The Exchanges, every show

Q How much money are they making? Do you guys have, is this like a five million dollar company? 50? 500? Like what's going on with this?

A I would put it in tens of millions, but this is the interesting like bull case is that right now they have like a very respected analysis group, but they're also launching a fund allegedly according to the information to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups, and they're already doing angel investing. And then also they're going to do credit ratings. And so the real model to think about this, the comp is Moody's. So if you're familiar with Moody's, they do credit ratings and Moody's got started during the railroad build out because the, the, the railroad build that was so capitally capital intensive that there was a huge, there was a huge secondary market for like, okay, is this person that's going to build this railroad from, from Chicago to Atlanta? Like, are they good for it? Do they have the money? And so Moody's is now an eighty billion dollar business. And I, and if you look at the stock, like it, Moody's has not moved during the sell-off, like it's doing fine, and yes, this is very indexed to, to the AI boom, but the, the actual business can be very, very stable, very high margin, and very big, like much bigger than people think when they think of just like publishing analysis.

AI assessment note: “I would put it in tens of millions”

Q And let's not, let's not take, take away their Their desire to go political. They enjoy the culture war, right? Like those guys like duking it out on the timeline with the Taylor Lorenz's of the world. And they just enjoy it. It's like a sport to them.

A And it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger. Like when J Cal's posting, like we're the number one podcast, he's not even talking about like the number one podcast in technology anymore. Like he will have episodes, like the all in show will have episodes. They're like the number one podcast in all the categories. And it's because it appeals to Everyone. If they were just sticking to deep dives on, oh, what AI agent is the best, or what startup got funded, like, they're not gonna, they're not gonna go broad, and they want to go bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and this is very natural, and it creates an opening for new shows to come in. This is what happened with Lex Friedman. He used to be the artificial intelligence podcast. It was all AI researchers. Then eventually he broadened out, started having political people on, started having You know, Jocko Willink on and Rogan and all sorts of different people on health stuff. And that created the opportunity for Dwarkesh who's doing fantastically. And now Dwarkesh is doing Tony Blair and eventually Dwarkesh will broaden out to all sorts of different topics that he's interested in. He won't just be the AI researcher show and then there'll be a new Dwarkesh and that's great. And it's this virtuous cycle that should not be, it shouldn't be criticized. It's just, it's a positive thing.

AI assessment note: “And it helps them get bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Q influencer, and basically the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company, he was just like, sure, that sounds great. The business does like, you know, millions of dollars a year in revenue now. So you can just do things, you can just pitch things, right? And these guys, like, you know, had they waited even another few weeks, maybe the opportunity never would have happened.

A Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. It's not like these guys were like ex-Facebook, ex-Twitter, like really established in social media. They just had the connection to Trump through the show. Clearly, like, a lot of energy, and you'll see that throughout this, this story. Like, the, the dates, we'll go over the dates, and it's, like, major milestone every, like, three months. Like, the speed of execution here is, is very remarkable. Faster than what I would think would be possible, given the scale of the operation. Um, so they go to, they go to Mar-a-Lago, they, they pitch it, and they kind of break down this idea of this, Truth Social, new media offering. They're talking about a streaming service, online payments network, a social media platform, and can you guess what the deal terms were? This is, this is fascinating to me because, like, we know a lot of companies that have done deals with celebrities, and it ranges all the way from like, oh, we just paid them a CPM deal, and they posted on their Instagram, to, oh, we gave them a couple points of equity, to like these fifty-fifty deals that happen every once in a while. I, I, I know some people that just did one of those. Um, in this case, Trump got 90% of the new company.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. It's not like these guys were like ex-Facebook”

Q I don't know. I think it's also very much this, this mean people love to talk about on X. Yeah. They like to kind of, you know, scapegoat. Oh, you know, it's all distillation. That's the only reason Chinese models are good. Yep. Is that actually true?

