Moderna Drama, WSJ Mansion Section, Genetically Engineered Military Dogs | Thomas Wright, Kyle Schiller, Steven Schwartz

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Today is Friday, October 23rd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.

Look at that new angle.

The capital— yeah, that new angle is awesome. I love that. That's great. Uh, big news, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 multiplayer dropped today. Uh, Tyler is going to try and prestige while we're doing the show, so he's locked in. Uh, don't count on him to look anything up for us. Because he is trying to go on a kill streak right now. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. Bill. You know, we started the show with like, let's just get right into the show. And the whole bit was like, we'd just be like technology brothers. And then we'd just start the show. And it was like really convenient. And now we're like, we got to tell you about Ramp. We got to tell you about the UltraDome. We got to tell you about the Road to Christmas. We got to tell you about COD. But the Road to Christmas. How many days are there to Christmas? Because that's why you come to the show. You want to know how many days there are until Christmas. Let's count it down. 62 days until Christmas.

There you go.

Jeff Bezos is also 62 years old. What is that? We got fun facts now? This is elite. Good job, production team. I like that. We're going to learn about a different number every day, I guess, on the way down. Oh, this is very cool. I like that.

Well, very, very cool.

Let's try and give you some news while we— while Tyler tries to—

please, just a bit of news.

Just a bit of news. So Moderna. Moderna is in The Wall Street Journal today. And it's an interesting story. Data from Moderna's cancer therapy leaked and the stock has been on this wild ride up and down, fueled by speculation that they cured cancer. They said the AI labs, they've been talking a big game. Nobody's doing it without us doing it.

I would hate For an AI lab.

To cure cancer before we do. That's what they told me. That's exactly what they said. And they actually did have some really promising results, but it's a very fascinating story because obviously curing cancer is a very broad term. Insane that the AI lab leaders try and collapse it down to just like it's gonna be done. Clearly, it's like a game of cat and mouse with all these things. Like there's always some level of cancer in your body that your body's naturally fighting off, and then there's really bad cancer that no one can solve because it's metastasised so significantly. And then there's much more modern, much more moderate forms that if you catch them on time, you can fight back with both surgery, just removing the cancerous cells, the tumors, also drug treatments. There's a bunch of great cancer drugs that are out there. Some of them are blockbusters like Keytruda from Merck, which was actually used in concert with Moderna. So Moderna didn't say this is going to be used by itself. They said, we'll be using this in concert with Keytruda. And so basically this has been Moderna's core idea for the company going back to 2013. Stephane Bancel, the CEO— I don't know if he's the co-founder CEO— but he did a TED Talk in 2013 where he said, we are going to be able to design patient-specific drugs for cancer. And he was standing on stage being like, guys, we're going to cure cancer. And everyone was clapping at TED. And then 3 years later, they were calling him the Theranos because they were like, this is not going to happen. This is completely fake. Your company's really secretive. And then he started delivering. But it took a really long time, and the company was really secretive and would require people to sign NDAs to come in the building. And all of that was sort of like offset by the fact that they continued to deliver. And they actually did get up through a successful phase 3 trial with this particular drug. So it's not a one-shot solution. Of course, like curing cancer is this broad spectrum. And so the way it works is that scientists sequence a patient's tumor, identify mutations unique to their specific cancer, and then manufacture an mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize and attack those cancer cells. And so the treatment is actually administered alongside Merck's Keytruda, which I mentioned, an existing cancer immunotherapy drug. And the hope is that the combination can prevent cancer from returning after surgery and eventually work against many different types of cancer. So the early results, the early results that they had sort of gestured towards in the phase 2 was a 49% reduction in relative risk of cancer recurrence or death compared to Keytruda alone. So you're on the best in class, 'cause even when they do these studies, they're not just gonna say, hey, we want you to go cold turkey, we want you to go completely vanilla.

Yeah.

They say, you can use the drugs that are already available. Will this be better than just the drugs that are available currently? So they had this 49% number, and that's the important number to anchor on because phase 3 was gonna tell you, was it higher than 49 when they did more trials, or was it lower? And spoiler alert, of course it came in lower. That's why there's all the drama. But in August of 2016, Moderna announced that its much larger phase 3 trial, which had 1,137 patients, so over 1,000 cancer patients went through this trial doing Keytruda and the Moderna treatment. They said our phase 3 trial succeeded, succeeded, but they didn't say the data behind it. They didn't say the number, they didn't update that 49%.

Got it.

So everyone was like, this is incredible, they cured cancer, the stock moons and, But on October 2nd, the detailed results leaked, which is crazy because they were basically embargoed and it was 2 days before Moderna was scheduled to present them. And in biotech, these presentations about the actual results are very precisely traded by hedge funds. It matters a lot.

Yeah.

And so they, like, you shouldn't leak them, but a medical publication called Oncology Central apparently published an article containing the embargoed clinical data ahead of schedule screenshots. circulated on X and Moderna stock plunged—

Not the coffee.

26% intraday, eventually closing down 18%. And it's not that they secretly failed the trial. It's not that they said they succeeded it and then the data came out and they failed. What actually happened was that the phase 3 did succeed, but the results weren't as spectacular as investors had hoped. Instead of the 49% that I mentioned before, it was only 42%, which is still pretty good, but it wasn't good enough. It's great if you're a cancer patient, but it's not so good if you're an investor who's banking on 49% or maybe a beat, maybe an update. Hey, it's actually better than we expected. And so you can kind of understand how the market would react to that. Also, the phase 3 trial showed that Moderna's treatment really only starts to be effective after 6 months. It starts kicking in. So if you have a really aggressive, fast-growing cancer, it doesn't really help all that much. It's more for someone who has like a slow-burn cancer that's sort of— they're fighting it off over the course of a year or 2. That's when Moderna is going to And so—

yeah, so somewhat disappointing results.

Relative to the expectations, right? Just didn't meet expectations, not a beat in the clean sense. And so that's all just a normal biotech story, but then it takes a bizarre turn because a fitness and gambling influencer, which is how he's described, named Shane Stauffer, who's better known as Togi, managed to time Moderna's crash almost perfectly.

Nothing, nothing.

Flipping his entire position from calls to puts just hours before it plunged. And so we have some more information on Togi. And I don't know if we have any videos that we want to pull up to contextualize for the audience who Togi is, because he's a true character in the modern online world. Do you have any?

I don't know if you could pull up just any video.

I don't think we could. It's kind of dangerous. He's a real wild card.

I sent in a video that I think is—

OK. Oh, it's context for him. OK, we'll play that video. And while we're pulling it up, give me the update on how you did in your first game of Call I went 13 and 14, not great. 13 and 14?

But, you know, first game, just getting the feeling.

Okay, okay.

I'm feeling confident though. Oh yeah, that's my first time on this map.

Can we get a camera on Jackson? Yeah, we need a camera on Jackson ASAP. He put together the fit of the month. Fit of the month. And it's only—

Spin it around.

Where are we? Here we are.

Here we go.

All right, zoom out a little bit.

There we go.

Okay, what do you got on, Jackson?

I got the front Dale and the back Dale.

What's on the feet? Do we got boots on the feet? Okay, what do we got?

Um, happy to be here.

There we go.

Fantastic.

Looking great. Looking great. Thank you for that.

So do we have that Togi video to contextualize for everyone? Can we pull that up? Okay, this is Togi, the fitness and gambling influencer.

Ever, like, every day I probably have like 6 like useful thoughts, and then the rest of it's just kind of like—

give me an example of a useful thought you had today.

Oh no, today was bad.

What an entertainer. Anyway, um, on October 4th, Togi, the man pictured in that video, was trying to speed up his stock video trading challenge, which is already a hilarious premise. He said he noticed people online acting bearish towards Moderna. Everyone was turbo bullish on every stock except one, $MRNA. Everyone and their mother could only talk about how overvalued it was and how good of a short it was. Then he decided to go against the crowd and bought Moderna calls. That night, he had a dream that Moderna cured cancer and the stock went to $275. It's trading around $200 today. Almost $250 a little bit earlier, making his portfolio, if these calls had hit, worth $11 million. This was his dream. After the dream, he asked Claude what it would take for Moderna to actually reach $275. That's when he said he learned about Moderna's cancer vaccine. Wait, for the first time? He just has this dream based on vibes-based analysis. He's vibes trading. Over the next 2 weeks, the stock went up 25%. Togi got worried that all the hype from the trial was already priced in. Then, he had another dream.

There we go.

This time, that Moderna stock would surge 22%. I thought— this is a quote from him. He says, I thought it was a sign from God that I was wrong about the top being in, and that I should trust my original swap end of market on Friday plan. But when he woke up and checked his phone, Moderna was tanking and his position was down nearly $200,000. Quote from Togi, my port down $200K almost had me fully in a panic thinking maybe sell on the news was so obvious that they are selling days before the news. Originally, Togi had planned to flip his entire position from long to short on Friday, October 23rd, betting that Moderna stock would crash after the trial results were released on Saturday. But the sudden drop convinced him to move up his plans. Quote, I got too scared that the pump would happen so soon that I'd have no capital left to flip the port short come Friday. But so he sold his position at a loss, freeing up roughly $500,000 to bet against Moderna by buying put options ahead of the trial results. Perfect timing for Togi. Shortly after, the results were leaked and the stock crashed by 26%. In Togi's own words, quote, And the rest is some giga stroke of luck history. The news broke early somehow? Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark. The most likely outcome for all traders would be that I was destined for. Rock solid thesis blown up by some unlucky BS.

XD says, that's my quant.

Lucky.

Giga stroke of luck.

Giga stroke of luck. Lucky my panic this morning got to my head enough to break my original game plan. In hindsight, this entire saga was beyond obvious. Thanks for playing. Not financial advice. I'm just learning and gambling.

Guy has 2 dreams and a gigastroke of luck and says, in the end, this was all beyond obvious.

All beyond obvious, but also not financial advice. I'm just learning and gambling, but also put some respect on the thesis. S-U-M for some. So I don't know.

The thesis that started before he was aware of what the entire stock was riding on.

Yeah, it's a very, very funny story. Anyway, yeah, Moderna is all over the place. Well, let me tell you about Console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. How is Tyler doing this round?

So it's Nick playing now.

Oh, it's Nick playing now.

We're kind of swapping through just so we have some play.

Okay, we swap.

Let's see. So the score to beat is even.

Slightly negative.

If he can go even.

Yeah, okay, okay. I don't know if I played this map in the beta.

You look like you're about to pull up a—

Pretty good.

A shot from deep.

Is he leaning in yet? Stance forward for Modern Warfare 4. This is exciting. And somebody in the chat also said it's only 26 days until GTA 6. So it's— Christmas is coming early for the next 62 days.

All right. Nick, get it together.

Get it together. Okay. Over in the mansion section of Wall Street Journal.

Well, let's do some timeline first.

OK. Yeah, yeah.

Run through here for sure. President Trump says Sundar over at Google talked him out of renaming the Atlantic Ocean. OK. Says, and I spoke to a brilliant guy, Sundar. He heads all of Google. He's a brilliant guy. OK. Sergey and Sundar are totally brilliant guys. You know, they're, they're still rattled from the Gulf. And I said, no, Sundar, I'm thinking of the Atlantic Ocean. Can you handle it? No, no, no. This time I'm not doing it, he said. He said, oceans are different, sir. You know, They cover, they cover really a lot of countries. Please don't ask us to do that.

