Weekly Recap: Mark Cuban, Kanye’s Wild Mansion Makeover, China Heads to the Moon, Money in Clipping

You're on the street.

Did you see that Cluley was in the Wall Street Journal?

No way.

Yeah, so. And in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought was kind of interesting, we do some clipping here. We clip on x, we create TikToks, we create Instagrams, we create reels, all sorts of stuff. But the Wall Street Journal's breaking down the trends and all the big money behind those bite sized social media videos. Companies are hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the Examples here is 1x which we've had on the show as well. Cluly we've also had on the show and nothing. We've also had on the show 3 for 3 with the CEOs of the companies that are using clipping to their benefit. So you know those buzzy, vile clips you see on social media, there's an army behind them. Kanoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy young clippers who help streamers, PODC and startups expand their audiences by making buzzy moments go viral on social media. Cunningham edits down clients, long form videos and short clips and then posts the shorts on sites like Instagram and TikTok. It is lucrative work. In May, Cunningham quit his finance job and now runs a team of eight clippers. He said the operation earns him 20,000 to 30,000amonth. Not bad. Clipping is one of the hottest corners of marketing. Instead of just posting on their own accounts, creators and companies pay clippers like Cunningham to saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite sized videos. They are almost impossible to miss. One technique they use to grab attention on crowded social media platforms posting provocative or outrageous content. And I think this is one of the issues that people should be aware of if they're going to start clipping is what is the brand line? What is the brand standard? I saw a viral clip from a podcast where basically it made the host like the host was joking, but the joke was taken out of context and just made the host look dumb. And that went super viral. But the takeaway for the viewer, like.

Great, you got views. Did you get, Are those valuable views?

Yeah, yeah.

It's not just, I mean the like the base case for clipping is that it gets no views. The good case is that it gets some views but doesn't really convert many people because the conversion rates on a million views is like a few listeners will actually be like, yeah, I watched a, I enjoyed that 60 second TikTok I'm down to listen to an hour of this. That's pretty. That's a pretty low conversion rate, but that's fine because you get the million views, you probably bring some awareness. But the worst thing that you can do is like create a brand as like the person that gets dunked on or something like that.

Yeah. And so certain people have productized this. Right. So you hire like this person, Mr. Cunningham in the Journal saying the only way to be famous and today's Internet world is with clips. I think like he's running his own operation. But WAP has productized this. I do think it's a cool way for young people to make their first money online. Like, if you're in middle school and you want to figure out how to make $100 a day, you can probably do that through clipping.

Yep.

But I wonder how much. I do wonder how much the social platforms will like if they see this as a feature or a bug. Right. Because part of the strategy is Cluli will spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Cluli content. And they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming. Just like shotgun approach, seeing they'll put out 100 videos. If a lot of them get under a thousand views and one gets a million, that's a win for them. And yeah, I just, I don't know how long this will be like the meta. Right.

Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack, we were talking to Chris Bast and Substack will automatically generate clips. There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internally, Newsmax that, that does some automated clipping, but actually telling a story, a piece of content that's within a larger piece is something that.

Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally.

Yeah.

Because in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views, but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require human ingenuity. And we saw this with, we talked to Dwarkesh about this, where he has spent a lot of time using Anthropic and Gemini and OpenAI to create workflows that will go through the transcript and try and find the. The best clips that will perform. And he says it always comes back at a five out of 10. And so he still has a team that does this and is very good and has a whole bunch of hard won Lessons about what works at a certain amount of time. And we've seen this with our content that actually winds up performing a lot of it. We have to do a lot of experimentation. But once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it and then we commit that to memory and our team commits that to memory and that becomes part of our continual learning. That happens. And that just doesn't really happen in when you're, when you're automating things with an LLM. So it is, it's probably like, I think it's a good like base case to start with. But a lot of this should be done by the platform. So I wouldn't be YouTube. Does it automatically Spotify? Does it automatically?

Yeah. I don't know how much credit he should get, but I do think that Andrew Tate's rise was his business model of paying people totally to clip his content to sell more courses, which he then would recycle some of the proceeds and get more clipping. And this was at a period where he was saying, I'm the most googled man on the Internet.

Yep, yep.

And he would just say that over and over. It would get clipped a lot. And it naturally had this sort of feedback loop. People were just, okay, what is this guy saying? I need to pay attention. But that was also hyper optimized for that format because he'd be like sitting shirtless in a supercar, smoking a cigar.

And any of these like social media hacks, they always have like a very narrow window of opportunity. Like the giving away. It used to just be just renting a sports car or like owning a Ferrari would be enough for a million views now. Then it became you had to give it away. And so Doug demuro, one of his big series that got really big, the car youtuber was he had a Ferrari 360 Modena and it was I think in the hundred something thousand dollar range. He had to get a bunch of debt to pay for it. It was very expensive. And he made a whole bunch of videos about his red Ferrari.

He leveled up his content.

Yeah. And it was great. It was great content. It was interesting. And of course it was. He was more like making fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture. But still there just weren't that many YouTube videos of like a red Ferrari. So you click on it and people found him that way and he grew. Then it became like the Mr. Beast era of like, I'm going to give away a Ferrari. Last person to take their hand off the car wins it. And that was a big thing that was even more expensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari, pay the, pay the, you know, the monthly payment for a certain amount of time and then sell it and hope that there's not that much depreciation. Like the net cost was truly the full price of the Ferrari. But at least you're giving it to someone. It's like a write off probably. There's something there. The most recent MrBeast video involving a supercar was him literally shredding a Lamborghini, just destroying it. Like Whistlin Diesel has become a huge YouTuber on the back of just like destroying supercars and G wagons and all these crazy cars.

Tyler, I think Sean Frank just gave away a Lambo. Oh yeah, he posted about that.

That's working. That's working.

Maybe soon he's gonna have to start.

Destroying it or I don't know. Yeah, I think giving it away. But yeah, I mean it's like, it's like this.

That made sense. That was a sterrato.

It was a Strato. Very special car.

Yeah. No, but the real pinnacle of this was Whistland Diesel.

Yeah. Whistling Diesel took it to the max.

To the Absolute Max. Ferrari F8. Beautiful car. He destroyed it completely destroyed it. Right. And made a video about it. It's incredibly entertaining to watch somebody drive a car that's normally a garage, a garage queen and have somebody just absolutely take it off roading all this stuff. Fantastic video if you haven't seen it. Yeah, it's funny, I was looking up what kind of Ferrari it was and Google's AI overview says whistling diesel parentheses Cody Ko destroyed his Ferrari F8. And so AGI has not been a.

300 days to the singularity time.

300 days.

300 more days till AGI. We're not getting any closer. Clipping took off during the early days of TikTok when chopped up snippets featuring Internet personalities like Andrew T. Mr. Beast would rack up millions of years. I swear Jordy reads the articles before we talk about them on the show. Maybe, maybe sometimes it sparked a new generation. I don't know how you read 400 pages of documents before we get on. When I put this together 10 minutes before we jump on. It sparked a new generation of creators who realized they could pay their way into virality by hiring hordes of clippers paid per thousand views to flood the Internet with the creator's content. Anything that can be clipped, a podcast, debate, social media montage, even movies. Startups such as Lovable an app that builds software from plain English prompts, Humanoid robot maker One Axe and consumer electronics company Nothing have hired clippers to multiply their content across the Internet through clips of product demos, podcast appearances and YouTube streams. You're stupid if you're not, if you're making an hour long podcast and only posting it in one channel, said Roy Lee, the 21 year old founder of Cluli, an AI note taking startup which hires clippers to plaster its promotional content across the Internet. The only way you can ensure a viral moment is to post it across thousands of different accounts.

