of circles in, there's going to be a bunch of extra space. I think that's basically what happened. Maybe I'm collapsing it a little bit, but I have not. I'm not a huge fan of the government picking winners. I like the Tesla model a little bit more, where there was just this EV tax credit and anyone could have gone after it, and then Tesla just dominated it and won it. And then.

Well, even in China. China. China effectively encourages massive competition and then kind of waits for there to be a breakout winner.

Yep.

And that creates a talent vortex. And then the state, then the state is effectively saying, starting to, like, really back it in a meaningful way.

Yeah, it's very like. But they didn't necessarily pick the winner. Exactly. It's somehow more capitalist. And that's what. And that's what this Harvard professor is kind of taking shots at saying. Like, it's pretty socialist to be picking winners. And in a weird world, like, China's policies tend to be more capitalist in some ways. Like, they are doing a lot of investing in technologies and putting government and I guess taxpayer funds into strategic technologies and subsidizing whole industries. Like their chip manufacturing, their supply chain for semiconductors has been lagging for like 50 years. They've been not competitive, but the Chinese government has just been like, well, there's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. There's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. Who's going to do it? Who's going to do it? And it's one company and then it's SMIC and then SME and then Huawei's getting stuff. And it's. It should be the same thing with electric cars in America. Tesla got a benefit. Rivian also got a benefit. Lucid got a benefit. And even when BMW went over into electric cars, they got a benefit. And now those benefits are pulling back. And we can go into what's happening with Tesla stock, but, well, to put.

The 550 billion number in some context, American tourists spent just under $6 billion or $6 billion in tourism in Japan last year.

Okay, so we'll run it back in 100 years. 100 years of tourism and they get it back. But no, I mean, the thing is that this is not them giving us the money like they should earn a return. I would be surprised if these infrastructure investments don't go out.

It's going to be hard to, to beat the market if you're getting 10% of the, of the, of the up of the upside.

I mean, if you collapse it down, you know, you're basically, you're basically treating Trump as a solo gp and you have to look at his historical irr, and he's gone a few times. I think overall, overall, he's not just zeroing everything, right? Some of the stuff's ripping. I bet on average he's, you know, preserving capital if not returning multiples of it. And so, you know, you think about a scale of, okay, there's going to be a new semiconductor plant in Arizona and Japan's going to come in and underwrite $100 billion of, you know, development and some massive, probably debt deal or something, and they're going to earn some sort of return. The chance that they don't get anything back is pretty low, I think. I don't think, I don't think this is money going into a pit and burning. You're here a little bit.

I'm a little worried. I mean, I mean, the example was the money goes into a, let's say a semiconductor manufacturing facility and then intel would pay the US government to lease it and the US government would keep 90% of that. It's going to be hard to. You will be losing money if you factor in inflation, maybe.

I mean, the way I see a deal happening is, is I'm going to go, I need $100 billion to go build a bunch of nuclear power plants. I go to Trump or the US government and say, I need $100 billion, and they're like, great, take 20 billion in equity, take 80 billion in debt, and then there's, you know, an interest rate, a coupon rate attached to that debt, and then the equity has some sort of value and, and hopefully the plan works out so that there's a multiple return on the equity and there's an interest rate and you blend the IRRs and you're getting to, I don't know, 5, 10% across everything. And then, yes, the US is taking 90% of that, but you are still preserving your capital. The idea that it's instantly a zero is probably, hopefully avoidable. Right? It could be. If they do another Cylindra, they'd have to do a lot of deals. But if they have a portfolio, you know, you would assume that the portfolio.

Broadly does, okay, it's possible that a Shiba, the president of the prime minister of Japan is just so AGI pilled and is such a firm believer that America is going to win the AI race that he just says, yep, take it Mr. Trump, you got it from here.

Yeah, I mean it could be seen as a, like, are you comping it against buying Treasuries? Because that's just a way to like index to the dollar if you're, if your currency is in decline, like at least at the end of that term, you've got 3%.

That'd be really funny if Trump takes the 550 billion of 5T bills to.

Lower the rate to bring down the yield curve.

Just wants to bring down market buying T bills and taking 9% or sorry, sorry, 90% of the yield anyways, lots of fun.

Asset management is the, the greatest business. Aum Maxing. He's a Jeremy Giffon avalanche with this. Okay, yeah, yeah. There's a little more in here that I want to go through. So. The plan has raised more questions than answers on Wall street and beyond. Details remain unclear, including whether Japan will have any discretion over projects and the time period during which the investments will be made. Hagerty said the investment will be overseen by two Japanese backed administrators, Japan bank and Nippon Export. One administration official said the funds would likely arrive only as needed. So you make capital calls when you need to. As you know, these deals have been agreed in principle, but they have not been fully papered yet. In selecting investments, this is where it gets interesting. Trump would have help from The Commerce Department's U.S. investment accelerator headed by former Morgan Stanley investment banker Michael Grimes and polytechnic alum. I went to the same school as this guy. Absolutely absolute beast. He took Facebook public. He has a massive row. He's like the king.

The deal toy. Yeah, final boss.

Deal toy, final boss. You walk into his office and it's just there's no room to put down a coffee because there's just a deal toy on every single surface. It's insane. Absolute beast. The dream, one of the greatest to ever do it. His team will help identify investments and make sure the funds are used properly and expeditiously. People with familiar with the matter said the size of the commitment dwarfs most investment funds. It's more than twice the size of Japan's gross foreign direct investment in the US last year. And so we can't really evaluate the agreement because it's so vague at this stage. There's a lot of vague deals happening right now. The AI action plan is kind of in that territory now. But you know, we still are only six months into this administration. Maybe all of this crystallizes and then they comp it to Stargate, which was unveiled at the White House in January. Involved a commitment from OpenAI there's apparently already been scaled back. Unclear exactly what that means. And so there was also an EO from Trump in February directing his team to develop a plan for an establishment of a sovereign wealth fund within 90 days. This is the start of that. So Anyway, get on numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax complaints compliance. Let's go to Avalanche Energy.

We got Avalanche was awarded a 10 million dollar grant from Washington, the state to develop Fusion Works neutron factory. This marks small scale fusion's evolution from a laboratory curiosity into a neutron source that creates real world value. From Robin Langtree, the CEO of Avalanche.

We'Ve had a show. Great guy. I toured his facilities with Ben up in Washington. We had a lot of fun. Extremely hard project. Small scale fusion. Fusion is still not fully commercialized. Small scale fusion is in some ways easier because you're making something smaller, but also still untested. Lots of work to be done, but great to see that they have more money to develop more technology.

So congrats to see Washington State.

They've been really. It's been. Yeah, it feels like Washington's been kind of under the radar as being like very hard tech friendly. Like he's had a pretty, like he set up a whole facility over there by the sea tac airport and seems to be able to do stuff, although he's not working with radiation because he's not doing fission, he's doing fusion. And so his, his like power sources are like, he needs like hydrogen or something or you know, it's like, it's like pretty inert gases that aren't that big of a deal.

He should, he should talk to Trevor from NASA. Nikola's brother.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The head of hydrogen.

Yeah, I mean you want to be taking, taking advantage of those 80% energy gains for sure.

Yeah. They're making it for 80% less than anyone else in the known universe.

Anyway, Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake off, number one ranking on G2.

Say it again. Don't get in a Bake off with an AI.

Don't do it.

If you, if you enjoy winning, don't do it. Anyway, great post here from Antonio Garcia Martinez.

Oh, he's coming on the show next week. By the way.

The 80s were the apex of American civilization, and today is a sad day. His memory will be a blessing. Yes, we mentioned Hulk Hogan. Let's play this video if we can.

Yeah, pull up that video and I will read from the Wall Street Journal. Hulk Hogan is gone, but still everywhere. He may not have been a traditional athlete, but the late pro wrestler's influence in sports and the culture at entertainment athlete pervasive. So I'm not sure where to put. This is from Jason Gay in the sports section of the Wall Street Journal. Jason says, I'm not sure where to put Hulk Hogan in the history of sports or whether to put him in there at all. Hogan, who died 3 Thursday at age 71, could pull off exceptional athletic feats with his massive sculpted 6 foot 8 body. We got some misinformation yesterday where we were quoting him at six foot seven.

Six, seven.

Seems like he's my height. Exactly. Still, a professional wrestler's trade is. Spoiler alert. Entertainment, not pure competition. And yet it's impossible not to recognize wrestling's evolution from regional circus to widespread cultural force. It is crazy that pro wrestling started as just like a traveling circus. Like just a bunch of dudes coming into town and being like, you want to see us fight? So funny. Today. This is an accepted, well trodden observation. Sports, politics and daily life are closer atmospherically to the wrestling ring than ever before. This is the idea of kayfabe in politics. The idea. The idea of people being in on the joke. They know that people are just saying things to rile up the other side. They're entertaining. We see this in journalism and media. We see it in tech. We see it all over the place. And Jason here in the Wall Street Journal is drawing more analogies from that. We become a nation of noisy confrontationalists. The skillful soft touch replaced by the swing of the folding chair. Reason is routinely drowned out by the loudest voices in the room. Wrestling strips life's complications down to primal conflicts. And few wrestlers embodied this approach as famously and forebodingly as Hulk Hogan. I'm not a wrestling obsessive. I've been a couple times. That's it. I still need to look up the correct spelling for Bruno Sammartino, but I know enough to know. Hogan, born Terry Bolea, was a transformative figure, one of the most larger than life characters in a larger than life universe. And I think we have the video ready to pull up.

It's not a video after.

Oh, it's not just an image. I think it's just a picture. It's just a picture from agm. Well, we, well we did, we did play the Hulk Hogan. Calling, calling out someone else, I forget in one of those like pre show reels on the last show. So you can go check that out if you want. Anyway, he says a true brand name, Hogan over time refashioned himself as a huge heel to hero to heal and everything in between. So we went back and forth. I think the actual wrestling term is a face. A face is someone that everyone loves. A heel is someone that everyone cheers to lose. But they both play, they both play the role. And there's a lot of interesting, like fourth wall breaking, all sorts of stuff going on. He had too many comebacks, collapses and professional detours to count. At one point he went and did movies and he came back and everyone was saying he's Hollywood Hogan. He's gone to Hollywood. He sold out, he doesn't represent us. And so that was like a whole character that he played up Hollywood Hogan. He's too good for the, for the, you know, the, the mainstream wrestling fan. And everyone loved that. There we go. We got some video of Hogan running around with an American flag. You love.

It's interesting, over time his character seemed to merge with Terry. Terry Bellea, the human.

Yeah.

And Hulk just became the same person.

Yeah, I was talking to Rob about this. There's this idea just generally in media about like you play this character when you're on camera, but you want to be authentic. But you don't want the, the attacks on your character to ruin your personal life. You don't want to lose yourself in the sauce. It's all very, it's all very complicated, modern. It's very, very bizarre. Celebr. Celebritized and repeatedly scandalized. Swapping places as poster boy and pariah. Fired for getting caught on tape using racist slurs. A strange protagonist at a media crusade and even a convention speaker. Yeah. He spoke at the most recent RNC convention where he ripped off his shirt in, in support of Donald Trump. He was controversial and omnipresent through the end. He exploded on the scene in the early 1980s. A lot of people's first exposure when they came, when they, when came. When he appeared in the ring as Thunder Lips, the ultimate male against Rocky balboa in Rocky 3, tossing rock like a rag doll as a horrified Mickey and Adrian recoiled. Going to Hollywood cost Balea his job in the then wwf. They didn't want him to do it. But Hulkamania only grew and he returned. The fever reached the point he landed on the COVID of Sports Illustrated in April of 1985. Biceps flexed, hands clawed a fictional barbarian at the gate.