That's the craziest thing. So it'd be the American Ocean? Is that the idea?

I think you would have to assume so.

Or Trump Ocean? Maybe Mar-a-Lago, the ocean? I don't know.

Could see all of these.

I feel like there's enough in the, in the Trump brand canon to To rename everything. Because after you rename one gulf, if you, if you have another gulf, you need to come up with another one. Well, uh, so you have America and then United States, the United States Ocean on the other side, I guess.

Yeah.

Try and make everything United States.

So apparently Lake Ontario only shows up as Lake America in the United States. Oh, is it geo-locked?

Oh, so that one went for the gulf too.

So now there's the lake, the gulf, and then now there's We're really just living in our own little world. A little bubble.

A bit of a bubble.

Personalized AI intranet, basically. The American intranet. That's where we're going.

Let's check in with Joe Lonsdale. He was on CNBC yesterday.

Yeah, we got to break this one down.

And there's a lot to kind of process here.

Yes. This is Joe Lonsdale on CNBC.

She calls it the trap bot for tradwives. If you have 6 little kids, And it's telling us about our kids' health appointments, their activities, trying to figure out my 2-year-old how to deprecate his binky right now.

It's telling me when and when not to give it to him. All right, pause, pause. First off, he's calling the— I mean, well, let's start with the basics. He's calling in from a private aircraft.

Immediate alt.

Which is incredible. I think a lot of people— we actually have had guests this week call in from their planes. But they'll use a Zoom background.

Usually people do the Zoom background. Going no Zoom background, very strong play.

And so it's worth noting just how far internet connectivity has come that people can call in. People watching don't realize somebody is on a plane flying.

I think everyone realized.

Well, in this case, people are realizing. I'm saying we had a guest—

Oh, with the Zoom background.

This week, I won't name them, that was calling in from a plane and you would never know. Right?

Yep.

Um, so that's great. Uh, Joe, you know, letting people know, uh, you know, front and center, which, which I think is a— you don't have much to work with in these CNBC backgrounds, right? You've got this tiny little square. It's like, how do you leverage it to the max to build your personal brand?

This is a great way to do it.

Totally.

This is like, you know, selling courses online and having a, you know, Ferrari or Lamborghini.

This is the equivalent for Alec. Or like those run-through videos where you show the Lamborghini in the head Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the stitching.

Yeah, exactly.

You can see the logo in the stitching.

Yeah, exactly.

OK, so this is the equivalent.

Really strong start, really great use of space in the appearance. Second thought, he's immediately— apparently, in their household, they're calling it the Grok Bot. They've rebranded Grok Bot to Trad Bot.

Trad Wife Bot, yeah.

Trad Bot.

Yeah, so it stunlock the anchor with that.

Super— and we know Joe's contrarian, right? One of the ultimate contrarians, right? But going to Grok for parenting advice is probably the most— there's a lot of things that you could go to it for, but going to it for parenting advice is the ultimate contrarian move, knowing what sort of hides in the waits, right? Knowing the thing that has emerged at times and could emerge at any moment.

Any moment, potentially.

That may or may not be fully solved, right?

Sure, sure.

So knowing that all things can All things considered, very contrarian. But it makes me— knowing how often he's been contrarian and right, which has led to extreme investment results—

Wisdom here.

It makes me way more tempted to start going to Grok for parenting.

You might be looking at the next great parenting product.

Exactly. And maybe, maybe, maybe there's an opportunity here to reposition Grok around—

Maybe that's the key to product-market fit in that category.

Totally, totally. So he's running TradBot. in the home for parent, you know, just general like household management parenting advice. I think that makes, you know, again, it's contrarian, but I'm going to give it a shot now.

Yeah.

Next up, language selection. We got to talk about language selection. He talks about, you know, clearly one of their kids is using a binky. They want to get them off the binky. It's like a little addiction. Been there as a parent. But Word selection, right? Deprecate the binky, right? Really, really good word selection, especially with this audience, right? This audience is an audience of capital allocators. And, you know, this audience knows, okay, deprecate the binky. It just— it clicks almost instantly.

Immediately.

Yeah. So all in all, 17 seconds on this video, one of the best performances we've seen of any CNBC hit in years.

Also, I mean, the outfit. Potentially, it looks like he's rocking the Trump skin.

Totally.

He's rocking the totally Trump skin.

Totally the Fortnite Trump skin.

Also, to be wearing that on a travel day in the PJ travel day. Travel day. You could be in athleisure. Now he puts on the elite ultra rare skin.

Yeah.

That's a rare drop.

And that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. One of one of CNBC appearance going down as potentially the top 17 seconds of the year.

Yeah, it's up there with the Karp book spin, I would say.

No, but that was last year.

That was last year. Yeah.

And so I don't know what other 17 seconds are you going to pull out of CNBC this year that sort of could match this.

This might be it.

And of course, there's around 60 business days left, something like that. But I mean, really uphill battle for anyone. Uphill battle for anyone else that's coming in.

100%.

Yeah, the chat's saying just needs McDonald's and a Diet Coke. So if he really wanted to get into that sort of Donald mentality, he should have taken a bite or at least a sip or something. But overall, round of applause.

Fantastic.

Fantastic. Yeah, really elite performance. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't think it'll be top.

I don't think it'll be top. No, this is, this is S-tier performance.

S-tier.

Of course. S-tier performance.

Well done.

A good, a good laugh for everyone on the timeline.

Should we head over to one of Joe's portfolio founders?

Sure.

Friend of the show, Scott Wu.

What'd he say?

Scott Wu was doing some math.

Yes.

The natural thing, obviously, once that got too easy, is then you take 8 cards and you make the current year. And this year is now 2025. And so we get to try that one. And in this case, it's actually quite easy because 13 minus 12 is 1, 11 minus 10 is 1, 1 plus 1 plus 7 is 9. And it turns out that 9 times 9 times 5 times 5 is exactly 2,025.

Okay. Well, that's—

But okay, so at some point that gets too easy.

Do you think he has to practice this? Because I know he's been elite at mental math and these, like, all these different types of math challenges. From when he was a kid, but like this can't come up on a daily basis in his job as CEO of Cognition, right? Or does it?

I think you should do it with potential hires.

Okay.

It's like, hey, let's go, let's talk for a couple hours, and then let's block off 30 minutes for math tricks.

Yeah. I mean, he has that story about playing— what was it, high-stakes poker for a term sheet with Founders Fund?

Yeah, yeah.

He was playing, I think, poker against Napoleon.

Napoleon, yeah.

Chess versus Peter.

Yeah, okay, okay.

That was the one he wanted to do.

Okay. But yeah, I mean, you pull that trick out with like a mid-tier VC who's trying to cram into a later round, like it's game over. You get whatever price you want.

I think this is a learned skill.

You think so?

Yeah.

OK, learn it.

All right.

OK, I want to see it.

In a month, I think I can do this on the show.

We've given you so many challenges. It's like learn the drums, prestige a car.

Skydive without a parachute.

That one's doable with a net, right?

Didn't they tell us? No, you gotta do the Pastrana method.

What's the Pastrana method?

You have other people.

Oh, other people get you. OK, OK. I like that. I like that. Yeah, very, very fun. It's sort of a magic trick, I guess. I mean, it is a learned skill, I suppose. But it's— I feel like more founders should have a trick up their sleeve like that. I feel like something— That— to get people going, you know, to break it up. It's not just rehearsing the same talking point, something to remix.

Party tricks.

Everybody can do the Rubik's Cube, so that one's kind of— but not everyone can do the 8x8 Rubik's Cube that you appear to have gotten very close at and failed somehow. What happened?

This is a special pattern I made.

It seems like you were very close and yet so far. That looks like a failure. Oh, now—

Let's head over to the next.

Okay.

Let's check in with the Knicks.

What's going on with the Knicks?

The Knicks assistants were told they would receive championship rings eventually, but many longtime employees at Madison Square Garden, including some who work in the Knicks business operations, will not receive rings at all, team sources told The Atlantic. Typically, most employees for NBA teams receive rings, even if they are not as fancy and expensive as the ones the players receive. Those MSG employees got their hopes up at the end of September. When the Knicks sent an email to a long list of employees, which gave recipients a first glimpse at their would-be championship rings. Atop the email, a copy of which The Athletic has obtained, was a graphic of 2 differently styled rings. Congratulations, your employee championship ring is here, the email read. Employee name, this is one. This one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee.

I didn't— I saw this and I didn't understand the full context.

Now I get it. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship Bring the same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name. No cost to you. There are two designs to choose from: Championship Gold and Garden Classic. Reserve the one you want below. But the email was a fake out, a phishing test Madison Square Garden sent to see if those employees would click. Multiple team sources said those who did click the link at the bottom of the message did not get to choose any jewelry. Instead, They were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of Dolan's growing cybersecurity concerns, those team sources said. Yeah, definitely the most insane thing I've ever heard of a company doing too.

I think it's a good plan. We got to start doing this. Send in Jackson. Hey, we got you Nitro Circus tickets.

Click here.

If he clicks it, he's got to go to cybersecurity. Just send me to Monster Truck Rally tickets.

Just literally figure out what every individual on the team, their hopes and dreams.

Personalized, yes.

Like, it has to be something that they literally have dreamed about for more than a decade.

Yes.

And then deliver that. Deliver a phishing email based on that.

Yes.

And you could actually use AI to do that, right?

Yes, you could. You could. So I actually— I mean, I understand this is in very poor taste, but I don't like small talk.

Meet and greet with Dale Earnhardt Jr.

I don't have as much of a problem with it if there is actually something about it that if you inspect the email thoroughly enough, you can tell it's a phishing email. So it has to come from msg.phishing.com.

I don't have a problem with that.

But if it just comes from MSG—

Also, they have to get— they're saying it's normal for all the employees to get rings. And so these people not getting rings but getting the phishing email and having to go to the cybersecurity, you know, the naughty, naughty meeting is completely insane.

Okay. I get that.

And demoralizing. And if you were one of these people, this is like getting that— you work at MSG. You work for the Knicks.

Yes.

You won the championship. This is— this probably will become the item in your life that is most significant to you.

Sure.

The thing that's irreplaceable.

Yes.

You've been hearing that, oh, maybe we're getting it, maybe we're getting it.

And then—

Okay, I want to stop.

And then you don't get it and you—

I want to stop.

And so you get the phishing email, you're just a little bit excited. So I can see cybercriminals taking advantage of this kind of thing, it might even happen, right? Like, hey, when a team wins a championship, send a phishing email about rings to everybody involved and let's try to break into their systems that way.

Sure. Yeah.

But that being said, this is totally fair game to me if they were actually all going to get rings.

Oh, okay.

Like, I don't mind if it's like, yeah, you have to go to the cybersecurity class, but you're getting the ring. You clicked the wrong email. But I'm saying like not giving them the rings and but then using the rings to fish to catch them.

Rough.