This is thousands.

Thousands of accounts is a lot. This is also happening in music. I heard that when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. But people are saying like when Drake drops an album, he'll have the clippers clip all the music and it goes out and it gets a lot of views that way. There is something just about it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral. So just like spamming everything out kind of gives you the opportunity for lots of like, you know, happy accidents.

Lottery tickets.

Lottery tickets basically. But I still think a better strategy for most people will be what Dwark Cash and David Senra are doing, where you have someone who really understands how to create something beautiful. Even though it's a new format and people think of 60 second short form as like slop. It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated, it can be. It can be thoughtful, it can be designed. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs and they have a number one ranking on G2.

That's right folks.

Cluli's clipped contents generates around 800,000 views a day on platforms including Instagram and TikTok, according to Lee. Lovable and nothing said they were always looking for ways to reach new customers. Online marketplaces have developed to connect brands with clippers in the virtual markets, brands post the rate they will pay and freelancers sign up to make clips. Clippers are paid anywhere from $0.50 to $2 per thousand views, motivating them to find the most shareable moments. Nathan Resnick, a 31 year old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees businesses in insurance, wedding planning and real estate service pays diversify 50 clippers he finds online roughly 15,000amonth to create and post short form videos promoting his company's businesses. It's not really that crazy when you consider we were spending $250,000 a month on Google and Meta to drive traffic to our websites. That's a good point. Again, this is like the arb. Like, this eventually will get competed down. A lot of this will be taken by platforms. Opus Clip, or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it. You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook and it will make the clips itself. But right now, there is a huge, huge arbitrage.

Yeah, 1x has generally been sharp here. If you remember, they got their robot on Kaisanat.

Yep. They really understand the culture.

Friend of the show, Dar Sleeper. Total sleeper. Marketing sleeper.

Yeah, he's great.

He says people in the company were like, what the heck is this kid doing? A week later, their little cousins were talking about it at the Thanksgiving table.

There we go.

Anyways, it's cool. It's cool. I think it's probably, like you said, a moment in time. Probably not going to be like a. It's hard to see it as the most enduring strategy, but it works right now. And I think a lot of businesses, it was.

It was an insane, insane arb for Andrew Tate. And then it became, like, sort of commoditized. But we're still very early, and I think that there will be a lot of. I mean, it does feel.

I think the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them.

And that's what Andrew Tay did for sure.

Yeah, he clipped. No, I'm saying no.

Not just on the buying side. Actually, on the content side. When he would get on Mike, he would say crazy things that would go viral. And so he made it very easy. Whereas if you are like an enterprise SaaS company and you hold a webinar, like, you could hire a billion clippers and, like, you're probably not gonna rip like. Like. And that's why Cluly is, like, both doing stuff.

Somebody should test it out.

Test it out. Adio. Let's. Let's test it out. Customer relationship. Magic Adeo is the AI native.

Clip this.

That builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.

Clip this right now.

Clip this right now. Meta Smart glasses with a display is incoming. Codename is Hypernova. Priced $800 down from the expected $1,300. Zuck is cooking for real. For real, says Nick Meta. So the price is. The price is going down. And, I mean, they're taking a real shot at the Apple Vision Pro, which, of course, was. Was what, 3400?

And I don't think we can say. I don't think we can say much else, but I think we've. Have we not used this product well.

So Orion is a different product. Orion is what was demoed and has been displayed and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. But we're not exactly sure what Hypernova is. It could be a. I mean it's listed here in this article is a precursor to full blown augmented reality glasses. And so there has been a, there's been a third like option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart glasses market, there's maybe a few different products. So the Meta Ray Bans and the Meta Oakleys have been successful. Like people are actually buying those. They're wearing them, they're taking pictures with them. They're also using them as an AirPods replacement. Wireless headphones, they use them for speaker for music while they're running. They definitely have adoption. It might not be the biggest product of all time yet, but it's definitely working. And so they're scaling that up. Then you have the VR headsets, the Quest, the full virtual reality. There's some pass through, but in general people think of that as a virtual reality headset, of course. First created by Palmer Luckey at Oculus, sold into Meta and Facebook and now rebranded as the Quest. The Quest has been selling pretty well, but still probably suffers from churn. We see the chart spike on Christmas where everyone gets a new Quest VR headsets because it's a great gift. They try it out, they download the app, they install it and then they stop using it for a while. I was talking to Tyler about this. We gave him a Quest 3 Pro, Quest 3 Mini, something like that.

Quest 3S Xbox Edition.

Quest 3S Xbox Edition. He played Call of Duty on it a little bit. Played Halo on it.

Yeah.

For like two weeks and then ultimately churned.

Yeah, I'm not that much of a gamer.

Yeah, but you're supposed to be like, it's supposed to be an everything device. You're supposed to be able to watch movies in it, you're supposed to be able to code in it. It should in theory replace your screen.

Setup to be able to cluely in it.

But the fact that, the fact that they weren't able to find like a killer use case for someone like you means that they're still in that hunting for the killer use case phase. Then there are the full augmented reality glasses where you're passing through the reality through glass, you're seeing the real World. That's what we tried. That's what a lot of influencers have tried. Those are very much not real challenges.

What are the technical capabilities of the product and then what are the experiences available for that product? And they both need to, they clearly both need to improve totally in order to get to the point where, Tyler, we gotta be like, pulling the, pulling the goggles off and being like, tyler, it's time to come to work.

Yeah. Yeah. So. So. So my take when I had the Apple Vision Pro, it was, it was too heavy, it was really expensive and felt like, oh, I would, I would churn for this eventually. So I returned it. But the one thing that I, that I did enjoy was I watch movies in it and I watched all of Citizen Kane in it from start to finish. And Citizen Kane is great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler?

I mean, it's not that long. That's not like a long movie.

It is, it is a, it's a challenging movie. Like, it's not, it's not Mission Impossible. Dead Racking.

It's not even two hours long.

The Final Reckoning. It's not, it's not Top Gun. It's not just like you sit down, you're just like, wow, this is so engaging. Like, it is the type of, it is the type of movie that if you have modern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like, let me check Twitter for sure. For sure. Like, like. It is, it is, it is. It is as close as you can get to like cracking open a book, in my opinion.

I could give you movies closer to that.

Okay, yeah, something really, something really dense. But, but it's a slower paced movie. It's something that, I mean, it's even, it's even in like four by three. So on a modern TV, it's like render.

It's like UFC 319. Right?

I couldn't agree more. Exactly like that. So my, but my takeaway was that like the killer app, like, the rumor was that the person who worked on the Apple Vision Pro was previously at Dolby and had worked on the Dolby Immersive Cinema project. And so if you wanted to understand, like, the viewpoint of the team behind the Vision Pro was that it was a home theater on your face that you didn't need to buy an extra room for. And I felt like that was what it delivered on very well, except it was too heavy, too hot and a little bit too expensive. But the actual killer use case, I felt like it was there because if you love A movie and you throw it on like the content is solved. Like you can watch a great movie and be like, that was a good movie and you're letting the movie. We talked about this with Marc Andreessen where I was like, the iPhone was a good. IPhone was a good phone. And he was like, no, it wasn't. Which is maybe a good take. But eventually it wasn't.

