Market Top Signals Reactions, Perplexity vs. Cluely, Volkswagen Electric Bus Flops | Farbood Nivi, Sean Frank

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Today is Friday, July 11, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. That's right, the temple of technology, the.

Fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

We got a great show for you. We have some maybe terrible news. There might be top signals in the market. There might be top signals all over the place.

We've been building out an internal top signal tracker. Crowdsourcing, some of them.

Crazy.

And it's a long list. Yeah, we'll get through it.

At the top of the list, podcasters have been wearing white suits recently to celebrate the market ripping that feels.

White suits are actually a top signal.

It's a complete top signal. But of course there is some good. There are some. The economy strong. We're going to go through Joe Weisenthal's breakdown. Things are not doom and gloom, but there's a lot of crazy stuff happening and it's fun to dig through. I mean, the first major top signal, Bitcoin, all time high.

Yep.

You know, that's always, you know, it is definitionally a top signal because let's.

Go through the list here because it's quite substantial.

So one anonymously contributed through group chats, of course, stuff we've observed. We're going to catalog it and see if we can turn the tide of the top signals to ideally.

So starting off yesterday, Trump made a post on Truth Social calling. Basically celebrating the state of the economy, the markets, you know, just really calling out how many assets are performing well.

I haven't seen the second one.

Do you want to read through it? Do you want to read through it a little bit? Because he basically get through the post and we'll get to the moment.

So Donald Trump on Truth Social Truths. Tech stocks, industrial stocks and NASDAQ hit all time high record highs. Crypto through the roof. Nvidia is up 47% since Trump tariffs. USA is taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. Country is now back. A great credit Fed should rapidly lower rate to reflect this strength. USA should be at the top of the list.

No inflow rates, low rates are actually just a reward for when the markets are ripping.

Exactly.

It's a little treat that we give ourselves exactly when things are great.

Yep. And the White House is posting this. Screenshotted on Axe. The country is now back, says President Donald Trump.

Every account controlled by the White House has been on a tear. Some of them, some of the posts I think are a little bit low class and vulgar, but others are quite funny. But there's definitely the memers are in control.

Didn't Rune say every, like every politically aligned poster he knows who is like pro Trump now works for the White House. But like you just haven't seen it because they were like a nons and they just dropped off posting and now.

They'D be getting death threats. So they have to. It's even actually more in many ways it's, it's more controversial work than Doge.

Maybe. Yeah. Maybe it's more under discussed because Doge had this big like question in the media about like, you know, is Elon doing something that's, you know, he shouldn't be? Is he a government employee? Like what's the relationship between the two? And so there was a lot of investigative journalism that went into figuring out what's going on with Doge, who's involved.

Yeah, but nobody's investigating the memes.

Social media managers, which is.

They need to be investigating the memes of production. But anyway, so going through my list here. That's great. Eric Trump a while back said this is a good time to buy. This was a few months ago on Ethereum and then it just went down for months and now it's back up. And now it's back up and he's saying, you're welcome.

I do remember Trump. He called the bottom right. He said like now is a good time, time to buy generally. And then the market rips.

And so he created it and he. And he called it perfectly. It's wild, it's finesse. More going down the list. Coinbase, just who we love. But they did. They are a Fortune 500 company. They did update their profile picture to an NFT. Historically that has been a top signal. I do think their profile pictures.

Do you have any experience with NFT profile pictures?

You know, I've delved, I've delved over the years.

Experimented.

Yes. And if you. And if you look at maybe the moment that I did use an NFT profile picture in 2021, it was maybe only off by one or two months. In terms of. In terms of the.

I never used an NFT profile picture but I bought an NFT right near the top chain Runner.

Nice.

Which I still own, which actually I didn't like over invest get over my skis is very small portion of that's.

An asset that will be passed down through your family. Like I like fine watch.

I like to think of it as like a piece of 2022 lore. You know, it's just like a piece of history. But yeah, fun project and I feel like to some degree, you know, you're not really. It's like a skin in the game question. Like you're not really participating. You're not experiencing the market unless you're participating to some degree. But you don't want to get over your skis. And Sequoia also did the NFT profile picture at a really bad time and had to roll that back. Like there's been a number of like NFT profile pictures that have been like.

It is a historical top signal. It could be now just a signal for the start of a generational run new cycle. But historically it's a top signal. So we gotta call it out if.

NFTs are gonna make a comeback because there's been. Crypto has been coming back and bitcoin went from what?

30 NFTs will be back when a list celebrities are using them on their Facebook accounts. That was the real test.

Yeah.

X account could see it happening early.

Yeah.

Facebook account, Facebook, original Facebook account.

There's got to be new project then because I don't think any of the old, old, old products or projects are going to, you know, come back. That would be crazy. Although some of them are kind of lindy. Like haven't the original crypto punks. Crypto punks, those have kind of held their value. But the bored apes have sold off like crazy. But are still.

It's unfortunate. Bored apes are not in gag gift territory yet.

Yes.

Because you think, oh, it'd be funny to get like your buddy, like a bored ape for their birthday, 30k or something. But it's like, yeah, it's like, Tyler.

What'S the floor price of bored apes I'm interested in now? Well, Tyler looks that up. Let me tell you. Ramp time is money save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com Also, we never shout this out. 4.8 stars on G2 with over 2,000 reviews. That's great. Shout out, Rand.

World class.

Okay, another floor price is like around 10 ETH. So that's like almost $3,000.

3,000.

30,000.

30,000. Yeah. That's like not a gag gift. Maybe for the man who has everything.

Yes, for the man who has everything. Great, great. Gag gift it is.

Pink elephant.

We'll see at Sun Valley, but you know, by Christmas time.

Do they do pink elephants in Sun Valley? I feel like they should, maybe.

I'll have to ask some of each other, some of our friends that are there this week. So in other news, Robinhood CEO Vlad is raising at $900 million valuation for a math foundation model startup. And Vlad and Robinhood have been on a pretty generational run, but this does feel a bit top signale, right? Especially in the context of GROK1 shotting PhD level math in the announcement on Wednesday. So interested to follow that one. Optimistic. But again, mathematical superintelligence. Historically, when we've seen CEOs of public companies start ripping second companies and then getting these types of valuations without a lot of underlying revenue, it can end poorly. Andrew Wilkinson is giving stock tips. He hit the timeline today. I'll read through it. He was highlighting a company historically a value investor, but this morning he saw.

Things like the Warren Buffet stuff, right?

The Berkshire Hathaway for the Internet.

Yeah, that's right.

He says there are many ways to profit from the AI boom, but my favorite is Iran. I rarely buy stocks. The private market is way too attractive. But every once in a while I see something that stops me cold. In 2025, it's Irend. I call it a Picasso I found at a garage sale. The Stock is up 54% since he recommended it on my first million, but it's still cheap. Here's the trade in a nutshell. US capacity for energy and compute is highly constrained. 2. Permitting and building facilities takes years. 3. AI scaling laws are continuing to deliver, but even if they don't, tons of compute is required for inference. Iron is a highly reputable publicly traded bitcoin miner with massive data centers. Mid build in Texas, it pivoted away from mining bitcoin at these new facilities to instead build them out for AI training and inference. Once completed, these facilities should generate in the range of $2 billion in new cash flow companies.

Name Iran.

Iran. Even if AI completely fizzles, these facilities are highly valuable as traditional data centers or can be rolled back to mine Bitcoin. So it's an AI thesis, but if AI doesn't work out, we can still mine Bitcoin. The entire market cap is currently 3.8 billion. So Andrew, I don't think this is investment advice, but it sounds like it and interested to see where this one goes. But anytime you see a value investor start trying to cash in on the AI boom should be a little bit wary. Harry Stebbings today is calling.

It doesn't have earnings, right?

No, no, no, no.

It's trading around $4 billion.

I don't think it's ever generated any profit.

I mean it says. It says 23 million in EBITDA, but in 2024. So I don't think it's like losing that much money and I guess net income in the last quarter was 24 million but the net income to market cap ratio there is 40 I guess so. Still pretty high.

Yeah, I mean the thing here is.

It doesn't feel like a bumper at.

The same time Satya is pulling back on new data center development. It's happy to be a leaser. You have incredible NEO clouds that have deep domain expertise. The Iron Team I don't think has a bunch of team around running large AI training or inferencing. Yeah and so anyways just feels like.

They'Re a little bit late to that party because there's already like three or four Did Iren make the cluster max Dylan Patel article?

I doubt it because they're not online yet, right?

Oh sure, sure, sure. Yes because semi analysis does the cluster max rating for all the NEO clouds including the the hyperscaler clouds and I feel like they did not have Let me see Iren I don't think is on here. Tensorwave there are so many run Pod, Lambda, Scaleway, smc, Azure, Nebus Together, Crusoe Lepton, Oracle, Core Weave, aws.

So hyper competitive market. Unclear if this bitcoin miner is going to be able to pivot into AI training and inference in this when they're up against the players that you just mentioned. Another top signal. I'm not going to go out and say that this is impossible, but Harry Stebbings is calling for $8 trillion Nvidia in the next five years. Private markets investor backed a bunch of unicorns starting to make very specific price predictions on the timeline.

The specificity of the price prediction is interesting. I was thinking about that like should like as we talk about tech companies, should we be trying to like boil down to like price targets? And I just feel like that's not the domain of, of talking heads necessarily or like podcasters or private markets investors. Yeah, yeah it's just, it's just hard because like to do a proper price analysis on a big public stock like you, you really have to look at the financials like you have to read the financial reports. You need to actually understand the underlying financials. It like the vibes based analysis doesn't seem appropriate usually but who knows, I.

Mean sometimes vibes are all you need. John.

Yeah, it's certainly been like it's, I mean when was, when was Nvidia $2 trillion stock? Like when was last doubling like in the last year or something? I don't know. We can pull up.

Moving on Another incredible top signal, Circle, a great American stablecoin company, is trading at a 2300p E ratio nearly at once. I think they eclipsed Coinbase's valuation very briefly, despite the fact that they give half of their revenue to Coinbase as part of their distribution partnership. So again, lots of excitement around stablecoins. Feels like Circle could potentially be a little over its skis. But it's a great company and they have a lot of advantage advantages now. But the very euphoric multiple. Another top signal we have is Soham Parikh. We had him on the show just a week ago. This same sort of thing was happening in 2021, 2022, where engineers were really ramping up. Moonlighting activity. Right. They'd be working at Meta and then working at some startup or things like that. Covid maybe accelerated it. But again, if, if companies are so desperate to hire great engineers that they'll run these like super fast hiring cycles, put up with people, generally talented people that are underperforming. Right. Which Soham was, was not delivering, was making a lot of excuses and a lot of people and then rightly let them go quickly.

Yeah, it's just, it's just the nature of like the dynamic of just competition. Like if your competitors are hiring really fast and you need to hire really fast, you're just like, okay, well we don't need to go deeper so let's wind up fast tracking this person.

Yeah.

So you wind up hiring, you know, same person five times.

I guess it happens.

It is just like a funny anecdote that like, is like, oh, wow, those are some pretty crazy times. Remember that anecdote? Remember this anecdote? It feels like we're in this.

Moving on Masa top blasting or potentially top blasting anytime Masa, historically, Masa getting into the headlines, whether that's Stargate structuring this $30 billion investment where nobody knows, and the 500 billion, nobody really knows where the money's coming from. They're exciting, big headline numbers, but unclear if he will actually be able to deliver on that. I think him getting in the breakout, one of the breakout consumer AI winners, which is opening, is smart. He should have exposure there. But I think everybody should be a little bit uneasy that he's pulling out the checkbook and writing numbers of that size.

Also investing in not just OpenAI, but a new company that is a data center holding company that may not have the same economics as OpenAI. So there's a big question there about like how much he deploys. I. I'm trying to remember the, I mean we did that whole deep dive on Masa and you know he made a ton of money on amd but that when he made that investment it was like a way less frothy time or you know, it wasn't amd, it was, it was what, what was the softbank chip deal? ARM. ARM, yeah. When did that ARM deal happen? Softbank owns roughly 90% of ARM. They acquired in 2016 for 32 billion and later took it public in 2023. Trying to think 2016, was that a particularly frothy time for him to get into that deal? Because he has done a number of really great deals but when like the.

Other one is, the other one is Yahoo. You remember he had this crazy meeting with the Yahoo team where he basically was like, take my money or I'm going to. And he was like, didn't he ask? He was like, who are your competitors?

I'm going to give money to you.

And he didn't even know who the competitors were. But he said if you don't take my money, I'm going to go give the same check to them. So they ended up taking it. He acquired approximately 41% of the company at somewhere around a $200 million valuation. When Yahoo went public in 1996 he had an instant paper profit of 150 million. But then at the peak of the dot com bubble, Yahoo was valued at 125 billion. So anyways, phenomenal investment but very different valuation and ownership targets and unclear. I would love to see OpenAI get, you know, for profit and get public but for to, to, you know, we'll, we'll have to see going down the list another classic Pomp spac that we, we had Pomp on the show to talk about it. Spacs are back. Pomp's got a spac. A lot of people were calling that a top signal. I, I'm excited to see what, what Pomp does with, with his. But in general the, this retail excitement around these sort of bitcoin treasury companies is fascinating in the context of it now being very easy to get bitcoin exposure in a variety of different ways. I'm not sure we need a bunch of net new bitcoin treasury companies.

Yeah, it's mostly that like whenever there's a new trend or bubble they're like there, it's very easy to map. Like okay, there's one company that it's really working. This is massively successful. Like everyone is using ChatGPT. Like AI is a thing. It is Real. The Internet was real, Google was real, Amazon was real. But the 25th Amazon copycat did not do well. And so that's always the risk is that you've applied like the same overarching theme to something that's like so far down the power law that it will never grow into the valuation that it's been assigned. That's always the risk.

Yep.

What else do you have?

Dwarkesh updating his timelines. That happened Monday. We had him on the show. It was fun conversation. I think Dwark Keshe has remained incredibly bullish and I think he rightfully is. He also is being somewhat of a realist and being like, I don't think that AI is priced in to the market broadly, but I do think that some of the promises of AI will take another couple years, another five years, et cetera, to really deliver versus some of the much more hyper aggressive AI 2027. You might say that AI 2027 itself was, in hindsight that could end up being like the number one top signal, which is that basically, if you haven't read the kind of study paper essay, they basically say that by 2027 a single foundation model company could just be acquiring every auto manufacturer in the US to develop millions and millions of robots that would then build and we would hit the sort of fast takeoff.

Meanwhile, Apple was like, we can't possibly get out a slightly lighter VR headset until 2027.

Yeah.

And this is what we do.

We've been working on this for a decade.

We make stuff like every year. We are the best at it. We make the most stuff and the best stuff, pretty much the most complicated stuff. That's what we make in the widgets business. And yeah, making that headset lighter, it's gonna take us a full two years refresh that.

And I liked 2027. It was a fun thought provoking for sure, very thought provoking. But I think that we will be. We'll have to circle back on it 2030 or even 2027.