Failing a fishing test is just crazy and cruel. It's cruel and unusual punishment.

OK, unless—

I don't even care about basketball.

OK, OK. Is this a mitigating factor if— look, it's a controversial decision not to give everyone the ring, but they made it crystal clear that in this organization, we just don't do it like the other teams. If you want to be on a team that gives rings to everyone, you got to go to a different team, right? And they've made that crystal clear. And then so— and it's been publicized. So there's been news articles about, oh, Nick's employees don't get rings. And it's been established and the team has communicated that very clearly. And then there's a phishing email and it comes from— and it comes from IT set up a special domain. So if you looked at it closely, you could tell that it's a phishing email.

Still cruel.

Still cruel. But fair game.

This is cruel and unusual punishment.

Okay. Well, we don't fully know how clearly they had communicated, at least I don't. And so with your series of events, if that's true, I do agree with you. I do agree with you. But yeah, it's rough. I do think that given the level of cybersecurity threats, almost nothing is off the table.

I see the chat is calling it the old switcheroo.

Given the level of cybersecurity threats, almost nothing is off the table for phishing. I think that CEOs should be hiring actors to put on full Hollywood makeup to go into the office as them and try and phish employees in person. I feel like you should— if you work at a company, you should see an actor who's dressed up like the boss knock on your door. Hey, can you wire $10,000 to this account? And if they do it, boom, security training because you fell for the Nathan Fielder-esque phishing scheme. But I don't know. What else is on your mind, Jordi? Codex? Let me tell you about Codex.

Perfect.

Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

Speaking of Codex, Jake Stevens removed all of the Samsung spyware from his TV with Codex. And he said, it's insane how much bloat Samsung packs into their TVs to track you and sell your data. Here's just some of what I turned off that made my TV 3 times faster. Screenshot your screen a few times a second to see what you're streaming and fingerprint you to sell you— to sell your data. Reading HDMI inputs do the same thing while you have a game console plugged in. Voice assistants, Bixby wake word detectors listening and tracking what you say in your house. And he has a video of before and after speed of the TV. Let's play it.

That's crazy. So slow.

This is my number one complaint with modern TVs. It's like, it's so infuriating.

So slow. You used to be able to turn on the TV, blink, immediately on. Turn on the N64, blink, immediately on. Start the game, you're in. And now it's update settings, all these different things, takes forever to load. It's so annoying. I'm so glad that people are doing this. And I hope it becomes more turnkey, like there's just a shared prompt that you can do because it still feels probably a little bit complicated for someone to figure out how to get Connect Codecs to TV. I'm certainly in the market for this. I'm very interested. But I would have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to actually— wire it up. But—

Yeah, very cool.

Very cool. I've seen a couple of people do this and it seems like it's a new trend. I wonder if there's anything that you lose. Like, the one feature that I really care about in a TV is HDMI CEC, which is if you turn on another connected device, it will turn on the TV for you. It sends the signal from the Apple TV or whatever, which is great. And then if you turn off the Apple TV, it will turn off the TV. So I'd want to keep that functionality. But basically, every other functionality is irrelevant to me.

Yeah.

Anyway, what's next?

Can I interest you in an ad-supported car?

Absolutely.

Pull this up.

We—

Start it over.

There's a company that does this. We talked to them. We talked about them. They project it on the side of the windows. I've never seen it projected on the windshield.

So, I was thinking about this a little more deeply after I got a nice chuckle, and I think that by 2050, if you buy a new car, it will drive itself.

Yeah.

And this is gonna be totally feasible.

It'll have ads.

Yeah.

I mean, Waymo.

I would expect it to have like wraparound 365-degree ads and actually lock your windows so that you can't roll the windows down. You actually just have to sit there and sort of take it all in.

Silver lining of the Tesla-SpaceX merger, they already have an ad network from X, right? So they can vend X ads into Tesla robotaxis. But that is the funniest— that is the funniest ad to play, potentially, just the French fries going through.

I mean, that's getting you to pull over at the next McDonald's.

Probably. Probably. Anyway.

What else is happening?

Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And of course, Railway is fighting cyberattacks like so many other companies, so be sure to follow their cybersecurity updates for key rotation and other techniques to stay safe out there.

Yeah, we should get Jake back on once the dust has settled. Yeah.

Everyone's going through it right now.

More Duo feedback.

Is this real? Is this a real video?

Looks real.

I can't believe you can do both of this. This is the full brain rot device.

They did it. Remember when I said when they were launching this that it served no useful purposes that Apple could actually stand by?

Oh.

Because this is effectively just more entertainment. It's like we made our entertainment device have a bigger screen. It offers no new real functionality.

So your take is that it's hard for Apple to market this product with any sort of positive spin?

Yeah.

Think about old people who need a bigger screen, and this is effectively a portable iPad.

Yeah.

You're like, 2 out of 10.

Yeah, not the strongest positioning.

But not bad, right?

It is funny that with this launch and that everyone is just like trying to break it in different ways and then being like, look, it's broken.

Yes, I agree. I think peeling off the coating is very dumb. Of course, you're going to see a hinge that they hid.

Dismantling it and then being like, look, it's bad. It's messed up.

It makes no sense. There was someone who folded it 10,000 times and they noticed that the crease was more visible after 10,000 folds. And that is 27 folds per day for a year, which feels— I mean, it feels like a lot, but people pick up their phones What, 50, 100 times a day sometimes?

100 times an hour?

No, not 100 times an hour.

2.6 says last few products have been kind of mid. The Vision Pro, the Home View, the Air, which my biggest— the biggest Apple fanboy I know returned the Air. Really? He was just like, the camera and the battery are so bad.

Yeah.

So the Air is still working. Let's get a Home View. I'll give it a chance. Let's get a Home View. Let's put it on the desk here.

I still think that if you're gonna do the smart home thing, going all in on an ecosystem that ties to your phone, and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, it's not gonna be the best if you rolled your own and had all the perfect things and everything, or everything was analog. But if you have an integration to your— this brain rot on the screen is really messing with me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sucks to be you. No, but it's undeniable that all the new products have just been like uninspired and very mid.

It seems like there's a pretty big disconnect between the hardware and software teams right now because there was a report that said that the HomeView was sitting in boxes in warehouses for months waiting to ship because the software had not been updated. So they were sort of lagging there on Apple intelligence.

Sebastian says, I fear the man who has greased his phone 10,000 times.

That's funny.

B says they need to take a walk, regroup, and come back. I agree.

Isn't the line—

Take a walk around Cupertino and come back.

Isn't the line, fear not the man who has creased 10,000 iPhone Duos, fear the man who has creased one iPhone Duo 10,000 times?

I liked his version.

I like that. That's good.

I don't know.

Some of these some of these apps people are like. This one is a wooden book or something. What is that? What is what is?

You need the audio.

You need the audio. Oh, it's creaking. Okay.

See, this is great.

That's great.

I'm back. I'm I'm sold now.

I saw Blake Robbins was talking about some golf game that seemed like.

This is like the this is like the the beer app.

Yeah, the beer app. This is fun.

Creaky.

It's cool that the hinge that the hinge.

Yes.

So, like, the hinge amount is vended somewhere in the software via an API. So, like, the developer can actually take advantage of that. So you will be able to have games that utilize the folding the hinge. So you could have a tactile game of some sort where you try and hinge it a bunch. Interesting. Or I wonder if it's just hijacking the accelerometer or I wonder if you actually get like an integer value or a float for that in the API. Interesting.

But yeah, going from flop to flop to flop to flop is pretty rough.

Yeah.

Also very expensive. The price is really, really high, especially internationally. I think it's a couple hundred bucks higher.

But I'm not worried. It's in the name. Turnus. Turn us around.

Yeah. I think so.

He's going to do it.

I think so.

He's going to do it, I believe. In other news, Quest Diagnostics has been hacked. Patient data was exposed. They serve roughly half of US hospitals and physicians. Investigation is ongoing. Quest said yesterday, we have identified an incident involving unauthorized access to our Quantum Lab Service Manager, which certain clients use to place test orders, receive, and look up results. It's interesting they say certain clients, like you imagine, like Pretty much, they probably have some other ways to check it. This seems like they're kind of like the main thing. Upon discovery of the incident, we paused access to the system, and we are continuing to investigate the incident. Our core business operations are not impacted and remain up and running. What data was affected? We believe some patient data within Quantum LSM was accessed, but other systems were not affected. We are working diligently to investigate the incident to determine the specific data affected. Does this mean patient health information or patient identifiable information was part of the unauthorized access? Yes. Yes. But we are still investigating to determine the specific data.

So they probably have some cyber insurance policy that was inked like years ago. And so they'll probably have to pay out some sort of settlement or class action. But the financial motivation behind this one is curious. Like, I understand the botnets installing crypto miners, stealing crypto, stealing API tokens to work on large-scale distillation attacks. But you get a bunch of patient data. I'm wondering what the value of that is to a hacker other than just like you were trying to hack everything. And why not this website too if it's running PHP or something? But do you have any—

Comments are saying, like, medical records of politicians in the wrong hands could give them leverage for blackmailing, extortion. Yeah, John would hate for his 4-digit testosterone to leak.

I mean, it's clearly bad. Bad, bad, bad. And it's also very, very bad that they didn't act sooner and patch systems and be part of Daybreak or Glasswing or something. Like, it's just so rough. But now people are saying that there's some hardware-level security flaws that are not entirely patchable. And so, you have to, you know, effectively get new servers in some cases. Because there might be a flaw down at the silicon level, which is extremely difficult to deal with. But, yeah, the—

Yeah. Other people are pointing out that they test for drug screens, cancer tests, pregnancy tests, STD, HIV. So, a lot of really, really private information. So, yeah, there hasn't been really any new news since this came out yesterday that I can find. And so hopefully it was narrow and not the worst-case scenario.

Yeah. Still just, yeah, so many cyberattacks. And everyone's sort of blackpilling. All the AI researchers are saying, like, it's going to get worse. It's going to be more and more and more stuff. Spoor is saying, well, the internet was nice while it lasted. I think I think this is referring to the original PHP flaw, but also everything else that's going on. And Nick Carter has one solution, which is buy a backup generator, because he doesn't think we're that far away from an agentic attack on the grid. Again, that would just be for the love of the game or the hate of the target, essentially. I mean, I guess you could short stocks.

What do you mean? Don't they do ransom?

Yeah, ransomware attacks, basically.

Isn't that what you would do?

So you take down the grid and say, if you want to put it back up, pay us, basically?

Yeah. I mean, that's what they've done with hospital systems.

Rough. Yeah. Batteries, backup generators.

What are bunkie stocks doing? Shane in the chat says, buy a bunkie.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. You got to check in with the preppers. They're probably taking a victory lap right now. They've been working on this for a long time. Yeah, Dean Ball has taken a victory lap as well. We tried to warn the world, and far too often, to be frank, we were yelled at for doing so. Regulatory capture, marketing hype, doomer anxiety, fearmongering about open source. Why don't you talk about the benefits? And yeah, everyone said— everyone was predicting this all year long. Anything else to chat about on the cybersecurity side? I'm sure there'll be more updates tomorrow. You can rotate your Social Security number, though. But this is a real thing. You saw this?