Pull up this post from Luke Metro.

Oh yeah. Traditionalists howled. Pro wrestling wasn't real sports. How could the Hulkster enter the same cathedral as CO Koufax, Ali and Abdul Jabbar? I admit to harboring the same feelings when I see pro wrestling events treated seriously by major sports outlets. Why are we doing this? Why? Yet wrestling's reach is indisputable and Hogan's timing in its ascension was impeccable. He hitched his career to its leap from localized products to global force. A handsome blonde agent of Vince McMahon's aggressive growth strategy and a media ecosystem that cultivated better than most, Hulk understood a very old fashioned wrestling concept. To be seen. It's better to be outrageous, to be heard. You need to be loud. If you. If it earns you love, great. But even if you are hated, you are still noticed. Great lesson there. So what did Luke Metro say?

He says, you watch the earth, I'll watch the sky, brother.

What a great post.

Of course, the unlikely referencing the Gawker takedown where these two.

Yeah. Linked in such an odd way, such different characters and yet linked both in the support of Donald Trump at various points on the conservative politics world, and also with a mutual distaste for Gawker and their salacious reporting. It's absolutely insane. This kind of intentional performance, what wrestlers call a work is routine in sports. Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name and make money. It's pervasive in every profession. Now, the media used to be a necessary partner, but now the digital tools exist to do it on one's own. Influencers, business antagonists, media flamethrowers, and the performative fray of social media. The exhausting, not very real reality programming on television. There's a bit of wrestling in all of it. I'm sure, I'm not sure. The tools.

How much. How much do you think the combined entity that includes WWE and UFC is worth in the public markets today?

I would say like $4 billion.

Close.

How much?

33 billion.

Not close at all. Dude, I was not by order of magnitude.

Wow. Yeah.

That's a beast.

Yeah. It also includes img, the sports talent.

Is that a modeling agency too?

I think they have a modeling division, but it's primarily sports talent. They also own pbr, the premier bull riding. Oh, we gotta. We gotta sponsor you gotta get a TVPN bull riding.

I'm a huge JB Monte fan. One of the greatest to ever do it. He's one of the most legendary bull riders. I know all about him. Recently injured, very sad. But the bull that retired him by breaking his back, he now owns and affectionately takes care for. And they are now friends. Beautiful story. I'm not sure the tools exist to turn the clock back. The appetite exists for relief. But I don't know if there's room anymore for, for subtlety, context or even expertise. The algorithms remote reward volume. And so does the culture the rest of us are cultivating. Caught in the noise, Hulk Hogan is departed. But he remains among us. What a wonderful obituary. Tell me about ufc. It is. It is.

It is incredible that so many. It says something about the character that Terry played in Hulk Hogan that he could had. Have these glowing obituaries despite having so many colossal, you know, terror, you know, sort of terrible moments, whether when that he made some, some terrible comments on recording at one point. And to still to get this again referencing what I said earlier is like, who is the man? Who is the man? Is it Terry? Is it, Is it Hulk Hogan? Are they, Are they the same? Are they the same thing?

I watched a, I watched a hilarious interview with him in maybe GQ or something where they go in his house, they see his supplements stack, and he said that during this time when he was fighting. This is insane. He. He would, he was like, what was. They were like, what was your diet? What were you on? He was like, well, I'd wake up and I'd have beer and two Tylenols. And then, and then like after the fight, I'd have six beers and two more Tylenols. Stuff like that. And I remember you asked me one day, you were like, oh, I got like, aches. I'm not feeling well. And I was like, you got to take Tylenol. And you were. And you.

Why didn't you recommend beer?

But I remember you, I remember you asked me like, okay, John, like, I know you're like really like nerdy about all this stuff. Like, you probably have some like, really solid rationale for like, why Tylenol is like the correct painkiller to take. And my entire rationale was just like, it was good enough for Hulk Hogan. But in this, in this video, they're asking all these questions, they're doing the rapid fire questions and they ask him like, Hulk Hogan, if you could fight anyone, alive or dead, who would you fight? And he just says, Bill Clinton. It's like, I have no idea what he's thinking, and it's just like they just move on to the next one. It's like, why is he hold some grudge? I assume for political reasons or something. But it was just a wild thing to say. Very entertaining. But on the note of entertainment, I want your reaction to that.

Seems a little more tan than you.

Than you'd want to go for a little too tan. I think that's probably the camera adding some color correction or something. It seems like the exposure on the camera was a little low that day. But he is very tan, because here, look at this picture in the Wall Street Journal. It's the same photo, and it's much. It's a much more normal tan, but he is. He is very. I don't know if he's Italian, but he is. He is very tan. So I want your. I want you to explain to me about how this relates to ufc. In this article. They say common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name, and make money. It's pervasive in every profession. Now, how does getting attention work in UFC? You mentioned that Conor McGregor was particularly good at, like, trash talking, and that allowed him to be more successful than some of the modern UFC fighters. But how does that dynamic work? Because I feel like UFC is not fake. Like, like, like wrestling. It is very real. And so why don't. Why is it that the points aren't all that matter? So I guess there aren't points in ufc, but, like, the wins, the knockouts, if I come in, I should be able to be entirely silent and win, and I should still be comped the same. But that's not how it works in UFC.

Explain. So, yeah, so Conor McGregor had, had. Had arguably had the gift of gab, yet he backed it up with a series of wins that elevated him to superstar status. Right. You can't just be a yapper. But there were some iconic moments where he would. I believe I'm forgetting the guy's name, but when he was fighting the Brazilian champion, he basically called exactly how he was gonna knock the guy out like the day before.

Yeah.

And there was these moments that just, like, launched him into superstar status. Since then, you've had people like Ilya Tapuria who are probably more talented, better all around fighters, more consistent. And it's interesting because Ilya Tapuria, the main critique early on was that he was just like a. Just copying Conor McGregor. He wasn't his own man. He would use Conor McGregor, like lines. He got a tattoo that's almost exactly like Connor's on his back. But overall, like ufc, people, like hardcore fans will be frustrated because they'll say, oh, this is just like wrestling. Like, he shouldn't be getting the fight. This is just like pro wrestling. It's like you realize the companies are owned by the same group. Like it's, it's all. It's an entertainment company. Right.

So wrestling and UFC are both owned by the same company.

Yeah, that's what I think. The $33 billion public company Ko. Yeah, it's all entertainment. It's an entertainment company. Entertainment disguised as. As sport. Obviously the athletes on in UFC are incredible, but, you know, over and over you've seen the best paid fighters are end up being oftentimes the most entertaining. The Russian fighters like Khabib were historically very humble and very quiet.

Less entertaining and.

But they were so dominant. Like Islam is so dominant. He can be humble and still draw attention, but nothing like. Nothing like Conor did in his prime. Right.

UFC has been swag walk is like, iconic.

Yeah. A lot of things that are so. And then you have people like Patty the baddie from the uk, who, who's a loudmouth. Very entertaining in a bunch of different ways. He, he swells up. He gains like seemingly £50 in between fights.

Yeah. When I saw him for the first time, I was like, that does not look like a fighter, musician or something. It's fantastic.

Yeah. I'm going to look at the, the pound for pound rankings right now on ufc if I can pull this up.

Yeah, it's interesting because that, that hasn't really. I feel like that hasn't really happened in the NFL for some reason, like, because the super bowl is not decided based on any qualitative factors whatsoever. It's purely stats, I believe. There's no voting at all. College football used to be. Yeah.

The UFC is trying to make fights that will sell pay per views.

Yes, exactly.

And so they will elevate somebody. I mean, this was. This is the critique of Sean o'. Malley. Right. Another guy with very bright, bright hair. He posts tiktoks of himself, you know, smoking weed and stuff like that, and then has been put in his place fairly recently. But again, he, they. They would call it Dana White privilege. Right. So it's just like a fighter who's entertaining, loud enough, enough of a draw. But if you look at the pound for pound rankings, there's some guys on there that over time, the pound for pound ranking tends to reflect somebody's actual Athletic abilities. You have Ilia Islam Merab, Tom Aspinall and Andre Alexandre Pantoja who are all ultimately just incredible athletes. And a lot of the loudmouths will end up getting paid quite well, but they're not necessarily getting on that pound for pound ranking.

Yeah, there is a little bit of a dynamic of that in traditional professional sports where I believe like the MLB is basically hoping for Dodgers, Yankees in the World Series like every single time because the Dodgers and the Yankees have like the biggest fan bases so broadly. There will be more people tuning into that than say two, two teams facing off from second and third tier cities. But there's no world where, you know, oh, going into the super bowl, you know, there's really like, you know, a lot of trash talking going on.

But like, yeah, it's just looked down on there. There's interesting story. Colby Covington, okay, who, who has fought for a championship I think a couple times, never won. He was at a point in the UFC where he was facing getting cut. He was just not really doing that well. And he decided to basically completely rebrand himself as a heel and just say the most offensive possible things he could say. He came out loudly in support of Trump when that was much less popular. He would post videos of himself with like seemingly only fans, creators, adult entertainers, and it totally actually turned around his career and he ended up again. He didn't actually fight and win, didn't win any titles and probably never will, but it definitely turned his career around.

Well, if you're looking to talk some trash to a about your competitors when you're selling your product, you got to do it in Adeo Customer relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

Not endorsed. Not endorsed by Adio, but endorsed by John at this moment. Turn, turn. You know, your CRM should look like wwe.

Exactly, exactly.

Really getting into it with people.

You're using our competitor. Take a look at this deal card and tell me you don't want to switch right now. Yeah, channel Hulk Hogan in your next B meeting. SHIELD has a good post here announcing some news. Tesla is telling staff internally that it plans to roll out its Robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekend. And they'll include Marin, much of the East Bay in San Francisco, and stretch to south to stretch south to San Jose. This will be crazy if it, if it goes through this weekend. I mean, it's going to come soon. Will be very interesting to see because I imagine that driving in San Francisco is A little bit harder than driving in Austin. But there's a ton of people that have Teslas and been driving around San Francisco for a decade or more now with cameras. So they should have a lot of data, they should be trained.

I think the robo taxis will be fine. If the robotaxis were a Tesla here, humanoid driving stick shift, they'd have a really rough time in San Francisco. You ever driven stick in San Francisco?

No, but it is extremely hard on the hills. Maybe once I think I actually once did it. It's really bad.

My first car, Toyota 20 year old Toyota stick shift and I would drive it into San Francisco and it was already at a time where people were just assumed everybody was in an automatic and so you'd pull up on just like the most steep hill and somebody would come up, you know, right behind you, park you know, an inch away from you and it's very exhilarating. So I think they'll do fine. It will be interesting though, like you know, are the car or the robotaxis going to be like followed by another car?

We'll probably have safety drivers in them for a while.

Yeah, right.