I mean, the big thing was our conversation yesterday with Meter about the actual, like, are we close to reinforcing AI where the AI models are self improving? And I was kind of like, okay. I really hadn't read the full report beforehand, so I didn't really know what to expect. I was blown away because I was expecting, you know, something between like, you know, like Arc AGI. It feels like with Arc AGI we are 10% towards solving something there, which is just like, you know, a basic versatility in AI that it can solve things that humans can solve. And it's not narrowly defined, it's generalizable. Now ARC AGI is like the perfect example of like we maybe haven't hit. We've done intelligence, but we haven't done general intelligence yet. And everyone keeps saying, oh, this is AGI, that's AGI. And RKGI is really holding it back saying like, well, if it was truly general, should probably be able to solve this basic puzzle that a kid can solve. And for that it's like, okay, we're going from like 9% to 15%. Like we are still like, you know, 85% in not even like nowhere close. And the meter report, I was expecting it to be like, well, yes, we're seeing slight gains on self reinforcing AI development and the AI is starting to help build itself slightly. And the result was like, no, it's actually setting us back in this domain. It's not working at all. And so that was like a pretty, pretty big like, okay, there's a, there's a completely different, like, not that it's not useful. The stuff's useful all over the place. I saw Rune talking about that. He was like, yeah, for so many different projects it is useful, but for the frontier, like it's not the product that's advancing the frontier at all. Yeah, but yeah, I mean that probably bridges into the. Well, the talent wars, but.

Well, yeah, bridging in. I do think that in hindsight we will look back and maybe a year, two years, five years, 10 years and think about the signing bonuses and general offers of AI researchers in June and July of 2025 as being somewhat of a top signal. I think it is very strategic and makes sense from Zuck and Meta's point of view. Right. When you look at their AI capex, it makes sense for them to have the best possible team and they have the balance sheet and the general profitability in order to do something like that. But in general, AI researchers who six years ago didn't get any attention, much attention at all from the media. The fact that they're now trading for more than NBA superstars, more than Tim Cook's annual total computer, it will be an obvious one in hindsight. The other one $6.5 billion aqui hire of I.O. i think that again, you can rationalize it in the sense that it's a couple points of OpenAI to put together the best founding hardware engineering team probably in the world that's available collectively. But at the same time, again, it's quite a lot Considering, you know, the company was barely, I think a year old at the time.

Yeah. It's interesting because like ChatGPT is so, it's so installed. Like it feels like it's already lindy and it feels like even if there is some massive correction like in the market or in AI generally or some pullback, like people are still going to be using ChatGPT as an app. Right. In the same way that Amazon made it through the dot com crash. The question is like, what. What will it take for the IO acquisition to look like the Instagram acquisition? In hindsight, like, they still kind of have to go from zero to one with that project, which is very different than Instagram, which was already a mature.

And growing business and they'd figured out ads really well.

Well, Instagram, were they doing ads?

They weren't doing ads.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Saying. But meta was like, we know how to make.

Yeah, it was like a perfectly complicated, perfectly complementary business.

We know how to monetize social users better than anyone on earth.

And you have gotten a bunch of users and it's working and it's growing.

Yeah.

And you're even.

And we can actually accelerate the growth of the business in a bunch of different ways.

So it'd be very different if it was like, okay, yes, I.O. is selling, you know, like it's a small but growing hardware company that people.

Love with a product people love.

With a product people love. And maybe they can't manufacture enough of it, or maybe they're under monetizing it right now. But people love it. But it's like it's pre launch. Yeah. Multibillion dollar acquisition for pre launch is pretty crazy.

Yep. Going down the list. What else do we have? I think the tokenized private company shares. I think it. That is interesting. Without Republic and Robinhood both creating products that are completely unauthorized, basically derivatives, the companies that they're offering are angry at them. Saying, don't do this.

Is the Spider man meme of like top signals pointing at each other. Everyone's like, this is the top signal.

Anyways, I'm excited about these experiments. I just think that I'm a little bit wary. And then last but not least, Satya doing two rounds of layoffs this year. We've reported on this before. Microsoft does routine layoffs. I think they're pretty good at kind of identifying underperformers or people that should just move on to different roles. But Satya, I think has been, I think will look back and he's been excited but pragmatic. Right. And I Think that he will when the dust settles. I think he'll look pretty good.

Yeah. I wonder like if there's some massive pullback and I mean, I don't even know what, what that would look like. Essentially, let's assume that the current capability of AI models essentially plateaus for like a decade or something like that, just hypothetically. And they're useful, but it's not some reinforcing fast takeoff super intelligence. Is Microsoft a big loser in that scenario? It seems like Satya is pretty well positioned, right?

Totally.

Like the company Prince Cash is very healthy, has done these layoffs. They'd have to retreat from some stuff and some of the promises that they've made maybe. But in general it seems like they'd be really, really well set up to just like, like stick through. But I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of going back to the, the dot com bubble and, and the like, you know, the effect of like Oracle's mainframe business, like probably made it through pretty smoothly because it was just like really long contracts with companies that were getting true business value out of it and weren't about to churn because it was not this like experimental. Like if you had moved from paper to an Oracle mainframe, you weren't like, oh, this stuff's overhyped, it's not going to solve all my problems. I'm going to go back to paper.

Yeah.

You know, and so in the same way it's like if you're on, you know, Microsoft cloud or Azure or everyone's using Excel and they're like, maybe we're getting some value out of this copilot upgrade that we did. Maybe we pull back from that. Maybe. Yeah. Our employees like rewriting emails every once in a while. If they pull back from that, it's not disastrous to the fundamentals of Microsoft.

Yeah. And we didn't even cover how there's a set of labs with billions of revenue and then there's a set of labs that are valued similarly that have zero revenue and basically $100 billion of market cap with very little revenue supporting that at all.

The question like a year ago was what was the. Who's actually making profit off of AI? And it was only Nvidia. Nvidia was making more than 100% of all the profit combined because all the other companies were loss making by comparison. And now, and now like that narrative has taken so much hold that Nvidia is the largest company in the world and it's put this massive target on their back at 4 trillion where every, all of their major customers want to get off Nvidia. It feels like, like Google did it, Amazon's doing it, and Microsoft saying that they want to do it. And Apple's, you know, was never really a big Nvidia buyer. But the on device inference is crazy too. Like if you think about if, if we don't have any major breakthroughs in how AI works, like the capabilities, and we just want the current capabilities everywhere as cheap as possible, like on device inference becomes really, really valuable. Right. And all of a sudden that drops demand for Nvidia potentially. Right.

We might need to do a SWOT analysis, John. Yeah, no, I mean Nvidia's incredible company, Jensen's an incredible CEO. They were perfectly positioned for this, you know, multi decade technology trend.

And he was way underpriced at the start of the boom. Yeah, like the, the orders really did come in, the training runs really did happen. The question is just, is that next order of magnitude the, like the situational awareness from Leopold Aschenbrenner, this thesis that we're going to build a 5, $5 billion cluster, then a $50 billion cluster, then a $500 billion cluster, like, is that going to happen or will there be a hiccup? And this is always the, this is always my question for like the doomers. Everyone was saying like P doom, you know, what's my percentage chance that goes bad? And I was like, the much more interesting question is P stagnation. What is the probability that something happens? And whether it's technological or even regulatory, like the. If you compare AI to nukes, with nukes, we had the ability to make nuclear reactors and humanity as a whole basically just said we're going to pause and we stop building them. And now we're talking about building them again. But if you look at that curve, it is a perfect S curve. It's like we had no nuclear reactors. Then all of a sudden we grew them exponentially and it looked like, wow, we're going to have energy too cheap to meter. And then it flatlined and we were. And for a variety of reasons, they're hard to build. Hard. Then there were regulations, there was just general fear. So there were a lot of different things. And I would always go to the doomers and just say like, even if all of your assumptions about the capabilities of the technology are correct, what is the probability that there's just like if you are successful doomers and you freak everyone out, there might be regulation that just says don't build anything bigger or it could be economics, it could just be, it could be physics, as we've talked about, with this idea that at a certain point you can't put more than 100% of global GDP towards building clusters. It's impossible. And so there should be this S curve there. And that's why all the AI researchers are now focused on the, the, the compression of learning. And like, the actual algorithms are getting more efficiency because, like, there will be, you know, there should be some sort of like, you know, top upper bound of the amount that you can build. But that certainly hasn't been like a thesis broadly in the market. People have just been like, yeah, like we'll just, we'll just 10x computing and then 10x it again, then 10x it again and it's like it probably will happen over a period of time.

Great investment strategy, by the way. Get a 10x and then 10x it again, and then 10 exit again.

Yeah.

And last but not least, almost forgot about this one, but it should be included the White House meme coins, which was, which feels like crazy times. Very long ago, it was the local top. Basically, at the time, it was the local top. Many people were calling the top.

Yes.

Just hurling meme coins out of the White House.

Yeah. So that's the real question is how local is this top, if it is a top? Because we've been in the kangaroo market, it could just be, oh, a couple months. Even the interest rate, sell off, the post SVV crash, that was like one hard year. Right. And then we started building back and we got the AI narrative. And so there's this big question about like, you know, Dwarkesh pushed his timelines back, but he's not saying that super intelligence will never arrive. He's not saying that AI will never break through these things. He's just saying that it'll happen a little bit, a little bit further out. And so the question of these meme coins being a top signal or all this crazy stuff, it's like there could be like a short term sell off and then rebuilding back up on something else. So I don't know, it's always hard to manage these things and predict, but it's certainly fun to highlight all these.

Things and at least be good to keep track of them.

Yeah, you got to be tracking the top.

Keep your own list. Keep your own list.

Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free@graphite.dev let's go through some more timeline. Joe Weisenthal says, thinking about the recent episode we did with Charlie McElgot eligotte where he referred to Trump as the human vex. He just creates volatility out of thin air.

It really is, I mean Trump Coin. Trump coin is up 20% over the last week.

I mean volatility traders have to be.

Although dramatically since what is the, what.

Is like the actual market cap of Trump Coin?

Is it sticking around? Circulating market cap is 2 billion. Fully diluted is 10 billion. The price per Trump is currently it peaked at $45 and it is at $10 today.

Wild. So I like this one from iam developer the dumbest person you know is being told you're absolutely right by ChatGPT. Like it is funny to imagine that that is somewhat like that. Like is is the Glazegate like deranging society in some ways is the fact that everyone's getting this like constant positive reinforcement because if you go to it and you're like hey should I, should I go 100x long in the market right now? It's like, yeah, you actually for my interactions like you, you are at the level of Citadel. You're definitely, you definitely could just be a hedge fund manager if you, if you went full time on it, like you could do it. Like you're definitely not just like a retail trader who's going to get hosed this time. Like everybody.

Yeah, you're different.

You're different, you're different. Tracy Alloway has a funny post this week. In a nutshell. Do you see this one? Markets don't like tariffs, but Trump just imposed more tariffs and markets are at all time highs because markets think he's going to pull them back. It's great. I mean, you know, we are just in this cycle of like even, even the bad news is just like a catalyst for good news when it's reversed.

Yeah.

And the psychology of the market is.

Just like total up credit to grok right now. Maybe it really is super intelligence because I asked it should I go turbo long the market right now? And it says deciding whether to go turbo long means using turbo warrants or similarly leveraged derivatives to bet on rising market prices requires careful consideration of your financial situation, risk tolerance and current market market conditions. Since turbo long refers to a high risk leveraged financial product anyways, it breaks it down for me. I don't think it necessarily does it.

Make a recommendation though.

It says not advisable for most investors. Okay, should I ask it but what if I'm built different?

Well, we're.

Haha. Love the confidence. If you're built different and ready to roll the dice with a turbo long. Let's cut through the noise and get real. Anyways, honestly, it says if you're going to do it, pick the right asset, which is good advice if you're going to invest in the good companies.

It doesn't feel like talking to somebody. I would expect someone with super intelligence to have strong opinions and I feel like none of the AIs really have.

Honestly, this is pretty sound advice. So the pro move is test your turbo long strategy on a demo account to see if you're as different as you think without torching real cash.

That's good.

It does say not financial advice. Well, I'm going to take it as financial advice.

Tyler, have you been playing with Grok 4 at all? I have not, no.

All right, well, sign up for.

What about the heavy web browser?

Yeah, so I'm using the Perplexity web browser. It's called Comet.

Ok. How is it?

It's pretty cool. I mean it's.

So pitch me it. Like, why would I use that instead of Chrome?

Yeah.

So I think the main thing is like it can read what's on your screen.

Okay.

It can also like sometimes interact with stuff on your screen.

Okay.

So I'm in Google Sheets right now. I have this list of names and I'm trying to get like, okay, where do these people work? And so first I said, just give me a list of people on the screen and put that into the chat. And then I said, okay, where does people work?

It gave me that.

And then it started to like load them in. Like it would interact with the Google sheet, it would like input them in, which is like super useful.

That's pretty cool.

But then it kind of started breaking. So it's like. I think the product is like very early on still.

Yeah, but.

And it's also pretty slow.

Yeah.

But I think this like kind of paradigm, if it was. If it was like super fast and like much kind of cleaner.

Okay.

I think it'd be really useful.

So I'm hearing like it saved you a copy paste from like copying the sheet into a different tab of like ChatGPT, basically. Yeah, that's the first thing.

It basically just moves two tabs into one.

Yeah.

How does the. How does the search is like. I'm assuming the default search is Perplexity. Yes. How fast is that?

So that's pretty quick. It's just when it's like Interacting with the page. It's like really slow.

Yeah.

Interesting, interesting.

How does it compare to Cluly? I don't know. The design trade off of new browser interacting with only the website versus the whole computer.

Yeah. Cluly is definitely more catered toward the video call or video input. Audio input. Um, it's like, I think that it's kind of different use cases.

Yeah. Because you want more like proactive. Right. Like, like I would ask you a question over zoom.

Yeah.

And Cluly would just hear that question and automatically query it.

Yeah, yeah.

As you've been browsing around with the Perplexity Comment browser, has it ever just done something without you take. Without you being like, go do a thing?

No. No.

Okay.

It's always like I prompt it. It gives me something where clearly is like you have it running and then yeah, you can, you can query it, but it also will just give you stuff.

I feel like this is that, this is that debate about like push versus pull from AI. Like if I have to, if I have to tell the computer to go do something versus like it does it preemptively for me, proactively for me. I'm thinking about like Google Chrome will do like auto translation on websites. Like if you land on a Spanish language website, it will just be. It'll just understand that you want it translated into English. It'll translate it and then just re render it and then it pops up a little bar at the top and then you can choose to go back to the Spanish language 1 if you speak Spanish, I guess. And I feel like chopping down some of those like proactive ones. And you see this with like when I go to the Wall Street Journal, they already, they have an AI on their side, an LLM summary for like three bullet points from every article. And they do that proactively on their side. I don't have to ask it. So there's always this question of like, where's the right place for the interaction to sit? How expensive or wasteful is it just to like do that interaction on everything. But like you could imagine a situation where the browser, every time you hit a news website, it's pre populating the obvious questions or the extra one layer deeper or one layer shallower. Like here's a summary of what you're reading and then here's extra context on things that are one layer deeper. Because when I go to a website or an article, I'm usually trying to understand like give me the high level and then give me like if I went through and clicked on every person in this article and went to their Wikipedia. That's usually how I browse. And so I guess if it could do that a little bit faster, that might be valuable.

Yeah, I think it'd be cool. I mean, there's always a worry about you're basically just like, have this bar on the side that's just full of slop if it's just summarizing your page.

I also wonder about it in the context of that meter results. Dwarkash has a post here. He says, surely this doesn't have any implications for how I use AI and whether I'm fooling myself about how much more effective it's making my podcast prep. Right? And I think that there might be something there where it's like, I could just read a Wall Street Journal article here, or I could pull up a Wall Street Journal article with a sidebar of like, ChatGPT summary and also ChatGPT extra queries to give me more data. But at a certain point, like, I just have to get the information into my brain one way or another. And so giving me, like, three layers of abstraction on top of it, it's like, it's not necessarily improving the actual time for me to understand what's going on with buyout firms, poaching young bankers.