A Uh, I mean, Anthropics Head of National Security Policy, Taran Chabra, accused Zipu, Z.ai, uh, of distilling both Claude and OpenAI models for GLM-Five. Two at the Aspen Security Forum, Earlier, uh, this week, this is from Vincent Chow, senior AI reporter at SCMP. He said it's the first time that they've named Zipu specifically after previously calling out Deep Seek, Alibaba, Moonshot, and Minimax, uh, join the, join the club at this point. Um, also accused, they also accused Deep Seek of continuing its adversarial campaign of distillation. Anthropic is now shutting down distillation accounts on the order of millions accounts of per week. That is crazy scale. You have to, I, I mean, you always think about it as like, oh, there's like shut down that one company or shut down that one block of IP addresses. But when there's a really, really distributed attack, we've even heard about whole companies that just like resell Claude tokens or, or GPT's 5.6 tokens. And that looks like a reasonable business because it's just a wrapper company. Of course you want to work with them, but then you don't realize that on the other side, who are their customers? Why do they, why did they get to a hundred million run rates so quickly? Well, maybe it's a lab that's trying to distill through this pass through entity. And of course, it's hard to like watermark the tokens once they go out the API and…

AI assessment note: “Taran Chabra, accused Zipu, Z.ai, uh, of distilling both Claude and OpenAI models”

Q What was the, the, the most expensive Beanie Baby Transaction ever. Do you know?

A I don't know. I, I do know that prices peaked, uh, throughout just, they perfectly tracked the dot-com boom. So in two, in 1998, uh, Ty, which is, uh, Ty Warner, his company is called Ty, uh, T-Y, they make beanie babies. They made 1.4 billion dollars in sales, making it one of the fastest growing toy companies in history. Two years later, the market crashed almost overnight. Prices on the secondary market plummeted, a supply overwhelmed demand, and speculative buyers exited. So people were in the habit of, um, and yes. Interesting. The chat is correct. Uh, eBay was a major, major driver of, uh, Beanie Baby's growth because people could buy them and then the secondary market was way more liquid than ever before. Before it was like, okay, if you buy some, some rare drop or some limited edition thing, And you want to go sell it. You have to go to like a trade show that maybe happens every once in a, once a, once a year. You have to find maybe your local shop, but there's not that much liquidity. Remember when we were talking to our friend about the, uh, the, the, the, the collectible card market, Beatles memorabilia. He was saying like, I only need two buyers. It's very easy to find two buyers. If you're, if you're, if you're interacting at internet scale, it's harder if you're in some town and you have a rare Beanie Baby and you need to see Are there any other crazy Beanie Baby …

AI assessment note: “I don't know. I, I do know that prices peaked”

Q Uh, they are making it available to pro users, but why don't you get into what they're actually doing?

A Yeah. So they, in the announcement here, they say they're releasing operator, which is an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Now, ChatGPT four O has already been able to go to the web and retrieve individual HTML pages, suck them in and use that as context. So it can get more up to date data, but this is a step forward in that the operator It has its own browser and it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. It's currently in research preview, meaning it has limitations. Uh, but this is one of the first agents, which are AIs capable of doing work for you independently. You get a task and it will execute it. And this is fantastic. I think this is gonna be very, very helpful. Um, there's already been the ability to use ChatGPT to write a little bit of code, like little code snippets. So I was doing something where I wanted to, uh, scrape A website and just paginate through there, like, 20 pages of standard formatting, like, you know, list of, uh, of like, I think it was like podcast episodes and I just wanted them all on a spreadsheet basically. And it was able to write the Python code for me, but it didn't really work because it needed like JavaScript and stuff. It was like, it just wasn't, it just wasn't quite there. But with this, it's, it's like the AI has a web browser that can fully render a webpage and just click t…

AI assessment note: “they're releasing operator, which is an agent that can go to the web”

Q Do you want to re-explain the bucket?

A Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, so, so we have, so, so we have, you know, we react to a lot of, A lot of posts from X on this show. We wanted to create some differentiation here. And so, uh, when we see something on the timeline, that's a banger, it's, it's from a friend, it's from a brother, maybe a previous brother of the week, someone really important. It's about a really important topic. We put it in this stack. We print it full size. It's a banger. This is from Max Meyer. You know, it's going to be good. It's important. He's setting the discourse, but every once in a while we see posts that are good, but from people we don't know, Maybe they're just kind of random, timeless. We could just react to them whenever we want. So we print them on these small four by six cards, and these are the bucket poles. We put them in the bucket.

AI assessment note: “we print them on these small four by six cards, and these are the bucket poles”

Q like a product that you could eat, you could drink, um, that wasn't software based and, but still was innovative. And so it was like kind of in this mix. And I remember Andreessen Horowitz got behind it and some others. And so it was very interesting thing. And I think it started out of like a hacker house, right? Like you guys had a crazy house. Is that right?