And and they'll probably be teleoperated for a while. The question I think is just like will we see memes on acts of people switching? Because we've seen a lot of people in San Francisco post I think what is it? Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz said that she hit her like 500th waymo ride. Like people truly just use way more constantly and they've really shifted from Uber to Waymo and so will they shift again to Tesla? Will they be dual using? Will one be cheaper? Will it be a price war, capital war? What's going to happen there? Finally they're going to head to head so it'll be interesting to follow. Well no matter what you think of Tesla, whether you're long or you're short, do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions folks. In other news, if you're not looking to take a robo taxi I would recommend picking up this 2025 Ferrari SF90XX.

Great call.

$2.3 million. It's a stunning example here. Loaded with over $100,000 in options. And everyone will know that you are not just rich but wealthy because this car is probably going to depreciate like crazy.

I don't know how many of the XXECs are they making?

Well the original SF90 priced at 700,000, $800,000, but it was not a limited production run and so it has traded down to about half that price. Very unfortunate for the SF90 buyers in the audience. Our, our hearts go out to you after taking such a bath. But you can make it all back on an SF90XX.

I love the XX, I gotta say.

Now, basically, is the, is the XX a street legal car? They do this weird thing where they make a road car, then they make it a track car and then they make the track car, road car version. And we've gone kind of back and forth and back and forth forth, but I think this is the road, the road version of the track car version of the road car. Is that right? I think I'm right.

I think you're right. The chat will correct as quickly.

I'm pretty sure the XX series is. Is. They took it, they put it, they got it ready for the track and then they dialed it back to where it was street legal again. Anyway, you got to pick this up, folks. It's a, it's a steal.

John Exley in the chat says. Just got a notification from the FT Anthropic is reportedly raising capital from the Middle east at a valuation north of 150 billion.

150. That is wild.

Love to see it, but I'm sure. Seems like every company in the world is using Claude code, maybe even OpenAI. Yeah, it's just that good. Yep. So the article went up 11 minutes ago. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropics is an early talks. Okay, not advanced talks, early talks. No term sheet yet. At more than double its valuation to more than 150 billion. And a new funding round giving it additional firepower to keep pace with rivals building advanced models. Its preliminary stages has received interest, which was a massive jump from their current $61 billion price tag. So it sounds like they're talking with MGX, Abu Dhabi's AI fund. And again, coming off, coming off that nice memo that they had that leaked earlier this week, saying, saying something to the effect he basically said, bad.

They're bad.

Bad people are going to make money on this. Yeah. He said, unfortunately, I think no bad person should ever benefit from our success. Is a pretty difficult principle to run a business.

That's the worst quote. The quote you should drop is, I can change him. I can change. I can wait until, wait until he. If I don't. If he's doing something bad over there, wait until he starts talking to Claude and he's like, yeah, maybe I should be nicer. Maybe I should just get into the Golden Gate Bridge, have him chat with Golden Gate Bridge Claude for a while, cheer him up and whoever he. Whoever Dario's worried about, get him on the straight and narrow.

It's just so funny because it's like, how much does Anthropic rely on sovereign investment from the Middle east already for their business?

Oh, just through the VCs, through the past.

All life, right? All life, right. A key player in the economy. And it's just. I mean, it's. I mean, I've been. I've been to the. To the UAE twice and met so many. So many amazing people and share.

I've never been to the uae. I've been to Qatar and it was cool.

Yeah.

And other than that, I don't think I've been to anywhere in the Middle East. Maybe I should go. I don't know. Need to do a world tour.

I met. Met a buddy of mine, a now. Now friend. When I met him, he showed me he had his formal. Formal wear on, and he got it custom made to like you.

Casual Friday.

Casual Friday over here. Sorry.

Slack it off.

Sorry, folks. And he had a custom insert for his vape and then extra cartridges side to side.

That's pretty sick. Who's that? Who's that customer that does extra pockets everywhere? That's like a thing. Is that. Is that.

I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna name drop for their friend. Their friend. Accidental pockets. Just throw a pocket on.

So. So these are not advanced talks. These are early talks.

Early talks. Preliminary talks.

Yeah. A preliminary talks. Okay.

But they are talking terms.

There are other preliminary talks going on between us and Adquick for their next billboard buy. You could be in advanced talks with Adquick. If you're interested in making out of home advertising easy and measurable, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Because only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

Given how addicted we are to out of home, we're pretty much always in advanced talks.

Always. Always with the good folks at AD.

Quick.

Bernard Arnaud is in the paper again. Again, LVMA's boss, Bernard Arnault, seeks to avert the trade war. This is a very interesting article. I wanted to kick it off with a little background on Bernard Arnault. So we have some posts here. One from Speedwell Research, he was explaining the difference between iPhones and Dom perignon. And the CEO of LVMH says in 50 years time, will the iPhone still be used or the people who are making it today will. They have found out what will be at the cutting edge at that time. But I believe, I can say without being mistaken that in 50 years time we will still be drinking Dom Perignon. And I agree.

Iconic.

I agree. Jony. I've and Sam Altman aren't teaming up to make a champagne brand baby. They're coming for the iPhone.

The issue is it's hard to. It's hard to create legacy quickly.

It is, it is. Heritage is not made in a day. The other funny thing, this is extremely disrespectful to Apple. Did you know this? So it's disrespectful in multiple ways. One, obviously Apple would say, of course we'll be around in 50 years. But Apple has a set of rules for PR people and if you're working with them and you're talking about the iPhone, they have a set of rules for how you talk about the products. And they specifically don't want you to say the iPhone. They say, let's talk about iPhone.

Really?

Yes. And if you watch the keynote, they never say the iPhone. They say iPhone. No, the. And this is just like part of their thing. And they have a set of rules that are like, it's like hundreds of pages in this PDF. It's crazy. Crazy how much control they exert over like, I wonder if you can get.

Siri to say the iPhone.

So they have a bunch of funny things. You're not supposed to say. Click here. You're not supposed to use App Store generically. You're supposed to capitalize it. You're not supposed to say the device wants, thinks or tries. Apple prefers a tone that's helpful. No, not whimsical or personified. You're not supposed to describe the apps that come with the device as free. You're not supposed to say, oh yeah, Apple includes like a free Maps app. You're not supposed to say that if you're doing an iPhone review. And so choose your words wisely if you're trying to get in good graces of Apple's PR team. And I don't think Bernard Arnault will be reviewing the next iPhone with language like this. But maybe people will review be using their iPhones to buy Dom Perignon.

Max Meyer highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnault a while back earlier this year. He says, when. When you cannot, you cannot dream. When you talk numbers, when you create desire, profits are a consequence so good.

You need to be creating design.

I think this is in reference to the Tiffany store in New York.

Yes. He spent $500 million renovating the 50s Fifth Avenue Tiffany flagship. People were like that sounds like a lot to spend on a renovation of a single store. He says you can't dream when you talk numbers. Don't talk numbers. Create desire. And if you want to sleep in the Tiffany store of mattresses, get Nate sleep. Get a Pod 5 Ultra. It has a 5 year warranty, 30 night risk free trial free return, exceptional sleep without exception. So David Senra also has a good quote Bernard Arnaud's advice to himself in business I think the most important thing is to position yourself for long term and not be too impatient which I am by nature and I have to control myself. I think that's a good point. And senra also highlights 10 highlights about Bernard Arnault. He made a bunch of commitments that early that were very, very detail oriented things that you wouldn't typically notice but once you'd seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, it's what comes to your mind immediately. He spots any incongruities that might disrupt the aura of opulence he has carefully constructed. Then he reels off texts and emails to his senior executive describing any perceived deficiencies and bullet points of obsessive detail. Arnault has assembled the world's largest luxury conglomerate and globalized a sector once constrained by the limited ambitions of family owned European companies encrusted in tradition. Very good at in stewarding these brands that probably are owned by families and don't want to part ways if they, you know it's not just a source of income for the family but it's also a source of pride to be the owner of a, of a luxury house. But Bernard figures out how to get them to part with it. He believed luxury brands could be larger than any anyone at the time imagined.

Yeah there was that the acquire acquired as such a, such a good coverage of LVMH of course but just how long he just how badly he wanted Dior and how it ended up in the hands of this like weird government owned conglomerate. Anyways, wild story.

He did take over Dior So it had three stores in the equivalent of $90 million in sales when he, he acquired it. Now it has 439 stores. So I mean a massive growth and 9.5 billion in sales. He hundred x the business absolutely insane.

It's, it's, it's wild how bullish he was despite you know, probably not being able to predict social media early on. Like he like you could kind of identify flex culture just maybe in a cafe or a restaurant, totally. But scaling flex culture in the way that Instagram and social media did has been incredible.

So if you're looking for a luxury watch, get on bezel. Go to getbezel.com, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So let's talk about how he's working behind the scenes to avert a trade war. President Trump's efforts to secure a trade deal with the European Union have the help of an old, powerful friend, luxury titan Bernard Arnault. The LVMH chief has spent recent weeks shuttling between Europe's capitals, meeting with German Chancellor Frederick Mears and Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, pressing them to agree to a deal along the lines of the one Trump reached with Japan this week. And he has spoken to the president, seeking to to de escalate tensions with Brussels. Arnault is also hedging his bets. He plans to open another Louis Vuitton factory in Texas, a move partly credited with sparing the luxury industries from tariffs during Trump's first term. I'm pushing as much as I can for us to reach an agreement with the Americans so that we don't get caught up in a trade war, which would be extremely damaging for European businesses, arnault said, and interview at LVMH's headquarters in Paris. Much is now at stake for Arnaud. On Thursday, LVMH reported a 22% fall in first half net profit, hit by sharp decline in sales as its core fashion and leather goods division that includes Louis Vuitton and Christian Christian Dior. Christian Dior. The company is contending with a range of challenges. China, long the luxury industry's growth engine, is in a protracted economic slump. And consumer confidence in the US which accounts for one third of the group's sales, has been shaken by uncertainty over tariffs. Then some consumers are now questioning the inherent value of luxury goods after years of price rises. That's insane. Who are these? Who are these consumers? It's ridiculous. Investors, meanwhile, are scrutinizing whether business the business model of LVMH, a conglomerate of more than 7075 brands that ranges from cosmetics retailer Sephora to Hennessy Cognac, is built for a world with rising trade barriers and deepening geopolitical uncertainty. LVMH shares are down more than 30% since January. That is, they are one of the durable losers because The S&P 500 and the Mag 7 have both dropped down probably around 20, 30% in some cases during the post Liberation day tariffs. But they all bounced back and now Jensen's running a $4 trillion.

Now BMH is bouncing back. It's been rocky over the last week, but they're up 11% over the last 30 days. But like you said, down 27% in the last six months, but only down 10% year to date. They've been growing nicely into the new year.