The. It's much faster to read a great summary of something, but you're going to affect. If you spend 10 seconds reading it, you're going to retain a lot less of the context and the relevant information if you just spent five minutes reading the article. So with ChatGPT, like, style summaries, do you just need to, like, spend. Do you still need to spend five minutes of time reading a bunch of different summaries around the same topic in order to get the same level of context?

I think there's two things. Like, one is that, like, there's just no substitute for spending a full day with a topic, like reading a book and researching something and reading as much as you can about a topic, talking to people about a topic. Like, the more time that you spend on a topic, like, whether it's searching ChatGPT or reading Wikipedia or reading articles or talking to people. Like, it's just the more time you spend with something, the more information you're compressing, whether that's a ton of summaries or a ton of long form, like, there's just no substitute for, like, the amount of time that you put into something. Because if you're like, you read a summary of a book that was really good And I read the full book. I'm just. And I spent five hours with it and you spent one hour. Like, I just have an advantage over you on the information. And then on the flip side, it's like there is an art to summarization. Like, the work of a great biographer is to summarize someone's life and to summarize all these conversations that they have with about all the people around that person and read all the books about that person. And like, when you think about, like, you know, David Senra with the founders podcast, like, he reads the book, he summarizes it, but he does it in a way that is like 10 out of 10. And I feel like all the alums are very, like, mid stuff, generally. They do. And they do a very 5 out of 10 job. Like, like Dwark has said, well, this.

Is the crazy thing. R for Rock On X reported yesterday that this company, Headway, which is the number one book summary app, just released a series A. Or, sorry, they just did a series A. They are at 200 million of ARR growing 2x year over year with 30% net income.

Yes.

And you would just think that that business would be getting destroyed by.

So I saw that and I was thinking about Francois Chollet had a tweet about this. Am I going to find this cholet? How do I spell Francois Chollet? Here we go. He had a post here that said, in my personal experience with Duolingo, I found that it isn't an education app, it's a mobile game. It's completely ineffective at teaching you languages, but it's quite entertaining and great at making you feel like you're learning. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that company is, in fact less about actually teaching you that information any faster and more just about repurposing information in an entertaining way. And it's giving you some sort of value that way. And so you're happy to pay for it because it's just a good way to spend your time. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, like, there hasn't been any massive breakthrough in how you deliver information to a human being. Like, their brain has a certain IO and you have to get the information in. We don't just have like the Matrix where you just. Just go, now I know kung fu, right? That's not what we've created.

Not yet.

But repurposing stuff in, like a fun and different format certainly seems like it has value to the tune of serious financials for that company. And I wouldn't And I would say like that, that is not, that is not. That company's success is very much independent of like actually game changing artificial intelligence. It's more about the actual implementation of the app and the experience of using the app.

Total.

Anything else from the browser? Browser wars.

Get on dia.

I think I'm gonna keep, keep playing around with it.

Playing around with it.

Can you download dia?

Yeah, download DIA and let us know which one you'd pick over those two because they're both AI browsers. OpenAI is gonna have one in maybe a couple weeks. I think that was the Reuters reporting. So we'll have to try that too. Demo all these, see what is happening.

The browser wars brought to you by Chromium by Google Chrome.

Browsers will definitely be designed in figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together. Get started for free. We should read through Joe Weisenthal's analysis because he says green shoots for the economy. I was texting with him, I said, there's so many top signals. He said, there's been top signals my entire career. Maybe this time is different. We'll see. He says it's not just the stock market that's booming. There are signs that the US economy has some wind in its back right now. And this is what was interesting about the ZIRP era. Even though there was so much froth, so many overfunded companies at 100x ARR, it didn't destroy America because the health of the consumer, the health of the core economy was actually doing pretty well. There was just this, this tech layer on top that was extremely frothy. But the baseline of like where mortgages were, how much debt people had, defaults on car loans, all of that stuff was much, much more stable than 2008. And so that's why we didn't go into like a depression after SVB crashed. We just went into like what most people would call like a correction, not a depression. So that's interesting. So Joe is breaking it down and we're going to talk to Sean Franklin about this too. The Amazon Prime Day sales data came out, so I completely missed it. Prime Day is in the summer. It's not Black Friday. It's like the, the opposite time of.

The year for Amazon to basically be like, we're going to have two Black Friday.

But apparently Prime Day sales dropped. And he says, well, prime Day sales may be a worrisome signal about U.S. economic momentum. I want to observe the counterpoint and the fact that maybe the economy is seeing Some green shoots. But before I talk about the economy, let me talk about the market for a second. Despite all the uncertainty and negative seeming news developments, the lines keep going up. Trump recently announced 50% tariffs on Brazil due to the country's treatment of its former president. Nobody cares. Trump talked about more aggressive tariffs on Japan and Korea. Barely a blip. Maybe this, maybe the story is that none of these things will have much bearing on, on the major market growth drivers, namely AI, so they don't matter. Maybe the story is that Trump will cave in the end. And so these headlines are just noise. We've seen this before, but I don't really know either way.

Maybe it's Pannikins getting off the sidelines.

Yeah, I mean, they learn their lesson. If they sold at the bottom when Trump was saying, like, don't panic, we're going up, like they, they feel stung by that. And so, you know, people learn the most recent lesson most recently. But either way, there's just not a lot of sensitivity in the market to all of the latest headlines. Okay, but back to the real economy here. Here the picture is mixed because actually some of the indicators seem to be going in a positive direction. So, for example, initial jobless claims number I like to track closely have actually fallen for four straight weeks. Today's Delta Airlines. Today, Delta airlines is surging 15% after the company reinstated its earnings, reinstated its earnings forecast and said that demand is coming back. People are flying more. According to tracking from Civics, which runs a massive ongoing survey online, perceptions about the economy, while still net negative, are at their highest levels in years. And this is the chart that I think the guys are pulling up. It's a little bit hard to see because it's very wide, but basically from 2017 to 2020, everyone was very optimistic about the condition of the national economy. Through inauguration Day, the tax law sign, the stock market dropped, stocks began to decline, but people were still optimistic about the economy. And then coronavirus kind of changed everything. There was this massive, massive drop where we were hitting circuit breakers like every day for like weeks. It was terrible. I remember it very vividly.

We barely had sports.

Yeah. Yeah, we barely had sports. Yeah. The NBA canceling was crazy. That was like the. Okay, wow, this is really, really serious.

And so I think everybody was looking around saying, we're living through history right now. And I. And I actually don't like it.

Yeah, everyone lost their jobs. Who is in like retail or any sort of service industry? And then the NBA players lost their jobs. Like, yeah, you can't even Play basketball. And so it was, it was a disaster. And since then, the reporting for the last five years from the survey has been net negative, basically, but it's at its highest rate in basically years. And so all the way through Inauguration Day, still negative and dropping through Russia invading Ukraine and then dropped after the Inauguration day and the tariff announcement, but is climbing back up, which Joe is highlighting is potential green shoots, so he says. Yesterday, the New York Fed released its latest survey of consumer expectations and it said that respondents are anticipating lower inflation, improving job prospects and expect easier access to credit. A big theme from a month ago was that the economy was decelerating, but the Fed might hold off on rate cuts because of uncertainty about the ultimate tariff levels. But it also seems plausible, at least right now, based on a little smattering of data, that part of the story here is economic tailwinds. Oh, and by the way, cities, U.S. economic surprise index, which gauges how all data is coming in relative to expectations, recently turned positive. Again, it's good news. So, you know, I don't know, all these top signals, it might be, might be too much. Top signal might be, might be too early.

You know, we might just be getting started.

Yeah. Also, Citi put on a buy rating on one of the companies that you were talking about.

Which one?

I forget. One of the ones that was like, was like an example of a, of a top signal. Citi was like buy it. I forget which one. Maybe, I don't know.

But switching.

Let me tell you about Banta real quick. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously continuous trust management platform. Takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So I want to have a debate.

Time for a debate.

Time for a debate.

The great debate.

Sean McGuire versus Augustus Dirico, good friends of the show, hung out with them both multiple times. Very interesting PR dust ups this week. Very, very interesting how they got in the pickle, they got in the different pickles and then different strategies getting out of it. And I want to compare them and see if there's any lessons from how you should handle a bunch of negative attention. And so Augustus, we had him on the show Monday, was sort of like being attacked or canceled, but by the right, by the far right, by conspiracy theorists, kind of the tinfoil hat right wing crowd all around this idea that he was cloud seeding, what, two days before the massive floods in Texas that wound up killing a lot of people. And so it was this Very, very serious scenario. People were dead. It was a natural disaster. And he kind of was just going about his business, like cloud seeding. Oh, someone bought it here. I'm going to go deliver it. I'm going to. Someone bought it there. He's running his business and then he gets dragged into this thing and he has to, all of a sudden.

And to be clear, very fair and. And good that people were asking questions. Right. Like, natural process.

Yeah.

Like they. The question should be asked.

It's not like they teach cloud seeding in high school. So I think.

And it's a. And it's a scary topic. People are generally kind of wary of weather modification, whether it's from a religious angle or health reasons or chemtrails or whatever. Whatever they sort of subscribe to. Yeah, I think it was right for people to ask questions.

So many examples throughout history of like. Of like, there's a technology that's great. It has a promise to do X, Y or Z. And then there's like a negative side effect that comes out of that. And so Augustus has had to. He just got sucked into this because there's like this very acute story about the Texas floods. And he's right there. And so he has to go explain cloud seeding and what he does and make his case as aggressively as possible. Sean McGuire, on the other hand, kind of waded into a debate or like a. Like an argument over Mamdani, the mayor of New York, in a very different world. Like, Sean lives in California, is a tech investor, is not directly affected by New York City politics, and could have stayed out of it entirely and instead was like, proactively not known for staying out of it. The man loves the debate. He loves to fight.

And so I think his position generally was you need to be vocal and loud about extremism and whether or not people believe that.

Zoron.

Zorhan. Zohan. Zoron.

Not Zohan. That's the Adam Sandler movie. Yes.

Whether or not people believe that Mamdani is an extremist, personally, I've seen some of his old posts. It seems like it has some very extreme views.

Maybe he's changed, maybe he hasn't. He's kind of gone back and forth. He was saying, defund the police. Now he's saying he doesn't want to do that.

He did. And one of Sean's points was that Mamdani was sort of celebrating the third. And he. And I believe that Sean brought up that the last intifada, there was a bunch of Suicide bombings. It's like, kind of a crazy thing to promote.

But the interesting point is that, is that Sean could have. If Sean hadn't posted, no one would be talking about Sean McGuire. Right. But Augustus didn't come out and comment on anything, and everyone was asking him for comment. Like, it hit the timeline from other people. Sean's crisis started with a Sean post. So it's a very different, like, inciting element.

Creation versus reaction.

Yeah, something like that. And so my question is, like, does that necessitate a different comm strategy? Because they had very different comm strategies. So what did Augustus do? He went direct. Right. And was posting his side and his data and his opinions and engaging with everyone that was attacking him, quote, tweeting them and doing it in a way that was, like, slightly funny, but also very serious. Sharing as much data and I think being very diligent about, like, speaking their own language.

Yeah. If he sees a post pop up that's going viral, he's jumping on it.

He puts it in the comments and then also, quote, tweets it. Yeah. And then also he went direct to a lot of the big platforms.

Yes.

I have a list here that critiques were coming from.

So he came on our show Monday. We had a good conversation.

He did, like, a space that day, too.

Yep. And then he proceeded to go on cnn, Fox News, pirate wires, infowars, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck and Tim Pool, all within the span.

And those are all conservative outlets, basically.

While working with a bunch of other legacy media outlets to provide more.

There's a Washington Post article here now. And so he's gone across the spectrum. What's interesting is that Sean has not done any interviews, I believe, and he hasn't. And he certainly hasn't, like, reached across the aisle to his attackers and said, like, I'm going to engage with you, and maybe that's the right move. I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, I think he's been engaging over and over.

I don't think he commented on that Wall Street Journal article.

No, I'm not saying he wasn't doing. He wasn't taking the sort of traditional media approach, but he's been very active and engaging with people bringing up, saying, hey, like, basically the key point, the key issue was the definition of Islamist. Many people saw that and thought he was putting all Muslims in a bucket.

Yeah, yeah.

His intention and approach was to point out extremism, Islamist extremism. And I think that just got, like, oftentimes in a post context is Lost. And so he was basically trying to set the record straight. Also did a 30 minute, like a 30 minute video, talking through kind of the original post and some of the reactions to it.

Yeah. So for me, it highlights, like the two different styles of going direct. There's going direct where you control 100% of the channel that your content is going out on. So it's your X account. It's a video that you create and you upload. It's a post that you write. And then there's going direct where you're not sending a. You're not sending a liaison to cnn, but you are going on cnn. And that's. And so Augustus did this interesting thing where, like, he definitely, like, went direct, but he also, he also did all of the legacy media stuff. Like Fox News is legacy media. CNN is like legacy media. And not in the traditional going direct playbook. But there's like this evolution and I think it's risky. Like, it is risky to go into someone else's platform. You go on infowars is going to have a certain aesthetic. You go on cnn, they might ask you some really hard question that you're not prepared for. They might try and make you look bad. Like, this was the. This was the narrative around these, like, around the whole move of, like, just go direct. Don't talk to the press directly. Don't let them tell your story. Tell your own story. Well, he's doing both. And it's interesting because it feels like it's working for Augustus. Like, it feels like he handled this pretty well. I would give him. I would give him a lot of credit with Sean. It's interesting. He did send out there. There have been a few surrogates. So Joe Lonsdale went on TV and defended it and kind of explained it, but Sean didn't. And I think that I think these both might be good strategies. I'm not really like, oh, you know, there's a one size fits all here. They're very different situations.

Yeah. Bill Ackman came out in support of Sean. There was a great post from Pat Grady, Sequoia partner. Pat said yesterday this tweet expresses a personal view. I'm not very vocal on Twitter and I'm sure this tweet will piss people off. If you're looking for drama, this is probably not it. This will be very disappointing to people with extreme views of any kind. And that's sort of the point. The purpose of this tweet is twofold. To express my support for the Muslim community and to express My support for my partner, Sean McGuire. Pat says, Some of my best friends are Muslim. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They are feeling fear right now. Fear for the safety of their families. This is not hypothetical. These are real people, loving parents and their sweet children who aren't sure if they can live here anymore. He goes on to say, some of my best friends are Jewish. They are warm, kind, wonderful people. I love them like family. They too, have felt their fair share of fear over and over again for generations. This is not the experience any American of any background should have in this country.

They.

This is not what made America the greatest country on Earth. Muslims are not the enemy. Jews are not the enemy. Extremists are the enemy. And when we let them sow the seeds of fear, fear of the other, we are letting them win. So basically, it goes on to say that this is really not about different cultures and people. It's more about kind of. Yeah. Long story short, you don't want to let the extremists when.

Yeah. Or like, put you in the bucket of extremists.

Yep. So, anyways, interesting. Interesting response. Both. Both of them are not, you know, these will be ongoing.

I wonder, I wonder what the takeaway is for, like, with. With Rainmaker. Like, the core claim of the controversy was directly about Rainmaker's business. And essentially it was in many ways existential to Rainmaker because there's, like, proposed bands of the technology. Right. And then there's also just the question of, like, should cloud seeding be done at all or not. Right. And that was like, the vibe online was like, that was where the debate was. Whereas people are not debating, like, should Sequoia invest in tech companies? Right. It's like a completely separate thing. Thing. And so maybe it does merit, like, a different approach in terms of, like, PR management. I don't know. I think they both handled it well. I don't know that I would recommend anything differently. I'm just wondering if. I guess the big question is, like, when should you step outside your core competency?