A Yeah. Uh, I mean, a bunch of funny stories from that. This was the, yeah, Warby Parker was like the first e-commerce company to kind of think about it from like a tech first angle. Uh, we were a couple of years after them, um, right around the same era as like Dollar Shave Club, if you remember that company. Um, but yeah, we met in a hacker house. Uh, my, my co-founder and I, we went to preschool, middle school, high school together, went to college in the same city. And so we move out to Silicon Valley. We're looking for a place. We find something on, uh, like Craigslist. It's like an Airbnb listing. And they're like, this place is incredible. It's got a pool. It's got five bedrooms. It's exactly like the social network. You're going to love it. We show up. The pool is filled with algae. The bathrooms don't work. It's just absolute squalor. So we grind for like six months there. Eventually we moved to the tenderloin, which is an even nicer community. And And, uh, we're living in technically a one bedroom with three guys. So I was living in the living room. Another guy, uh, Rob, the guy who actually came up with the idea for storyline, he was living in what was technically a closet. Cause it didn't have a window. And we were just, we were just hacking.

AI assessment note: “we met in a hacker house... We show up. The pool is filled with algae.”

Q John, you, uh, you're cool because you, um, I think you're like us, uh, but maybe even more extreme in the tech world and that you have your foot in the startup world and you're hanging out with these big wigs, but you're also can just joke around and shoot the shit and like you're pretty self-aware. Who, uh, what do you align with? Who do you align with politically?

A Oh, uh, yeah, I, I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas. Uh, he was, uh, he's a smaller candidate, so he's not polling super well, but he worked for the CIA, and he also was on the board of Palantir, and he would be the first computer scientist president, and I think that that would just be very, very interesting to see someone with a CS background. Obviously, I love programmers, and I, I think that they think about the world in very interesting ways, and we've had this very long, long arc of, you know, lawyer, lawyer, businessman, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, right? Like, that's the story, and he's like a younger guy, so, uh, I'm, I'm proud to endorse him.

AI assessment note: “I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas.”

Q Could it be something to do with their fee streams?

A Well, someone had a much more, uh, nuanced take from this, which was that, uh, celebrities are becoming, like, multi-platform, multi-disciplinary. There actually are multiple income streams, and so, this was not, I, I gave a quote too that they didn't use, but someone, someone chimed in and said, like, yes, a lot of these people are, a lot of these celebrities are doing, Um, much more complex deals. Uh, starting brands, starting companies, building holding companies, and so they actually wind up interacting with, like, the finance bros much more, much more often, and it's not so much like, oh, you got set up with someone with money. It's much more like, oh, you work on deals together, and you talk about the same things, because when you're a celebrity at a certain level, yeah, you're going on set and filming a movie for a couple weeks.

AI assessment note: “There actually are multiple income streams, and so... celebrities are doing much more complex deals”

Q Yeah, I mean, isn't it from, like, min maxing?

A Min maxing, and that's what I'm getting at. Like, you shouldn't be token maxing or token minning. You should be token min maxing. And the idea of min maxing is when you're in a video game, you want to get the most resources for the lowest cost. So if you're playing League of Legends, you're going to put just the right amount of, of gold into this particular item or this particular stat point in an RPG, and you're going to try and find the optimal build based on your resources. You have confined resources. And somehow, It feels like these like tech and all these companies went through some sort of hallucinatory, hallucinatory period where they lost sight of that. They should always have been min maxing because that is the goal of business at all times in all things. You would never say like, oh yeah, we're ad maxing this quarter. We're going to buy as many ads as possible. Oh no, it didn't work. We, we spent way too much on ads. They were not effective. We need to admin spend as little as possible on marketing. It's like, no, you always want to be spending. You always want to be getting the most return on ad spend, the highest leverage output.

AI assessment note: “Min maxing, and that's what I'm getting at. Like, you shouldn't be token maxing”

Q Page has said internally at Google many times, I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race. Everybody is focused on ROI, but the people making the decisions are not basically saying that, uh, scale, it's all about scale. Uh, you just, they're going full set, right? They're not thinking they're, they're optimizing for winning, not necessarily, you know, uh, in this spreadsheet, optimizing purely for, uh, immediate ROI.

A Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're in the position to generate a lot of cashflow, it is kind of the per the game theoretic optimal thing to over invest in a new huge technology. You have to, uh, because if you don't invest in the technology wave happens, you look really stupid. You lose your job. If the technology wave happens and you invest, then you're good. And if the technology wave happens, uh, if the technology wave doesn't happen, but you didn't invest, you don't really get as much credit for that. Because then you're just kind of stable where you are. Uh, and so, it's this, it's this uncapped opportunity with a lot of downside if you don't invest, so people are pushing it. What you laughing at?

AI assessment note: “it is kind of the per the game theoretic optimal thing to over invest”

Q You think it would a hundred percent have killed the deal?

A Almost certainly. I think one of the key deal points In the negotiation with Google was we do it via Google's comms and legal strategy because Google does not want to get hit with some crazy FTC lawsuit. That's going to not just be some multi-billion dollar settlement, but also a huge headache for years and bad press and stuff like that. So Google says, Hey, we, we want to do this our way. It's going to be awkward, but we're going to take care of everyone. And, and yes, we will. Yes, we will leave. Enough money on the balance sheet to pay out all the unvested options. And, but in exchange, you got to do the comms our way, which was rough. You have to create a terrible, you have to be scapegoated by the entire, you have to get hazed.

AI assessment note: “Almost certainly. I think one of the key deal points In the negotiation with Google”

Q You're thinking, this day I turn 18, that's gonna be me. Wait, is it, is it 18 or 21?

A It's 21 now. That also changed recently. Um, so Enjoy comes out with one of the first big e-cigarettes. It's, it's an example of that, uh, you know, older technology that has the big vapor cloud. Um, and the FDA hits them with a lawsuit and says, hey, you are selling an unapproved medical device. This is a device, it's electronics, and it's a medical product because you're making a medical claim, and that medical claim is this product helps you quit smoking. Smoking addiction, cigarette addiction is a, Is a disease. And so, by selling a product that helps you quit smoking, you need to be regulated by the FDA. ENJOY fights this back and forth. It goes all the way to the Supreme Court. ENJOY wins. Because they were kind of not saying that, at least they made the argument that they were not saying this is to help you quit smoking. They were just saying, this is a cool thing to do, separately. Don't worry about it. Don't ask us about the relation to smoking. This is classic. Um, but in the interim, The FDA is able to put an import restriction on the company, so they're making the product, I believe, in China, probably overseas somewhere, because it's electronics, it's equipment. They bring it in at the ports, and the FDA says, hey, while we sort out this lawsuit, you can't bring any more in. And so this is kind of like the ban hammer that they bring down. It winds up bankrupting th…

AI assessment note: “It's 21 now. That also changed recently.”

Q calling, emailing around the clock. People will just probably start ignoring people that they don't know. Um, so it'll be interesting to see, but I would say like the other side of this is that you will still have the young tech kitty team that uses the AI tools better than the veteran who knows what to build and they have relationships, but maybe you can't build as fast, right?

A Yeah, I, I think it's a good thesis. I wonder if the age thing will hold because I'm thinking about the, the tech programmer kitty that the reason that they're good at programming is that they stay up all night and they code constantly. If you take someone who's 16 right now and instead of getting them obsessed with programming and scripting and writing little apps, they instead become obsessed with Industry research, understanding an industry really well, and they actually are going to like, they pick a very niche specific industry. They go to all the conferences. They're there. If they raise money, they're spending it on Tegas and GLG doing expert calls. They're networking like crazy. They go and do internships in this thing. Like, can they actually learn the true nature of that industry and gain the expertise of someone who's 40 in four years if they work Nights and weekends and constantly, and they're obsessed over it. I think it might be possible for, for, for a twenty-year-old to still check all of the SAM lessons.

AI assessment note: “I think it's a good thesis. I wonder if the age thing will hold”

Q What do you like? Okay, now I'll surface.

A Now that I see myself walking around like, like in the rain in LA, in downtown LA, and it's a photo real image of me in a red jacket and then a navy jacket and then a black jacket, I can say, okay, I think, I think I look best in the navy. Let's go with that. Let's look at some materials up close. It generates images of those. It finds that. And then it also tells me, okay, I want this material or this, or this material, and I wanted this price point and this one will ship and it's made in America or something like that. And then it surfaces that. And then, and then it's, it's like all of these things, like there's still like chat interfaces, but there's no reason why they can't be audio interfaces. They can't be video interfaces. So you could eventually get to a point where, where, you know, your, your shopping interaction is essentially like an AI avatar, like holding the thing up. For you and saying like, here's the jacket and it's purely in synthetic, but then the actual jacket comes to you.