Have copy and paste.

No.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you're like The Motorola Razr V3 didn't have copy and paste, but it could make reliable phone calls. And so my take was like, yeah.

It'S just worth remembering that it had some extreme shortcomings and it was frustrating.

To use and yeah, but it was, but it was easy to justify pretty quickly as, as a device that replaced another experience. Whereas it's, it's much harder. It's like the Apple watch works for those people because they're like, I want to know the time on my wrist. I'm used to wearing a watch. That's easier. It's much harder to be like pendant. Not a lot of people wear pins all the time. It's a harder, it's a harder act. The activation energy is higher. So I was always saying that, that going to making the movie experience really, really strong would be like in an obvious but killer app. I don't know if people agree, but Mark Gurman's talking about this in context of the Apple Vision Pro. He says Apple Vision Pro is suffering from a lack of immersive video. Apple has slow walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro. The company's AI and smartphone. Smart home roadmaps have come out. But when you get down to the core of the problem, Apple's Vision Pro headset is selling well for two reasons. One, it's $3,500 price tag and a lack of sufficiently compelling features. There are other issues, like a limited array of custom applications, the device's weight, and a cumbersome setup process. But those are less important. Developers are continuing to release apps and there are now accessories that make the device feel lighter on your face. I gotta try those. Apple has also dramatically improved its operating system. The latest version of the Vision Pro software, Vision OS 26, now offers widgets and has been well received. But none of that matters for Apple if people don't buy the Vision Pro. By all accounts, the device remains an extremely niche product. I'd venture to guess Apple has sold well under 1 million units in the US since launching it. A year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a priority for Apple. On the company's last earnings call.

I wonder how many of those units have been returned.

That's a good question. I mean, I would assume if you're quoting sales, you have to not include returns. I wouldn't be surprised if they've still sold.

I don't know. You can count sold.

That's very sketchy. If they include that.

Well, no, he's guessing. I'm just saying. I just wonder what the return rate is because didn't you return your.

Yeah, I think it was probably like 50%. They probably sold 2 million. They wound up like leaving 1 million out in the market, basically. I mean, they have so many Apple stores and it's such a device and, and it's such a moment. It took over the timeline. It was the current thing for like three days. People were talking about it. A lot of people tested it out, a lot of people kept them. A lot of people have the disposable income. But yeah, 1 million does even seem high.

Yeah, this is interesting. So Gurman says more of the headset just doesn't feel like a priority to Apple. On the company's last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook almost seemed surprised when a Wall street analyst quizzed him about the device and the company's strategy. Thanks for bringing it up, he said. Before delving. Mark Gurman is delving interesting before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we really believe in. So Gurman says in the near term, Apple isn't going to dramatically improve the Vision Pro. The next version, coming as soon as this year, will mostly just get a faster chip. That's a necessary Upgrade. The current M2 chip is outdated for such a processor intensive device. But it's not going to change the way that people think about the Vision Pro. The bigger upgrade is coming in 2027 when Apple will release a model that is both cheaper and lighter, he's reported. But that's a long time to wait and there's a risk that the category simply dies out by then. I think that I know a lot of developers that were super excited to capitalize on the release of Vision Pro. They had all this energy and excitement around getting access to the product, starting to build applications for it, and I don't know that any of them are still building for the product, which is a problem. This sort of like chicken and chicken and egg problem Apple.

So he provides a couple examples of like how little IMMERSIVE video Apple has really released. Apple is still featuring a highlight reel shot in immersive video of the NBA all star game from 2025. To be clear, the 2020 from 2024. To be clear, the 2025 all star game played a year after the one Apple is showcasing took place six months ago. And there's no immersion immersive vision of on the Vision Pro like you would assume. They shouldn't have just said, hey, let's go shoot one immersive video of the All Star Game. It's like, what is our NBA strategy?

What's our immersive video schedule?

Yeah.

And what is our Strategy to get 1% more content onto this device every single day forever.

Yeah. Or just have a big release every Friday.

Yeah.

You sold a thing $3,500 device to a million ish people. You should probably figure out how to deliver them content that makes it valuable.

If you look at the number of minutes that are being uploaded to YouTube every day, that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company. Basically it's just slightly more every single day. Sure, they probably have a few down days, but in general, social networks, the amount of content on them should be growing every single day. Any sort of media device, I'm sure Netflix is not like, oh yeah, like, you know, next year we're going to have less content on Netflix. That would be insane.

Yeah. So apparently the immersive content shoots are extraordinarily expensive and resource intensive.

So that is crazy because I looked into how expensive it is to shoot an immersive video and I feel like it's actually not that expensive. Like, yes, you need this fancy blackmagic cinema camera that actually just came out with a special lens. But you can just set it up. It can film for 45 minutes on one like, you know, SSD basically. And you can just upload that. The problem is that you can't. If you're doing CGI and you're doing editing and you're doing like scripting and storytelling and all that. Like the killer use case needs to be take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere cool and then allow people to watch that like in, in Vision Pro. And that needs to be it. And so this was, this was Ben Thompson.

It feels like there's so much, so much that they could do. You could take immersive video behind the scenes for the F1 movie.

Yes.

And make that available to people.

Yes.

It's like you can buy one, buy this, you can watch F1, you can watch behind the scenes with the actors, producers, directors. There's just a lot that they could do. But I think there needs to be something for users to really look forward to if they're going to invest in this device. And right now it doesn't really.

Yeah, the other thing is like, they should have, I feel like they should have done more like there was a little bit of like revealed preference in the fact that when you open up the Vision Pro, the app that's in the top left corner, like the first app, if you are reading left to right like a book, is the Apple TV app. Like it's very much like you should go watch a movie right now. You should click on this and then there's some other stuff. But mainly it feels like they're pushing that. But they should have done more to really, to really make it like a movie watching environment. Something that people really, really focusing on that narrowing instead of trying to do like seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for like educational content? Is it for this prehistoric planet thing and these like dinosaur stuff or games or collaboration? They had FaceTime in there. They just threw a lot in there and I feel like none of them will break out. Instead of just chopping it down and being like, okay, this is going to be the best place to watch an imax movie in 3D. And so you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know, maybe it won't even work if they pull that off. But it'll be interesting because Meta is going to fire back. So there'll be a small screen for mini apps and alerts in the right on the right lens. And the spectacles can be controlled via the neural wrist accessory. So think about it like Meta Ray Bans plus Google Glass, basically. So you have to look up here and you can see notifications, you can see a little bit. There's a different set of companies that are building basically movie theater watching glasses. So it's just a big screen. It's not VR, AR, it's not positionally mounted. It's just a screen on your, your face at a much lower price. I haven't tried them. I don't think that they're fully there in terms of resolution. A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple Vision Pro to commoditize to the point where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff, actually doing all the testing and then Apple will ultimately take that back.

Thank you.