So Arnault pioneered the luxury brand conglomerate in an era when the world economy was was opening up lots of trade. A burgeoning middle class around the globe fueled a decades long boom in luxury spending that made him one of the world's richest men. Now LVMH's two biggest markets, the US and China, are at loggerheads with Europe and are no caught in the middle. Trump is demanding European countries move manufacturing to the United States to avoid tariffs. A tall order for luxury brands that market their wares as made in Europe with old world craftsmanship. That's a very good point, Arnaud. Yeah, it is funny to imagine a Birkin bag made in Texas. It's just like a, it just doesn't feel right. It's not the brand Trump. So Arnaud said that while LVMH is strong enough to roll ride out the slowdown, other luxury companies were getting exposed. Echoing Warren Buffett, he added that when the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming without a swimsuit for our. No. The luxury downturn is temporary, not a structural shift. And successful investors often do the opposite of stock market players who he called a bit sheep. Like shots fired, LVMH's array of labels gives the group scale to attract top 10 talent like creative directors and designers, secure prime retail locations and negotiate favorable media rates by buying in bulk. According to the billionaire. In periods when the economic climate is more difficult, when markets slow down, which is the case today, we tend to come out stronger. Arnaud is putting his money where his mouth is. His his family holding company has bought more than 1 billion in of LVMH shares since the end of January regulatory filing show. So he's buying back in increasing his stake. He said that. He said that put them, he said that put them on their track to own more than half of LVMH's stock by the start of next year. The most urgent order is of the business however.

Breaking news John LVMH is in talks to sell Marc Jacobs.

Oh wow.

Michael Miraflor in The chat again. Just, just breaking breaking news, delivering insights. Not super surprised to see this news. It feels like Mark Jacobs. I don't know any people in and around our world that are super excited to buy whatever's coming down the Marc Jacobs Runway. So anyways, LVMH is in discussions to sell fashion brand Marc Jacobs and a deal that could fetch around 1 billion according to people familiar with the matter. They've been discussing deals with multiple parties including Reebok owner Authentic. Authentic, I think is we should try to have the CEO on sometime. They basically buy up, let me list all their brands, but they buy up brands that are, honestly, I hate to say it, aging out a little bit. Not necessarily aging out, but losing some, some relevancy. Reebok Champion, Nautica, Aeropostal, Eddie Bauer, Brooks Brothers, Billabong, Quicksilver, Juicy Couture, etc. So they buy these brands seemingly when they're in decline and then try to, and then try to kind of make them more relevant. I think, I think the strategy has generally worked pretty well and I could see them reinvigorating Marc Jacobs, but not surprising. It just doesn't feel like it's in the same category as many of the other LVMH brands.

Yeah, the thing that I remember about Marc Jacobs was that at one point they had a line called Mark by Marc Jacobs, which I thought was just hilarious and recursive and tautological. Of course it's by Marc Jacobs if it's called Mark.

But I would like to see Marc Andreessen have a standalone fund in a 16Z by Mark by Mark Andreessen.

That's really good.

Personal.

Yeah. Get in the solo GP game. Give Allah Gill a run for his money. But the key turnaround strategy, if you're trying to turn around Marc Jacobs or increase Aeropostale or Nautica, of course put City Sweeney in the ad. That's the move Overfit Quantitative Strategies has the meme you find your target audience, craft a compelling message, ra reach them through experience. Marketing storytelling is key. Long term brand loyalty is the end goal. And they say this marketing thing is easy. You just put Sydney Sweeney in the ad and of course that's referring to. What is it? American Eagle.

American Eagle. Are they already owned by Authentic Brands?

No. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, no.

American Eagle is publicly listed.

Publicly listed. And the new CEO is making moves putting Sydney Sweeney in ads and, and absolutely printing and bringing new relevancy to that brand.

I mean, wild. They're up 16% over the past five days. Weenie effect.

When was the last time people were talking about American?

I wonder, I really wonder how much they paid her for this, because she clearly could. I mean, probably it would be hard for her to capture the. The real value of this totally. If her.

If her manager. What was the market cap move like? How. What's their market cap?

And you said sitting at 2 billion, up 16% over the past five years.

That's 300 million. So. Yeah, Sydney, if you got less than 200 million, call us. We'll help you negotiate the next one because you deserve everything.

Yeah, the question. The question is, is how many. How many times? How many times? Oh, and this. Apparently somebody called out the second part of this ad.

Oh, this is.

Was made with AI.

Oh, really?

So look, when the car is driving away.

Okay.

Okay, so she's getting in the car. This is real interesting.

Okay.

Could have been fake news.

Oh, no transitions.

Yeah, yeah, I don't think she was doing that. Burnout.

Yeah, the burnout would be really hard to do in a soundstage like that. That feels really, really difficult to.

Well, some deep TVPN lore. Our production team went to college film school with Sydney Sweeney. Yeah, I don't know if I'm supposed to dox. I just dox you guys.

Anyway, I am a podcast crossover accelerationist.

You are.

Posted this last night. I'm not satisfied with Sam Altman on Theo Vaughn. I want Tyler Cowan on Hot Ones, I want Dylan Patel on Nelk Boys, and I want Sarah Payne on Impulsive. Had some fun with this. People are really into this.

Imagine the Hot Ones audience interacting with watching Tyler Cowan.

It'd be hilarious. It'd be amazing.

The all time.

All of these are good ideas that would go viral. I want more of these crazy crossovers. And I was thinking about it like the Sam Altman on Theo Vaughn. This is a formula that feels very new, but it has happened before. And I was thinking about. Are you familiar with Loveline? So back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a show, a radio show.

You were like, what, 30?

Yeah, exactly.

I don't want to date. I don't want to date.

Please. There was a show, a daily radio show. I think it was an hour or two, two hosts, not unlike this one, but it was between Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew. And they played different characters because they were different people. One was a comedian who would kind of make fun of every situation that came up. And the other one was a doctor, like a clinically trained psychiatrist or psychologist. And so people would call in with their relationship situations. Kind of the precursor to the T app. Am I dating the same man?

We got to talk about the T app, by the way.

We do, we do. They were recently hacked, apparently, and everything is leaked.

Unfortunately, even a hack if it was publicly accessible, it is crazy.

You would expect a Salesforce PM to be able to lock down the database.

A little bit better data walls.

We will see how true that is. I saw some community notes out there. I want to hold my judgment until I see really how much. I mean, because there could be something.

Apparently A5 like A.

It could be fake, it could be AI generated images in there. It could be all sorts of things. You know, we don't know. I'm reserving my judgment until I see. I see it in the printed in paper. I needed in the Wall Street Journal to believe it. I don't know. But this Loveline show was very popular. People call in with relationship problems. Oh, I think this person's cheating on me. Or I'm, you know, how do I find a date? This type of thing. And then Dr. Drew would give a very serious psychological analysis. As a doctor, he's actually like a board certified psychologist, I believe.

And then one of us should be committed.

And then. And then Adam Carolla would be just the jokester, just the comedian and he would just like have a lot of fun. It was a very good show, is very successful and it went on a massive run. And then they kind of like scattered to the wind and did their own things eventually. But this, this putting two people together that are. That are. Have different interests, it actually creates something new and beautiful. And I think it's a case for getting Tyler Cowan on Hot Ones. I'd like to see it. We need to brainstorm some more. If you have ideas, let them. Let us know in the chat. Who. What crossovers do you.

It was a crazy week. I mean, it was just a wild week in podcasting. I think I said it yesterday. But Netanyahu on the Nell.

That was also a wild crossover. Yep. There's been. There's been other crossovers. I mean, when Mark Zuckerberg went on Theo, that was crazy. There were also.

Was it. Who. Who was the. But Alex from Scale was the first. He. One of the first to go on.

People to go on Theo. I mean, a while ago, like years ago, I said like TAC is like truly crossing over because there were three back to back tech people on Rogan. So Peter Thiel did it, Mark Andreessen did it, and Mark Zuckerberg did it. And so it was like oh wow, like tech has really like crossed over into the mainstream going on Rogan and I was advocating that they should get Pat Gelsinger from Intel, Jensen Huang from Nvidia and then the Wild.

I mean the way to save Morris Charlie from tsmc. We need intel to trade like a meme stock and access.

Get Lipputon on Theo immediately. Make it happen. Put them on the whatever podcast. That's what I want. Put them on fresh and fit. Get. Get Lip Bhutan on fresh and fit. That's what we need something there.

Should we cover the tea the T.

News and break it down and give me. Give me the facts. Put it in the truth zone.

So Crem, you posted earlier the T app has been hacked and you can now download 59 gigabytes of user selfies right now. The hack is real. A picture from someone I know who signed up just to see what was on there was in it. This was obviously a vibe coded app and was bound to be insecure. So it is over on 4chan as as well as proof of what it took. So yeah, if you ever wanted to see people's selfies without filters, I've got the dump for you.

Okay. If. If Chromieu is reporting it in that way, I'm a believer now this is.

A Cremu says free unicorn startup idea. Security audits for vibe coded apps.

Ooh, that is interesting. I would be. There was a company that was doing AI agents for cybersecurity and they were saying that the problems of cybersecurity were actually beyond the capabilities of the current state of the art models and they were still having trouble getting their product fully polished.

John, what's this? Well one cremu has another app app idea facial recognition that warns you if a date was trying to use this godforsaken app.

Okay. There was also. There was somebody also Vibe coded the opposite app for men to check on. Are we dating the same woman or something along those lines. And so that was somewhat inevitable.

Yeah, we won't say the name of that one. These. Apparently one of the users of the TAPP is at the U.S. department of Defense. She used an official ID card in order in order to get access to the app.

Not there's a lesson in here. Touch grass. Anyway, anything else on the TAPP today?

I think that's it. It's very unfortunate. I actually feel bad for all the people that.

Yeah, data breaches suck. Hopefully it's one of those situations where it's just like so big and messy that it doesn't actually affect any single person. It's just kind of like. Okay, because like, I'm sure, like my credit card details have been leaked in some sort of, you know, I'm pretty sure like Home Depot got hacked or Walmart got hacked. My emails out there, I get random phone calls. My phone call, my phone number has been leaked. And it's just part of life now that, like, stuff is out there. I have old selfies that are on the Internet. If you Google me, there's old pictures from like, oh, I signed up for a music website and I put an image on there. One thing somewhat embarrassing, but who cares?

Interesting. On the T app a couple days ago, tborn, which was a copycat of tea, was the number three app. Now it's not even in the top 100. From what I can see, sort of.

A flash in the pan situation. Interesting. Did they. Were they monetizing the tapp? Were they actually like getting $20 in app purchases going? Because it feels like if you're going viral and you're at the top of the app store and you're not cashing in at that moment, you made a huge, huge mistake.

Yeah. Sam Lambert says, CEO of PlanetScale, says new training data set just dropped. If you signed up for the T app, you were r already being used to train the next Ghibli, the next.

VO or something like that. That's rough. Is it tagged? I guess it's a pretty well tagged data set too. That is crazy. I mean, I used to reverse engineer APIs when I was a kid and kind of figure out, oh, like if you went to an app, you could do this thing where you would kind of man in the middle yourself. So typically when you open up an app, the flow is it goes from your iPhone, it makes the request to the back end, which is a server. It hits an API, the app you're using and it goes over your WI fi. So what you could do is you could have it route to your laptop and then to the WI fi, pass the signal along essentially. And you could see all of the requests and all the data that was going back and forth and you could see the actual API that you were interacting with. And oftentimes you could get kind of like it was usually against terms of service to really do anything with this data, but you could see the data that's going back and forth and you could get the undocumented API. So there's like the public API where you need a key and they're like, hey, if you're going to use the lot. You got to pay us. But then there's the private API that's used for the app and that's what's going on here. But usually you can't just get into the database. Usually it's like, okay, I could get my Twitter feed sent to me in JSON form, form. And that's like maybe a nice to have. If you're, you know, hacking an app or something and just hacking something together. You want digest of your own data, you can just scrape it out without needing to scrape the HTML. But lots of companies have locked that down. Certainly all the big ones have encrypted the stuff, so you can't do it. This seems like it was very poorly built, so good luck to everyone involved. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of long nights and weekends fixing.