I think it's interesting to think about reach with these two strategies. I would imagine that Sean has actually had more, like, reach, like, actual eyeballs on his content.

Interesting.

Just kind of estimating based on how viral some of his posts have gone, I would assume he's gotten 50 million views on his posts this week. Yeah, like a really, really crazy number. And Augustus has gone on all these different platforms, but I imagine the actual reach is far lower when you add, you know, if you Go on. If you go on Fox News on some random show, there might be a hundred thousand people that watch that segment.

Yeah. But maybe that's better because like the people like, with, with Sean, like, he's trying to, he's trying to fight back against something that's like a general vibe or a general accusation of a bad vibe, which is like Islamophobia. Right. Whereas Augustus is trying to fight against like very precise, you know, pushback against his exact company and like the work that he's doing. Precisely. And so if I'm thinking about like, who is Sean talking to? He's talking to like the broad audience of like, people that perceive him as a person in tech.

Yeah.

And if I think about Augustus, he's thinking about like, how do I save.

Weather modification as an industry in the country?

Totally. Like, specific regulator, specific politicians in specific, like, and also like the local people in, who live down the street from the farmer who's going to pay for cloud seeding, who might go to their city council meeting and say, not in my backyard. So it's like, it's people that are. I feel like the, the pushback against Sean was very like, broad and just like bad tech guy vibes. Like, like, just like negative, broadly on the left. And the folks that support Mamdani, they all like, kind of just broadly don't like Sean right now because of what he said with Augustus. It's like there are a few people who were completely animated by the theory that he was responsible for the floods. And so he had to address them.

Yeah. He's really deeply defending his business, his industry, his actions.

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

Yeah.

I don't know. I think that's like, it's certainly like, it's certainly like the riskiest. You're like, you're, you're, you're the furthest away from something where you'll immediately have everyone in your industry rally around you or everyone in your. Because it's like, well, this is very core to their business. But at the same time it's like, you know, there is some value just being like this. This is less of just like an investor. This is just like a person and they have opinions like about everything. And so I'm interested to talk to them and work with them because I, and it also, I mean in the original post, like he, he did throw up a massive flag. That was just like, I'm pro capitalist. That's pro America. Right. And so the question of like, does this hurt Sequoia? I think we were talking about this earlier. It's like, no, because the people that were really bothered by this or like didn't get through this nuance and understand the PAC radio response and understand him unpacking it. Like probably we're not going to be in the Sequoia portfolio. Right. So I don't know.

Yeah.

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What else is in the timeline we should go through? There's, there's so many good stories we should go through this, this story in the Mansion section. Let's do that.

There we go. Finally, there's a bunch of stuff. A California ranch is for sale for about 50 million.

I really like this. There were two, there were two very interesting houses in the Mansion section today. And they're both being sold by tech founders who I've never heard of and some of them don't. One of them doesn't exist online. So this guy, Don, tech entrepreneur Don McKinney, found himself at a crossroads in 2014 after four consecutive startups. Crazy. Including one that sold to Lucent Technology for billions of dollars.

I give him permission to call himself a serial entrepreneur.

He's the Don.

If you started four companies and you sold one for a billion, you can put serial entrepreneur in your bio.

Billions.

Billions.

Yeah. I need to figure out exactly the whole deal here. I think this is. Yeah, they have it here. So he, he basically, instead of doing another business, he basically retired and started building a crazy house. He chose the latter he purchased roughly 1,100 acres of ranch space in Sonoma, California for 12 million and painstakingly restored it, spending 33 million over the years. Now McKinney is looking to sell the ranch, which has multiple residences, two lakes, four greenhouses and a custom wood shop, for around 50 million. Known as Sonoma Summit Ranch, the ranch is perched at the top of Sonoma Mountain, about an hour from San Francisco.

That is prime primary great option for a, you know, GP at a platform fund that wants to maintain proximity.

I was about to say, you know, is it really worth spending half of your bonus as an AI researcher on one house?

Yeah.

Or is that unresponsive in many ways?

Well, it's a sole bonus post tax.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

That's some ordinary income right there.

That's. That's really, really rough. Anyway.

A Florida native, McKinney started his tech career in Silicon Valley in the 1980s as a founding vice president. Let's give it up for all the vice presidents. That is a story Firm worked on 3D imaging. In 1991, he founded International Network Services. Fantastic name. Which was acquired by Lucent in 1999 for 3.7 billion.

1999, selling. What are you doing, buddy? What are you doing?

I think he timed it. I think he timed it.

You hold onto that stock for two more years.

International Network Services, they don't make names.

They don't name companies like this.

I mean, actually they do now. People are bringing it back. What was the company we talked about earlier this week that was like, I don't know, it was Wisconsin or.

Oh yeah, that was just a fan writing in.

Yeah. No, but it's real company.

Yeah, yeah, real, real company, but not like hyped company.

Well, soon to be hyped.

Soon to be hyped. Yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah. Let's look at this.

By the mid-2000s, McKinney, a conservation advocate, was looking for a ranch to preserve when he heard about an available thousand acre ranch that had been owned by a single family for years.

Wow.

By sheer coincidence, McKinney and avid fisherman had caught a 1,119 pound Marlowe. Oh. So I have to actually, I have to correct this. So the ranch was 1,119 acres and by coincidence, he had caught a 1119 pound marlin in a fishing tournament a few years earlier. He took the parallel as a sign and bought the property.

What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

I've never been big into that world. No, I don't think I've actually ever.

I've caught 150 pound halibut in Alaska.

There we go.

And I did it when I was a kid. It weighed more than me at the time.

Wow.

It was the biggest like boost to my ego of all time. I caught an animal that was bigger than me.

Every person, every person should do that at least once.

For sure.

I got to do that.

A thousand pound marlin. That is a huge, huge fish. So the ranch hadn't been touched in years. McKinney said he relished the opportunity to dig in. After tackling the ranch infrastructure, he turned to the main house, originally built in the 1950s. Many windows didn't close. It was not clear where the front door was located. He took the roughly 4,240 foot square house down to the studs and rebuilt it one by one. He rebuilt the other outbuildings, he said, including the circa 1930s cottage and a horse barn, which is now a party barn.

There we go.

Let's go. A skilled woodworker. He also added a 5200 skilled woodworker. He's just building his own. This is legend. This is like the dream.

So the interesting thing here, the interesting thing here, he bought this property when. So he bought the property in mid 2000s. Was it 2014 or the mid 2000s?

Oh, I guess he started working on the, on the, the remodel. The remodel, yeah.

So he's $45 million into this property, selling it for 50, but he bought it in the mid-2000s. Yeah. So on paper, not the best return. But memories are probably priceless. Time with it returns on.

He also has a home in the Bahamas. Memories. And he is selling. So he and his partner have more time and resources to devote to philanthropy. We can't we wait until. Why wait until we kick off and then have our estate dole it out? He said, let's participate now. That's great, Chad. The market for prime ranches is strong thanks to liquidity. Among other high net worth buyers. Probably those AI researchers. Unironically, there's a lot of people hedging in land. Yeah. If you're worried about the top signals, buy some land. Buy a ranch anyway. Get on numeral to numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. So there's another story in the mansion.

Appliance platform of John Coogan.

It is. I use it. There's another tech person who has a $50 million home or just slightly under 49.5 million. This is an 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom home with a tennis court and a pool. And you're gonna, you're gonna love this. I don't think you've read this yet.

Not yet.

Okay, I'm gonna blow your mind. So a circa 1930s estate just a few houses from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is coming on the market for 49.5 million. The roughly 8,000 square foot, nine bedroom estate was the longtime home of the late inventor Ronald Katz and his wife Madeline Katz. Ronald was best known for a series of patents that revolutionized automated customer service and telephones and for making breakthroughs in credit card technology.

Right. So if I'm hearing this correctly, sort of. Sort of like AI agents for.

Exactly.

Sort of like, you know, a vintage version of fin.

Yes, yes. I mean, I'm very excited to be hanging out with Ohnn in a few years, hopefully. He's patented Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one. But yes. So this guy has a whole Wikipedia page that we can pull up. We're looking for Ronald Katz. I think I have it in here somewhere. Let me see. They got so, so much stuff here. Ronald, we're not getting through any of this. Where is it? Ronald Katz. Okay. Ronald Katz. Yes. So his inventions are primarily in the field of automated call center technology. He has more than 50 patents covering his innovations. Patents. I know so many people who have like generational wealth from patents. It's crazy. And it just seems like it's something that just doesn't exist.

Kind of a lost art.

It's a lost art. Toll free numbers.

We don't know how to patent in this country anymore.

We don't know how to patent. It's completely a lost art. Actually, the person who bought my first company was a patent guy. He went to college and studied like chemical engineering and built a bunch of patents for like lubricating petroleum as it flows through oil pipelines. And he came up with some chemistry, patented it, and then he was like, yeah, in college I was getting like 100k a month from licensing my patents or something like that. Like, sick.

Yeah. There was a time when it, when it seemed like the plan play was to develop technology, patent it, and license it out to companies. And then now if an entrepreneur comes to you with an idea, it's a bad signal. And they say, yeah, like I'm working on patents. It almost always is a huge bear signal.

Yeah, it's like it is such a lost art.

We don't develop something and then capitalize on it yourself. Yeah, because it is like that. You can, you can definitely, if you get it right, you can make a lot more money from delivering the technology or whatever it is via your own product and capturing that incremental margin.

It's interesting because you'd think that the passive income bros would be super into patents. They'd be like just become the world expert in a certain field, get a PhD in it, spend 10 years researching the frontier and then develop an innovation, patent it and then just cash flow free, you know, lifestyle forever.

I do have one friend that had something like this where he developed this supplement and effectively licensed it to a company and has just been getting millions of dollars a year for his. I have a patent coming up on like 15 years.

Did I tell you I have a patent?

Ah, big patent guy.

Maybe it's not a lost start. I don't make any like cash flow off of it though. But I have a patent for breakers. The capsule. I can hear that. I don't even have the. I can hear you. Yeah, I have a patent on the capsule pouch. The capsule nicotine pouch.

Fantastic innovation invented.

John Coogan the inventor. I love it. Anyway, not quite, not quite. The portfolio of Ronald Katz. I'll take you through a little bit of his history. It's interesting. So born 1936 in 1961 he co founds telecredit with Robert Goldman is the first company to enable merchants to verify consumer checks over the phone using an automated system without the assistance of a live operator. So it's this is 61, 61, like totally pre Internet. Someone says I'm going to write you a check. How do you verify that they, that they have it? You have to call the company and say do they have money?

It's an agentic workflow.

It literally is because it cut out the live operator that was the telephone operator. It's actually an agentic workflow. You're 100% right. I know you're joking, but it's true. And so in 1988 he forms a partnership with Amex to provide call processing services. That partnership later became First Data Corporation. And so he founded Ronald Katz Technology Licensing. And I feel great. Prison First Data. Huge. First Data is the, is the, is the layer below stripe, right?

I'm pretty sure there's a layer below stripe.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Stripe uses First Data for acquisition of credit cards. And I'm pretty sure it's the first processor of Visa and MasterCard. And so I don't know if they use. That might be misinformation. I don't know if Stripe uses First Data still, but I remember that like there is a lower level below Stripe and, and First Data was like one of those. But Ronald Katz, where. Where was this founded? Yeah, Nebraska. So he. So Katz gets in there. Anyway. He also had the patent portfolio that for companies using automated call centers. Over 150 companies have taken a license to patents the technology licensing company that he has earned approximately a billion dollars in license fees such as suing accused infringers who take a license. He also founded telebuyer llc, a privately held company that commercializes inventions he made relating to electronic commerce and network based monitoring systems. In the early 90s, Katz developed a computer controlled video system for monitoring remote locations and an advanced scheduling and routing system for telephone and video communications. Katch leveraged his knowledge and work in these areas to create. Create an electronic commerce system to help businesses reach customers in remote locations.

I love, I love all these words.

B2B SaaS founder. Absolutely insane. It's wild. So anyway, his house is on the market. It was built around the same time as the Playboy Mansion. The home resembles an English country house with tennis court and pool. It sits on roughly 1 1/2 acres in Holmby Hills overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club on Mapleton drive, one of LA's most storied streets. It's also adjacent to Spelling Mansion. You know, Spelling Manor. Spelling Manor. Have you ever heard this? Aaron Spelling, he was a big TV guy. He built the largest home in Los Angeles, something like $100 million. It had a. It had a dedicated room for present wrapping because you're gonna wrap so many presents at that level. Like there are levels to this for sure. Like oh actually when I moved into one of my first apartments when we started making money young, I moved into. It was like a studio apartment. It was nice, but it had no walls or anything because it's like open floor plan because it's just a studio and I'm just one guy. And I had a. There was room for a. There was room for a washer dryer, but I didn't have a washer dryer because like send out the.

You made it a present wrapping.

I made it a present wrapping station and I put a little table there and you could like work from it. But it was like in the bathroom and I was like, this is my version of a present wrapping room.

Spelling.

Yeah, it's like I'm aesthetically living in Spelling Manor. So the Katz has spent years renovating the estate before moving. Normal story. Here, the couple filled the home with art and collectibles from around the world. The game room includes antique billboards, billiards table, and vintage arcade games. Also on display was Madeline's collection of pigs, stuffed animals, ornaments, sculptures, and paintings. It became. It started with just a few pigs and grew to become her thing to friends and family. Kept adding to the trope. The family plans to auction much of the home's contents. Have you heard about this? The. What's it called? It's like. It's like the elephant problem or the giraffe problem. There's a name for it where. Where you make golden retrievers your thing. And then everyone's like, oh, what should we get you? Oh, you like pigs? And then it snowballs. And then everyone gets you so many that over 20 or 30 years, you develop, like, this massive collection of trinkets.

For you, it might be horse accessories. I got you those horse electrolytes. You can get just more and more supplements.

You're not the first person to get me horse stuff. I told you. David used to get me mane and tail, the horse shampoo, just as a joke because I'm built like a horse. I guess he thought it was very funny. He loved it. That's great. So, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe Cane and tail. By the way, Zach is really into the horsepower metaphor. You know, he's like, obsessed with horses and stuff. You know, everyone's gotta have a brand. Anyway, what were you saying?

No, I said, nice new haircut.

Oh, yeah. Thank you.

Horse could never. A horse could never.

Horse could never. The horse hair is strong. It was breaking the scissors. We broke multiple pairs. But we did get it cut thick. It's thick hair over here. But you know who else has, like, the.

What's it called?

It's like the grandma elephant problem or whatever. This. This woman who has this house has like an insane collection of pigs because she started collecting pigs. Everyone gave her pig stuff. Somebody said that Peter Thiel is the same thing with Tolkien. Named a few companies after Tolkien. And now everyone's like, everything you do must be Tolkien referenced. Like, if you are at all involved or whatever, like, I'm getting you another copy of Tolkien. And like, you know, this person was kind of commenting, like, you know, like, he might not watch the movie every night. You know, he might just be, like, generally a fan of that and then also a fan of other things.

But you can be a fan of.

People tend to collapse the meme around you down to just like, oh, you're, you're not just. You're not just into Tolkien and other things. You're like the premier collector of Tolkien stuff. So.

Well, other news. We have a post from brother. Reggie James has been on the show before. He says, I need TVPN to bring back Cougar Night at the Rosewood.

Has it gone anywhere? Someone needs. If you're in Silicon Valley, go to the Rosewood and report.

We gotta ask. We gotta ask. Prank for exits.

So he might be aware.