It was like, I'm pretty sure like the multi touch screens like those were out there in other like the technology existed in other phones but it just was poorly implemented and Apple was able to come in and do like the.

Virtual There is an article from Eric Berger saying after recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the moon.

This is the case of Hammer.

I went there because it's because at this point it's difficult to come to any other conclusion and he is writing this article to explain. Eric Berger is an enormously bad for the United States reporter so in recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030. On August 6, the China manned Space Agency successfully tested a high fidelity mock up of its 26 ton Lan Yu lunar lander. The test, conducted outside of Beijing, used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there. The test, said the agency in an official statement, represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capture capabilities of a manned spacecraft. As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before 2030. Then last Friday, the space agency and its state operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology Pretty hard name successfully conducted a 30 second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket center core with its seven YF100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit. These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengju spacecraft in June. A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions. Thus, China's space program is making a demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements elements of its space program large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade. For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this. For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program. Been there, done that. Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that strikingly resembles the lunar module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable. With its lunar landers. NASA seeks to develop in space propellant storage and refueling technology allowing for lower cost reusable lunar missions with the capability ability to bring much more mass to the moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise. But recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA alongside Blue Origin's Mark 2 lander, indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. So it's now probable that China will quote unquote beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race. To put this in perspective, ours connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China space policy and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition.

And Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point. Only Wall street can save us. The solution is make the moon a state as Mike Solana suggested. Create mortgages on the moon and then securitize them.

And once Wall street allow retail to.

Go, once BlackRock owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business.

Yeah, yeah, they've been getting, Wall Street's been getting pushed back on owning single family homes.

They own 99% capital. Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now they own all of them. They bought my house for me. I didn't want them, I didn't want them to. They just bought it for me. I didn't have an option. Yeah, they were like sale and lease back you rent.

Now you will own nothing and you'll be happy.

Yes, that's exactly what happened. No, they actually own like 1% of house.

But Dean says the land you lander is significant because it's part of the usual China, Chinese crawl, walk, run approach to a major space project. The People's Republic of China can benefit from other people's experiences. Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecrafts themselves. So the test of the Lanyu lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process. So anyways, important to flag. We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently and it's tough.

It'S tough to bootstrap an economy like it is an incredible milestone and yet America's done It so there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first. It's not supposed to superlative. And then the question for SpaceX is are you better off landing on the moon or just putting up more starlinks and just making more subscriptions like it is? It is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage. It takes a long time. Maybe you need a new government program, some sort of incentive. I mean fortunately like we Firefly has been to the moon Blue Origin's planning, SpaceX is planning like there are a of lot competitive American companies that are working towards it. But the underlying incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now that might be higher value. Although it will be a very weird moment if, if China's just up and back on the moon, constantly running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon. We got to get back.

You got to get back there.

Welcome to stream Mark, how are you doing?

Good guys, how y'? All?

What's happening? Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you. Where should we kick it off, Jordi?

Where should we start?

Dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising.

Sure.

Maybe you could set the stage for us. What, what set off your alarm bells? What triggered your initial worry about this idea of ads in LLMs?

Because this isn't the Internet, right? It's not just a normal digital product platform. It's a platform that, depending on how it's trained, depending on what pre prompts you put in, it could be very manipulative. And there's not really age limitations at all. There's not really any limitations whatsoever. And normally I'd be, let's just be laissez faire, right? The market is the market. But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbit holes and, and other people being told to kill themselves and you just don't know what can happen. So if I build a model and it becomes popular, even if it's only a niche model, right? Just like there's headspace and there's calm. Let's just say I build the calm AI large language model and I have millions and millions of users and I want, and I have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever, right? And they're trying to get more sales and I need the money. I can easily, easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do. And that's my concern. And so if we just want to put up, you know, just little ad, traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all, you know, put them into the chat list on the left hand side. Great. You can do all the display ads you want. You could do video there all you want. But if it's in the response that comes back from the model, boy, you're going to have lots of problems.

Yeah, I think Sam Altman said something to this effect saying that artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent. It will be very good at convincing people. So it is reasonable. What do you think of Sam Altman's latest commentary on how open I might get into this world? That the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be, would not be monetizable. But if you, if it made a recommendation to buy a product and then you said, hey, I want you to go check out for me, it sends out.

It's already doing that, right?

Yeah, it's already referral fee. Is that okay?

Yeah, it's already doing it. You know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate. It's a whole nother thing. When there's a search query. Yeah, right. We get a lot of traffic from OpenAI chatgpt for cost plus drugs dot com. In fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs and I don't want to take the time to look at the latest price list, I'll just put in what's the price for you know, dare from whatever it may be and it's right there. And so yeah, of course they can extend that but response is a whole. And models are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query versus influencing and engaging in a chat.

I guess the question, yeah, I mean.

I think, I think to double down on what you're saying, an example if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent and maybe doing some product research and you have ads and you have, you know, organic listings or webpages, that's one thing. But if various AI models are seen as trusted advisors, if you compare that to a situation. If I ask John what kind of car should I get? And John starts giving me answers and saying like, I think you should, I really think you should get this car, it's really nice. And then I buy it and then later I find out John was getting a 10% kickback. I'm like, hopefully I like the car, but if I didn't, what are you doing? You know, and this happens In a business context too, you might, you know, people get in hot water all the time because they're taking referral.

In this particular case it's really easy. Just like, you know, there's, you know, emoji for sources or just says sources, you could put a dollar sign just to show they're being compensated.

Sure, sure, sure. And do you think that needs to happen at like the FTC FCC level or are you, do you think I.

Don'T know the legal convention of it enough? You know, hopefully it's self enforced but you know, there's the idiots and assholes who don't self enforce.

Sure.

And particularly for medical stuff. I mean, does it easier to chatgpt about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to? Sometimes.

But does that call example you gave matter? Because I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here. And yes, I could set up a search engine that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads. But how am I going to take market share from Google? People are going to go to Google and Google does say when it's an ad. And so as long as the power law winner is a good actor, we kind of.

There's also an interesting thing where there's this self, self enforcing sort of positive effect which is if, if people rely on ChatGPT, for example, to help them do product research and buy the right products and you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the product that they're getting paid the most eventually. I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize I'm not going to use this app anymore.

I wouldn't agree with that, Jordy, because I think people are primed for misinformation these, these days. You see it in health care continuously. You know, you saw it with COVID vaccines, people on their deathbed saying I wish I had taken the vaccine. You know, and you see it now with, you know, raw milk where now there's more people who have, you know, there's examples of people who have died and people just don't care. Yeah, you know, they just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, ChatGPT is woke up so I'm using right GPT. And that's because those are the kinds of answers I want because you know, there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group when it comes to the product decisions. Just like we saw the anti Bud Light and that kind of builds and you see Pro right wing products. I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another source. There's just so much personal identity in how we use technology. That's part of my concern.

How, how worried would would you say you are about AI? Broadly? I think over the last few months the industry has woken up to, you know, a year ago people were kind of laughing about AI safety. Right. And, and thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios. Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well being. If you just give hundreds of millions of people unlimited access to these tools, there is going to be some effect. Some people will be good, some people will be bad. But what's your high level read?