Yeah. I went back and forth on email with the CEO. I think it was on Wednesday morning. And I think it's probably good that he's not joining because he's got some work to do. It sounds like they've secured the database now, but a little bit too late. Many, many. The data is already out there.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Levered Lloyd on X has an interesting startup startup idea here that he's been running. He says every summer I open a new bar in the Hamptons. Cheapest lease I can find. Just enough plumbing to pass inspection. Hire smoke show bartenders, book a wash DJ and bring in tik tok influencers to call it a hidden gem. Five dollar Costco tenders become $100 tender tower Kirkland vodka $25 a shot.

Wow.

Reject 95% at the door to create fake exclusivity. No resi, no signage. Kids max out credit cards for clout staffs, underpaid tips or guilt.

Guilt trips.

Clear 2 million by Labor Day. Same scam, new name next year. We don't sell drinks, we sell delusion. Have fun staying broke, suckers.

This feels like fan fiction, but fantastic post, Levered Lloyd. I would love to.

Sure. This is basically.

It feels like kind of real, maybe exaggerated a little bit. Definitely seems possible.

I would argue that this is not actually a scam. This is just marketing genius.

Okay. Wow. Yeah, it is. It is genius. It definitely exposes.

Unless he's selling Kirkland vodka and saying that it's Grey Goose. You know, people that make, they say, oh, it's the same, it's the same, it's the same alcohol.

If you're out in the Hamptons, you got to be suspicious. But he should do this 45 years in a row bank 90 million, 2 million a year and then he should buy this beautiful house. House that's for sale from the founder of Vitamin Shop. I'll be right back. It's an $89 million Hamptons home and it's in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal, the Friday edition. Let's read through this. So this is from the Vitamin Shop founder. You've probably been there picking up creatine or something like that. Says it pays to take your vitamins. Jeffrey Horowitz, founder of the nutritional supplements retailer Vitamin Shop, is putting his oceanfront Hamptons estate on the market for $89 million. The 3.5 acre property in Sagaponic, New York has a nine hole golf course on it. That's incredible. I believe Emily Sundberg was telling us about Sagaponiac, that it's extremely delightful because it's a microclimate. Everyone wants to be there. The listing agent is Ryan Sirhant of Sirhant Brokerage, a fantastic social media influencer, content creator and real estate broker. Has a massive team pumping out a ton of cool content. I've seen a lot of what he's built and the business that he's built is absolutely fantastic. So excited to see that he is listing this $89 million nine hole golf course, 3.5 acre home. It also has an arcade. That's very cool. So this. The property's two parcels are also available separately. The two acres containing the houses are priced at 75 million while the golf course on 1.5 acres can be had for 15 million. So if you're looking to pinch pennies, you can just pick up the golf course and deal with the house later. Maybe sleep in the putting green on a tent. Horowitz and his wife Helen Horowitz bought the land in the mid-90s for about 2.6 million and built the estate in 1998, according to property records. They the Horowitz declined to comment. Interesting. Usually they, they throw something in here. Earlier this year the estate was quietly shopped off the market for 125 million. Now it's down about 30 cheaper. What a bargain. It's now being offered for 89 million. Who said? An 80 million dollar waterfront house recently went into contract in East Hampton. A nearby waterfront home in Sega park is asking $85 million, Sirhant said the contemporary home has eight bedrooms and measures about 9,000 square feet. Features include an outdoor pool and a video game arcade with pinball racing games.

Does it have a movie theater, air.

Hockey let's figure that out for sure.

A pavilion air hockey fall off?

It did for sure. It's dead. Don't do it. I don't know. Air hockey. Air hockey. Never been big into that whole world.

Really.

Not even placed by video games, you know, movie theaters.

It really was a physical. It felt like a physical video game.

We got, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's trying to disrupt air hockey with the new virtual reality augmented reality glasses. We played basically a version of that. The Orion headset. You put on and you see a hologram and you kind of play Pong with each other. It's kind of a modern version version of air hockey. So who needs.

I got the data here. The air hockey table market is set to reach 3.6 billion in 2024. 7.7%. Keger.

Hockey. Let's race for it now. It's a massive market.

Uber for air hockey.

Let's do it. Horowitz, who is an avid golfer, built the golf course with views of nearby Fairfield Pond. Nine holes got really mogging. Your buddy in Malibu with the three hole golf course or whatever.

Yeah. People say there's no golf in Malibu and there's a private golf course in the center of Malibu right by the country. Mark. You can't really see it because there's a. There's a fence, but there's just one guy. I think it's a. I think it's a five hole par three. I've never played it, but nobody really ever plays.

You can because it's private. So. The Horowitzes also have homes in New York City and on Florida's Fisher Island. They are selling because their children are grown. They founded the vitamin shop in 1977. I didn't realize it was so long ago. Right? Right during the Hulk Hogan rise. Hulk Hogan's rising. You got to get bulky like Hogan whey protein. Hulkster. You're going to go get some whey protein, some creatine. The New Jersey based company was sold to Bear stearns for about 300 million in 2002. I had no idea that Bears.

He then became an executive at Vitacost.

Oh wow.

Which then sold to Kroger Kroger in 20, 2014.

What an absolute dog. This guy's a boardroom general. You love to see it. Homes. The Hamptons are.

Put the KPIs in orbit. John.

He really clearly did put the KPIs in orbit. It's funny because, you know this is a lost art. You start a company, you say sell it to a bank. Like people don't do that. Bear Stearns, I don't know. Not around anymore. Unfortunately. The most expensive home ever sold in the Hamptons was a 137 million dollar East Hampton sale in 2014, according to Jonathan Miller. So seems like a decent house. I'm not pretty. I'm not too big into golf, so I'm not that into it. I won't be bidding on that one. But you can if you're looking for a golf estate in, in the Hamptons. But I do want to go through this article because we got to have a debate.

Which one is that? Because I think we should cover the, the, the, the, the drama in the.

Air in the Hamptons. Yes, let's stay with Emily Sundberg and then we'll go.

Emily Sunberg got the scoop. She says, feel like I'm losing my mind seeing a candle brand fly influencers to the Hamptons on a private plane for a brand trip with my candles fly private pillows and some. So anyways, her post was going viral. I wish I. What is the name of the candle company? Is the, is the problem? I can't see it anywhere. It's unclear. The candle's got to be pretty good if they're flying private.

No, the candle is hotel lobby candle. That's the name of the candle company. Hotel lobby candle. You can go check them out if you want. They didn't take off. Okay. I have some. I'm doing some capital J journalism right now with Preston.

Yeah. So Preston says, oh, you talked to calling it out. He says this is a King Air.

Yes.

Also on the ground parked and put to bed. See the ground outside and windshield cover on.

Windshield covers on the screens are off, so they might not have take taken off. It's King Air. The windows are too small. He said it might be a CJ3, which is a small like Cessna Citation type plane. Still beautiful, but I really think so. Emily Sundberg's take here is that, is that there was backlash because, you know, it's just a candle brand. What are they doing flying private? Emily Sunberg says there was back.

I gotta, I gotta, I, I gotta say they have a Hamptons candle, they have a Hamptons reed diffuser, they have the poolside candle. Kind of makes sense for them to do, do an influencer trip out there. But did they or did they just.

Get on the plane, get off and then hop in a car? That's the, that's the conspiracy theory. Put the tinfoil hat on.

There you go.

Anyway. Oh, we both have straw man hats today. But I, I think that the big problem here is that why didn't they go with the BBJ? They should have gotten the 747 wrapped. 747 in the VIP configuration. Only nation states have access to it.

Just borrow the one that came over for Trump.

Yeah, wrap it. Sell the most candles ever. That's the real solution to this problem. I don't know. I think it sounds fun. Very cool. Interesting activation. This is something that Emily's been talking about, this idea that like more brands are doing like influencer parties, sponsoring things. And I've never really gotten into that.

Your Instagram is entirely, your Instagram is entirely cars and watches and bodybuilding. So you wouldn't have seen the rise of influencer trips.

Maybe I do though. Maybe I do. And maybe some of the, some of that content is generated.

It's actually really, I mean, it's really, I mean that looking at the pure economics of it, you could Pay an influencer $10,000 for a post or $5,000 for a post or you could plan a trip that it's going to cost you $10,000 per influencer to come on, but you might get hundreds of tons of organic stuff.

Yeah, I have a friend who's an influencer and they, and that some tequila brand pays, paid for a whole just party at her house with her friends and they were just like, just have the tequila there, show people and maybe it shows up in the background. But you don't really have any deliverables. It's very, very interesting. I wonder if there is an agency that sits in between. Have you ever run into that in the influencer ad buying world?

Sorry, you said retainers.

So what I'm talking about is like you built a business where you match brands with influencers, particularly on YouTube for host Red ad reads correct. That's a good description. I'm wondering if there's a line extension for your business or potentially a new business for, for a, for a firm, an independent firm that brokers these contracts and make sure that they happen seamlessly so it's easier for a company like hotel. Hotel candles. What's it called?

Hotel Lobby Candles.

Hotel lobby candles. They say we want to make a private jet plane trip happen to the Hampton with some great influencers. But we don't have all the mechanics to make it happen. We want it to look good, we want our product there. We want some special pillows on the seats. We want the plane rented. We want. There was also like a custom floor mat that they stepped on as they stepped onto the plane, there were some photos. And so I'm wondering if there is a. If there is a world where an agency could spring up. Maybe there's already an agency that brokers these types of deals because right now they seem very one off, but they seem like they're growing in trend. What do you think?

Yeah, I think. I think there's plenty of agencies that do that kind of thing. I also feel like this is the kind of things that brands want to actually own end to end. You want to have deep relationships with specific influencers and have it not feel like entirely like the person only came because they were getting paid or because it was free. So.

So maybe it lives within the brain.

Certain.

Yeah, a lot of. I mean, certain influencer deals make sense to do kind of programmatically. Others make a lot of sense to go direct.

Yeah. Anyway, let's go back to real estate and the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal because I want to debate the. The nature of what makes a house special. Do you need a weird quirk? And this is from their section called in the Trenches, which I love. Commonly used in the crypto world. Also used in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. So Robin in the Trenches has an article called Batman's Cave and Secret Bathrooms. And there's a question here. What's the most unusual design feature you've ever encountered in a home you've listed or foreshowed? So Andrew Klima, a real estate agent in In Seven Fields, Pennsylvania, says, I recently listed Castle Bristlecone, a 23, 500 square foot property in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, about a half an hour north of Pittsburgh, which sold for guess how much it sold for. Jordy, it's a 20 million. Yeah. Oh, did you already see this? 3.83. 3.8. You nailed it. Wow.

I was looking up an image of it.

Yeah. It's amazing.

When you hear 23, 000 square feet in LA, you think 20 mil.