AI assessment note: “I think I look best in the navy. Let's go with that.”

Q Yeah. You have to understand, like, are you still going to want to do this product? If in the first year you do a million, the next year you do three million. The next year you do three million and then the next year you do 10 and the next year, like, are you still going to be wanting to play that game if it's not a rocket ship?

A It probably means less venture capital and it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at The stories of like Red Bull monster, like these guys, they grind for years and years and years, and then they pop because they're in a big market and they do have the, the branding and formulation cracked, but they're, but they own enough to make it worth it. And as long as you get, I think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like, you have to work super extra hard to get the first, to get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life Like worth living basically. And then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses, your kids are in good schools and stuff, then it's like, okay, well I can grind and compound for a very long time.

AI assessment note: “then it's like, okay, well I can grind and compound for a very long time.”

Q dollars. Um, and it's going to take a little bit of time to get there, but if you kind of, it really is, is it kind of a, uh, uh, uh, uh, it's, it's not, it's no longer a venture product, right? So you're sort of treading water and not embracing reality. Um, and going with Gafon and companies is a much better option than just shutting the company down.

A And people kind of like know this deep down at the later stage where, you know, if you're doing a hundred million ARR, it's like, okay, private equity exists. Everyone knows Bain, KKR, all these companies that are very obvious and they probably calling you, um, or strategic acquisition that could be very valuable, or maybe try and take the company public, but people don't realize that like this, This, like, kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an acquihire and more like a special situations deal with somebody like Jeremy. So, uh, anyway, good luck to you, Ben. I hope you figure it out.

AI assessment note: “people don't realize that like this, This, like, kind of zombie stage”

Q with like devastating injuries because something blew up. And, um, there's a real, I, I, I don't think, uh, I'm all for giving smart young people lots of money to, to do ambitious things, but It's almost like they're, find the balance of it, right? So, but, so bet on, bet on the kid, bet on the dropout, but go get them somebody from Lockheed Martin to be their chaperone.

A That's the under discussed thing about Facebook. They had some like VP of engineering who was like 45, who was there very early. I forget what this guy's name is, but he was like, allegedly like very important in like stabilizing the company early on when it was a bunch of crazy kids running around. And And he had like just the right level of respect to be like, okay, when he speaks up, we should listen, but he's not trying to like, be like, oh, we got to bring in NetSuite. He wasn't like, he wasn't slowing anything down, but he was providing like just enough, like, you know, basic rules. Cause at one point, like Facebook was all just like one file on a, on a web server. And like, when you wanted to make a code change, you would just be like, Hey everybody, I'm pushing the Code like nobody make any changes. I'm going to update the file or whatever, like the files on the web server. It was like, it was like crazy. And he like brought in like cool stuff that like cool process that everyone's like, okay, yeah, this process actually makes sense.

AI assessment note: “That's the under discussed thing about Facebook. They had some like VP of engineering”

Q So, but like, what do you do in that five year period?

A Because we, because we launched in 2016, we were able to continue selling our products. So we were doing a ton of sales and I mean, it was still slow. It took a long time to, to introduce this product to people. We started with a nicotine gum product. Uh, and, and I mean, I think we did a great job with formulation and branding. Like it, it, it, it is a better product. Um, but we would constantly get compared to Nicorette. Nicorette's very cheap. There's also generic Nicorette there. Amazon has a Nicorette product or a Nicorette competitor. Um, so we would get compared to that all the time. And it wasn't really like a, a growing category, like the overall NRT spaces is called nicotine replacement therapy. Um, that whole space, Is, you know, under a billion dollars revenue.

AI assessment note: “we were able to continue selling our products. So we were doing a ton of sales”

Q the way, you are a remarkably good storyteller, and it sounds like your co-founders are as well with, like, very pointed articles and headlines and that kind of thing. How do you think about the storytelling of the business, um, and, like, the marketing component of that in, like, consumer world? You ride with trends, you kind of, like, try to drive your own narrative. What is the mechanism there?