Give some good coverage on.

Yeah, he might be aware.

But when we were at the Rosewood for staying there the night before YC demo day, you remember overhearing this, like the most. There was a man and a woman like a table away from us having the most deranged conversation, the most Rosewood coated conversation of all time, where I think she was divorced or going through divorce, talking about, like breaking down, loudly breaking down their entire financial situation and being like, basically like, I'm good because we have Carrie in this fund that's definitely gonna hit in the next.

Never have I wanted Clearview AI more.

Are you familiar with Clearview AI, the software to identify.

Yeah, you take a picture of someone and it scans the Internet. It tells you immediately who they are. And it's like very controversial. And people are like, oh, this is like, you know, total like surveillance state stuff. But I would have loved to know what VC she was talking about because it was an absolute. There was other stuff.

It was like wildly.

Oh, yeah, I've been checking our credit card and we're just seeing like he's hitting.

No, like every night in every city. Absolutely wild. Well, Ryan has a good story here responding to Reggie's post. It says, one time in 2012, my co founder and I crashed and burned so hard. In a pitch on Sandhill. The partners wrapped with, look, it's. It's Cougar Night. You guys would actually do pretty well there. So that's the beauty of Sandhill Road. You could crash and burn.

I don't even get this. I don't get this post. Like, why, why would they do well if they're.

Well, like maybe. Maybe like they're just crashed and burned.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Like the company has crashed and burned or something.

They didn't do well on the pitch.

Okay, so he's like, maybe you can. Very rich. Yeah, that's what he said. Okay, got it. That's hilarious.

Couple of studs. Head over to. Head over to the roadway. Rosewood.

Anyway, underrated strategy. Go to The Roadwood. Go to the Rosewood, talk to the cougars. Sell them your product. If you're an sdr, just go and pull out Adeo Customer relationship magic. Adio.

Having adio on deck for cougar night is crazy out.

Do you keep the cougars in the crazy CRM or no?

But they're potential leads, right?

For sure. If you're selling to a VC and there's a cougar there who's maybe you could sell SaaS to that VC and it would reinspire him to grind harder and save the relationship.

Save the relationship.

It's possible. Anything can happen.

Anything can happen.

Nothing like the joy of implementing a new B2B SaaS product in your workflow, in your everyday workflow. If you do that, that could just reinvigorate your entire life.

Yeah, you're just at cougar Night. Just can't stop talking to the cougars about agentic workflows for saving your marriage.

No, you're just like, why would I want to go on a bender and go to Nobu when I could be grinding? I've been reinvigorated.

Many people are saying that.

Well, we talked about the top signals. Whether you're long, whether you're short. You make your own decision. You make, you do your own research, then go express it. Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions. Let's talk about the VW bus.

We got to talk about Dylan Parker for moment yesterday talking about his fix. He raised a series B for his fixed income platform and he mentioned that they power Publix fixed income products. So very cool.

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

Shows in my opinion, lack of conviction.

Yeah, like, I mean BMW's doing this with like the i4 instead of the, instead of the, the. The 545535i. The i5 is going to be the electric one. And it just is.

We know somebody, we know somebody that if they, if BMW were to touch the M series, they would make Jan6 look like a children's birthday party.

They'd be very upset about that. But so it was always confusing. Why didn't they just bring it back as like the boss? And now you can get it within bit a little electric powertrain, but then also it's like this fun, kitschy, nostalgic vehicle. And what was the price tag on this thing? It was like 70,000 or something like that. So much money. Yes. So even before the recall, the luxury sticker price of the ID buzz, which starts at about $60,000, kept a break on sales as consumers pivoted to more affordable wheels. In the US where the vehicle became available toward the end of last year, just over 3,000 had been shipped to dealers by the end of March. And then there was a slowdown in EV sales. The tax credits are going away, and President Trump's tariffs have caught automakers off guard. Very, very rough. Yeah. So in Dallas, European car enthusiast and parts supplier Autry McVicker said he was dead set on getting the Buzz until his dealer told him that the Palmello yellow and white version he had his own Ion would cost around $72,000. Far more than he expected. Yeah, this feels like, you know, premium SUV territory. So 45k, 50k maybe 55k, 72 feels crazy for this. And. And it seemed like I don't know why they couldn't get the price down. Do you think it's something to do with just the actual manufacturing complete complexities of electric vehicles? Because Elon is able to sell a car that's similarly capable, although the Model Y has way more range and features. And so it's hard to go up against. If you're comparing the Buzz to the Model Y in a spreadsheet, you're going to get. Okay, Buzz is like cool and different looking, but am I really willing to sacrifice so. So many features and pay twice as much?

Yeah, it is interesting. I'm seeing a original 1973 Volkswagen bus for sale for $65,000. It's got 85,000 miles on it, so it's seen a lot. But it's possible that who knows what went into kind of pricing it, but they might have said, hey, we're making this bus for that category that wants just kind of like a fun leisure vehicle. It's not super functional. You're not going to drive it to the snow. You're maybe driving it around town, going to the beach, things like that. But it doesn't feel like a, it just doesn't look like a car that somebody's going to daily. And that feels like a huge problem. If it's 65k, the average American might, I don't know, I probably shouldn't say the average American, but middle class family might say hey, let's get the Volkswagen bus as our daily family car. But it doesn't, it just looks kind of funky and loud and I, it just sticks out.

I mean, so, so in this article they say that the ID Buzz in Germany, like the, the spokesman said that it was designed to be a halo car, like a halo product, which is, it sounds funny when you compare it to like the Audi R8, of course, but they said the goal is to bring drivers to showrooms and they're not really planning to sell in great numbers. So you're like, oh, that ID Buzz just does look different. When I go to get my next car, I should, I'm just sick of having like the same plain white SUV that looks like everything else. But then you go in and you're like, wait, how much is it? And is it really that much better than features against the VW Atlas, I guess is there is their full size suv and so you walk out of there with an Atlas which is probably around 55 60, I guess.

I actually don't know where you can get an Audi Q8 which is, feels much more like a premium product for the same price.

Yeah.

So. And it's, and it's just a lot more functional.

How much did that, that Cullinan sell for in cars and bids? That was like it had like 200,000 miles.

Did you say the one that we were recommending people get is like a call booth for their office?

We were recommending that.

I don't remember that probably. I mean we broadly were recommending picking up an old Continental GT instead of a phone booth.

Yeah. Okay, so a Rolls Royce Cullinan Black Badge 2020. So it's only five years old, sold for $170,000, just barely twice the price of the ID buzz. But it has $114,000 miles on it. Can you imagine, can you imagine putting 114,000 miles on a Rolls Royce Cullinan in five years?

I can, I would love to.

I mean that's, that's so, so many miles. But, but people were debating this saying like okay, yeah, if you're, if you're going, if you're putting that many miles, like it has to be highway miles. So they're not hard miles. Like, it's probably fine. Like, and. And Rolls Royce, you know, has a bad reputation as being, like, you know, in the shop all the time. But if it made it this far, like, maybe it'll make it another 100,000 miles and it, like, actually stays in good condition. So maybe it was the steel of a century at 170. Who knows? Could have been bombing around in a. In a Rolls Royce Cullinan. Anything else on the VW bus thing? I still think it's. I just think it's. It's. It is. It is hard that they price it so high. Maybe. Maybe the opportunity is more like. Like. Like Tesla just needs more different trim levels, but then needs to bring the manufacturing prowess to deliver things at more affordable prices. Because, like, how different is the world? If the cybertruck is cheaper, does it even need to be. Should it stay up there and be this halo car?

Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing, somebody who lives. I live in Malibu. I bought a Mercedes metric because I wanted, like, a family van, something I could drive around surfing with, et cetera. And I have zero interest in the Volkswagen electric bus, and that's an issue. The other thing is, if I was thinking about car, if I wanted, like, if I wanted a surf, like a car just to, like, trash and take to the beach and take surfing, you can get a raptor for, like, 70 Raptors. It's, like, obviously very different, but if you're a dad that wants, like, a kind of a car, you can, like, beat up and do a lot of things in and throw the kids in. Do you want to drive this, like, novelty VW that's going to depreciate, like, 50% in a year or get a wrap.

I think it can be a very cute mom car, and it can definitely, like, if you look at Volkswagen.

But does a mom really want. Do they really want the buzz over, like, a Q7?

No.

But isn't Audi a Volkswagen product too?

Yeah.

So there's totally a flow where you go in for the buzz thinking, like, maybe I'll get the quirky thing. And then you walk out with a Q7. Or you walk out with an Atlas, which is basically a Q7 too. Or you upgrade, you get a Urus Cayenne Turbo gt. Is that a Volkswagen Prada, too?

Yeah. Porsche's Volkswagen.

At least the. At least the Cayenne GT looks different, you know, but part of the reason that the VW bus is. Is, like, so legendary is, like, it was an icon, and they spent a lot of Time building that brand. They ran a lot of out of home advertising. They probably would have loved ad quack back in the 60s when they were pushing the buzz.

I mean they were adquis out of.

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Yeah.

Five star amenities. And you can hotel graded amenities of course.

Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks go, go get on a wander. And we have our, we have our guest in the studio. What are we doing? Jordy?

Deep diving, tropics, a bunch of things. So Barb, let's bring him in.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

There he is. It's great to have you in the temple. What's going on?

I hope you don't mind if I do a shot before we start doing.

What are you drinking?

Johnson olive oil.

Oh, Brian Johnson olive oil shots.

Okay.

There we go.

Is this. That's insane. I love it.

Is it? How does it taste?

Yeah, give us a taste review.

As olive oils go, it's spicy, but it's super tasty.

Spicy. Okay.

Yeah.

Is this a short term performance enhancer? Like you're on the show for 20 minutes right now. Are you going to get a boost for the next 20 minutes or is this more like you do daily and then it improves your performance?

It's less of like a performance enhancer, more like a daily thing.

Okay.

Just really good fats in. But I also heard that you guys are really sweet guys. So I'm just gonna pop on a glucose monitor here.

Okay.

There we go.

Just to find out if it's my blood sugar or not.

Take us through the rest of the stack. What else are you doing? So some context on this. Farb's a buddy. He's also here in LA with us investor and but the real reason I wanted to have you on is because I feel like you have consistently been maybe two years ahead of me on various different types of health biohacking experiments. And I've always felt like I was somewhat ahead. Like in 2020 I had a.

You're like 20 years ahead of Normie still.

I had two years ahead of you farb, you would have loved this. I had a core cold plunge just in my bedroom in college. No, this is 2020, a year and.

A half dorm room. Because didn't you tell me the college, the Dorms is like 6 dudes in one unit.

UCSB will have like 15 guys in house.

15 guys in one house.

Ideal biohacking environment.

Imagine you're just like on during sex, they say.

But anyways, you've impressed me with how at the front frontier you are. So I wanted to have you on to talk about everything, get the update on how you're thinking about GLP1s peptides. We can talk about a bunch of other things, but why don't you give a quick intro yourself and then we should start with your stack, what you're running today. And then we can get into some subtopics.

Great, great.

Farbud Nivi, sort of health nut, entrepreneur, investor. Have a new project that we're just getting off the ground right now. It's called Protocols. And hopefully we'll have some big news to share on that in a few weeks. So yeah, I guess that's, that's my intro.

What's the stack?

Yeah, let's start with what you're running.

Today or what do you think? What do you think you do that has like a power law outcome on your health? Because like sleep, diet, exercise seem like the most most important. And then you get down into like I'm taking the seventh type of magnesium tonight and it's like.

Or farmers doing like gene therapy.

Yeah, yeah, walk me through what's important. And then, and then what's more experimental?

I've done like tons of experimental stuff. I've been doing blood work for like well over a decade. I got, you know, follistatin gene therapy. I have genetically modified plasmids in my shoulder here. They're probably getting near the end of their lives because they, you know, last a year or two. And I mean the crazy thing is like, despite being a health nut, I kind of found myself at the end of last year, beginning of this year, sort of overweight, depressed and pre diabetic. And you know, I'm 48 now, so these things creep up on you. You can't do what you did 20 years ago and get the same thing 20 years later. And so I kind of sat back to figure out like what's wrong with my stack. Right. What's wrong with my routine. And really what it came down to is that I don't really have a routine and I'm Sort of making it up every day. I think Shane Parrish was on Chris Williamson and said had this great point. A person with a routine will outperform a person who is negotiating with themselves every day. And I'm like, that hit me really hard. I'm like, oh, wow. We're doing self negotiation every day. We're reinventing what it is to be a human being on a daily basis. What do I eat? Should I exercise? And I'm like, I'm really bad at routines. So that was actually the problem that I set out to solve. And in doing that, I actually ended up stopping taking trt. So I don't take testosterone anymore. I stopped taking.

How was coming off of it.

Yeah, that's super interesting because I feel like everyone. The narrative is like, once you're on it, you can never get off of it because your body stops producing it naturally. And you're like, you're either on it forever or, you know, you should never touch it. That that's like the common narrative.

This was like, another problem with my routine. I would take trt. I would do it for a month or two, and then I stop. So if you do it super consistently, it takes a while for, you know, the boys downstairs to turn off.

Okay.

You know, so, like, you can do it for a month or two and stop, and they'll come back. And so I did a ton of blood tests, actually, and my most recent one, which I just did with function, I did a huge function panel, and my team. My testosterone's like 600, 700. My free testosterone's above 100. It's pretty good.

That's great.

Yeah, impressive.

So, yeah, I actually stopped doing peptides as well. And we can kind of get into a little bit of that. I've done peptides for probably seven, eight years. And so my stack right now.

How are you getting. How are you getting them seven years ago? I'm curious.

Up and down.

And also. And also, I feel like the only peptide that people know broadly is, like, glucagon, like peptide, like GLP1. And that's generally not seen as a peptide for guys on TRT who are clearly going to the gym. It's more for, like, you know, serious weight loss. And so I'm curious about, like, what. What peptides even, like, drew your eye or were interesting or, like, what was even the goal with those?

Yeah, I mean, I like to experiment some, you know, seven, eight years ago, I'm like, let's see what these peptides are about.

Sure.

And peptides are just like short strings of amino acids. Like a protein is a long string of amino acid. A peptide is a short string. And they're used a lot in signaling in your body. So you can take one peptide that tells your body to make more human growth hormone. And that's kind of interesting because is that BPC?

Is that BPC157?

Yeah, BPC157 is different. BPC157 is like this sort of broad ranging peptide. You actually make it in your gut and if you just give yourself a lot more, it seems to help with healing in general.

Yeah.

Do you think other ones increase growth hormone, other ones improve deep sleep? And if you're on Twitter at all, you're seeing a massive proliferation of these sites selling it. And to your question about like how was I getting it in the years that I've done peptides, you could get it from a doctor. You couldn't get it from a doctor. You could get it from a doctor.

Yeah, yeah.

Kind of in limbo now. And all these sites, they sell it for research purposes and.

Which you were actually using for research purposes.

For research purposes.

Yeah.

But it's not for human consumption. The GLPs, which are another type of peptide are the ones that you get like Mounjara Ozempic. And that world is really getting crazy too because we know the brand name Ozempic. But like Ozempic is old news. The, the current one is Tirzepatide.

Yeah, that's right.

And then retatrutide is coming next and there's two or three more after that.

Do you think those will break into kind of like athletic men who are maybe sitting at like 13% body fat? Or is it already going to micro dose or do you think it will remain as just like a powerful tool for, for weight loss?

Well, yeah, the thing that's been interesting is all the reporting around, you know, GLP1s or tirzepatide helping with like willpower broadly. So imagine just having 20% extra willpower.