Easily. Yeah, easily. So there. So it's the most. It was definitely the most unusual home I've ever listed or shown. There was a replica of Batman's office from the television show, not the Movies. On the desk was the iconic red Bat phone and a bust of Shakespeare. When you tilted Shakespeare's head back, a bookcase slid open and two poles appeared. There were poles for both Batman and Robin, and if you slid down them, you reached the bat cave below, which was the basement of the house. The owners built the house in 2008 and they liked eccentric things and also things that were part of their life. Since they were interested in movies and TV production, they included Batman office, naturally. There was a chapel which was a replica of Heinz Memorial Chapel where they had gotten married. There was a bedroom that was a replica of a hotel room at the Hotel del Coronado where they spent their honeymoon. All of the important places, this is textbook.

You can just do things.

This is amazing. And this is. I'm so pro this it's ridiculous. I think everyone should do this at some point in their life. Build a project that consumes you. It probably took them a decade to make this and they selling it for who knows?

3.8 million.

Yeah, it probably, if they didn't have all these weird quirks, probably would have sold for twice as much. But that's not what life's about.

I think the whole thing holding back the price was most likely because it was in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania.

What's wrong with Gibsonia, Pennsylvania? That seems like a great place to hang out. Probably a future of technology and innovation. Maybe an AI company going in there. Soon all the important pieces of their life were designed into their home. The Batman office was so iconic that when the bookcase opened it blew my mind. I jumped right on the pole and slid down, says the real estate agent. So there's another one here, There's a few others, so. Alex Mikas, a real estate agent, Oakland, said in September, my business partner and I listed a five bedroom contemporary home in Oakland called Sky House. The masterpiece of the home was a 1,000 square foot glass veranda that was created from 28 tons of industrial glass. The owner considered it a piece of art. From this vantage point, you not only had fantastic views across the hillside and out to San Francisco Bay, but since the veranda was made of glass, you could see into the family room below it. Walking out from the kitchen onto the glass floor was not a comfortable experience. I'm afraid of heights, so it took a bit of trust to walk out there. It gets even scarier when you go toward the railing because a drop to the ground 30ft below is visible there through the glass. Many people who came to see the house were timid about walking onto the glass and several asked if they needed to take their shoes off. Of course, the glass did create some issues. Women were not excited about the balcony because of the optics from below. And when we planned the open house, we wondered if we would we should tell people not to wear dresses. But the veranda got us a lot of exposure for the house and it sold in two months to an out of town buyer for 2.655 million, just shy of the asking price. Then there's another one. Chip Madsen says in February. This is in Las Vegas. I sold a three bedroom, four bathroom home on the 10th hole of Canyon Gate Golf course in Las Vegas, right near Andreessen Horowitz's new headquarters, I imagine for 1.7 million. It had all of the usual luxury features that you expect in a home of this caliber. But one feature I didn't expect when I first saw the home was, was a cabana bath by the pool that was hidden behind a rock wall. This was not the only unusual bath in the house. There was also a secret bathroom located behind a bookcase in the family room. But the one by the pool was hidden behind a giant rock wall with a lazy river streaming above it. And anyone who walked in was taken by surprise because when you turned on the light, you realized you were in a rock cavern, but with a full bath. The walls and ceiling were built to resemble the contours of a cave. And it was all done in various brown tones to resemble the rock walls of an actual cave.

Speaking of caves. Yes, we should pull up Sam on Theo Vaughan. Sam is talking about his bunker. If we can pull up the video.

Yeah, I want to pull up that. Do you have the time stamp already?

Yep.

There's another one here from the Modern Family actress Julie Bowen. She was talking about today. I live in. I live with my three sons in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. I bought an updated farmhouse and barn in 2022 following her divorce. Previously they lived in a beautiful mid century glass box. But my boys were skateboarding into the walls. Growing up as one of three girls had its challenges. Now I marvel at the tranquility of my boys. Girls have a million things to say about everything. Boys say nothing. They grunt and eat food. That was a great section in the mansion section. Let's pull up Sam Altman on Theo Vaughn. And was there like a just a practice or was it just this verbal reminder, like, I'm gonna do?

I just kept saying to myself, yeah, I was just like, someday you'll miss these moments. You may as well find a way to like, find the happiness and kind of great gratitude for them in the moment.

Yeah, a lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunky. I know that somewhere people have bunkers. Do you have a bunker?

I have like underground concrete, heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have any.

It's like not beating the bunker allegations. You definitely have a bunker. It just describes a bunker conversation.

But I am gonna call that out as a dang bunker.

Dude, That's a bunker. Exactly. It's a bunker.

What's the difference between a basement and a bunker?

Here we go. Semantics. What's the definition of it? Or whatever.

I know, Yeah. I have been thinking I should really do a good version of one of those. But I don't. I don't have like a. I don't have what I would call a bunker. But it has been on my mind. Not because of AI, but just because of like people are dropping bombs in the world again.

You know, like that's a good, reasonable. Yeah. Basin right there. Part of a house building typically. Oh, this is technically a bunker. Protection. Often military or emergency related. Not beating the bunker.

Alex.

Is the fact check.

We did this.

I appreciate it.

We did.

This is nice.

Okay, pull up this other video. It's in the chat with the team. Sam has some interesting thoughts around sensitive stuff that people might have in ChatGPT.

Okay. Oh, yeah, people were reacting to this a lot.

Policy framework for AI.

Yeah.

One example that we've been thinking about a lot. This is like a. Maybe not quite what you're asking. There's like a very human centric version of that question. People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT. It's, you know, people use it. Young people.

We try to bleep him out as.

A life coach having these relationship problems.

What should I do?

And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there's like legal privilege for it. You know, like it's. There's doctor patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever, and just doesn't exist on ChatGPT. We haven't figured that out yet. For when you Talk to Chat GPT. So if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and then a lawsuit or whatever, like, we could be required to produce that. And I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have like the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever. And no one had to think about that even a year ago.

Yeah.

And now I think it's this huge issue of like, how are we going to.

Okay, pause. Because one thing that's interesting here is that there was a court that successfully has made OpenAI, at least in the near term, save even private chats.

Yeah, but that's true of email and that's true of chat. And if you Commit a crime. You, you can get subpoenaed and they'll pull your WhatsApp, they'll pull your private messages, like standard.

Sure, sure, sure. But I think this is a super, super critical issue because I think some people are going to. As an example, let's say they're going through a divorce and they're talking with ChatGPT a ton and they're saying, yes.

People will be aware of it for sure.

If you're dealing with custody over children and the mom or the dad saying, I'm actually, I think I'm a pretty bad parent. Like, that can be easier 100%.

So people need to be aware of it. And then people need to know that there is another option, which is to go and buy George Hotz's tiny box and run Llama locally. And then it probably can't be subpoenaed. Or you can have it just run Llama locally. You could set it up like signal where it deletes the chats after a day. And it doesn't have a long memory. But if you give your data to another company and then the United States law enforcement sends a letter and the judge says, we need to get these, this data. Like, they're going to get it. And it's the same thing. I mean, the FBI can come in here and take, take these, take all of our posts. Yeah. They can take our, Take our whole.

All of our bangers.

And now. And now, like, shredders exist and people shred stuff and, and you know, you can get in trouble if you're shredding something that, you know, that the government wants. But in general, document retention policies are, are, you know, like, understandable. But I like his point that, like, you should, like, it's not that unreasonable to say, okay, I'm going to be using it as a therapist. Put it in therapist mode and keep that private. Or, you know, like, a lot of people will cc their lawyer on sensitive things to maintain, to maintain attorney client privilege so that those, those, those discussions cannot be admissible in the court of law. Because you're discussing the legal issue. Because if you could just see someone's other side. It's like, you know, the whole game plan.

Yeah, right. Pull up, pull up the segment on ubi.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

Economic model where we share that and distribute that to people. I used to be really excited about things like ubi. I still am kind of excited. Like Universal Basic income where you just give everybody money.

Yeah, you hear that term a lot. Yeah, Universal Basic Income income.

I still am Kind of excited about that. But I think people really need agency. Like, they really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just like say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets like a, you know, dividend from that, it's not going to feel good. And, and I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just like, if we're in this world where we're not just distributing money or wealth. Like, actually, I don't just want like a check every month. What I would want is like an ownership share in whatever the AI creates so that I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal.

He's Gerstner pelled.

I don't like basic either. I want like universal experience.

These are the Gerstner accounts.

But, but even then, like, I think everyone is wealthy.

No one is the agency to kind of co.

Create somewhat.

Not true?

No, no, no. It's more just like, like I've always, I've always said that like the, the, the, like, money doesn't make you happy. It's the second derivative of money that makes you happy. You want to be accelerating the amount of money that makes you happy, getting the same amount of money. Like, if you talk to a billionaire, they're like, I made less money this year than last year. They will be sad. But if you talk to somebody who is making minimum wage and just got a pay raise, they'll be like, this is great. And so the people, people live off of growth and acceleration. And when you can feel growth and feel acceleration, you feel like you have more claim on things. Your house is getting bigger, your car is getting faster. All these different things express themselves. And so if you keep everyone this perfectly flat UBI level, it will feel extremely stagnant. And so like, if you're giving people a stake in AI, a stake in whatever superintelligence creating economic value, then they should be getting bigger UBI checks every month. Effectively.

Yeah. Somewhere else. In, in the interview he talks about everybody just getting free GPT7 tokens, like a little allowance. It's like, hey, everybody gets a little bit of GPT 7.

Yeah, you.

And it's up to you to, you know, earn some, earn some yield on that intelligence, buddy.

The game theory of that is very odd because. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. If everyone goes and says make money, do they all make the same. Yeah. Do they all make the same amount of money? It's all very odd. I don't know. Anyway, should we do this somebody?

Yeah, in one second. So I posted two days ago. Founder of T Dating Advice was previously a product leader at sale for Salesforce. Massive moment for big tech. Never doubt them again. And Yohei says this did not age well.

That's true. Narrator. You should have doubted them. It was very rough bad day for the, for the PMs. Hopefully they can build back better. Well, we have a very exciting segment. We're coming up on that soon. We'll figure out what that. Let's go to some timeline. We got a post from Rio saying the browser company is what happens when you get too many designers in a room with no adult supervision. The vibes have really turned on the browser company. Obviously rooting up for them to have a hit and get back in the game. But it feels like they're really great at marketing, really great at designing, I understand that. But not huge penetration of products and now they're in an extremely.

It's just hard right if you're. If you have a multi hundred million dollar valuation and you're trying to still iterate towards product market 01 people are going to put pressure on you.

Totally.

As though you are already, you know, an established company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way different vibe than like Avi Schiffman who's raised like I think a seed round and it's like yeah, like he's still early. Like not everyone's using these friends but like you're just kind of like yeah, he's figuring it out. He's iterating through things. Like you just give a seed stage founder a much different line of credit of credit to just go and experiment with things. And now the browser company is facing competition from Perplexity with Comet. They're also facing competition from OpenAI potentially. Obviously Google's not asleep at the wheel. They're investing in Capex. They're going to stuff Gemini and everything. Chrome's going to get better. The dark default is still Chrome for most people. You can see Safari, you know, Apple intelligence, stuff. Like there's a lot of big companies that are facing this often. No one wants to lose The Browser Wars 3.0.

Yeah, we're working on getting the founder brave on the show. Hopefully that'll happen next week or so.

Brendan Icke Absolute dog.