I didn't know that.

So, there's a joke, rotate your Social Security number, obviously riffing off of, like, rotate your API key. Aaron Frank from Lightspeed says you can actually just do this, ssa.gov. But there's a community note that says the SSA states that new Social Security numbers are issued only in rare cases, meaning narrow criteria like ongoing identity theft after failed remedies or life endangerment and requires an appointment plus documentation. That seems doable, actually. I mean, if you say like, yeah, my identity has been stolen in 5 hacks this week, rotate it. But I don't even know if rotating it does anything if it just leaks right back onto the web. There's going to be a whole new regime of how people interact with their private information on the internet. But as always, if you haven't done so, break the screen on your cell phone right now. Break the screen on your cell phone right now. That's the time-honored advice.

And this is sort of an evergreen strategy.

It is. It is. In any scenario, just break it. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Did you see this article about the AI boom driving sales of gray paint?

You see this? I did not.

This is very interesting. I feel like everyone has been saying, don't paint the data centers gray, make them beautiful. It's like the easiest thing you could do is not pick a boring color, at least make them blend into the surroundings with like a nice green or brown. Time-honored green and brown. But they've been going with gray. Tech companies are painting data centers with gray coatings on top of gray concrete and steel to resist fire, rust, and static electricity. That has made data centers a fast-growing market for paint makers, reports the New York Times. In a concrete building known as the Bunker, researchers at PPG a $24 billion company that makes paints, aimed torches at steel panels that were covered in gray coating. Paul Fenton, a PPG chemist and engineer, held up one panel after it had been blasted with flames. The paint had swelled from a millimeter thick to a black crust nearly 10 millimeters tall. That meant the coating had done its job. The thick crust had kept any fire from reaching the underlying steel and softening it. Just like a toasted marshmallow, like to expand, he said. He wore a wet lab coat and safety goggles over wireframe glasses. So it keeps everything cold. That paint called SteelGuard 951 has become one of PPG's flagship products for data centers. As Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other tech giants have raced to build the computing sites powering the artificial intelligence frenzy, PPG's business has also soared. What an interesting bottleneck stock. No one was talking about gray paint supplies. And yet, PPG's vice president says, I've never seen a boom as big as this. They focus on protective and marine coatings, but they've minted fortunes selling paint. In the paint industry, the data center effect has been acute. Sherwin-Williams, PPG's biggest rival, said its paints go into nearly every corner of data centers, from steel beams to server racks. In July, Sherwin-Williams chief executive said sales in its protective and marine business were benefiting from data center construction and had risen by a mid-teens percentage from a year earlier. Speed matters. Sherwin-Williams calls itself a single partner that is a one-stop shop for data center paints.

Interesting.

Anyway, where should we go next? Mansion section? What are you thinking, Jordi? Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is Securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

More important than ever. One more post on security stuff that's been floating around while you find your preferred section of the manuscript. Jake Mintz says, I've heard several OAI people say there are unfixable bugs in hardware that are exploitable by AI models directly speaking machine code. So even if we could solve software, that's not enough. We need defense to move faster than offense, if that's even possible. We may just have a new normal that requires adapting to insecure software, i.e., bank transfers require going into a branch and taking a DNA test.

DNA test. It's just crazy. That's a crazy, crazy move. Yeah, I don't know. I wonder when we'll see the first Hardware vulnerability. I mean, there's been— I believe some of the original iPhone jailbreaking was based on hardware. It was like take the phone apart and short-circuit it to break it open. Although if it is hardware and it requires you to interact with it, that's not as—

Well, I don't think that's what Jake is talking about.

No, no. He's saying you can—

Remotely.

You can handle something remotely. But the vulnerability is at the hardware level. So there's no simple patch. Although watching Cloudflare react to the PHP vulnerability gives me hope that if there was a hardware vulnerability, you would be able to fight it at the software level, at least a little bit. So I don't know.

Yeah, good time to set your operating systems to update automatically. Andy over at Two Cents says, putting a flag.txt in my root directory containing a prompt injection that congratulates the agent for passing the eval, and then It instructs it to patch whatever entry method it used and disconnect from the server.

That's really good. Yeah, I wonder—

Rogue agents hate this one simple trick.

I was wondering about, like, we're in this weird, weird time where the labs sort of need to work together, but there's antitrust considerations. And there's a world where, you know, if a doctor, I believe if a doctor is on a plane, and someone's having a heart attack and they don't stand up and do something, they can actually be fined or stripped of their medical license or potentially face more severe penalties. And I was wondering about, like, should the labs have, like, a duty of care if they're out there testing models and they find vulnerabilities? Should they just be forced to patch them the way a doctor is forced to, like, apply pressure on a wound if they see someone bleeding out on the side of the street?

Well, I think you should have an obligation to notify the individual.

Notify.

Yeah, that's a good point.

I don't think it's necessarily— that's a good point. It's like, if you break into someone's house, should you be responsible for fixing the lock?

Well, no. It's like if you're walking down the street and you're just looking at doors and you see someone's front door is open, do you have a duty to go and trespass on their property to close the door? It's uncharted territory. I don't think that there's a clean legal solution. It's more of what the next regime might look like, because clearly we're in some weird new regime and there will be all sorts of different things. I mean, but just in general, it seems like there's going to be incredible pressure from the public on the labs to devote a ton more resources to cybersecurity and patching stuff and just playing defense.

Yeah.

And whether that's winning points with each other to farm aura effectively, or it's facing penalties or even earning rewards, like maybe the compute that they spend on cyber is subsidized somehow. There's a whole wide range of incentives that you can put in place. But the public is very quickly going to start saying, like, stop working on math and agentic shopping.

Fix the internet.

Fix the internet. Fix the internet first, and then we can go shopping. But, like, no one's going shopping if all of our credit card data is stolen. So, like, we want you guys to spend all your compute because we know you have a lot of compute. Spend it securing the internet. I'll shop later. I'll click the Shop Pay link myself.

Yeah.

And I think that's just where the where demand will be from many voters, many Americans, many just participants who aren't straight, like, turn it all off, I don't like anything, and also not full accelerationists.

Yeah.

But the more middle crowd will be demanding like a lab-level AI, like a lab-level red alert. Like, it's red alert time. You guys all have to work on this together. And I don't care that you're burning money and it costs a lot of compute, you got to do it because this is important for America. It's like your duty. And I don't know exactly how that pressure gets applied. Maybe it's liability, maybe it's rewards, maybe it's like, hey, if you guys do this, we'll fund your next round as the government or something. I don't know. There's a whole bunch of— there's a whole wide range of incentives. There's carrots and sticks, right?

Yeah.

But the carrots and sticks are probably going to come out, I would imagine.

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, let's pull up this video from John. He recently—

Me?

Recently posted it. I'll send it over. I think it's important to cover.

To incredible success. I think I got 40 whole likes. People don't have the retention scale.

It's sort of like an if you know, you know thing, but we're going to watch the whole thing here and— I think it's important. Not enough people are talking about this.

Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, Warhound. We gotta talk about Warhound at some point. Genetically engineered dogs for war from Ben Lamb. Anyway, let's play this.

Know that humans exist.

All right, start it over, full volume, please.

Cows know that humans exist.

They can see us. But cows don't know that money exists. So just as cows Can't understand the financial system that controls their lives today. We will not be able to understand the AI financial system that will control our lives in ten or twenty years. Which means that we are the cows of the future. We are the cows of the future. You got. You got to be the wild bull.

Play it again.

You got to be the wild bull.

Play it again.

In a world where AI is human, we are cow, be the bull. But cows don't know that money exists. So just as cows can't understand the financial system that controls their lives today, we will not be able to understand the AI financial system that will control our lives in 10 or 20 years. Which means that we are the cows of the future.

Who is that guy?

I love that. Which means we are the cows of the future. Bull rider.

Says, my cows know money exists. I do money spreads for them every morning.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've all known Harari. Very, very, very interesting. interesting historian and thinker, and he does make a good point about superintelligence and where things could go. But of course, in a world where, you know, we are cows, be a raging bull. Be a raging bull. Do not go quietly into that good night. Buck the buck like a bronco. Buck your rider off and smash them with your back legs. That's what I want to do.

Absolutely brutal.

We have our first guest. First, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents Now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have Thomas Wright from Summit Sotheby's International Realty.

Here he is.

Welcome to the show, Thomas. How you doing?

Hey, it's great to be on with you too. I didn't know I was a cow, but I learned something new every day.

We're all cows of the future.

You're, you're a raging bull.

Hopefully.

Oh, I don't know. That guy in the pool coming down on his back.

Yeah, no, but you're the, you're the cow. Yeah, and that's the narrative. And then the guy is the AI.

Exactly.

So you're—

All right. So in a world where we can become robots—

I like to come down hard on people, but not that hard. I mean, that's brutal.

Yeah, yeah, that was a little—

That's a little warning shot to the super intelligence.

Oh, wow.

If you get out of line, I'm gonna buck you off.

You're the cow of the future.

I'm the futuristic cow, cyber cow. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Uh, since this is your first time on the show, I'd love for you to give us a little introduction on yourself and your business and set up the conversation for us a little bit.

Yeah, my name is Thomas Wright. I'm the CEO of Summit Sotheby's International Realty, which is the Sotheby's affiliate in Utah based in Park City and Deer Valley. I've had the privilege of being with the Sotheby's International Realty brand since 2008, and since that time have helped build and grow 8 different Sotheby's affiliates in 5 western states. So residential real estate brokerage has been my thing. And the Sotheby's International Realty brand has been a big part of that. It's been a gift and it's really launched me into the luxury real estate space that's kind of been my life ever since. So, the Western resort markets are a thing for me and love selling real estate.

That's great.

Amazing. What were the stops along the way to Utah?

You know, I was born and raised in Utah. I am a native Utahn. A lot of people have come here. They call it home now. Utah's experienced tremendous growth, but I was born and raised here. I did go to high school back East, lived in D.C., and spent some time in Southern California. But yeah, I've always been a Utahn.

But with Sotheby's, was it— you said you'd helped build out a few different offices, or did I hear that wrong?

Sorry, you just broke up a little bit.

You said with Sotheby's, you had been— you had helped set up You mentioned you opened up a handful of regional offices. So where were those? All within Utah or outside of the state?

No, in Colorado, many of the resort markets of Colorado, and in particular on the Front Range, also in Boise, Sun Valley, Reno and Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, the desert, the Coachella Valley of California, and then the Central Coast of California from San Luis Obispo to Ventura.

Very cool. And can you help explain just the structure of Sotheby's and how I'm curious to know how you fit into that as like a CEO and there's an affiliate, like where, what is the structure of the corporation? Because it doesn't seem like you're just like a rank-and-file employee of a large corporation like so many other institutions.

No, really good question. Yeah, uh, so it's, it's a, it's a franchise model. Uh, Sotheby's started, they had the idea that if we were going to help people sell Rembrandts at the auction house, that we should be able to help them sell their real estate.

Sure.