Well, it's changed a lot. We went from fear of the Terminator to fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect expect because they're such good communicators. Right. We can't talk to other people or we feel, you know, shy or not open and communicating with other people, experts or friends or otherwise. But this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time and depending on how it's programmed will compliment. What a great question, Jordy. What a great. That is. That is a really interesting approach. So a lot of things to be concerned with there particularly because AI is not smart.

Yep.

Right. AI is just statistical right now. And I'm of the mindset that that's not going to change for a long time. You know, one of the reasons that you don't see full self driving cars that are just everybody using no matter what is because it's easy. There's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car. You know, we have Australian, many Australian German Shepherd. Million Australian shepherd. Right. Tux and about 6 years old. I trust Tux at an intersection to know when to cross before you know that he's never been to before before. I trust a car. And that's the whole point with AI because they're just rules and laws and latencies that they, that it can't account for. It's all text, some graphics, some video, but it's always behind. And then that's part one, part two worse. I think we're going to see a groundswell in how intellectual property is dealt with. A groundswell change in how IP is dealt with. Because there was for a long time it's been publish or perish. Get your stuff out there. Get, get it into Journals make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert. Well, the minute you do that, right now it's going to get absorbed into, you know, training data for these models and you've lost everything you've just created.

Well, what if I want to, what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk and I want to get people and so I should just write as much as I can?

That's what you're going to do. Yeah, you're people are going to use bots to try to influence, to post things to try to influence. Like the robots text for, you know, for AI. You can, you can structure it in ways so you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all why raw milk is amazing.

Right.

But the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death. AI doesn't understand pain, AI doesn't understand context. AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago. It doesn't know that there was a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened. Right. I can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it. You know, this ball fell off the table, what happened next. Right. It's just not smart. And as long as it's not smart, it can be influenced. And B, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't, it doesn't have judgment.

So what would you tell the folks at OpenAI and the other foundation model labs on how to structure their business? It feels like a firewall between there needs to be some sort of truth seeking organization that's focused on, on delivering the highest quality results. And then on the flip side, you have a monetization team.

No, I mean you can't check for quality.

That's impossible. Yeah, of course you can. Like, you can, you can always like benchmark these things or just like vibe test them with the, with the, with the audience.

You know, Jordy was giving me shit. I was giving Jordy shit online.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Completely different, right?

What I'm saying is like, is like Google, Google does try and try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query. And then separately they have an ad auction function that, that adds as an ad platform and those two teams are separate. And so like if your age, if your age is showing up as one of those like knowledge boxes on Google, you can't just pay to have them change it. Like that's a separate business line and it's A separate team. And they are separate products in the ui. Yes, they exist on the same page, but they're separate.

And that's fine. Right? I mean, to me, the bigger questions are, what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today? Or at least as I understand it today. Right. I don't see AI getting smart. I look at AI and I think, it's the world's best library. Let me explain in another way.

Yeah.

We all have that one friend that remembers everything.

Yep.

Everything. Right. Hey, what did we do that one day back in college? Remember when you know our one buddy. Oh, yeah, this is da, da, da, da. That's AI, though. It'll remember everything. It'll give you the, you know, if you give it A, B and C, it'll figure out D, E, and F. Right. But it doesn't even know X, Y, Z exists. Just like you're right. So it is just like the world's biggest library. It is just like a meeting of the minds of just regurgitation. And so knowing that then you. You have to. There's going to be so much competition between the models. That is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation.

Right.

Because there's not. There'll be five, six, whatever it is, foundational models before there's consolidation. But beyond that, there's going to be millions of models, millions and millions of models. And every brand is going to need a model, particularly like in health care, like if you are Stanford Medical. Right. If you are Mayo Clinic, if you're MD Anderson, you're not going to just, you know, put out all your IP from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that ChatGPT can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge so it remembers everything that all your doctors and scientists did. You're going to keep that to yourself. And so in terms of the business models, these guys are going to have to start making decisions. Are they going to start paying a lot of money for content? Because as much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits. Right? You don't. You're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they.

Could cover and pay for a ton of content, to be clear. I mean, they're paying Reddit, they pay the New York Times. They pay all sorts of.

Yeah, we had, we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog. I was like, I assumed you already scraped it.

But think of it. If you're I mean let's talk about from the government perspective.

Sure.

So they just cut all these NIH grants. Right. All this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs which they have. Right.

Foundational research, basic science, all this research. Yep.

If the government really understood AI, they'd be like, okay, we're going to keep on investing in this research and then I'm going to make it available to the biggest bid, the highest bidder, whoever.

Privatize it. I like that. Make some money off.

Right.

It's not even a deal. Privatizing it, but monetizing it.

Monetizing it. I like this. This is good. Make some money off of that non profit research, are you?

Because that's the way things are working right now. Honestly, I don't have a problem with that at all. If it gets us more solutions but. Or doing our own, you know, the government doing its own model and making that available for a fee.

Yeah.

Those decisions from a business perspective that all these models are going to have to make. Otherwise how do they keep on adding more training data? Because there's no way to synthesize all that shit. You're not synthesizing, you're not creating synthetic data that all of a sudden is going to, you know, you could tell, you give it all the backstory you want, that you're a doctor, that you, you invented this, that you did that. It ain't going to invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent.

Yeah.

At any point during the hype cycle so far, did you think that this time might be different? There was, I would say a year ago the common, a common line was this isn't like the Internet bubble because there's real revenue. You know, these companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. This is different. This time is different. Meanwhile, and I wouldn't lean on this too heavily, but MIT had a report this week saying that 95% of Gen AI pilots in the enterprise are not turning into, not creating real value. I'm curious what your read has been.

I've been through every single technology event and evolution and this blows them all away. Now how you implement it in business is a whole different issue. Like literally When I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, well son, I got this receptionist right there, I got that secretary. I'm never going to need that shit ever. Right. And, but then, you know, my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage.

Yeah.

There are going to be integrators that particularly young kids, like when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21 or 19, 21 and kids going to school, what should I do? What should I do? I'd be like research, learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies. Right? Because to your point, companies don't understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage. You got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything's going to be customized to your unique utilization. Right. Or use usage. Who's going to do it for them? Particularly small to medium sized businesses. There are 33 million companies in this country. 30 million of them are solopreneurs. Right. Single person enterprises. There are only, you know, there are millions of Companies that have 1, 5, 10, 5100, 500 people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts. This is where kids getting hired, coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity. If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school, even whatever it is, your excess time and you're learning the difference between Sora and VO and you're learning how to do all this video, you're learning, learning how to customize a model so that then you can then walk into a company and say I understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store. We're selling and selling shoes online. Let me show you how to benefit you. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school because every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI and that's what people don't understand.

Yeah, we talked, we hired two, we hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built products instead of saying hey, here's what I can do. They just showed us, they took a day and just built something.

We said they went to chat. GPT or Perplexity.

Yeah, yeah, well, the bear, the bear case. John was joking about this though. I thought this was interesting. We, we, we had one of our interns built this product. It's tvpn.com guest is this guest directory transcript tool. And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it. So that was a, that was a bull case for software engineers still having a job.

But you don't even have to be a software engineer. Right. You just have. People are afraid to ask the models the right questions. They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that it can't, they can't answer kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow ups and their ability to prompt. They have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees.