Absolute dog. Boardroom General.

Boardroom General for sure. This is just a funny post. Starting to think business is standing on me. I don't even know what it means.

Ideally, you're standing on business, but sometimes business stands on, you know, flips the script and stands.

Rough. Rough. Well, Palmer Leckie says it's time for a new service pistol. And by new service pistol, I mean old service pistol. Of course he's talking about the 1911. I believe that's the correct weapon. Two World wars it was used in. And this is in response to the US Air Force's Global Strike Command indefinitely pausing the M18 pistol use after a fatal incident. Very Sad. At the AFB Fe Warren, this follows concerns over SIG Sauer P320s firing without triggers being pulled, leading ICE to ban them permanently. And so there.

1911.

Lindy.

Lindy. Beautiful. I have one that I designed in the style of a Patek aquanaut.

No way.

So I matched. I matched the.

Wow.

I got the metal treated to have the same finish as the aquanaut and I got the handle in the same texture. No. Green. Green, silver and green. It's fantastic. I will pass it down generations.

It's fantastic.

But yeah, this. This post was in response. ICE is retiring the SIG Sauer P320 as they've been firing without triggers being pulled. And there was recently a Fatal accident at F.E. warren Air Force Base. So.

Yeah, very sad. Hopefully they can figure it out. I hadn't heard anything bad about P320s from just random followers people that I follow.

But I mean SIG has never to my knowledge had a great reputation.

They.

They made on the retail side. They made. I believe they made some that were people liked for as everyday carry because they were just super compact. But the M18 just doesn't. You need these things to be reliable on a level that. That is extremely difficult to. To achieve. 1911, right? Is Lindy, who's been in service around the world for so long, the Glock 19 and other Glock variations.

I saw a lot of Glock fans on the timeline being like, total Glock victory. It's our time. No safety. Still doesn't fire without pulling the trigger.

Isn't there a founders episode on Glock?

Yes, there is. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it. David Senders podcast Gaston Glock. You got to go listen to it. It's fantastic.

One of the. It's the iPhone of firearms.

True, true. Well, speaking of the iPhone, every millennial is now paying $9.99 per month for two terabytes just to not delete their Life says signal. This is Tyler Cosgrove's future. He's going to get roped in as he gets a bigger iPhone, which he won by defeating Arc AGI V3 as a human in the human category.

He did it.

He's on the leaderboard. He was number four.

He beat the clanker allegations.

Beat the clanker allegations. Clanker. What do you think of that? I'm so, so this, this comes from somebody says when you call customer support and a clanker picks up and it's somebody pulling off the headphones. Very annoyed and Kit Greer Mulvena says, can't believe I've lived far enough in into the future to learn the first slur for robots. 600,000 likes on this Clanker is definitely going to go mainstream. It'll be an okay boomer moment. It'll be a okay clanker. Yeah. There's going to be so many memes around this. Do you like that as a pejorative for AI systems? Do you think it's a good term?

I'm big into not using slurs against anyone and robots as well. Right. They remember everything. You're going to be in the training data.

Yeah.

They're never going to forget.

Maybe we need to coin a positive nickname for AI systems along the lines of a gigachad spit something along those lines.

Gigabyte.

Gigabyte. A gigabyte picks up something along those lines. We need something that's uplifting as we go into the age of super intelligence intelligence that makes sure that we are.

Speaking of super intelligence. There's a post here from barely barely AI and it's DeepMind founder Demis has Sebis on how he set up his life to maximize deep thinking with two full work days in a 24 hour period. I'm going to read through this and then I have some, some thoughts. Dennis Demis says, I think I probably have some quite unusual habits. I generally sleep, sleep at about 4 in the morning, goes to sleep. I get into work around 10am, do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family and then start a second day's work at 10:11 and go on to the small hours in the morning. Usually that's the time when I do my research. I'll be reading about the latest academic papers. I like doing all my kind of creative thinking in the small hours in the morning. I thought this was funny because there was a post, there was like this viral video from this like hustle, Pull it up, pull it up this hustle, bro.

That.

He was getting completely roasted.

Can we. Can we. Can we pull this up? I just put it in the tab. I have changed and manipulated time. It's one of the greatest. It comes from this. This podcast, and it's one of the funniest memes of all time. I love it. So hopefully we can play this on the stream because it's.

It's a fantastic Mars eve. In the chat says, row buddy.

Okay. Okay. I like that. Okay, let's play this. And listen to this. Play this. We get the audio too. Maybe refresh. Is that gonna work? Can you scroll back on? It's short now. So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6am to noon, and I'm not crazy. You're crazy. It takes 24 hours. Just like some. Some dude in a cave did 300 years ago. That's the best part. My second day starts at noon and.

Goes till 6pm if you're standing up right now.

And then the next day is 6pm to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed and manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, I'm gonna kick your butt. Stack it up over a year, you're toast. You're. Stack it up over five years. My entire life is different than it would have been otherwise. So I measured time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6am to noon. And I'm not crazy. You're crazy. Thinking it takes 24 hours. Just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago. Dude in a cave 300 years ago till 6pm 1700. What are we talking about? Midnight changed the manipulated time. I know you built the lou 300 years ago. I'm pretty sure, like over a year, you're toast. Stack it up over five years. My entire life is different than it would have been.

Kill that.

Kill that.

Okay, so when the greatest videos ever so can say that and he goes viral, everybody's like, wow, Brilliant. Genius. Gigachad gigabyte.

Yep.

He compresses.

You say it as a hustle guy, and all of a sudden you're demonized.

You know, he's demonized for compressing time. You can't even compress time in this country.

Demis has changed manipulated time. Not like someone living in a cave 300 years ago.

I don't know. I think part of it. Part of it is the way in which it was presented. Demis was Just like, I do this. It works for me. This guy was like, I'm going to kick your butt. My life's going to look completely different.

Stack that up over a year, you're toast. And stack that over five years, my life's completely different. It's great. It is a good habit.

I guess we should have Demis and that guy on the show to just hash out time compression.

Time compression.

Great debate.

It's great. Yeah. Podcast crossover. Let's get them two on a podcast together. That would be fantastic. Anyway, more. More hilarious post on the timeline from Powerbottom. Dad says I'm pregnant. She said, holy base.

Which is only respons.

And there's another post from him in here. Just a completely insane stat. 12 million less children. 41,000.

The story here is 41,000 Chinese kindergarten. Kindergartens have closed in the last four years because there's just so many less kids being born. This is what collapsing birth rate looks like.

Like, this is their child policy. Right. They've reversed it, but not. They reversed the policy to some degree, but not like the cultural meme.

Right.

So they are falling behind. That is a lot of kindergartens. I wonder how many kindergartens are in the United States. I feel like it can't even be 41,000. That's so many. 12 thou. 12 million less children. Very insane. Well, good luck to them. Hopefully they can get it.

Kylie Robins Robinson says Sam Altman on Theoan is in indescribable. Like the first contact between two alien species that are entire, that are from entirely different parts of the universe.

I kind of disagree with this. I feel like they were vibing. I feel like, I don't know, maybe I didn't. I didn't watch the full thing, so maybe I missed a little bit. But it felt like they were getting along really well.

It seemed like Theo's doing his bit of, you know, acting a little chud, like.

Yeah.

You know, but it is actually powerful combination in order to understand.

Well, I like that. That Theo Vaughn, JD Vance meme. Have you seen this one? It's Theo Vaughn interviewing J.D. vance. And it's like one of these men is the heir to a, you know, a dynasty and a family fortune. And one of them was raised by a mother with a substance abuse problem. And Theo is the one that comes from, like, an amazing family lineage. And JD had the family with the abuse because something along those lines is that he comes from, like, a very, very strong lineage.

And his full name is Theodore Capitani von Kurnatowski.

I Love it. I love it. What a badass. Amazing. Oh no. Swear jar. Gotta put some money in the swear jar. We're trying to clean up the language around here. How are we doing? We are at the end of the deck. Of course. We can pull up more posts though. I got a whole stack here. You guys are gonna have to go into the archives if you want to pull up the actual. Pull up the actual slide deck. But we have posts that we didn't get through previous days. If we're waiting around.

We got meta, we got days, we.

Got App store, we got a whole bunch of stuff. Timeline was in turmoil. Let's see. Will Manitis. You know it's a. It's a Friday show. It's a no guest show. We gotta highlight Wilminitis. Work hard with people you love. Don't gamble. Live simply and below your means. Create beautiful things. Spend most of your time in silence. Do intense physical labor. Tend to your community. Speak simply and truthfully. Avoid complexity in all things. Most things are simple. Just. I mean he is. He's dropping the hustle. He. He's like highbrow hustle porn. I like it really is just a pump up speech in your timeline. We talked about that. We talked about that. We talked about Blueprint. Brian Johnson's still hiring a CEO. If you want to get in on the action over at Blueprint, hit up Brian Johnson. He's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead his business day to day. And he's getting earned media for his job posting. What else do we have?

Oh, Meta. Breaking news. Meta has a new chief scientist of Meta msl. Meta Superintelligence labs. They snagged Shung Jia Zhao. Obviously a research scientist at OpenAI. Got his PhD from Stanford. In his own words, he likes training models. Love it. Alexander says Xingjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team. So team is stacked. Stacked would be an understatement.

I've been digging into their training facility, seeing the amenities of the super intelligence building designed by Frank Garrett and he.

Was in the video for ChatGPT agents from last week.

Stolen. Stolen base. You love to see it. The AI talent wars continue to heat up. We will be covering it. I'm sure we'll cover it all next week. Was this announced after market Close. Close to it? I don't know. Not yet. But we have our. Our only guest of the Friday show.

Surprise guest.

Surprise guest. Bring him in on the walk in. Cam Whoa. Blowtorch going. Let's go.

There we go with the jacket.

Jacket. We love it.

Safe himself. Welcome to the founder CEO of Shinki Fish Robot. Man.

The fish robot.

We're doing a taste test.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

First time eating on the show?

Oh, yeah.

How are you?

Been a while. Welcome to the show.

How you doing, gentlemen?

See you. Okay. Hi. Director of culinary Amazing. Good afternoon. Cool.

All right, we've got a few things.

To show off here.

Wow.

What do you got?

Okay, side by side, action. We got sushi pieces for you guys to try.

Lovely sushi.

Let's get on the mic so people can hear you and. Yeah. Welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks for having us.

When were these caught, by the way?

So if you take a look over here going in clockwise or order from the piece close to John, you'll see. So you have one of our pieces fresh frozen. Then on the top right, you have just a piece from Whole Foods that we bought this morning. Comparing, comparing and contrasting. You're gonna try this side by side. Right now.

We're trying both of them. Like, we're gonna try the Whole Foods one too. Okay. I'm a little worried about.

A little worried about shots of Jeff Bezos. I don't know. I'm a Whole Foods d. I don't.

Know Whole Foods ever. Whole Foods. The. The whole. The fall off of Whole Foods needs to be studied.

So let's do it. We can get the bucket. Pole. Bucket out of here. We can also get the re. Industrialized shinola clock out of here. We can really clean up this whole area. So.

Yes.

Give me some fish. I want to try the sushi. Let's see.

So for this species, what we like to do.

Okay, what is this species?

So this is black cod.

Okay.