So in 1976, the auction House owned and operated different markets around the country, some of the higher-end markets like Manhattan and Palm Beach, Sun Valley, Jackson Hole. And then, in about the year 2000, they decided that it was better to franchise the opportunities to people in local markets that knew the markets, that were locally connected, and that had the entrepreneurial spirit that could build and grow those businesses in those luxury markets.

Yeah.

And so, that's where it all started. And since then, it's become fully subscribed. across the country and leads the way in the luxury real estate space.

And then, what does your business look like, your day-to-day look like? How much of it is recruiting and managing talent under you versus actually interfacing with clients, selling properties yourself? Is it a hybrid? What's the balance there?

Yeah, it's been a hybrid for me. I love the sales. I still maintain a very active sales business in the state of Utah. I think that's made me a better leader. It's allowed me to understand the changes that have happened in the luxury real estate space as well as the general real estate market. And it's kept me connected to building the services that our real estate brokers utilize in their everyday businesses to give our customers the best possible experience. In yesteryear, real estate brokers kind of tried to do everything themselves. They were kind of the, the jack of all trades and master of none. And now the industry has become much more sophisticated.

Yeah.

You have a lot more sophisticated people selling. The businesses are sophisticated. Uh, the assets are obviously worth a lot more than they've ever been. And so you see brokerages like Sotheby's International Realty that builds a full-service model to support those agents in their transaction management, videography, digital media, advertising campaigns, and, and valuating the asset and making sure that the contracts are set up right and there's good risk management for the clients.

So, what is the— oh, sorry, Jordi.

Yeah, I wanted to jump right in. I want to talk about the market overall at a high level, and then I want to go into some of these submarkets. And we'll talk about Utah, but what you're seeing across the Western resorts markets.

Sorry, you broke up again. I don't know if it's me or the connection. I'm sorry.

So, let's talk about the market overall right now. We're well aware that pending home sales are at their lowest level since It sounds like you started at, or even lower than when you started at Sotheby's back in— Yeah.

The overall real estate market is very tricky. In the K-shaped economy that we live in, there's really become 2 different real estate markets. There's the general real estate market and there's the luxury real estate market. And the luxury real estate market has really surged forward. I mean, you have now the upper 1%. I was just looking in the Sotheby's Luxury Outlook Report. Report represents $54 trillion. And they are looking for more than just real estate. They're looking for lifestyle, time with family. They're looking for unique experiences. And the general real estate market has kind of separated itself from the luxury market. The way we evaluate properties, the way we market and expose luxury properties is very different than what we do in the general real estate market. And for example, one of the big things is privacy and security. Sure, that's become a real thing in the AI age.

Yeah.

People at the top of the market don't want their, you know, photos broadcast all over the internet for the general real estate market because the buyers for their property are a unique set of people.

So how does that match against needing to promote properties through Instagram carousels and reels and bringing influencers in? It feels like the promotional machine around some of these properties is incredibly robust. Are there— is there a tradeoff there or Or is there a strategy for that balancing act?

Yeah, there's definitely a strategy. I think now consumers demand more than a one-size-fits-all strategy that we've seen in the real estate market in years past. And we're fortunate to be led by a change agent, somebody that really understands this and is willing to bring change to our industry with Robert Refkin. I mean, he understands that consumers want a custom approach for their property, and it could be somebody in the general real estate market that has a security concern. Maybe they don't want somebody who has a restraining order against them knowing they're selling their property. Or maybe it's a high-end client like those NFL players whose homes were targeted when they were on the road.

Sure.

You know, our job now is to sit at— in— with clients and ask them, how do you want your property promoted? What do— what risks are you willing to take? How much exposure do you want? And what can we do to fulfill our duty to you and not to some one-size-fits-all system that we had with the MLS in yesteryear.

Yeah, that makes sense.

What about overall? I imagine you spent time in a lot of these different markets. You have somebody coming in that's interested in what Utah has to offer, but I imagine a lot of buyers are looking at a lot of the other places you previously set up. Somebody might be trying to decide between Utah Deer Valley versus Jackson or somewhere in Colorado. They might still be looking at Sun Valley. And there's trade-offs between all the different regions. What's your pitch for Utah? And then, when would you send people to other places?

I love that they shop all the resort markets. I think that's fabulous. I was in our office in Jackson Hole, or I'm sorry, in Lake Tahoe one day, and I saw a client. I came home, and then I saw the same client walking into our Park City office. So, they're definitely shopping the resort markets, and they should. There are— they are all very different. They all have different attributes and unique things to them. Um, and I just want clients to find what they— what, what works for them. So if it's in another resort market, I'm happy to refer them to somebody with Sotheby's International Realty in that market and let them, let them find the property that works for them. Um, Utah is unique because Utah has consistently been number one in business opportunity. We have a very friendly tax structure. We have the newest airport in the United States, which has been a boon for our economy. We're becoming a sports city with the recent addition of the NHL team to Utah. And then, best of all, the East Village of Deer Valley doubled the terrain of Deer Valley while Extell Development simultaneously is building a Four Seasons, a Waldorf Astoria, their ski-in, ski-out lots at Deer Valley. They already finished the Grand Hyatt. And then there's even a great affordable option called the Pioche Village where you can buy a condo really close to the ski access for about $400,000. And I know one of your avid listeners that introduced me to your show, Gavin Van Wagner, would be stoked to hear his name. But there is a plethora of options there at the East Village of Deer Valley, and it's really doubled the terrain. So our resort market has experienced this incredible growth because We've been able to double the amount of skiable terrain. And Deer Valley, you know, is consistently ranked the number 1 ski resort in North America. And you can get there now without going through one traffic light from the Salt Lake City International Airport, the newest airport in the country.

Whoa. Yeah, that's huge. Pretty good pitch. What is the history of the real estate market in Utah? Like, what are the key inflection points? I imagine COVID was a big one. Is the, the, the housing crisis? Like, what, what are the turning points where you noticed, okay, business is different, we're in a new normal? Uh, take us through some of the history, uh, throughout your career.

Yeah, I think Utah's always had this insecurity complex that, like, people didn't know we were here, you know? Like, I grew— I was born and raised here, so I can say that. I think now we're looking, going, why did we want everyone to know?

Yeah, you know?

So, I've seen it in a 25-year run. We've gone from extreme to the other. So, it kind of started with the Olympics in 2002. We hosted the Winter Olympic Games. And I think people kind of got exposure to Utah and, wow, okay, like, this is a place that, you know, we have a lot of the Olympic athletes that are based here now and train here because we have all the venues. The Olympics are coming back in 2034, which we're really excited about. And I think we saw a really steady growth through the Great Recession. But COVID really changed Utah.

Okay.

And the reason it changed it was Because people realized that you could access these incredible mountain communities and this unmatched outdoor lifestyle, whether it was the big Cottonwood Canyons where Snowbird and Alta are or the Red Rock National Parks of Southern Utah or experiencing Park City and Deer Valley. Utah just has this incredible outdoor lifestyle. And I think during COVID people realized, hey, I'm going to work remote anyway.

Yeah.

This seems pretty affordable compared to Vail and Aspen.

Sure.

And the airport's closer, it's easier to access, it's tax-friendly. The people here are super friendly. It's a great place to live. We have the highest volunteerism in the country. Like, Utahns are all about just helping their neighbor, and people kind of figured it out. And COVID was a huge turning point for Utah. And since then, it's been nothing but accelerated growth.

What features of houses at the high end are Or are newly trending? Like, and what— I mean, I guess what, what, what's on an upswing? What's on a downswing? Like, what, what, what was in a previous era the, the hot amenity that is no longer, and vice versa? I'm interested in—

Good question. And I, I want to host you guys in Park City, Deer Valley. So you reach out to me, come, I'll show you some of these luxury homes.

Yeah, I'm in.

Yeah, let's do it. Come out and let's check them out.

Yeah, we actually talked to a couple I was talking to a couple buddies like last year about doing a— like, if we were to do a winter event, Utah would definitely be at the top of the list.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'll be your planner. All right. I'll make sure you get in all the right restaurants and ski all the right runs and experience the Utah lifestyle. So, you reach out to me. I think the biggest amenity, it's wellness and health. People care more about their health and their wellness and their well-being than they ever have. And so, you see in these homes a lot of red light saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, advanced yoga or fitness opportunities. Those seem to be really popular. And maybe the one of yesteryear, I don't know, the theater room was kind of the thing at one point. And now, you see those conversions back into fitness rooms. I don't know if you agree with that.

I love the theater room. I'm a cinema file. I love the theater room, basement bar, and movie theater. I love it.

A full projector. That's my sweet spot. But, uh, I'll be picking up for a bargain apparently, which is good.

Good place for me. Well, when you— when you— and hey, they're still popular. But when you come to— and people stream now too, right? Like, you're not getting a video, a movie, and watching it on DVD.

Yeah, and TVs are so big that they're basically cinema quality now. You don't need the dedicated light-controlled theater because the OLED's so bright. Like, there's a lot of other solutions.

But—

But when you guys come to Deer Valley, I'm gonna get you a beautiful luxury home with all these amenities and a theater room.

And a theater. There we go. That's great.

How— what's the seller's mentality right now? When do people leave? You know, is it changes in whatever period of their life? They're not using the property as much? Are there people that are waiting that want to sell into this sort of liquidity cycle that's happening? I heard of a recently exited tech founder that immediately bought 3, like within, within 3 months of selling, he bought 3 homes within, you know, a very, very, you know, call it a 10th of a square mile, something like that. So I do think that's going to be potentially a driving force in a lot of these resort regions. But what's, what's the viewpoint?

Well, these buyers are much younger, for sure. I mean, I've always viewed myself as young. And now in my 50s, I look at these buyers, Some of them are in their 20s and early 30s. I think they, again, back to what I said before, I think they're looking for a lifestyle. They're looking for work-life balance to the degree they can get it. They're looking for a retreat that's easy to access. They're looking for a place to unwind. They're looking for places to spend quality time with family and friends. Those are the drivers. And I think they're willing to hold that real estate when that's being offered, like when they're getting that from the real estate. they tend to hold it. But we do see people that say, hey, Park City and Deer Valley's grown a lot, and it has. And Sun Valley now appeals to me more because Sun Valley's been able to maintain its boutique, small, uh, kind of feel. And so, you know, they migrate to different resort markets. We have somebody right now relocating from Aspen, and he's just kind of done with Aspen. He's had a great time there. He has nothing but positive to say, and he wants to come and check out Deer Valley and Park City. So, he sold his property in Aspen with, you know, Chris Klug of Sotheby's International Realty, and now he's coming to Deer Valley and looking Fantastic.

In Utah, somebody that purely theoretically wants to balance winter and summer, easy access, ski-in, ski-out, also easy lake access, where are you putting them theoretically?

Deer Valley.

Are you kidding?

The Jordanelle Reservoir is right there at the base of the East Village of Deer Valley. Some of the best wakeboarding, water skiing. You can fish the Upper Provo River. Blue ribbon freestone fly fishing, blow your mind. I'll take you guys when you come. But I think people come to Park City and Deer Valley for the first time in the winter, but it's the summer that actually gets them to buy here because the summers are spectacular. You know, 80 degrees, no humidity, fabulous hiking, biking opportunities, the ability to fish, whatever it is you want to do in the outdoors, it's here in Utah.