Right. I completely agree. That's jobs for everybody. This feels like a, it feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and, and explore, learn, implement things at businesses. If all of a sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge.

Well, Mark's saying he's cool with display ads. He's cool with a Labubu showing up in the sidebar.

Yeah. On the side chat, that's fine. But think of it. Okay. There's a death war going on with the frontier models.

Yes.

It's zero sum game in their minds. Not all will make it. Some will get consolidated, maybe one goes out of business.

Yeah.

Right. And so for the next however many years, however long. There used to be a time when Excel costs $499 to buy a spreadsheet now worth, you know, not free, but like basically Google. Yeah. Google Sheets. Right. Google Docs, etc. The basic models are always going to be free because of ads.

Like the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business.

When was the last time you saw an ad in Google Sheets?

No, you don't. But the reason that they can subsidize is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash they don't care about monetizing it. Yeah.

But in the case, I mean.

To.

Take Mark's side, I mean, a subscription product also subsidizes a free product.

Yes, that's exactly right. So you're gonna have tiers.

Right.

Free. Your kids version, free. And those, those, those versions are going to have more constraints because they know high school kids, you know, seven year old kids are going to use them.

Yeah.

So there'll be all kinds of limits built in.

Yeah.

But then you get your $20 version and ChatGPT is doing what? $12 billion annualizing, growing quickly. That's insane. Love, you know, Lovable. All these guys were just crushing it. It's like I, I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia, which does, you know, talking avatars. I don't know if you know.

Cool. Yeah.

They're killing it.

That's great.

Killing it. It's just up and to the right.

Yep.

You start them off with it's just a whole freemium model. Right. That's been around forever and I think that's going to happen. But as you know, we talked earlier about buying ip. You'll see things go into different directions. So you'll have a chat GPT/healthcare and if you want that, it's an extra five bucks a month. You'll see chat GPT programming or math or foreign lang Duolingo version. Right. And it might be an extra 50 cents a month or a dollar a month, whatever it may be. And then there'll be, you know, entrepreneur version and it'll have all the integrations into all the, the states so that you just, you know, fill in these forms and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated. Because all the agents are will do all the work. All that stuff you can upsell.

Yeah.

And so. But if they're not using your model in high school, they ain't going to use it in college. If they ain't using it in college, when they go for that to that company, they're not going to use you. And I think that is a big deal. But I can't say it enough. All these people were in a trans transition period right now for kids coming out of college, whether you have a computer science degree or not, but you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree, it's probably not the right way to go. Go into any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete. There'll be more jobs than, than people for a long, long time because there's only going to. There's going to be two types of companies in this country, in the world. Those who are great at AI and everybody else. And this is not. AI is not intuitive. You're not going to take a 40 year old who's worked at a company for 15 years and say go play with ChatGPT and figure out how we can improve our productivity and improve our processes. Some people will put in the time to learn it, but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agents start doing things and then, you know, writing software on lovable or whatever and having all. It's going to be intuitive for digital natives and Gen Z who are going through school and graduating with that. That is going to be jobs left and right for sure.

Totally agree. Wanted to get your. We were just on with Vlad from Robinhood and he's super excited about getting everyday investors access to great private markets. Great companies in the private markets. Wanted to get your general read on that. You've obviously been part of Shark Tank for a long time.

You imagine if you were watching and you could be like, I want to invest. That seems extremely.

Yeah. And a lot of people have taken crack.

Sure. People have pitched you this exact thing.

I'm curious because. Because you obviously you. I can, I can see you being. Yeah. It's great when company. When. If retail can get into the next Figma. But there's, you know, not making a lot of figures.

Right. I've been anti. Not sweat equity, crowdfunding. Right. Crowd equity programs against it because there's no liquidity. People love a company, the next figma and they put in their life savings because they know FIGMA is going to the moon baby. And they can't, they can't get out.

Yeah.

And they gotta wait. That's the problem. And so that's part one to the problem, part two and more of a system systemic problem. There's just not enough IPOs. I mean it's like watching some of these IPOs. They're like meme coins now. Bam. They take off and then it's musical chairs to see who can get out the last but first. Right. And if you don't get out first or near the beginning, you're getting crushed. You know. And so is there a way whether it's tokenization or. Or other approaches to that. Probably. But it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker.

Yeah.

If Vlad or whoever is a market maker so that there's always some liquidity within X percentage of the last trade. Great. Then everybody can do it. And everybody's protected to a certain extent as long as they're not doing deals with where the people are just out and out lying. Right. Or misrepresenting it. At which point hopefully the CFTC or the sec, whoever happens to end up in charge.

Not enough just to bring access. You also have to bring liquidity. Last question. If Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president?

I mean it's easy to say yes right now, but that's probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider because otherwise I'm not. I don't want to do that shit. Not my dream to be president. I'd rather argue with you guys.

Yeah, yeah, it's my dream. Come back on the show. You'll be too busy if you're in.

The last, last question for me. Are you excited about the, the, the American taxpayer potentially taking a position in intel?

Oh, interesting.

You know what, it's a great question, Jordy.

So you're sounding, you're sounding like an AI. You're sounding like an AI.

Yeah, you sound like a.

You know what? What you don't know is I have chat. GPT listening.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's running clearly. He's running clearly.

It is a progressive's dream. This is the Bernie Sanders dream, the AOC dream. Because, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it, it's asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires. So when you take 10% of intel and first let me add the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think is awful because it was meant to be a grant and that was the deal the United States of America made. And now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country. I think that's bad. But generally, if this was okay, we'll put in more money in order to take. And we want 10% of intel. Obviously they can say yes or no. Just like Nvidia and AMD had the option to say yes or no on the H20 chips. Just like material, whatever. MP had the options. Yeah, politician.

Politicians have gotten so good at trading stock. Maybe we want, maybe we want them running our federal funds.

No, you don't. But, yeah, but if you're going to generate. If I, if I was running, right, And I would say Donald Trump did the same thing. He got this one right. Now the only question is, will he do it at the, the right time? Because would you. I'd rather take more money from taxpayers, the average person who might need to pay more. Or even the billionaires, the oligarchs, according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates from 39, 37 to 39 or 41? Or can I just take it this way? Right. Take it before it even gets to them. That's a progressive's dream. I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops and Elizabeth Warren. Yes, yes, yes. And make, you know, make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles along with every other supporter. Because those guys.

Well, if they.

If they got excited about it, he might reverse course.

Well, of course that's why they're being quiet, because they don't want him to reverse course. This is 40. Maybe that.

Maybe you're 40.

Aisle. Everyone's playing chess.

I mean, but don't you guys agree? Isn't it just like a progressive dream? Yeah, like. And, you know, so tariffs, which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitches, when you can convince 30 plus percent of people in this country that that tax that they're paying with increased prices isn't a tax somebody else is paying it. Amazing sales job. Right. So now that's $360 billion towards the deficit and everything. And if you can start doing these other deals that aren't piggish. Right. Meaning they're fair to the companies that are involved and they're not across the board, like tariffs, and start banging down on the deficit in the way. That is the ultimate progressive approach. He's turned into Bernie Sanders.

Yep.

He literally has, you know, only the better salesperson.

You're great at this. This is.

I give him credit, though. I'm not knocking them. Right. I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers because he is. He is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves.