But then there's the, there's a counter example of like it makes you less risk on. And so like Will Menitis has that post. That's like, what is the effect of capital allocators broadly being on GLP1s? Like will we be a less risk?

They're not going turbo long.

They're just like, will we have less?

Maybe that's how we save the T bill. You know, it's like people are just like, yeah, I'm fine to just earn 2%.

There's a bill in the house for testosterone. What are you talking about?

To see it. We should get one in there.

Yeah, yeah. I'm investing in T bills. I'm taking majority of my bills and paying tea.

People microdose.

These things.

They seem to have like a lot more than just weight loss effect, blood sugar regulation. They seem to be reducing cancer in a bunch of studies. So there's even a, you know, some people just micro dose them. Like sometimes when I was doing it, I was taking a really small dose, you know, one fifth to one tenth of what the even starting dose is.

Do you feel like a plateau though? Because it feels like, you know, I remember the first day in college, I tried caffeine. I had coffee. I actually didn't have caffeine until college and it was like amazing. And I've had that experience a lot of things and now it's like, okay, I kind of just need a bunch of caffeine to get back to baseline. And I imagine that you, you maybe experience that with your journey on peptides and testosterone. But then is it like, is it like once you get to the plateau, you pull it out and then kind of reset the baseline. How do you think about that?

I used to think nonstop about that and do it all the time and I kind of don't anymore. Now I have a routine that I stick to. It's like light first thing in the morning, hugely important.

Like on your phone. Right? Just max brightness out and hold it there.

VR headset. AI slope in the morning.

That's hugely important. It actually sets your bedtime when you get light in your eyes in the morning, outside.

Okay.

It sets your bedtime like 16 hours later.

And what, what, what counts for getting light? Like I walk to my car in the morning at 5:30. Does that count? I'm outside for a minute and then I'm getting light when I'm looking at the sunrise, I guess.

Yep, that's the light. But, you know, maybe get three to five minutes.

Three to five minutes. So I should like kind of walk around the block or something a little.

This morning. This morning I got up like, you got to my house, we were driving into the office and I was running like five minutes behind. So you kind of had five minutes just putzing around out there.

I did.

That was for your health, John.

Thank you.

Whether or not you do it, that's helping you. That's helping your health.

Yeah.

And then I usually, you know, do the morning stuff. £ a lot of water in the morning. I learned this from a Buddy of mine, Jack Dreyfus, who as this sort of morning ritual about not using his phone and chugging water. And those are actually sort of life changing. You don't want to blast social media into your eyes in the first hour. It really changes your neurology if you don't. Then gym, getting vitamin D, walks outside, a whole list of supplements.

What do you like in terms of gym?

What do I do for gym? I do like 15 minutes every other day.

Okay. Wow, that seems like, short. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like I'm recovery maxing.

Okay, recovery maxing. Interesting.

I mean, all your gains coming in, lifting.

Yeah. So how have you noticed since. Yeah, I'm assuming you went through a period where you're just like, bro split.

You seem like you've done CrossFit. I don't know, I'm just throwing stuff out.

No, I'm like the last guy you'll see doing CrossFit.

Yeah. Okay, but have you ever done it?

No, never.

But were you ever running a bro split? Like, you know, chest, back, legs. Chest, back, legs, rest on, you know, Sunday. Did you ever do that?

I'm kind of, I'm like light version of that now. Like, to me, the, the thing I learned is that like a little bit of a bunch of things actually makes the biggest difference.

Interesting.

And so like having a routine where you kind of do these things regularly, that actually makes a bigger difference than going like crazy on one thing, which kind of puts your health lopsided. And that's actually the. You know, I was mentioning protocols earlier. It's a little app we've been building that kind of makes all this easy. We call it health maxing with friends. So you can basically do these little routines. You can build a stack for yourself and then you kind of do it with friends. They do them too. You see their faces appear as they get them done throughout the day. And that has honestly made the biggest literal difference in my health of anything I've ever done. Not even, not even close.

That makes sense. Talk about microplastics in glass. I know you've been diving into this. That study came out. Everybody, everybody was like, wait, this feels like some propaganda from big plastic that says, yeah, even your glass. Water has plastic.

There was a talk at Hereticon about that. Remember? It was like, how would you get people to use more glass or something?

Or. Well, that was, that was more of an exercise.

Yeah, it was a mental exercise exercise about how to get people to use more plastic. And it was like one of the, one of the ideas that people threw out was like, make glass sound bad.

Yeah.

And like, here we are. Here we are. Somebody ran the.

Yeah, here we are.

Yeah. What is the actual data?

Well, the study was done by like, I think a French organization. So we don't know if it's just EU propaganda or actual science. So, you know, we have to put it to the test. So basically they found there's more plastic in glass bottles than in plastic bottles. And the culprit is like the cap at the top of the bottles. They have like a little plastic inside the cap of a glass bottle and it seems like that's the plastic that's getting into it. So I'm actually replicating the study. I found a local lab that will do the analysis. I'm going to get a bunch of different waters and just send it in and see what the results are.

Do you know how big the study was in France?

Because I feel like size. I mean, it was like a pretty well done study.

I feel like the whole. The whole difficulty is like, do you test, like, what's the variability? How do you get the actual size? Are you testing like hundreds of water bottles? Thousands? Or like the other thing is different.

The big thing with plastic and people don't say it as much, but it's kind of started there is like, don't leave your plastic bottle in the car because when it gets hot, it leaches.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

So I don't know if they're comparing it, you know, to a leached plastic bottle versus a glass one that's empty.

Another one. What are you doing around cholesterol right now? I know you were running an experiment there a while back.

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

It's kind of crazy.

Six weeks.

So is that something you'll cycle going forward or just effectively do consistently?

Probably take consistently. Some people I, I pair it with like a good dose of CoQ10 because some people statins or red yeast rice, they experience like some muscle soreness and it seems like taking a good amount of CoQ10 basically takes that away, which for me it does.

Makes sense. How are you? Have you been playing around with hyperbaric oxygen chambers at all? I'm sort of anticipating that that is the next version of the home sauna or the home ice cold plunge. It feels like we're maybe a couple years out from more commercial or more consumer friendly versions of those products because they're showing tremendous benefits. But if you actually look at buying one, it's like this like $30,000 machine that looks like it's out of a hospital and it looks really kind of scary. But I want to be doing it consistently and I don't really have time to do it outside of very mixed branding too.

Like the first time I heard about a hyperbaric, like sleeping in a hyperbaric Barrick chamber, it was Michael Jackson. And then I'm pretty sure that's like the first time it entered my mind as like something that you could do, although extremely valuable for scuba divers because you know, if you get the bends like you need to be in a hyperbaric chamber to recompress. And so it's like a life saving technology for, in the scuba diving world. But then it was like used as like this odd, this odd crazy health hack. But then Brian Johnson's been talking about it a lot.

So.

Yeah. What's your take on the hyperbaric chambers?

I'm actually in the process of finding one to purchase and put here in the office. And it seems like it's basically one of the best things you can do for longevity and health. And the thing is you need to get up to about 2 atmospheres. So they have, they have ones that are like 1.3 atmospheres of pressure, 1.4. Some are above 2, but it seems like 2 is the spot that kind of gives you the most benefits. It's sort of the sweet spot. I mean literally improving your DNA, increasing your telomere length. I think Brian Johnson said it was the best skin treatment he's ever done. And the guy does a lot of skin treatments.

Yeah.

So yeah, I Think you're right. It's going to get bigger and bigger. It's a little bit of a nuisance because you're in there for an hour to an hour and a half.

Doesn't he like work? I thought Brian Johnson was like doing emails in there or something.

Yeah, he has one that you can kind of sit upright in and get stuff done.

Okay.

Yeah, I like these more. I think the reason that saunas are so great is it's passive. It doesn't take a lot of willpaper to say or. Sorry. Willpower to say, oh, I'm volunteer on tvpn. Yeah, it doesn't take a lot of willpower to go and say, I'm going to go and sit in the sauna for 30 minutes. And it has tremendous benefits. And I think the same thing for the hyperbaric chamber. You can go in there, get some work done, read a book, listen to TVPN, etc.

Yeah, it's on 24 hours. Yeah, it's a wild time. We got some really crazy stuff coming down the pipeline. They. They think they have a shot that, you know, will lower your cholesterol for life in one shot.

What?

That's crazy that the company that did my gene therapy is working on one that'll increase your iq.

That's insane. Wow.

How much data do you personally need to run an experiment on yourself? Like the IQ one? It feels like. Yeah. If you got 20 people that got some benefit, you might be fast.

Maxing Just down for Faustian bargains.

Yeah, always.

As long as it's not harmful. I'm generally okay with trying it to see what it does.

Sure. But how do you notice?

Last question. I'm curious, what's your thinking around? I think I know the answer already, but this sort of like ancestral philosophy sort of like consume things that existed hundreds of years ago versus something being made in a lab is not necessarily bad. And you should take advantage of science.

I think it's just not a great heuristic in general. It's convenient and easy, but I don't think it's a great heuristic. Right. Everything should stand up to having a good explanation for it. And neither of those are great explanations is like bowing to ancestral ways or to science. If you don't have a good explanation for why the thing works, then you should be kind of suspicious of it. And I don't think either of those are great explanations. You got to take things on their face. Circadian alignment is. I mean, it turns out that the BRO scientists were right on A million things. We thought diabetes type 2 was literally incurable before the 2000s. Bro scientists always thought you could cure it with lifestyle and diet. Finally, in the 2010s, after 100 years of thinking it was incurable, we realized you can actually reverse type 2 diabetes. So in a lot of cases, the BRO scientists are right.

Gotta continue to bro down.

Trust the experts.

Always trust the experts.

The bro scientists.

Awesome. Well, we'd love to have you back on again when you have more news in a couple weeks and yeah, let's. Let's hang soon when you have more, when you're running your experiments, whether they're on yourself or water, hit us. We love breaking news. So great.

Okay, great. Happy to see you guys.

Have a good one. Bye.

See you soon. Cheers.

If you're looking to up your sleep game, head over to 8sleep.com.

That's right.

Pod 5 Ultra, the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod 5 actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body, and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep. Head over to 8sleep.com we got Sean Frank in the studio. The man who invented the wallet invented E commerce. He invented e commerce. He invented the wallet and now he invented podcasting with us. Welcome to Stream. How you doing?

Been too long guys.

I'm doing great. I heard the eight sleep ad. Yeah, I got two perfect scores in a row.

No way.

Yeah, yeah.

That is so hard to do.

Yeah. Last night posted 100. I posted it on Twitter. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that was the intro that I got.

How many, how many one year olds do you have at your house?

Zero.

Okay. I'm kind of playing with one hand or two hands tied behind my back here, but congratulations.

I went through about a year period where my lovely children were just sleeping perfectly.

I have an idea.

Every night, eight sleep should make a.

Sleeping bag for a four year old that they can't get out of. Kind of a straight jacket, a padded room that's temperature controlled with a lock on the door so the kid can't get up.

So dark.

But we're gonna turn this. You know how there's like every show's like the manosphere content. We need to do the data sphere content. You're not dad yet, so it won't really work. We'll need different guests for that. But we need to get really hard hardcore in the dad content. Anyway, let's talk about TikTok. TikTok selling to a U.S. owner to get ready. They're turning down the focus on Shops and pushing the ad product again. Shops has always lost money. I didn't know that. And without the parent co funding it, no one wants to eat that loss. TikTok will be an ad platform again at least for the rest of the year. Break that down for us. What does that mean? What are the implications?

Yeah.

Have you guys ever bought anything from TikTok shops?

No, I've never used TikTok.

Dude, I love that. John, you're a true patriot. But yeah, so, so TikTok shops, I mean if you talk to people inside of TikTok like high up they do not see Meta as a competitor. They don't want to compete with Meta. Like it's obviously like they're, they both have short form video now. They're. But like TikTok never really was a social app in the way that Instagram and Facebook really are.

I heard this this morning. People are. One of our friends was saying like the Gen z, they don't DM each other on TikTok. They use Snapchat to talk and chat and then they use TikTok as like a YouTube style content. Yeah.

So like if you talk to people at TikTok they really want to go after the YouTubes of the world and they really want to go after Amazon. Right. Because Amazon is this big pot of money. It's 600 billion a year in e commerce revenue that no like Amazon's given up trying to grow. Right. So we have prime day going right now there. It's four days of Prime Day. They doubled the length year over year and they said that it'll grow 20%. So each day is down like 40%. When you add that up you get 20% growth. It's just pure value extraction for Amazon at this point there's gonna be more ads like they, they've signed up 100 million prime members. That business can't really grow anymore. So there's this big pot of money that Walmart tries to attack.

Pronatalism might, might change that. I expect Amazon to start lobbying for, you know, subsidies for young families. I mean to just like we just need to triple the population in the United States.

We were laughing earlier about the fact that I believe Amazon makes more in net income than Tesla makes in revenue.

Like way more.

Way more. It's crazy.

There's levels on the Mag 7 chart anyway.

Yeah but it sounds like with TikTok going to us owner like something's changing there. Break that down. Yeah.

So they spent probably 24 months and easily $30 billion trying to get people to use TikTok shops, right. Right. Now the estimate is that like it's a billion dollars a month in GMV. So a 12 billion dollar GMV business, that could be high, it could be low, it changes. That's not very big. Like, you know, Shopify's GMV in a quarter is probably double that, right? So Shopify probably does a quarter billion in gmv. So they haven't been that successful getting people to actually shop repeatedly. And to get that billion dollars, they lit a bunch of money on fire with subsidies.

Wait, do you mean a quarter trillion.

Quarter trillion in GMV for Shopify? Probably. Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's it. Yeah, that's what I meant.

And you know, we have Amazon at 600 billion, right? So, like, TikTok is trying really hard. Their goal this year was to get to 20 billion in GMV, right? So to be like one tenth of what Shopify's at. And when they launched for the first 12 months, it was aggressive subsidies. So they would come to brands like mine and they'd be like, hey, sell on our platform and we will give customers 50% off. And then we're like, well, I don't want to sell 50% off. They're like, no, no, we will fund it. We'll fund discounts, we'll fund free shipping. They made this aggressive push to try to get people to shop there, right? So there was just.

And simultaneously there was this other company, Flip, that was doing the same thing. Basic, is that the right name for it? They were just basically giving away products. It was basically a. What was it? A wealth transfer from LPs to venture capitalists to the American consumer selling dollars for 90 cents.

For a lot less than that for 50 cents, apparently.

Yeah. So, and Flip was the same thing. All of them are. I mean, Teemu Shein. Everybody's coming after like this disposable income in America, right? So Flip's like, we're going to take a social, you know, commerce attack on it. TikTok was the same thing. You know, Temu is owned by a publicly traded company in China, right. That's worth like $200 billion. And they were losing, I mean, probably $100 million a month to try to get, you know, user acquisition. All of them are coming after Amazon. So that strategy would probably continue to play out if section 321 didn't close. I don't know if you guys covered that. You had Ryan Peterson on, but it used to be that you could ship, you know goods via Temu from China to the US Totally tax and duty free. Right. So why is Temu cheaper than Old Navy or H and M or whatever else is. They're paying zero taxes so we closed that. Now Temu's revenue and their traffic has fallen 50% in like 60 days. Right. They've taken their gas off of customer acquisition. Same thing's happening with TikTok. They have a really awesome app with a ton of users and if they're forced to sell to the US someone's just going to turn that into a cash cow. Right. It's going to get bought by you know, it's probably going to be Walmart or you know, Applovin is making a bid like all of these ad platforms are making a bid because there's a bunch of users there and, and if you have to do is you have attention, you could turn on the money printing machine which is Google, which is meta. Right. So you know it will, it'll end up being more of a meta competitor. They're going to abandon the strategy of going after Amazon and they will just start printing money like every good app platform should. Like you guys do.

Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah it was, I, I have a, I had a friend that at the time that the, the TikTok ban was being for floated or the app was being removed from the app Store, I had a friend that was just absolutely printing on TikTok. He has a nine figure E commerce brand and he was like I don't really want it to be banned because I'm making $2 million a month right now and it's pretty good. But it clearly was just fake and heavily subsidized and totally unsustainable.

Yeah, explain, explain this interaction in the comments to that post. They barely, Ariel says they barely co fund anything anymore. Hard disagree with this take and you said but that's why they stopped co fund co funding things. Is that talking about TikTok's parent bite dance paying this or TikTok co funding promotions with brands? Yeah.

So they've been winding it down for probably the past three months. Right. And I mean this is, this is.

TikTok going to brands.

Yeah. The co funding is when you run tick tock shops to try to get new brands in there to try to get your sales up. They are, they are going to cover discounts, fees and they will give the brand that money so that the discount pass to the customer.

Yeah.

So TikTok, you know Amazon gets 15 of all transactions as fees tick tock gets 6% but they take that 6% and they give you 30% of your, of your transaction back. Right? That's that co funding element that they started to slow that down drastically in January when they got banned. Right. The writing was on the wall that they're not gonna do this anymore and they've been slowly bringing down co funding. And then if you go on TikTok, there's a term called ad load. It's how many ads do you get per post? Right? So you know, on Instagram it's like you have an ad load of 33%. One in, one in three posts are gonna be ads. TikTok got to.50% of all ads were monetized through affiliate.

Yeah, yeah, so so it's, it's natural post ad, natural post ad, post ad, post ad, post ad. Yeah.

And, and the ads are split between monetized via shops, which is, you know, like affiliate posts and normal ads. They have turned that down drastically and made the ads way better. So traditional advertising, where I spend money to get people to my website, right. Like what matter does. It's been crushing on TikTok ever since they, they made this change like three months ago. Okay, so the writing's on the wall. TikTok shop will be drastically deprioritized and the ads are going to start being awesome again.

What about the state of live shopping in the US where you guys at? Ridge, like did you have somebody that was live on TikTok all day long selling wallets? Did you ever, did you ever go live?

Why do you think Sean has that podcast mic? He's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, you know, we, we've tried it because Amazon pushed it pretty aggressively. Flip pushed it aggressively and then tick tock, push it aggressively. We've tried all that. It doesn't really work in America without the subsidies. Right? Like there's this flywheel on TikTok where you get 50 people to go live, they all start selling stuff, they push your product to the top, then other affiliates want to come in and start selling it because it's a good selling product. But that only works when you heavily subsidize it. And that hurts your Walmart business or your Amazon business, your Whole Foods business, because nobody likes to be, be undercut. I've had a lot of friends who, you know, I have a friend who got to $10 million a month on TikTok shops, but in the grand scheme of things he has like a hundred million dollar a month wholesale business. So it's like, dude, it just, it's it was cool, it was exciting, it was fast growing and they made it profitable for brands, but it's all falling apart. I. I don't think Americans really want live shopping and I don't think it's ever going to catch on.

What about. So, so what do you think the future of platforms like Whatnot is? Is it focusing on these sort of like niche collectibles and auctions and things like that? Like, could it work in subcategories?

Yeah, dude.

And you know, to give TikTok credit, they brought affiliates back, right? Affiliate was a bad word in 2021, right? If you were, if you were doing affiliate marketing, you were selling like the scammiest product on earth or like porn or Viagra or something, right? And they made more young kids be okay with selling stuff on the Internet. So they made affiliate cool again. And I think you will see more of that, but it is going to be more, you know, niche. I think Whatnot's a great platform if you like Pokemon cards or if you like gaming. And you could see Twitch, have more social comments built in, but it's not going to be the hundred billion dollar GMV business that TikTok's trying to build it to.

And in that it is in China, right? And Asia broadly.

Why does it work there and not here?

I don't know, man. I mean, customers in America are used to like infinite choice, right? The other thing is we have just really low E commerce penetration compared to China. Right. China's at like 40% of all transactions are happening online and America struggles to crack 15.

So yeah. What's the downstream effect of like the ads getting better on TikTok? Does that mean like brands need to be investing more in like actually like, you know, super bowl ad level creative? Is it doing some sort of viral stunt, like the clulee thing? Like is it just algorithm hacking AI slop? Like, like what, what do you think the meta will be in terms of like actually having an ad really, really perform on TikTok, post sell or post sale to US owner.

Yeah, well, I would suggest in this right now, but what Metta has pushed. So Meta is like still the king of, you know, performance advertising, right? 130 billion in ads run through that platform and they spent the past year working on something called Andromeda, which is their new ad engine, right? And all it is is they want high velocity of creative. They don't care if it looks awesome, they don't care if it's AI generated. They just want high variety, right? And they want you to feed the ad engine as much high variety content as as possible. Really focus on short form video still. But like high production, ugc, AI, whatever you want to put in there and then drama to just finds the best thing for the best person at the right time. Like they've really focused on making sure they can like their internal ad auction serves the best ad for the best person. Take whatever winners you have over there because that is the heavy lifting for you and just run them on TikTok.

Yeah. Like are we, are we completely past the era of like it was the Harmon Brothers that were doing those like really catchy, really high production value videos. I remember like the Dollar Shave Club launch video was kind of like the case study in this where you could go get like 100 million impressions on one really crazy ad and then do retargeting based on how long people watched. Like is that, is that meta just completely dead? Are we no longer going to see like iconic ads for particular brands?

So Harmon Brothers did great. There's a company called Sandwich Video. They did.

Yeah, Sandwich was another one that was really big in that.

Yeah. Raid Drop is still doing it.

Yeah.

The problem is like there's a percentage of creative cost to ad spend. Right. So if you're gonna spend a million dollars on a video, you have to spend at least $20 million promoting it. Right. And it used to be that like the ad cost could be a third. Right. When you're running TV ads, you'd spend a lot of money to make a really memorable thing. And the Delivery was only 2/3 of the cost. The delivery now needs to be like at least 95% of the cost. And that just drives everything, the investment in creative down.

So is there. I think yeah, yeah. But is there some sort of like like on, on. On unquantifiable value or in the short term around like creating like what's called a shelling point. So like we all know about like you know the eras tour for Taylor Swift, like it was such a big phenomenon that everyone's aware of that. Or like Barb and Heimer or like the dollar Shave Club ad, like everyone has seen it and so it has like enduring value for a really, really long time. And if you're creating like a bunch of like highly tailored random ads that are just kind of like generally out there, you never create a brand that has like yes, everyone remembers that particular Nike campaign. Everyone remembers like this thing that broke through and everyone was talking about that ad like the, the iPhone or the, the, the ipod, like Silhouette dancing campaign. Like, everyone remembers that one. Like, are we just post that type of marketing or is there still potentially alpha. If you could underwrite it across like two decades and you're willing to take this like really big shot, go make something great and then be like, yeah, we are going to spend 20 million against this $1 million ad that we shot. It might take us a couple of years to actually deliver to everyone, but we're going to do it and it's going to pay back over like 20 years.

I don't know. My, my, my immediate thought is that it's not enough for people to just remember a moment of your brand or remember that your brand exists. It's not going to. It doesn't guarantee to have value 10 years from today because, like, when's the last time you bought a dollar Shave Club product despite.

True.

Totally remembering the campaign.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

And as long as it's hitting that ratio where 95% of the dollars are going to creative. So if you have a massive fucking budget where you're going to spend a million bucks on a video and you can Support it with 20 million, sure, dude, if that's what you want to do. Like, it's. But we're like, when dollar Shave Club made that video, they didn't have any money.

Yeah.

So it was all organic exposure.

Right.

They made a really good video that, you know, they really gambled on it where it was 100% of costs were going to add creative. And as ad creative costs go down and as the Internet gets messier and harder to stand out, like, you just need to have that money spent on actually delivering ads.

What do you think about the modern incarnation of the Dollar Shave Club? Like 100% of the spend going towards the creative. Like Clulee just ran this playbook. What's your reaction to that? The reason people have seen the cluly viral videos is not because of ad spend. They might be promoting it a little bit here and there, but mostly they're just really good at getting engagement and going viral. And so people are remembering that now. Maybe dollar Shave Club is a cautionary tale for them, but is that even a tool in the tool chest that founders should be reaching for?

Oh, yeah, dude. Controversy and rage baiting. Right. We all know about Cluey. Yeah, it was a good video, but it's because, yeah, they, they're really good at rage baiting. The other thing is like Dr. Squatch did the Sydney Sweeney.

The bath thing. Yep. Right.

Like, we're going to talk about that because of the controversy tied to it and like the outlandish nature. But if you want to make a really beautiful message, the ipod dancing video, nobody gives a fuck. You have to make somebody mad.

The culture shifted. Yeah, it's rough. Yeah. Explain to me Dr. Squatch. I haven't used the products or I'm not really even familiar with it like. But there's news at the company too. Like just tell me everything you know about it.

Well, dude, every Sunday me and Josh the, the current CEO of Dr. Squatch play tennis. So you guys are in la. If you guys are big tennis guys, you should come. Should come play.

That'd be awesome.

Dude, they're. Dude, they're crushing it. It's a great story. So the guy who made it, Jack, you know in 2016 they were doing $3 million. He had some other partners and he had the foresight to understand that distribution was everything. He raised like 30 million bucks. He bought all his other partners out and with $27 million remaining, he's like, I'm just going to put everything into YouTube. He dumped all of that money into YouTube advertising and the flywheel just got started.

Talk about product portrayan.

Because every brand at the time said you can't get YouTube to work as a direct response channel. Like programmatic YouTube. Yeah, like creator driven. YouTube was working but. But that wasn't like. That was a kind of novel insight that he had.

Yeah.

And it was, it was a beautiful raindrop video. Like, like that video is still like it was funny, it was iconic. And he's just like men's soaps. A massive category. This should be bigger. I'm going to bet the farm on advertising. He dumped it into it. They ended up getting a huge secondary transaction. Molis is a great bank. They were in that deal for him. They ended up getting bought by Summit. This was like peak Covid 2021. So then summit put in a great management team. Josh, Josh was there working before there and then they just scaled the thing. I mean the numbers are like they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars this year. They just got bought by Unilever for 1.5 billion. And it's a great outcome. Right? I mean Summit's going to make a ton of money. So you know we're kind of at the end of the fund cycle for a lot of those DTC funds.

Right.

If you raised money from a brand, it's a 10 year fund. Like we're getting towards the end where there's going to be a lot of consolidation Dr. Squatch is a winner. Made money all the way up and now they're going to be owned by Unilever and they'll be the next, you know, generational men's personal care brand. They'll be the Axe or like the bod spray, whatever we had in middle school, that's Dr. Squatch.

So. So seven years the reaction on this video. So seven years ago they launched this video, Natural Soap for men. Has 122 million views on YouTube. Was that the case of just amazing creative and it went viral naturally or did they spend money to get that 120 million views?

Oh, they dumped like 20 million bucks into that video.

Okay. Wow. I mean it has 11,000 comments. So clearly like people even if they saw it as a promoted post, like they wound up engaging with it because it was good creative as well. So. But wow. Yeah, what a crazy arb at the time. Sorry Jordan.

I guess speaking of coming to the end of fund cycles, what is the state earlier this year we were covering kind of the state of roll ups wasn't looking that good. I still think it's not looking great. Will there be any real bright spots in that sort of category of investment?

Right, right. And I think I sent you this before we got started. You guys had like the last guy on here was curing diabetes, right? Like okay, if that works. $100 billion company, you know what I mean? Like we talk about Nvidia crossing $4 trillion. It's just a whole different game when you come to consumer, right? Dr. Squatch at 1.5 billion massive win. Everyone in that group will end up being LPs and new funds. Right. But like they're not going to be Mark Zuckerberg. They're not going to be $100 billion outcomes. Right. So then there's a company called we are Wild. I'm friends with that team. They're in the uk. They got bought by Unilever as well. So I mean multi hundred million dollar deal, you know, if you raise at a 5 or $10 million valuation and you exit for 200 million, that's like what venture returns used to be in 2011 or whatever. It's a massive fucking win. Right? That's just the world consumer's still in. So there are a lot of winners, right? Poppy getting bought. You know, there's every, every like two or three weeks right now there's a new either CPG brand or hair care brand getting bought in like this, you know, one 100 million to $500 million range. That's happening a lot right now with that consolidation.

What's the postmortem on the bill versus.

The actual, like roll up, like roll ups where I'm gonna raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of brands and you know, the hope would have been to ipo. Turns out it's very hard to make money owning a bunch of Amazon brands or a bunch of random Shopify brands.

This is like the Thrasio thing.

Thrasio. And then there was the open store.

And a few others were trying that.

But it's been roughly.

I used to get emails for that all the time when I was running e commerce for brand like, hey, do you want to sell? And I'm like, no. Like, did you look at Crunchbase? Like it's not like that type of business.

No, Sorry, Joy, I misunderstood the question. Yeah, all of those are. I think, I think I got a dm. I don't know if this is true or not that open source bankrupt. So I don't know if that's been announced yet. But like, they're all like, thrasio went bankrupt. Open source is going to go bankrupt. There's like, we thought there'd be synergies and like running all of these, like small independent islands. But like, no. People still want large brands who can perform revenue. Right. Dr. Squatch is that. And like if you can get to $500 million in revenue and consumer. It's typically one brand. There's typically a lot of profit tied to it. Like Hexclad.

Open Store. Open Store, which was the URL now reroutes to jackarcher.com which looks like a men's.

Which was one of their brands. One of their brands.

It's a dude. It's a jack dude. Napolo with some socks, which we love. Looks pretty cool actually.

How are you? So earlier on the show we ran through a list Trump calling for lower rates while the markets are ripping Robinhood CEO raising for a math AI company at $900 million valuation. Andrew Wilkinson's giving out stock tips. Harry stebbings calling for 8 trillion Nvidia Circle at 2000 times price to earnings.

2000.

2000 times 2000.

200 times.

No, it's 2000. Satya's being smart doing some layoffs. Then you have Sohan Parikh Massa's top blasting your favorite fintwit influencers launching spacs. Zuck's making offers. Are you feeling the top? Are you worried right now or do you think we got some room to run?

That's a great question. We probably got room to run, right? I mean.

So let's go. Wait, wait. So we have an update on the gong. Good friend of the show told us that we have not been properly warming up our gong before we hit it.

Apparently there's a risk of breaking it.

Or just making it sound poorly. So you have to just give it a couple taps to get it warmed up.

There we go. There we go.

That's great. That time.

I don't know, they'll correct us in the comments.

We did it poorly, but we're learning our gong.

Anyways. You said we have some room to run.

You said go ultra long. Sell your house, sell your car.

Can we expect an NFT profile picture for Ridge is like really kind of the.

Yeah.

What, what they kind of.

Well, no, no, it would be, it would be an AI agent for wallets. Yeah.

Wallet coin.

So I think wallet coin.

It's back to ICOs guys, initial coin offerings.

Yeah. Oh, well, yeah.

How do you. I mean, I think like Ridge has just navigated through so many different crazy cycles that it's probably business as usual. Maintain a strong balance sheet, you know, just stay profitable, grow, you know, all the things that a business should do. But how do you plan around? Do you update your kind of thinking or strategy at all around cycles? We were asking Ryan Peterson earlier this week how he was if he thinks that if rates do come down as a little treat for having a strong economy, there's certain brands that are going to benefit from that, retailers. But I'm curious how you think about it.