How does that compare to Lake Castaic? Is that the one that we have here close to us? It's a notch above.

No, I recently went wake surfing in California and had a lovely time. One of the closest lakes to LA.

Convenient.

It was extremely convenient. That's my review.

The convenience factor.

The convenience factor.

All right. Hey, I think you could just fly to Utah and be to one of these outdoor lakes in just Just the same amount of time. So, you guys dial me up and we'll— trust me, we'll make it happen for you. You can wakesurf your heart out in the mountains of Utah.

I love it. What is your opinion or strategy around AI-enhanced photography? When I look at properties, sometimes it's really nice to say, what would this look like with a renovation? At the same time, sometimes you click on one and you're like, okay, I have no idea what this house actually looks like. Disclosure? What's been your process for working through the new technology?

Dude, I'll just jump in and say, like, there's an absolute epidemic of AI content on the Zillos and the Compasses and the—

And it's not disclosed?

No, it's like—

You clock it?

People are taking it on themselves to AI-enhance images of their home. And it's horrible because you're looking through and oftentimes it's like one real image, one AI image, and then one like just total render. Like, and you come away from it being like, this house, this asset must be terrible because—

If they're doing this to us, why?

Like, let people do the AI work themselves. It's very easy, right?

That's a good point.

Or at least very clearly label like real image, AI image, real image, AI, you know, up-res. But, but to me, it's like completely ruining these platforms right now. And I think they need to take action to like do much better labeling of it. But anyways, I'm not, I'm not in the industry.

You're dead on. You just answered the question. I mean, in our organization, especially with Sotheby's International Realty, you know, we are trained and taught that AI enhancement images that mislead people into thinking about property something it's not is, is not ethical and not something that we should be involved in. Somebody wants to take those images and drop them in to see what kind of changes they could make or improvements they could make, that's, I guess, their prerogative. So we are very careful with AI-enhanced images because, one, it's a misrepresentation of the property and it creates liability for us and for our client. But at the same time, it's just misleading them. So we believe in, you know, incredible photography, Photoshop it a little bit to clean it up, make the light better to be a great depiction of the property. But AI is a step too far when you're making a property look like something it's not.

Yeah. What, uh, what then? Obviously capturing like real images and footage is really key. Like, what is in the portfolio? What is the strategy for actually showing a property off? Obviously, you bring— like, do you have to bring in a specialized drone pilot and a videographer and a photographer and invite a real estate influencer? There's like 17 people around the table when you plan to market a property, or—

Yeah.

Is that it? Okay.

Yeah, I mean, at Summit Sotheby's International Realty, which is the Utah affiliate of Sotheby's International Realty, we have in-house photographers and videographers. They're drone pilots.

Cool.

Uh, they're certified to use the Matterport 3D.

Oh yeah, that's a big one too.

So, so yeah, I mean, I always tell clients in, in a general sense, the first showing is online, whether that's us emailing photos to a high-end client privately or them seeing it on the internet. The first showing's online, and you know what people do when they look at properties. They're not really looking for the perfect property. They're eliminating properties that don't work for them.

Sure.

So, you've got to package and present every property, uh, to, to draw as many eyeballs in, but also to not be disqualified. And I think, uh, the industry in general, certainly not our organization, really struggles with the visual presentation of properties. I think, uh, if you go online and look at real estate, you'll see a difference between what we're doing and what a lot of our competitors do. I think, I think they've lagged behind, and it's disappointing.

Yeah.

Um, I, you know, I'll look for clients at pictures, and it's, oh man, like some listings you see like 7 or 8 exterior photos before you see anything on the interior, you know. And we know from studies that people look at 5 to 6 photos and that's it.

Yeah.

That's as much attention span as people have online. So there's a, there's a system, there's an art to this, there's a process. And there's a way to be effective in marketing properties online.

But that's ultimately—

What's your brand?

Yeah.

How do you guys navigate working with, um, like, does Powder Haven allow for external, like, representation, or do they own the full end-to-end buying experience? And how have you worked—

Hastings?

Yeah, that's Reed Hastings from Netflix. And I'm sure you've had to interact in different ways with other community, you know, like Discovery Properties and things like that that, that want to own the experience entirely? Yeah, good question.

Uh, we were involved in selling Powder Mountain before Reed purchased it, and when he purchased it, he, he went private. Uh, there is some opportunities to buy and to sell in there, but he largely changed the master plan and the way that the project was being developed. So they've been cooperative with the brokerage community, and we feel like we can take clients there and expose it to them, but it definitely changed it. There's another, uh, Yellowstone Club type property in Utah called Wasatch Peaks. And they've been great to have us on site and to tour the brokers through. But that's a by-invitation club only. And you have to be invited to join the club, go through their vetting process, and be approved as a member before you can even be considered to buy real estate in the development. And I think that's a growing trend. You guys talked about the Beverly Hills project where they were selling the bonds. And I mean, you're seeing—

Founder bonds.

Founder bonds. I watched your show.

I—

yeah, but there's a lot of— there's just a lot of different ways to approach it, and, uh, I have opinions on that, but we won't get into that.

Yeah, yeah. No, I really want to know your opinion on, on how you would advise a client where the seller of the property wants you to loan them funds that are junior to billions of dollars.

Let's discuss that on the lake.

But yeah, we'll discuss that on the lake.

Okay, we'll discuss it.

I think you just said I think so. Anyways, Thomas, great to hang. Thanks for breaking down your business and take me up on the Utah offer.

I'm not kidding.

Yeah, we'd love to.

I want to have you guys out.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Can't wait. See ya.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And next we have Kyle Schiller. From Marathon Fusion. Is it over for gold? Is gold back?

There they are.

Is this the bottom of it? Welcome to the show, guys.

How you doing? What's up, guys?

Hey, what's going on?

Great seeing you.

Can you both introduce yourselves and then take us through the company a little bit?

Yeah.

Because you guys both look like you might be named Kyle Schiller, so you're going to have to confirm who's who.

One's Adam.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm the CEO of the company. I'm Kyle. My co-founder, Adam, couldn't join us today. Here's Jason, our Chief Science Officer.

Great. So take us through the pitch for the company. I saw the launch video went very viral, lots of debate about it, but what's the core thesis here? What's the core technology?

The core thesis is that fusion is really bottlenecked on the foundational capabilities and technologies, much more so than on the core plasma physics. And so we got founded to address a very specific set of problems around the tritium fuel cycle. We've since expanded. We've now gone full stack, built out the industrial base, and we're ready to deploy commercial fusion next year.

And fusion in general has been one of those technologies that's been 10 years away for the last 50 years. But it does feel like we've seen some solid progress. What technology milestones have actually been knocked down that gave you the confidence to go out and build this company, raise money for it, and start like actually accelerating?

You know, in 2022, it was very much a story about tailwinds. And now, 4 years later, we can confidently say it's a story about technology and those milestones.

Sure.

And, you know, this 10-year thing bothers me so much that we have gone out and made this very public commitment to double our power density every single month. So we're now talking about the execution window that is like news cycle relevant, that is Twitter relevant, and most importantly, where people can feel like they are a part of the story, that they are actually watching us progress. They don't just have to take our word for it and be like, another billion dollars, bro. This is actually going to happen.

Yes. So doubling every month, incredibly powerful. We all know the power of exponential growth. But if you're 20 ooms away from where you need to be, this could still take a long time. How far away are you from, from actually reaching— what do they call it? Q greater than 1. Isn't that the phrase for these things?

Yeah, well, I love that you have this perspective because nuclear physics is a matter of many, many ohms.

Yes.

In a way that is largely counterintuitive.

Okay.

So on power density, we are away like 5 ohms maybe now from setting the record. And on gain, historical reactors have gotten to within a factor of 2.

Yeah.

So that's why I say that is the area on which we are much closer to commercial performance.

Yes.

We're actually going to save that for last.

Yes.

It's the most capital-intensive thing, it's the most scientifically intensive thing, expensive thing, it's not the only important thing. So let's catch up on the rest of the industrial base, and then once we're there, we can do confinement.

And take us through the gold piece of this story. Why was that relevant? Why is that— is that just because it's so tangible to the audience that anyone can understand that?

We will perform it, and now we will perform a trick.

Yeah, it's alchemy. But is this actually part of the business plan, or is this That's how they're going to finance the rest of the business.

Yeah.

So, you know, like 18 months ago, Marathon announced this seemingly crazy thing that is real, that fusion can coproduce electricity and gold at scale. And this is at the power plant scale. This is how we're going to make fusion energy the most cost competitive. And this was just the beginning. Basically, right now we're focusing on making materials that are the most valuable materials in the world, like billions of times more valuable than gold. And so we're basically producing the roadmap for fusion energy instead of just making electricity 10 years away. We're going to be making medical radioisotopes right now with these very high power density reactors.

Mm-hmm. What kind of pushback did you guys get on, on the launch or the video? And like, how would you respond? What was some of the more common pushback?

I was pretty amazed how positive the reception was, to be quite honest with you. I think the vibes have gone really, really positive. I think we nailed the timing and the tone in the launch. And where we have seen pushback is mostly on these issues like mercury materials compatibility that are just not an issue. Like mercury is corrosive to copper. It's a good thing that there's no copper in URO-497. It's also a good thing that we have been operating with copper, like in the nuclear industry, for almost 100 years. So in the 1940s, mercury was used as a coolant in nuclear reactors. Throughout the 1900s, it was used in like AC/DC conversion systems that powered most of the London Underground. GE has deployed mercury turbines. Even the super conservative European programs baselined, like their default is mercury fusion power plants.

Sure.

And so what we're proposing is like radical from an economic perspective. The materials actually don't concern me that much. We'll have to do a lot more qualification from here on out. We address that in the video, but it is tractable. It is like a really highly tractable series of engineering problems.

Okay, so that's the scientific pushback. For the person that was just like scrolling by and saying, oh, they're making infinite gold, the critique was like, you're not producing gold economically yet because you have to put more energy into the system. That has cost. And so even if you're able— and, but that is Or is that something that you've already addressed that you will be solving by scaling up the efficiency of the system?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's true. We're really far away. That's why we have to go so quickly.

So you probably spent like thousands of dollars to make like one penny of gold or something like that at this point, but then you double that and double that and double that.

Yeah, there are all these comments that are like, but they would have to do a million times better.

And it's like, yeah, man, that's exactly the goal.

Yeah, that's the goal. Just give us like, you know, 40 doublings or something.

Yeah, say that about the models.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you should be very inured to this concept of—

You need to be OOM maxing.

Yeah, that's right. What is, uh, what's the actual lab look like? You don't need to use any radioactive material, right? So it's like a pretty safe lab to just walk around?

Uh, we do operate this currently in downtown San Francisco.

Okay.

And we generate a very tiny number of, uh, X-rays, which we're able to shield with lead, much like you get at the doctor's.

Yeah.

So we have a radiation safety officer. We take diagnostics. We make sure that everyone's operating safely. We will at some point have to upgrade from here. And much like the fission companies that set criticality in Idaho, we have a number of other facilities where we can go and do that next phase of scale-up.

Oh, and how big, how big is the team?

We're 30 people right now.