Yep. This is great. Well, thank you so much for joining.

We'll have to do this again soon.

Yeah, we got to do this again soon. We got to find a new. New topic to argue about, but this is fantastic. Health care.

Let's go. Health care, I got. Wait till you hear my shit with health care.

Okay, yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it.

Tomorrow, health care debates in. We'll email you. I'll see you soon. Have a good night. Thank you so much for joining.

Appreciate it.

Talk to you soon. Take care. Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California, mansion abandoned. Kanye west, you know this story, right?

This is such a.

It's so crazy. So Kanye west bought a. So he bought a. A mansion on the beach in Malibu and had someone, like, completely tear it down. And it looked like it was going to maybe be a. A renovation, but then it just turned into a disaster zone, basically. So developer Andrew Mazzella was in contract to pay $30 million for the concrete structure designed by starchitect star architect. They call them starchitects. Tao Dao, Ando West. West who now goes by Yi, had purchased the house in 2021 for about 57.3 million and gutted it. And Mazzella plan to restore the house to its original glory instead. Mazzella's deal is off. Seller Bellwood Investments, which brought. Which bought the hulking property for 21 million in 2024, is claiming Mazzella was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzella has said a peek under the hood revealed the project would require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated. I'm not accused of misleading me how.

The idea that a, you know, a 20ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of.

Yeah.

Feels extremely like, basically exactly what you.

Should look at these pictures.

Like, I, I honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state, just like, keep it like, it's almost like a monument to going insane.

Yeah, it's like it is. And I never understood the rationale was it was.

It feels like. It feels like having this, like, incredibly. This incredible.

Yeah.

You know, brutalist but beautiful home and then just destroying.

Yeah.

It now feels like it's. It's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of. It's like perfect performance art.

Yeah. Yeah. Was it performance art or was it more just like. Kanye actually wanted to renovate it and the renovation just went off the rails because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up and permitting, and then they just have like a cement slab outside their house for 10 months or 10 years. Speaking from experience here, like, it is hard to do renovations. In mid August, the house went back on the market for 34.9 million, down from 39 million designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sachs. The house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms. West listed it in 2023amid a firestorm over his anti Semitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood brought bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly $8.5 million restoration project with fractional ownership model. It raised millions of dollars from investors for the Ando project. Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazzella, a commercial fisherman turned developer who until recently was based in Montana. The Malibu project was. Was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date. But closing was delayed. Mazzella couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a Revised offer of 19. Of course, this. This is post Fire. So there were a lot of fires in Malibu. There were. Basically was locked down. It was a bad time. And the market.

Mazzella had a contract to buy the home for a certain price.

Yep.

Decided at a. At a later date that he wanted to pay less.

Yep.

And Belmont is pissed because. And he has a quote here. Mazzella turned out to be nothing more than a quote, unquote, Cowboy F from Montana who was, quote, unquote, trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence.

Huh?

Happens.

Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe?

There he is.

Welcome to the stream.

What's going on?

Live at the TBPN Ultradome. What's new with you? How you doing? I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation you're starting.

Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Interesting.

Everyone saw that. Everyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. Sure, sure. What. What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief.

Yep.

The agency honestly like, to. To rewind. Where. Where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about Mischief because probably what you see see is, like, videos of people wearing boots or, like, press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like, a handbag division, there's a footwear division, there's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with, like, more bigger permanent structures. Well.

Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I hit the.

Nice.

Nice.

So we've been operating like that for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's, like, normal stuff, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also, like, design and marketing. And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of, like, Mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever.

Yeah.

So the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is, like, maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger, too, because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last, like, six years. What have we not touched yet? And, like, maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like, maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's, like, cool. We can.

Well, it's amazing. It's there. What, what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with, with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with, with startups and, and scale ups and things like that. But what, what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out.

Can we partner with a company. Mike Jones does an Apple app. It's like that's just not. There's a special. There's something special about that, about just like giving. It's almost like patronage in some ways it's marketing, but it's just like it's still art and it's cool and it's like unbridled.

Totally. Right. Like the way that we look at these is like it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca Cola is material. Give us that and we'll make something new with it. Instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways. Right. The opportunity is like there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with.

So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural material. If you come up with just like, I have a great idea, it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never going to think about this, but I need to. The only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying I have the idea for you, or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down, do ideas.

I'm going outbound.

Outbound right now.

Nice.

This is a method for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine.

Yeah, that would be an amazing project.

That's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design bit that you're putting into space.

I love it.

We were look, we were Fast company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled. So let us, let's like put some stuff.

We got a, we got a space play for you. With, with a company that we're very close with. I won't say anymore.

Yeah, well, we'll talk after the stream.

I, I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly, on the business model of the new agency. Is there a world where you would, you would, you know, the standard agency model will be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one off, more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like $10 million of this and we will only price based on success. Is that, is that something you would consider doing?

It's totally on the table. And that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route. Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together, we both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting though is because of Mischief's position as like this artistic entity. Like in a way, like we have a personality, we have an audience and so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures.

Yeah.

With bigger birds.

That's what I was like. Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units.

Yeah. Over forever, basically.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Like I want, I want the, I want a Mischief themed line of kids toys. Right. Like I would happily buy those. I would buy a bunch of those. Right. And so that's like if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars and I would even pay a premium.

Yeah.

Because I know it's you guys behind it.

Yeah.

Another question I have, you know, I've, I've leveraged the, the Drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company party Round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops and it's because they're inspired by Mischief and they just see like drops get attention. I want attention.

One drop please, sir.

One drop, please.

One drop, please.

The usual, sir.

Sign me up.

The thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm Curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising. And they don't even know the difference. And so like where, where's that line from for you? And how often are, you know, would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to do advertising.

Yeah, just like a consistent message delivered via every channel. Forever might be the right thing for.

Not even forever or like a few months or a quarter.

Yeah, I would, I would take it even further. And it's, it's like that is the final goal, which is like get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But like the, the focus on the drop is, is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for, like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise? And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry, that's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material, that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop.

Just make something interesting that's our ideas valuable. And if you had to kind of think about a significant making something new, how much is it? Is it the idea versus the execution?

Do you hire idea guys and then like operational excellent people and they're like a dividing line.

Yeah. And to me, I, John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're get, we're feeding you this like incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these, these things that in your hands they might be million dollar ideas but. But poorly executed. Negative value.

Yeah, totally. I think it's like, like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where like the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both, that's the magic, right? That's. But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to, it's you just, you don't. You want to de risk on the concept side. John, to your question. I don't hire idea people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did, I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that's sold at auction for $63,000 at Paris Fashion Week, at Pharrell's Whatever, Coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer our general counsel joins brainstorms our ops lead points. Brainstorms, because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human, you have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also, like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid. And I think that's like a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupider, including myself.

What? Have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts? This is something that we, we end up doing.

I think David Ogilvy said simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in Mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept?

I think there could be. The line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there are layers, right? Like you appreciate it for the headline, but if you, you like really dig into it, you're like, wait up. Is this thing making fun of me and do I still like it and am I gonna buy it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts, right? It's like the layers are good, the ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like people's attention spans are so low and, and honestly like, people are just. We're all, like, very distracted. So you don't have a lot of window to, like, nail it. So you do got to have that one liner, like, pretty dialed in.