Yeah, rates coming down just open up financial markets again. Right. So it looks like the IPO windows open. Everybody's fucking rushing to the market. Bitcoin, all time highs. Fantastic. But we're getting a lot of inbound interest from PE groups and banks because they think interest rates will come down. That makes leverage buyouts work again. Right.

Okay. Oh, so it's LBOs.

Yeah. Yeah. So private credit has dominated the private equity market for the past three years because it's too expensive to buy stuff. You can lend out money. Right. You have this big balance sheet. They want to go back into buying assets and restarting that clock. So that'll probably happen on. If the economy can rip. Financial markets look tasty, you know what I mean? There's a lot of really cool things going on, but job data still, like, you know, ADP put out their June numbers and like it doesn't look good. Right. So I think we do end up getting rate cuts just because the financial markets are removed away from what's happening in a lot of businesses. So I think we'll get bad jobs reports.

Yeah. What about rates on Buy Now, Pay later and just the general consumer ability to click the checkout button on an E Commerce site? In theory, I would imagine Buy now, pay later products being highly sensitive to interest rates. And yet it's always felt like don't think about the interest rate when you click this button.

Right. Because the whole thing was that the interest rate was obscured. Right. Like for a customer in Klonda, they pay a 0% interest rate and it's built into this payment processing rate that we pay. Right. So like the whole idea is that if I charge a brand 6%, I think Shopee is like 6%. Shopay has pay in four, right? These people pay me in four months, I have a 6% interest rate. You know, it works out to being 20, you know, because they're paying back early. Maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25%. Who really knows? So there's like built in interest rates that like the, the brand's really paying.

So if interest rates come down, you would, you might expect those rates to come down. And then, and then companies are pushing that harder.

Dude, if interest rates come down, Buy now, pay later becomes a good business. Right now it's probably not that good of a business because the payment contracts are locked in, right? Like Shopify for the next four years, I have to give them 6% or whatever or whatever it is of whatever the Buy now, pay later is. And if interest rates come down, they're just fucking. I mean, I can't renegotiate that. So they'll just be printing money on that thing. But look, never bet against the American consumer. We love buying shit. Prime day is four days this year, baby.

Four days. Four days. Last, last question. Need to get the update on what percent, like how much value Ridge is getting from AI. Like Gen AI right now There were some big promises earlier this year from a variety of companies, but I'm curious what the actual, what is the core value that you're getting today? Is it just more diversity of creative, being able to test more or is it kind of business as usual?

Yeah, so I mean, two buckets like data analysis, it's fantastic, right? I'm running all of my data through like a bunch of AI tools. It makes reporting way easier. It makes getting like what's going to sell inventory, buying all that stuff is way easier with AI, I can just upload. Hey, here's the 12 months of sales data. What should I buy? And it can actually start doing that for me. And it's replaced inventory managers. I've removed inventory managers from my team. I have one person, director in charge of all that stuff now. But it has replaced people on the creative side. VO3 is fantastic. So we're doing hooks on VO3. It's really good at. If you have still, still photography and you want to add a little bit of motion, gifs, whatever, like it's great at doing shit. And you know, like I said, hooks are really fantastic. Static images, it just makes you. We can output way more static images than ever before. But we're still not at the place where like, I mean I spent $150,000 on photo shoots last month. Right.

Like in the desert you spent on AI tooling probably in the thousands or something.

Yeah, hundreds.

Right, hundreds.

We have cars in the desert off roading. Like AI is not doing those videos yet. I don't know if they ever will.

It's funny, we made that video for Wander and a large amount of people thought that it was AI generated. And I'm like, if you find me the person that is making that one shotting any of those scenes and doing it at that level of consistency, we will invest our entire balance sheet into your company. But yeah, that's good to hear. The data analysis side is interesting. I mean that's historically just been one of the hardest problems. The number one thing that will hold a lot of brands back this year is just not having the right inventory so that there's demand, there's general demand for what they make and sell. They just don't have enough of the right things. So just getting better there will make a huge impact.

All the tools are getting better. Whether it's like Excel or your analytics tool or your creative tool, your Photoshop's getting better content aware, Phil's been around for a long time now. You have it on steroids. But yeah, still a lot of work to actually get results from that. And so you still have people in the loop, dude.

And I think AI editing is going to be huge, right? You know, you shoot a lot of content. You guys shot that commercial, right? You probably shot hours, right? To get, to get a one minute clip. It's gonna make editing way easier. So productivity gains are here and they're coming. We're probably another, another two years before humans are not actually pulling out cameras.

Two years, that's pretty fast, dude.

I mean, if you ask Sam Altman, I mean, we'll see if OpenAI is going to be around in two years, dude, there might not be any left.

There might not be anybody left. That's true.

Yeah. I don't know. I think people will probably still be doing photos in a few years. I'd probably take the over on that one. But certainly there will need to be more of a story behind why there's a photo taken. Is it of someone that you know exists, but if it's for something generic like the stock, photography will truly go away.

Yeah, we're moving from the. You know, you can't trust images online because of filters just like Photoshop to you can't trust a photo because it may or may not be real entirely. Like it could have just been a hallucination from a machine.

But does it matter if you just want to see a picture of a forest, Generic trees in the background to, you know, tell you to give you a vibe of what this Dr. Squatch smells like, you know, fresh forest.

I'm gonna make a plug. There's an AI artist on Twitter. It's. I think the handles like this photo does not exist.

Okay.

They've produced some amazing photography right like that actually, like it's art. It makes you feel something. A lot of it's soulless. But these guys do a great job. So check that out. This photo does not exist.

Yeah, I mean that's definitely like the pitch in mid journey is like giving people like the tool to create something completely new and like leaving that inspiration that the. That like the human brings to the tool to create something new. But it's very hard for someone to just go and say, make me a viral video. Make me a beautiful image. Like, that's not the prompt yet, but we'll see.

Anyways, anything else? It's great to see you, Wallet man. Let's hang in person very soon.

Yeah, let's hang out soon.

Tennis guys.

I'll see you.

Send us time.

Great.

Have a great Friday.

Bye.

Cheers.

On the AI note, we should cover some of the back and forth around Grok 4 versus O3. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says Grok 4 feels like artificial intelligence to me. It's clearly not just constructing statistically likely connections, but it's drawing fairly deep insights on problems I hadn't seen before in ways I haven't seen elsewhere. Here's an example, and it's a very detailed example. The biggest shortcoming I see is the adoption of of confused musings from online forums as facts, coupled with the inability to derive deep insights from intermingled prose and graphics and sources. It needs contextual skepticism and more multimodal visual learning. Also, I bet there are hundreds of thousands of topics where a human professional could write a definitive guidebook on topics that online forum posters frequently confuse and that could be used to fine tune a lot of the low quality user content driven nonsense sense out of AI models out of current AI models. So bullish on the on the fine tuning labs that are generating data. What's interesting is Tyler Cowan says O3 is still better. So he's still in the O3 camp.

And more XAI news this is breaking. As of 10 minutes ago, Elon Musk's XAI seeks up to $200 billion valuation and next fundraising.

Wow.

Okay, early talks, early talks, early talks to boost its value from as much as 10 times from last year.

They're on the frontier. Let's see how much money they can make from this API.

This is the highest value that's ever been applied to X. Twitter, the Everything app.

Well it's not pre revenue. Now they're making money. There was more back and forth between two former guests of the show. Amjad says, I suspect it's part of the reason they crush benchmarks. Truth is seeking is all is an all or nothing proposition and it's crucial for general intelligence. Will Brown says, I think it's probably more the 200,000 H1 hundreds for RL and inference than the dope be than the don't be woke system prompt. I do think this is some pretty marketing pretty clever marketing. Sleight of hand by Xai Grok has been in the news lately for being edgy. Grok is also now in the news for being incredibly smart. They would like you to think that these things are deeply related. That they figured out how to scale RL like this instead of a short amount of time is in fact an impressive feat of research and engineering. There is no reason to think that it's that it's related to the willingness to say controversial things other than via the absence of efforts typically spent on guardrails. So yeah, maybe they just sent it fully into just, you know, training rl. Let's hit this as hard as possible and we covered this that the RL spend was apparently the same as the inference spend for this training run. So kind of new attempt and obviously a great model but maybe not really tied to the fact that they were trying to make an anti woke model specifically just the fact that it's a lot of great math going on.

Well, more breaking news. The US Geiger Capital is reporting on X the US just posted a surprise surplus of 27 billion for the month of June. Total receipts were 526 million. Total outlays for 499 billion. That's a free cash flow for the United States of America.

Yeah, that's wild.

Yeah, that's amazing. Absolutely wild.

Well, more breaking news. You can go to biggetbezel.com, your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

This is the time to develop a strategic reserve of Daytonas for sure. The Daytona reserve.

And I mean we shouldn't break this, but a good friend of the the show is becoming a watch guy and we're very excited to break the news.

When it goes to have him on.

Mark Gurman is talking about Tim Cook. The rhetoric that Tim Cook should be replaced is just nonsensical. Replace him with who? Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs sadly isn't walking through that door. I thought this is a good take that I've agreed with for a while is that, you know, Tim Cook is, it is such a large organization, so deeply entrenched in their massive supply chain. He is the one who built that supply chain. He is, you know, maybe missing the mark on AI Might have to partner with some folks, might have to spend a bunch of money, but fundamentally he's running the core business very well. And that relates to the new plans for 2026, the first half. They're going to release a flurry of new products. Mark Gurman has a story in Bloomberg. He says Apple plans an M5 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. A19 iPhone, 6, 17E New New Mac external monitor. That'll be interesting. I wonder if they're going to refresh that crazy display. The. What's it called? The. Not the Apple Pro, the Apple Pro Display XDR. That's the one that's like 5K. Yeah. If they make just a 55 inch version of that, it's game over. Like people would definitely mount that on the wall. But right now it's I think it's like 32 inches. Pretty big. Great for like, you know, working. And then we have the studio displays over there that are also very good. But they haven't refreshed the Pro display XDR in a long time. People still love it. They're also launching new low end iPads and M4 iPad airs as part of the flurry of new products. I think this is all kind of expected, but interesting. What else is.

Michael La Framboys is doing some market research. He Says, would you pay for a mini Archimedes that plugged into a wall and kill mosquitoes? Cool concept.

I didn't know what Archimedes was.

This must be some sort of missile battery. Yeah, it must be. But lasers or something. I think something like that. I mean, this is the future that we want. This is, you know, making also. So we had Michael, we had so Aurelius Systems. We had him on the show a long time ago. And yeah, this is. We need to take the best defense tech and use it to.

This is like Matt Friedman coded meets Palmer Lucky coded. It's like melding the two things together. Just like tiny robotics for, like, specific use cases, but defense coded. Very cool. Anyway, we should debate this question from Ben south or this. This historical anecdote. If distribution were really the only moat, we'd all be using apps from celebrities. He. He calls out Bizzle, which was apparently Justin Bieber's product, Bizzle. And then.

It's not clocking to you, John.

Not clocking to me? What does that mean?

You're so offline. So Justin Bieber launched a new album today, and he leveraged the kind of crash out that he had in front of Novu when he said, it's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business.

Oh, standing on business.

Yeah.

Okay.

But we gotta bring Bizzle back.

Okay.

It might still be in the App Store. Probably not.

And then there was the camera app.

Yeah. What was it actually called?

I forget what it's called, but. Dispo. Was it just Dispo? Eventually. Because it was originally launched with David's Disposals. It's interesting. It's like, yes, you can get the initial onboarding, but if the flywheel isn't there for the true social growth, like the true. What's it called? The R Naught. The viral coefficient. The viral coefficient isn't actually greater than one. You'll just need to continually be refilling the top of Funnel and it just will never grow. Underrated. There's, like, many more celebrity apps. The Jeremy Renner app, are you familiar with that? It was like a clone of Instagram, but it was just Jeremy Renner content. It's pretty sick.

Interesting.

It was just for, like, Jeremy Renner fans, they could just see his private Instagram feed, basically. Pretty funny. But yeah, it's interesting. It's like, begs the question, like, what is the ideal celebrity? The. The. The ideal celebrity app or way to get into technology. I'm still very bullish on Saquon Barclays strategy of just like invest in companies that are already like kind of deemed successful and like ordained by the, by the tech industry and the tech complex and just get in as opposed to like trying to all of a sudden become a tech CEO or like a co founder of something that, that you're just kind of taking weight on that you're just kind of dead weight on the cap table and you're not really driving it. It's like if you're good at being a celebrity, just focus on that and then invest separately. Anyway, interesting. What else?

Well, I wanted to highlight a market. There's a market up now of the next poly market of the next CEO of X. It only has X. Would be like the social app.

Yeah.

Unclear if there would be. If Elon just becomes the CEO, broadly there's no new CEO because you know, you know, for whatever reason they just don't backfill Linda. But then Sriram Krishnan sitting at 17%.

Oh, no way.

It's a very, very, very low volume. Nikita's up there too at 10%. But I think the company, I think the social app of X, now that it's a combined entity, it still needs a figurehead, it needs a core champion. So I'm hoping they find somebody new there.

There are some contenders that were highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if they're on this market. Particularly contenders could include members of Yaccarino's leadership team, such as John Nitti, global head of revenue operations and ad innovation at X. Angela Zepeda, X's global head of marketing or Monique Pinterelli, head of America's AT X industry Insider said. So those are kind of the rumors that the Wall Street Journal is talking about. But it'd be way more fun to get, to get a poster in there.

Definitely potential guests, posters in control.

Not one of these business people. Although we forgot to highlight this, but Linda Yaccarino, during her 12 years at NBCUniversal, she had the nickname the Velvet Hammer, which I think is amazing. She earned a reputation as a hard charging executive with networking and negotiating. Negotiating chops. The Velvet Hammer. Because she would always dress in velvet, I guess, which is so sad.

Velvet Hammer.

You gotta always have attire that's so iconic that it works its way into a nickname. We were talking about nicknames this morning. Morning. And they come from, they need to come from specific stories. You can't just like, you know, pull them out of a hat. They need to really be evocative. And the Velvet Hammer tells me exactly what she's up to definitely dress to the nines. Gonna get the ad deal done.

Well, this is a good post to end on from San Culp. You are terminally online if you know more than five of these. TBPN High Agency, Hegelian E Girl, Claude Code, Labu Boo. I still don't know how to pronounce that. I just see it written everywhere. Grok4prime intellect, Calamaze. That guy who claims to have implemented autofills and OTPs. A friend of the show sent us. That guy's making that claim. And then I noticed that it was getting community noted because the guy was just like, lying. Because that's like. I mean, it's.

I think it was. I think it was hotly debated whether or not he was lying. Like, obviously at Apple, like multiple people work on every project. So people were like, yes, well, technically someone else has a claim, but also this person might have a claim and there's no evidence that this guy doesn't have the right to claim it. Anyway. We are clearly terminally online because we know everything about this.

Of course.

Diving into a conversation about it.

Of course. Well, it's Friday. It's Friday afternoon or evening, depending where you are in the world. And try terminally touching grass this weekend.

Yes.

Go outside, get some sunlight.

Get some sunlight in the morning. Five minutes.

Five minutes.

Three to five minutes.

That's enough. Don't do more than that. Yeah, yeah. Get back inside. Dooms girl.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Leave us.

Thanks for being with us.

Podcast and Spotify for Monday. You on Monday.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Cheers.