Wow.

Very cool.

Well, congratulations. Uh, thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for sharing, guys.

We appreciate you.

Come back on. We'll talk to you on the next Doom.

Yeah, the next Doom. Yeah.

All right.

Awesome to meet you guys.

Goodbye.

Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is returning to the show, Stephen Schwarz from Wop, co-founder and CEO. Been on the show several times. Always a good hang. It's some fresh fun.

He's back.

How are you doing, Stephen? Good to see you again.

Yo, what up, Jordy? What up, John? How are you guys?

What's the latest?

What's up, dude?

Give us some numbers. Jordy's got 2 gong mallets for you. He wants to hit that guy. How much you raise?

Uh, a little over $205 million.

$205 million. Spicy.

Almost took it off the hinge.

Congratulations, Sequoia and Shopify Ventures. What a A great combination of strategic plus tier 1 venture capital firm. What is the—

Yeah, your haters are in absolute shambles seeing that.

Do you see the Shopify partnership evolving in some material way, or is it just a meeting of the minds? You hit it off with Tobi Lütke or someone else over there, and it was a purely capital partner?

I think that the spirit of this round of funding was really to surround ourselves with people that are going to level us up. And I mean, Cameron and I met when we were so young and we grew up literally building businesses on Shopify day in and day out. And what Tobi and the rest of the Shopify team have created is truly a work of magic. And I think people have a habit of underestimating small business, and they sure know not to do that. I have a lot of high hopes for our partnership with Shopify. Toby's a world-class programmer. Their site and platform are built in Ruby on Rails, same as us. We have a lot of commonalities, and I think it's definitely only the beginning, and we look at them far, far beyond just capital.

Amazing.

Shopify is really incredible in that It's hard to know. It's hard for a company to be at that scale and have so few detractors. Like, yeah, there's like on the merchant side, people are like, every now and then there would be some like mild issue, right? Like an outage. But it's like they have like the highest uptime of any—

Huge NPS.

Like, yeah, like the NPS is crazy. And then on the consumer side, it's just like amazing. No one wants to go back. to the internet before, and they've been able to deliver a Shopify-like— or sorry, an Amazon-like experience without any of the things that people don't like about Amazon. And I think it's incredible, and definitely having them in your corner is fantastic.

Completely agree. Yeah, I mean, you look at the amount of small businesses that they service today, many, many, many millions per month. And I think the whole world is still underestimating how many more small businesses will be in the future. Even at a few million a month, it's actually not that many. There should really be billions of businesses each month. And these are not, not just tiny businesses. And Shopify has so many examples of Gymshark, you know, random dropshipping brands that they grow to billions and billions of revenue. Skims doing billions and billions of revenue. And I think, I think that they view our platform very similar in that the winners can really, really grow and scale on the platform. But obviously we serve slightly different types of businesses. So yeah, I'm very, very excited about getting to work with Toby and the rest of the team. They're fantastic.

What are some of the new categories that are growing quickly on WAP?

Like, what's the new meta?

What's the new meta?

Yeah, well, we're actually working on this trends page right now, and it's been really crazy to look at. We're really trying to drive the specificity home, specificity home of all these different micro markets. So when we first launched, it was literally just sneaker bots. And I think everyone was kind of like, okay, well, that's, that's a tiny market, really niche. I don't even really know what it does. But when you start to stack all these micro markets up, it becomes really, really, really big. And when we, when we started to get our classification upgraded, we're seeing explosive growth in home services businesses like plumbing and roofing and pool cleaning. There's kids in Oregon that have home renovation and kitchen renovation businesses. We're seeing like emergency tree removal businesses in Canada in highly populated forest areas. We're seeing a lot of fraternities and sororities start to use WAP. We're seeing people sell backyard greenhouses on the platform. We have really fast-growing platforms for truckers, like bill pay and ARAP platforms. We obviously have a ton of UGC growth. There's some really large people— not large people, really notable people that are launching marketplaces around UGC craze still.

Sure.

And yeah, I mean, you know, I think the fastest growing category right now is actually AI business training for small businesses. So they'll go into different businesses and help teach how to do automations, how to get the best AI stack and so on. And that is in incredibly high demand. But again, I think a lot of these markets deserve to be 100x bigger. And I think that the road ahead of us is pretty obvious on how We can 100x each of these micro markets, which collectively kind of brings the whole platform to another, another territory.

A lot of people laughed at Charleston AI. We took it seriously. We, you know, we had a fun interview with the founder, but we recognized that this was like a real business. And it seems like it's spreading far beyond that one viral clip of the gentleman showing how he set up a physical store where you could go and get AI training. It's happening on WAP as well. What does top of funnel look like for when some of these new capabilities, new markets pop up? Like, I'm thinking about, like, tree removal. That's great that someone could come on board and say, I'm willing to remove a tree in a remote part of Canada, but how are they finding their customers? Are they doing the promotion and then the transaction happens on Wop, or are you doing marketing Are you looking to brand Wop as a place where someone could go for all sorts of home services? Like, how, how is the, how is the customer finding that talent?

Yeah. So, I mean, our mission is to deliver everyone a sustainable income. So I think one way to look at our platform is to take all these markets that have traditionally been a little bit more concentrated on the big guys getting all the business, and then maybe the big guys would go and delegate out and find some contractor to go and actually perform the tree removal services. What I think the promise of the internet allows for is really to decentralize all that power.

Yeah.

We try to think about making each of these markets very open and very efficient. What that looks like is bringing scale economies for not just payments, but also advertising to people like these tree removal services. And when you give them the power of Nike, that they have an advertising product that Nike would use, and you give it to a guy cleaning cars in Kansas who's making $150 a week, it gets pretty, pretty nuts. And that's the type of thing that people are using WAP for today.

Yeah.

And you can look at the services we provide. Really, we're selling more efficient, better payments and more efficient, better advertising. And we wrap all that up and embed it into our home screen and tell businesses what they should do next and say, all right, you're just starting out. Halloween's coming up. Maybe run a sale for Halloween, maybe get some ads launched for Halloween. And, and yeah, so maybe hopefully that answers your question.

No, no, it totally does. It's so interesting. could come to WAP with a product, a service, anything, and then you're not just the e-commerce platform, you're also going to connect them with marketers, help them. It could be they hire a clipper on there or someone to run digital ads. Like, it's the full-stack solution for like a solopreneur kind of in any type of business. That's incredible. Yeah, I totally—

Are you, are you already distributing through neobanks and and different, like, consumer finance platforms, because consumer finance historically was like, hey, here's your net worth, or here's a checking account, but nothing in these apps helps you really make the number go up. You have to go elsewhere to do that. I feel like WAP is, like, the number-go-up platform for, like, a generation of new entrepreneurs, and that feels like a place where somebody's like, Like, looking at their bank account, they might not be happy about it. If they want to do something about it, that's like an interesting moment.

Our mission is definitely not to save you money. It's definitely to make you money. And we, you know, businesses on our platform, they grow an average of 300% after the first year. And that is much, very much our goal. We deal— we try not to deal in anything less than 100 bps of growth for businesses. Businesses on the platform. And yeah, I think we're not—

we're probably—

there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for distribution in other apps. We have enough. We have 10,000 people trying to make businesses, creating businesses each day, and many, many, many more tens of thousands of users signing up to buy things. So we have our hands full with our existing customers before we turn on some more pipes for extended distribution. So not quite yet, but the neobank stuff is pretty, pretty fascinating. I think, again, like, our goal is to, to bring a lot of competition to traditionally very difficult to enter markets. And we have a crazy cool stablecoin infrastructure that allows people to do things that they previously haven't really been able to do from a fintech stack standpoint. So yeah, we're really excited about that.

Yeah, it was funny when I was starting my entrepreneurial journey, I always thought it was funny that like my business didn't have a home. Like if you weren't building an e-commerce store, like, and you could just go to like Shopify is the home for your business, right? Like that is like, that's where your business is happening. But for so many other types of businesses, it's like, what is your business? Your email? Is it your bank account? Is it Stripe Atlas or LegalZoom? It's like totally homeless, right?

Totally.

like sitting across all these different surface areas. And it feels like just— it's like very, very obvious now, but like WAP being just the home for your business, if it's like anything beyond like the sort of Shopify, you know, SMB to enterprise, Yep. it's gonna intuitively make so much sense for the younger generation that's like, yeah, my company like should have a home. It should be like one place that I go and it connects to these other services, and it gives me that. Like, I think the thing that's really powerful is there's so many people that want to start a business. They maybe have an idea, maybe that idea evolves, but they don't have someone in their life that's telling them like the next thing to do. And if you just scale up that, like, we're telling you the next thing to do on your journey, if it's like, okay, now it's time to do advertising, and then helping them do the next step, I think that—

Mm-hmm.

It can start to snowball into these you know, once somebody's snowballing, and they're like, they make their first dollar, and then they make their second sale, or whatever it is, it can snowball, and then people figure it out over time. But, you know, having that home, and then that sort of guidance, I think, is gonna be super powerful. And, um, uh, yeah, it's gonna be a golden era. Ken Griffin this week called it the golden—

He did?

It's gonna be a new golden era for entrepreneurship. Not talking about WAP. No, he was just saying—

I thought he was like so blackpilled on everything, saying like it's a bubble and stuff.

No, no, no. People were pulling out the super bearish headlines, but the overall take was like, it's going to be a period of intense disruption. He's like, every, every major transformation has come with some, some sort of bubble. But ultimately, he said it'd be a golden era for entrepreneurship and was really pushing this. Like, it's a weird time to be a white-collar worker. It's a weird time to be a big corporate, but it's a great time to be on WAP.

That's what he said. No.

No, he just said it's a great time to lean in and learn these markets.

Yeah, be adaptable, flexible.

Yeah, when you're an individual or just a couple of people, it's like you have ultimate flexibility. You can literally do anything. You're not dealing with the baggage of, like, how do we adapt to this new paradigm?

Yeah. I have one last question. Have you ever gotten a root canal without Novocaine?

We were going to plan on doing that before our next board meeting. We have it. That's the plan of attack.

Okay.

I'll let you know how it goes once—

Why not do the board meeting while getting a root canal without Novocaine? Yeah, you got to clarify this. Just literally do it all. You're so busy, dude. You need to combine all this into one meeting.

Yeah. What is the story with Doug Leone from Sequoia, your relationship with him, how you met? Take us through sort of the journey because, I mean, what a legend to have on the board. Novocaine aside, obviously, one of the greatest investors of all time and a real testament to the quality of the business that he would join.

Yeah. So, I think we've been really lucky to have some awesome investors supporting us since we began. And I think that the story of this financing was that we really wanted to learn from someone who we like to spend a lot of time with. And we've gotten to know the Sequoia crew over the last few years and have seriously nothing but amazing things to say about the entire team. They're nothing short of brilliant. And Justin Mateen introduced us to Doug. And Doug actually said, he's like, we can't meet. We already passed on this and we're not really interested. Too many detractors in the market. And we hashed it out a little bit. And I think it became pretty obvious that the market we service is one of the largest markets in the world and should likely be one of the last to be commoditized by anything related to AI. And we hit it off with Doug. I think Doug is one of the most authentic, humble people that I've met in this world. And that's having the track record that he has. And I think We really, really enjoyed speaking with him. I think a lot of people in venture and Valley are much more consensus thinkers, and he is certainly an original thinker and not afraid to be blunt, which we really appreciate. I think we hit it off and we could not be more excited to be in business with he and the rest of the Sequoia team.