A Yeah. It's, it's very tricky for this company for in the nicotine space. So we did one like tech crunch article earlier and they were just like, this is the next jewel, like very negative. Uh, and so we've mostly just tried to let the product speak for itself and just work with, you know, people who are in our demographic and have like podcasts and can talk about the product and are just like genuinely excited about it. Like some of the biggest like press we've gotten has just been, you know, People who use the product talking about how much they love it. And that's been, uh, been the best. We haven't really done a lot of like business storytelling. I think we should do more. Um, I think it would probably help with like the, like the FDA advocacy and, and, you know, like, like really helping it, helping us frame the company is like, Hey, look, we're like the one company in the space. That's not big tobacco. Like people, a lot of people don't know anything about Zen, but like, You know, started by a big tobacco company from day one, sold to an even bigger tobacco company, like just a couple of years ago, like every, every, like literally all of our, all of the competitors that are directly above us are owned by big tobacco. And I mean, like, it's good that they're moving people to new products. Like I'm, I'm happy for them, but there is something, uh, that makes for a good story…

AI assessment note: “we've mostly just tried to let the product speak for itself”

Q Are you more Republican than Democrat, or do you vote both?

A Yeah. Yeah. I vote both. It just kind of depends on who is, who can have like the highest impact on mostly technology and the business community. I think that those are kind of the, the, the things that we need to be thinking about. I do think there's the interesting, um, as I look back on Trump, I didn't vote for him, didn't support him, voted against him twice. But, um, but I think that there's this weird situation where like the problems that Trump brought Were obviously really bad. I think he really like divided the country and just create a lot of chaos. And I think that was like probably net negative for the United States, but he did kind of get China right. And he started this, like he got people waking up about the fact that we are in a great power competition again. And so you could see a world where the China situation dissipates and things get better. And that would be phenomenal for the world. And that's what I hope happens. And in that case, Trump will be remembered as, like, an idiot, basically. But the opposite could also happen, where the China situation gets hotter, and then people look back to Trump as, like, a, like, a genius who foresaw this all and, like, took the first steps to, like, make things safe. And so, I think the, what's interesting is that the, the way we remember presidents is often not by what they actually did, but by how their decisions look …

AI assessment note: “I vote both. It just kind of depends on who is, who can have”

Q Go sign up first, Retechery. Read the whole article. There's a bunch of context, um, and we're gonna come back to the story, uh, with the Germinator. Rohan in Semaphore says Paramount Ways leaving California over Warner Brothers Rift. What's going on here, John?

A So this is, uh, on the basis that California is trying to block The paramount, uh, uh, the paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. Rohan says, I'm told that if the states do choose to sue, they would have to assume the damages stemming from that action. Chiefly, uh, six hundred million to 1000000001.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state state taxpayers. So if, uh, if they leave those, uh, those fees would not be paid to the state. Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit. Brian Stelter is breaking it down. Uh, saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on, uh, misrepresentation of competition in the, in, in the entertainment industry today. So, uh, Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California, uh, after Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general, I always get that wrong, filed today to block its one hundred and ten billion dollar acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This story was back and forth Will Netflix get it? Paramount wound up with the highest bid, the most cash to offer. It got approved. Huge windfall for David Zaslav over at Warner Brothers Discovery, uh, but a very controversial acquisition.

AI assessment note: “this is, uh, on the basis that California is trying to block The paramount”

Q You can plug in a rack. But, yeah, big questions around where are they gonna get the compute? Where are they gonna get the, the energy Uh, it, will anyone rely on, will be willing to rely on them? Tons and tons of questions.

A This feels like an institutional investor who says, I want to participate in this idea that, uh, even older GPUs are trading above par. And so GPUs are sort of gaining value and they want in on that in some meaningful way, but they also want to wrap it in a public company that can sort of become a meme stock. Essentially. And then basically everything else about the business will be different because the entire shoe business will be sold off. And, uh, and this is basically just a use for the, of the ticker and the listing and the shell, and then probably an entirely different team, entirely different strategy, entirely different, uh, everything basically a new name. So here's the schedule for TNA that explains the pivot ahead of a shareholder vote on May 18th. It adds with respect To the renamed corporate entity, we are investigating potential opportunities in the computing infrastructure market, including the acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, related high performance computing infrastructure, uh, capable to support high workloads, whether from artificial intelligence and machine learning, or other, uh, needs of potential future customers and, and other related assets. Also, uh, because the anticipated electronics infrastructure business would be less focused on the public benefit of Environmental conservation, which is stated in the company's certifica…

AI assessment note: “So here's the schedule for TNA that explains the pivot ahead of a shareholder vote”

Q Um, but getting there is, it wrecks the ships, and if TBPN has money, it's the last thing you guys want to do is to struggle to make 200 grand, or 500 grand off an event, because it's totally distracting, right? But if you get massive, and you keep your heads down, these, these things, uh, they're, you know, the best of anything makes a lot of money, doesn't it?