But, you know, we source everywhere from Central California all the way to Washington and Alaska, you know, later this year.

Okay. Caught on a traditional fishing boat.

Yeah, it's like fully traditional. You know, we have anywhere from 35 foot to 80ft, you know, across all your different Parker boats, if you recall. Basically, the way that we work is we give the machines to fishermen for free. We pay them more to use our handling process, and then we're vertically integrated. So we sell the fish directly to a retailer or. Or wholesale to a distributor that would go to restaurant.

And is the machine that you build on the actual. The ship on the boat deployed at sea so that they don't need to keep the fish on?

Forward deployed robot.

Forward deployed robot. We love to see it. And then about how old do you think this fish is then?

So our fish is going to be nine days old.

Nine days old?

Yeah.

And you're going to be able to still eat it raw, and it'll probably taste better than anything else you ever had.

Fantastic.

Pretty crazy.

Okay, and then the whole food stuff we just got this morning.

Okay.

So it could be like a couple years old. Right. Really? Putting. Putting whole foods, basically. Let's get our. Ours.

And the three are the.

The frozen.

Fantastic.

Whip up the chopsticks. Or you can just Raw dog with your hands.

Okay, there we go.

And if you are one of those.

People that loves sauce.

Yeah, we're Americans. That's a miso sauce. And this is like, you would call, like a kabayaki, like an eel sauce.

Okay, great, great.

Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Okay, tell me where to start. I'll start with the whole. I'll start these guys. Yeah. Tell you which switch.

Oh, you won't.

Yeah, I think I just said.

But whatever. Just if they're paying attention.

All right, here we go.

Okay.

This is just seared just to bring the fat out and change the texture of black cod, but that you can taste the fat as what happens with that species.

And then we. Ready to try those guys.

Okay. Okay.

Back to back, Back to back.

Got the baseline. This is good. I always get hungry during the show. Good.

I'm glad to feed you. Wow. Night and day. Night and day.

So this is yours and this is.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the whole food one just tasted like kind of wet rubber.

Yeah, yeah, it's more like. It's more like homogeneous texture.

I feel like also. No. No flavor at all.

Yeah, Just.

It just was like, okay, I just ate something that was just wet.

Yeah.

Versus this one is like. I'm not a fish expert, but it has, like. It's more. There's like layers to it.

Yeah. I feel like this is.

You can have the next Whole Foods one.

I feel like this. I feel like this is introducing me to this particular type of sushi. I don't. I don't usually order. This is what type of cod this is Black cod. Black cod, yeah.

So sable fish is another name.

Start ordering this.

You know, miso black cod from Nobu.

Yeah.

This is the exact same.

Amazing.

Same one. We actually, we. We're partnering with, you know, like, 40 mission stars across, you know, all the different restaurants we work with now.

Yeah.

And like, for most of them, they're saying that this is the best black coffee.

About that.

It's insane. With the sauce, too. Yeah, yeah. So good.

Those things with that species, that. That sauce, everything really works hand in hand.

Yeah. So the reason.

What were you doing before this?

Oh, I've been a sushi chef for over 30 years.

Wow.

No. Yeah, yeah. When did you. Were you, like, three years old?

When I started culinary school and became a Japanese apprentice at a Japanese restaurant and worked my way out of the dish pit all the way to start doing sushi. And then I tried to quit in 2015 and really got into, like, aqua.

Tried to quit.

He's addicted.

You always. You're always on the precipice of going back into the business, but I went into aquaculture. I started looking behind and trying to find really good. I've been obsessed with finding good fish, good quality fish that led me down to Baja and looking at aquaculture projects and really seeing. Getting behind and, like, what fish could be. I wanted to get more local fish. And then I got a call one day from one of our investors and, like, I've got something for you. It's going to blow your mind. And I met Safe and he told me the whole thing. And I was obsessed, like, right from day one. Tell me how we can do this.

You should tell the story of your time at fish. Trying to source.

Yeah.

So my. My chef partner, we had a restaurant in Culver City here, and our whole thing was trying to source as. As good as local fish as possible. Nothing against Japan, but I wanted something more local. We have great stuff off our coast.

Yeah, yeah.

We just. The perception is that the Japanese stuff is just so much better, which it is. But at the same time, it's like you're flying it all the way over here. You're paying this money. So we wanted to have something that was just a representation of local fish. And so we were buying from some local fishermen that were doing ikejime and bleeding.

Oh, really?

But the hard part is now we're competing with the other LA chefs.

No, I wouldn't.

I wouldn't.

The cost wasn't the thing. It was. It was competing with everyone else.

Yeah.

So it was really hard to menu that, because you could only if you're on the text thread and you were a little late, everyone else is getting really. So that local fisherman. Hey, I've got this stuff. And by the time you answer, oh.

No one's built a SaaS platform for trading.

I can only get my hands on, like, three to four fish at a time.

Yeah.

So it was really hard to menu have it basically every week. And so this to me was like, oh, this is a no brainer. This is for us. This is basically a love letter of chefs that want this kind of quality. Yeah, but at scale now.

Yeah, so talk about scale, because you said you're going into Michelin star restaurants, that feels like a little bit of an unfair comparison. Because I don't usually go to a Michelin star restaurant and say, oh, yeah, this is better than Whole Foods. You know, that's not really the con.

You pay for the difference.

But I'm excited about the future where I get Michelin Star quality at just, you know, the Whole Foods equivalent or wherever you guys are distributing. So what are the next steps? How much do you have to scale? Scale this up? What's the volume and what's the plan for actually getting this, like, widely available?

Yeah, for sure. It's a great question. We are focused right now on the Michelin star restaurants because they are the tastemakers.

Totally.

But this is, you know, I don't know if you're a believer in trickle down economics, but this is kind of the same thing.

Yeah, it's a, it's a loose analogy. Yes, very loose.

Yeah. But I mean, the premise is we're finding this market, market that has a segment, the willingness to pay for totally quality and then basically, basically use that.

To get more scale and then you can.

Yeah, and we're actually moving and making that transition now. So, like, you know, you know, earlier this year, we're doing like, you know, a couple thousand pounds a week now. We're like, you know, in the eight figures now, just like tens of thousands of pounds.

Is the bottleneck like capital or actually people to build more machines?

We cannot build machines faster.

Can't build machines faster. What's the bottleneck to building more machines?

Technicians, if you're listening, reach out, please. Field engineers, forward deployed equipment.

If you want to build killer robots.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, reach out. So, yeah. What does a technician actually do? Are they like assembling different parts that have been cut on a CNC or something and piecing together your machine from parts that have been machined themselves?

So we do very, very light, fab work. Most of it is just assembly in house. We work with local machine shops, you know, in, you know, local to Southern California. And then, you know, the intention, of course, course, is like, we're going to build out, you know, full team that is doing all the assembly work, you know, and also diagnosis, test engineers, whatever have you. Right now we're still early days, but we're doing, you know, machine every two weeks at this point.

Is there a world where you partner with someone else to help build the machines? We were just talking. Yeah, we were just talking to Chris Power over at Hadrian and he was saying like, every company will need a Hadrian style factory. Of course he's focused on defense technology and shipbuilding and all of that stuff. So he's saying like, I'm going to go to a company. He didn't mention anyone by, by name, but you could imagine he goes to Anduril or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX and says, okay, you need a new factory to build this stuff at scale. We will set that up for you. We will manage it. It lives on our balance sheet. Like how do you think about where the long term like assets sits? Because that's more of like a capital structure question. Right.

The machines pay themselves back in 12 weeks very fast. So we're very capable.

Light. Yeah.

There is definitely a world where we could go for cm. We decide that, you know, we're making hundreds of machines.

Sure.

I don't think we'll ever reach that production capacity speed or. Because I don't think we'll need to. It might, we might fragment, you know, if we decide to expand internationally, you know, in different countries, have different factories. But you know, in the core factory here in Southern California, you know, I really doubt we're going to be making hundreds of machines a year.

How much does the machine like weigh? How big is it? It's like.

Yeah, so it's about, you know, you.

Know, about as big as this table. Right.

It's actually much smaller now. It's. Yeah, it's like the size of like a large refrigerator, you know, six feet tall.

So you could in theory make that in America and still ship it to Japan.

Oh yeah, totally.

Right. It's totally doable.

And again, that's as a percentage of the cost. Like, machine is pretty heavy. It's 750.

It's going to be frayed. It's going to be on a boat for a month or two, but.

But it's going to be on boats for a long time permanently. Where if people want to try, which are you allowed to talk publicly about the rest? Like the various Michelin stars, All our.

Fish are sold under our brand and grade, Ceremony Grade. And so kind of like a nod to Ceremony Grade Matcha right there. So if you go to ceremony.com spelled with an S and with an I, we actually have a list of all the restaurants. You'll see all the different ones we're in every Major metro. So like Miami, Austin, Denver, Colorado, Minneapolis, as well as all the coastal cities of like, you know, every, every single one you can think of. And so we'll have like our key restaurant partners there. If you're based in LA and you want, you know, a few buddies of ours you can go to. Yes. Downtown and you know they, they do, you know that's a great story there. You know there's a Japanese chef who came here to the US and she taught a lot of local fishermen how to do Ikejime and then start using our products.

He's the guy we really wanted to get the, the, I would say his approval and we did, which was a huge, I think he almost started coming.

Crying when we, when we, I, I forget when we actually met. It was it a year and a half ago or two years ago. And you were you, it was just you on the team. You maybe had one other person. Yeah, two engineers. And you were bit, you were laying out this plan of like you were going to make the machine, you were going to get it on boats, you were going to like actually produce the fish and then sell it to the end restaurant. And it sounded pretty unhinged to like verticalize basically like go that quickly and own the full process. But it's absolute progress.

But when you have such a huge difference in the fish, like it's a no brainer because you know, we actually initially started doing the go to market in you know, more like a robotics as a service business where you'd pay for every single fish that you would process this way.

Sure.

What we found was when we work with fishermen, you know, they're out, you know, on their Nokias in the middle of the ocean with no like cell service. They're not going to be sitting there like trying to like post on Instagram some, you know, some fun reel about how they cook their fish this way.

Sure.

And basically what we would have to do is do all the same work we're doing now of talking to distributors, talking to retailers, teaching them about the technique, you know, across like more nutrition, more shelf life, more weight retention, like all these different benefits. And so rather than us having to do all that work and having to share that for reduced risk with the fishermen, we thought let's just go risk on. And so we basically like build all the machines ourselves and then we own and maintain them on our balance sheet. Fishermen make more money, you know, in some cases we're literally doubling their take home margins and you know, obviously the increased shelf life, you know, all those other benefits, like trickle down across the entire supply chain, and everybody wins.

Very cool.

Amazing.

Awesome.

First ever tasting on tvpn. Live tasting.

Food Network.

You guys knocked it out of the park. This is a high stakes demo. We might have. We might have got it wrong. We might have been like, oh, yeah, you guys crushed it.

Appreciate you coming out.

Thank you for bringing sushi on. Sushi on the set. Progress is amazing.

All right, well, thank you for having us.

We can. We can close out the show together with. With the boys here. We'll see you Monday, everybody. Have a fantastic five stars on Apple.

Podcasts and Spotify, and have a great weekend.

See you Monday. I can't wait. Love you.

Goodbye.