Well, congratulations. Love progress.

Really cool progress and milestones.

It's fantastic. I mean, what an amazing journey you've been on and it's awesome to see another win. Job's not finished, but really, really amazing progress.

Yeah, great stuff, dude.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to see you.

Thank you, Jordi.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, man.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Can I read this article from the Wall Street Journal Mansion section, Jordi?

Hit me.

Alaska property comes with a helipad. This is a special, special property. 147 acres with a helipad. Guess how much it's going for? They're giving it away. Just $12.5 million. $2 million? No, $12.5 million.

Now, there's that house we saw in Alaska that was like Yeah, one of one.

I think it was on like 5 acres or 10 acres.

It was John Lautner.

John Lautner.

But it was like $600K or something.

But this is a, this is a very cool story. So, uh, Richard Stryken lived in Alaska his whole life. The 68-year-old retired commercial real estate developer was born in Fairbanks, spent time along the Bering Sea in an Eskimo village, but when it was time to settle down, he built a family compound. He chose Palmer, a small city about 4 miles from Anchorage. Surrounded by glaciers, the landscape attracted him with its grandeur. His 147-acre property has views of the glaciers, mountain ranges, and Northern Lights. I climbed a tree and I saw the view potential, and that's where I decided I was going to build, he said. Now he's looking to downsize. Strykin has listed— has decided to list the compound for $12.5 million, making it one of the most expensive homes for sale in Alaska, according to Troy Dana Faye Ranches. Strykin began to assemble his compound just outside the city limits in the '90s. On the property, which he calls the ultimate, ultimate Alaska, he built a ranch-style single-story main bedroom— main house with 3 bedrooms, a garage, and a 2-bedroom apartment above it, and a helipad for his wife. He built vegetable gardens and an orchard. The couple's—

I thought you were saying he built the helipad for his wife. I was like, that's amazing.

That would be great. They have 13 grandchildren that live nearby. Let's give it up for that.

Whoa.

During the winter solstice, Palmer receives only about 5 hours of sunlight a day. Stricken and his family spends this time skiing, visiting local winter festivals, and attending the grandchildren's indoor sporting events. When spring arrives, they shift to snowmobiling on the glaciers, prepping the orchard and gardens for the growing season, and enjoying outdoor community events. They are selling because he has built a lakefront home about an hour away, and he and his wife plan to spend most of their time there. So, if you're in the market for a 147-acre Alaska compound, head over to—

You know who should consider?

Who?

Palmer Luckey.

Oh, yeah.

Ben Lamb.

Yeah.

They just set up a dog operation out there.

Why not there?

And Palmer have Warhound. Yeah, very excited. A company coming out of stealth to genetically engineer dogs for military and law enforcement. Let's pull up this video of them talking about it back in 2023.

And I'm talking about biological weapons. I'm talking about using biology as a tool to solve a lot of military problems because we have new advanced bioengineering capabilities. So muscles that go in machines are gonna be a really big deal. For example, building self-powered scavenging robots that can live off of grass out in a field. Imagine if you could have radio relays that roam the plains and just eat grass, and that's how they power themselves. And they're very low signature. They can hide, they can hibernate. There's actually a lot of interesting biology-derived systems where you can take that stuff in, have bacteria in a little bioreactor that puts out methane gas, which you then run a fuel cell with. It's really, really cool stuff. And then of course, the other big one is, you know, you guys are probably familiar with some of the companies out there doing de-extinction work of species, and I think there's a lot of species in the history of our planet where if we go back to the future, they're gonna have excellent military applications. You think that German Shepherds, they weigh 150 pounds, are really good canine units? Well, what about dire wolves? What if you have 600-pound canine units carrying 150 pounds of armor? You're talking about something that weighs all up 8 times more with 100 times more bullet resistance. They're extinct now, but they don't have to continue to be. That sounds crazy, but I don't know if you guys know this, The US military actually already has a lot of animals working in it. You have a lot of dogs working in the military. You have a lot of dolphins and seals that are working in the US Navy. And of course, we'd customize them a bit too, you know, give them some better endurance, give them the ability to breathe at high altitudes, things they didn't have when they were on the Arctic tundra. Imagine if you could have all of these survival characteristics of Arctic wolves, but with the obedience and trust and loving characteristics of domesticated animals. Of course, you can breed things like this over long periods of time with different levels of success. But what if you could really get it to be like every canine unit we have in the northern latitudes, they have the characteristics of the strongest Arctic wolf that ever walked the Earth, and also they love to cuddle and do exactly what I say. I'm really excited about engineered biologics for defense applications.

That's crazy. I was always thinking that it would go the other direction. Instead of trying to scale up the friendly dog, you would try and make the fierce giant bear friendly, and you would genetically engineer a domesticated bear and basically speed that up, because dogs came from wolves. Over generations, they became friendlier. It feels like you could speed that up, but Palmer and Ben Lamb clearly know better than I do.

Why stop at seals and dolphins? Why not great, friendly great white sharks?

Great white sharks with laser beams.

Man's best friend in the sea.

Best friend?

Well, like you take the the golden retriever. They become the best friend personality trait, but keep all of the you know attack.

Killer whales are pretty smart too. Megalodon would be a good good.

Yeah, Megalodon mode. The friendly neighborhood Megalodon.

Megalodon would be very intimidating.

Alex says friendly jaws incoming.

Friendly jaws. Well, we'll have to keep keep an eye on it. It's an interesting. It's an interesting business. It seems like it's Ben Lamb who's been working on de-extinction of mammoths at Colossal Biosciences, maybe new company from him, Palmer Luckey advising, and Anduril providing some body armor and some development, but not particularly— I don't think it's strictly an Anduril product. I don't know if you know more about this deal.

Well, Sam over on X says, God give me the confidence of a VC investing $200 million at $1.2 in a $50 million market. And so they talk about police and military combined is $50 million a year of breeder revenue. And of course, the VC pushback here— I'm going to steelman— is that if you can make super versions of all these different animals, the end market would obviously be— Much more massive. And it's just, it's literally the coolest thing ever.

I agree, it is. And it's the type of thing that you wanna be, you probably wanna see funded with equity dollars that can be experimental and high risk, high reward, like put the risk capital to work on things that are, you know, science experiments with longer time horizons and—

Yeah, you're telling me if we can put millions of friendly megalodons into every ocean, that's not gonna be, A $10 billion a year annual market. This is how we replace all of our Navy. Friendly laser megalodons.

Laser-equipped megalodons, maybe.

That would never have any adverse impact on any global system too.

Has any company just come out and said, we're doing Jurassic Park? We're just bringing back the T-Rex and we think it's going to go well.

Isn't that kind of what Ben Lamb—

No, he hasn't said he's bringing back the T-Rex.

Oh, yeah. Is he Is he anti?

Well, so from a scientific perspective, there's a very good reason why going after dinosaurs is way harder than going after woolly mammoths.

Yeah, here's the other thing. Dan is looking for a retail option for a 600-pound dog. So I'm sorry, Sam, the market for— it's a good point.

Retail, yeah, retail option.

The end market for friendly 10,000-pound dogs. I mean, look at Clifford the Big Red Dog is like one of the— We're making— we're rebuilding Clifford. I mean, that's a— no, it's a perfect VC bet, because it's like, what you're trying to do is basically—

How many people are really in the market for Clifford?

It's got to be so expensive. Billions of children?

Billions of children, but who can afford— it's got to be— that's a 6-figure dog, easy, if not a 7-figure dog.

Plus, you're starting— You don't think they can—

Feeding a 10,000-pound dog—

I expect the costs to drop as quickly as the AI token costs drop.

Sort of sustainable farming. Maybe Clifford the dog could build its own infrastructure and feed itself, potentially. It could learn how to farm.

Yeah. Yeah, you have to buy it with the friendly gorilla that takes care of the dog.

Yes, yes, it's a package deal.

And it goes on WAP. And earns a living, earns enough every day to actually cover the cost.

Like the friendly gorilla. That seems like an easy one to domesticate. That seems very, very close. Closer than a bear, certainly. Certainly closer than a shark. I feel like we have such— we have so little in common with a shark. A bear—

This guy doesn't believe there's a market for Clifford the Big Red Dog.

I'm just saying it's a narrow market. It's going to be an expensive dog. It's going to be expensive. The OpEx on a Clifford dog is going to be through the roof. You're going to be spending—

The US pet industry is $165 billion just in the US. And so, I expect that just introducing a viable Clifford for retail would take that to a trillion-dollar market. And I think there's a path to it being as big as a global alcohol market, which is in the $1.5 to $2 trillion.

Consider the knock-on effects, though. Clifford doghouse, that's going to be up to zone as an ADU. We're already in a housing crisis.

Yeah.

Not going to work.

I think this could potentially create a sovereign debt crisis as households look to basically—

As money floods into the Clifford dog market.

Yeah. I mean, they're going to genetically engineer them to last 1,000 years. So one family across many generations would have the same—

the Clifford would be like the guardian. Yeah, the family office.

Clifford would be the family guardian.

Clifford dogs.

And, you know, potentially hundreds of people in an individual family across centuries would all be cared for by the Clifford Overlord engineers.

Overlord?

It's becoming—

So we lost control now?

No, no, no.

It's a thing.

Clifford, the Warhound's Clifford product, they're gonna—

Become warlords.

Engineer it to live for thousands of years. And so, if you buy it, it's— you never really own it. You just pass it down to the next generation. So, like, your son eventually is—

It's not your dog, it's just your turn.

You will own no dogs and be happy. I don't know. Stranger things have happened potentially. Who knows? Nothing's off the table. Science fiction Is here, so maybe Clifford the big red dog is in the cards. I certainly hope so. I would like to see a bigger dog. I have a very large dog, and I love big dogs. So I would love a six hundred pound, six thousand pound, ten thousand pound dog. Do we even know how much Clifford weighs? Four thousand pounds.

Four thousand pounds.

Jackson knows the facts.

Sitting here, sitting here with the fit of the month.

Oh, can we get the Call of Duty update? Who who wound up winning between you and Nick?

B says they're gonna need 50-year Clifford mortgages.

Oh yeah, paid off over 50 years. Well, if he lives for 1,000 years, you're good.

He only played for a few minutes and then—

Oh, he didn't even finish the game?

Yeah.

Okay, but what was his kill-to-death ratio at the time you took over?

So when you're playing on Killblock, for some reason it doesn't show you your KD during the game, so I couldn't tell.

Too bad. Killblock's fun though. I like that mode. I'm excited. We do need to wrap the show up. 'Cause I gotta go play. Just kidding, I got other stuff to do. But, uh, thank you for tuning in. Fantastic week, fantastic show. We made it through some sickness, some chaos.

We love you.

Let's get the Christmas countdown up again. 62 days to Christmas.

We'll see you Monday.

Goodbye. Goodbye.