A Of course. That's always the nature of these things. That's why we, like, focus. That's why we, like, not doing events. Uh, I am, I am interested in your reaction to my, my take that, uh, like, the, the, the Dream Forces, the Meta Connects, the Google IOs, like, this has put pressure on the, on the, uh, cross-platform tech conference. Uh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to go to CES to announce the Meta Ray-Ban displays. He hosts his own conference. Uh, you know, Even Sony and Xbox, like, they can, they don't need to go to CES, even if they have a presence, it, it takes away from, like, the aura and importance of those events. Is that something that you, that resonates with you, or is that sort of overstated?

AI assessment note: “Of course. That's always the nature of these things. That's why we, like, focus.”

Q How much do we know outside of the trailer though? Like, we don't know,

A Well, this was leaked, ah, something like a year ago from a journalist who got the story, and it was widely denied that it was happening, and, ah, he was very upset that he wasn't getting enough credit for being correct here. He ultimately was, but, yeah, all we know is that they filmed the documentary in the lead up to her actually going to prison after sentencing. There was a pretty large gap before when she had to report to the prison. She gets out in 2030, so, Coming up three years, four years away. And so, uh, I believe even in a week you can get a lot of footage if you're spending the full, you know, every day with someone. And then there were a number of visits to the facility by Nathan that were recorded, probably talking through glass or talking at a table, something like that. So, uh, we don't know.

AI assessment note: “all we know is that they filmed the documentary in the lead up”

Q But the idea is to put more, Space data centers on these?

A Yeah. I mean, if you think about this in, like, the most grand project you can imagine, which is like the Dyson Sphere, basically, solar panels directly around the sun, all the way around the sun, to capture all of its energy, ah, you're gonna need to send a lot of solar panels to the sun. Making those on the moon is lower cost, potentially, than making them on Earth. That's the, that's the theory. But then, in the meantime, Elon's clearly thinking about making at least part of the satellite up there, and then, I mean, you could, you could ship up the chips and just make the, the, the housing up there, if that's the most, if that's the heaviest part. You could make the more economically precise, valuable piece up here, drop off a bunch of chips, drop them into the actual, you know, housing that's been made, and then launch those into orbit. There's a whole bunch

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, if you think about this in, like, the most grand project”

Q And yes, you can go even with, with, with cars, right? It's, um, A car is worth more if the prior, if the previous owner had, was significant in some way.

A Yes, yes, yes. A Steve McQueen is gonna, is gonna sell for more. And I think that, that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness, and then, and then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value, and when he gets to the idea of, ah, just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately, and that's very easy, and you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years, and we've had a system for counteracting that, like, you have to pay licensing fees, and that will happen. Ah, so he has a good, he has a good balance.

AI assessment note: “Yes, yes, yes. A Steve McQueen is gonna, is gonna sell for more.”

Q How did you conclude? What was your takeaway?

A My question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online, who's on sub stack, uh, being like, okay, Now's the moment. A million dollars on the table. I'm shutting down my sub stack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people cross post. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a sub stack, that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel. I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our sub stack list. I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it. On John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm. So I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well. So then they can surface that to people. If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that. And I think they'll be successful there.

AI assessment note: “So I don't think X needs writers to go all in.”

Q I always just think about like, okay, what is. The, what are the, what are the wedges? Like, what are the hundred wedges? And like starting to write that down on the list. And then how do you prioritize the wedge such that who, you know, me or whoever's listening is best suited to do that wedge. Yeah. And also it's easy, easy ish to, to, to build that wedge.

A Yeah. I mean, with, with this particular idea, like obviously you need, you know, Like rock solid cybersecurity chops in terms of the actual technical skill of your team. And then you also need insane B to B connections to be able to go and sell this. So it's not for everyone. This is not something like, you know, some college dropout kids going to build in their free time. Maybe they will, maybe they'll be able to put it together, but you know, I, I would assume that this is going to be something that comes out of like the current industry. Somebody that, uh, somebody that already has a lot of rapport and connections and can, uh, really like, Know exactly what product to build immediately.

AI assessment note: “obviously you need, you know, Like rock solid cybersecurity chops”