Yeah.

How. How dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the Internet? Like, do you have a. Do you feel like you usually have, like, a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get? Do you get surprised, or do you still get surprised? Surprised often.

Totally still get surprised. Like, you always. You always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh, yeah, like, this will work. Because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like, I don't know if this is gonna work. And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people gonna buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did.

Yeah.

No.

You know, like, is there a project that you think is, like, criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what's your example of a project? You're like, ah, that's still, like, one of my favorites.

Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared.

Okay.

And so we buried it in an art show that we did. But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the Ship of Theseus?

Yes, but explain it for the listener.

Totally. So it's like. It's this old paradox where imagine you have this, like, large wooden ship, and every day, over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship, and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? We found that a very interesting question, and so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As one does.

How do.

As one does.

Yeah, explain.

So we.

We found the sync. We did recon. We. Not me. I'm not.

I.

It wasn't me personally. Somebody here names. But we found, you know, we. We tracked down the serial numbers, the parts ordered exact. Like, replica. We. We ordered the exact same parts. Built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. And then the next day, do it again. And do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw.

Just an art enthusiast. I just like art and I go to the bathroom.

That's all big. How'd you get the big piece through? Isn't there, like, one piece that.

That. So that we decided to leave.

Okay.

That we did not swap out, although we had a plan. We fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the seat. But I'm telling you, we got. We got a little bit. We were honestly scared.

Got a little carried away.

We still. We still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they have our sink and we have their sink, and ours is now part of, like, our art gallery.

So that's amazing.

Although. Although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it. Because as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of, like, hidden in all of the other pieces, people definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom.

They should have.

They should have sectioned it off, turned.

It into an installation.

If any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back.

Let's make it happen.

Let's make it happen.

Army, how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? The painful question, is it, like, it has to be, like, 100 million? Like, at least.

Yeah, probably.

Honestly.

Probably.

Probably, yeah.

And is there. Is there, like, there. I'm sure. I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like, we did something back in the day with Party Round. Where we did it was called Helpful VCs, where we made CryptoPunks for every VC. And then we put them on a website and we said, you have four hours to retweet these, otherwise we're going to auction them off. And it was, like, for, like, charity, right? We weren't, like, trying to make money, and that was, like, one of the ways that we broke through. And, like, shortly after.

I think there might be something to do with crypto and, like, stablecoins, where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. You have to remove. You have to make it not like a speculation, you know, because as soon.

As you leave the like, like the, the people who get the joke are. And then the people who don't get the joke show up and then the, and then they're losing their life savings. That doesn't feel good. Whereas like, if somebody, you know is bidding on that handbag, like, they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's. They understand that.

Look, I think, I think that crypto route for us is. We've often plotted our own death and I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug. Yeah, I shouldn't even be saying that because now everybody's going to know.

Everybody's going to know.

Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys. So one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys jobs anytime soon, despite it being able to maybe piece together random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for, for some of, for some of these various plays?

Honestly, tbd and I think, I think it's. I do, I will say, like, unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple of years, we, we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That, that's like the truth. Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, it is rooted in something real, but we're not in a rush to use it necessarily. If it's going to be here forever, we've got time. Mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to make use of a format. We'll see. We just have to see.

How do you think about. Are there any projects like time is an interesting variable that you can play with. Right. Like part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is just the narrative and the story of like you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very. And that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays, like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious. And, but, but again, take this sort of incredible planning.

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that. Right. Because like, if you think about it, we were.

Yeah.

If you, if, if you had, you know, I know you guys have, have a few investors. If you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt and you're there, like, all right, buddy, like, why don't you put some points on the board first?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you guys, I feel like I've earned it now. Like I, I, you know, something like a decade.

No, yeah, because like, we've, we spent basically, like, we've only been around for the pandemic and post, like a little bit. Post pandemic. Right. And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming. Like, live day by day, like, just survive. Like, banks are shutting down. Okay. Get through tomorrow. Right now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure and now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what does that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we, should we disappear for 20 years and then come back? That would, that would actually be the coolest thing we could do, is go dark for two decades and then come back.

It's worked for other artists. Could you do something? So we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show.

I've heard a lot about it.

I haven't watched it.

I mean, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys's level in the sense of he's next level. Yeah. Like one sentence, you know, pitch. That's hilarious. But then the more you get into it, like, the funnier it is. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade long stunt? Like Mischief, like Mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of housing in the United States.

I mean, that was crazy.

Like, we, if there are any like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture. We have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive.

I can just see like, like the right rv. Like there's, there's this RV outside of our gym.

Yeah, yeah. Yellow from the sun.

Like the windows are open.

Aluminum on the outside. Yeah. Winnebago. It can be A stunt for Winnebago Corporate.

How do you feel about the state of social media? Like, broadly, it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy. Even thinking about how durable like Twitter and X have been despite all this change. But what, what's your. And, and do you even. Do, do you feel like you need to use social media or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a love hate relationship with the, with the platforms. Right. Because like platforms, if you, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting and now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty based and more vanity based, which is fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct. So I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. And every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone.

The Cha Ching.

The Cha Ching.

I am now banned from Venmo for life.

Well, PayPal.

Let me know.

PayPal. We'll have the CEO of PayPal on.

I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll, we'll, we'll work on it.

We should get work on it first. This is, this is important. We were, we were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The examples were the viral Labubus, Dubai Chocolate, the viral Italian Sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost. And I was wondering if, if you're worried about the spillover from Internet slop culture into the real world. Just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there.

But I think I saw it on Instagram.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. You probably did a front Facing video talking about it, or you saw someone do a front facing video talking about it.

Reaction video.

Yeah.

I mean, look, it would. I, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like, what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category.

Yeah. I mean, the boots. The boots, right?

Like, it's like absurd, Absurd aesthetic. And maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that response.

No, you guys, definitely that, that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the Everlane era, quite luxury boots. The boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that being like absurd aesthetic.

Just like popping imagery off of your screen.

But then the challenge, the challenge with this, this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's, it actually becomes, I mean, maybe, maybe as like for me, right, I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s. I'm in my late 20s now. Eventually maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist mischief item for my home. But at the same time, once you get on the maximalist track, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep going crazier and crazier. And maybe in the Internet era, there's no turning back.

It's totally possible, right? We might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And how do you break free from that?

Right?

But I'm not too worried. We actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like and then if it ever stops working, then do something else.

Well, I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time a, an A list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more, more viral than the scandal.

They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a bitcoin to this address and I'll send you two bitcoin. And then they actually do it.

They actually do it.

Genius. Yeah. That is a get. That is a one time get out of jail free card. You heard it here first.

Just payoffs.

If you. Yeah. If you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're. You're, you're caught at a Coldplay concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide.

You'll be good. Yeah, sure.

Go for it. Yeah.

Awesome.

This is great. Yeah. Thank you.

It's really great, great to get the update and just hear your so much clarity on. On all these different areas that we talk about all the time.

Yeah. We could talk for hours. Yeah. We'd love to have you back whenever. Whenever it makes sense.

Yeah. We gave Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll leverage that for your next appearance. I can't wait for it.

100%.

Let's do it.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Great to catch up. Cheers.