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Anyway, there's more news in the Wall Street Journal today. Big Boogie, the Memphis rapper known for his high energy delivery and viral interview moments, declined an opportunity in Jacksonville in order to focus on music, according to remarks he made publicly. He said I ain't go to college, big Boogie said, before adding that he turned it down to pursue rap, and that surprised a lot of people at the time it did so. The opportunity, according to Big Boogie, involved a scholarship connected to a college marching band program. The rapper said the school was located in Jacksonville, describing it as a big college with a big band. Financial terms of the alleged offer could not be independently verified. Big Boogie characterized the package as substantial, though he first described it as 15 million, then revised that estimate to 10 million and later 5 million. The person present for the exchange challenged the figure in real time during this interview, noting that while the offer may have been a scholarship, it was unlikely to have totaled 5 million. Big Booby defended the characterization, suggesting the value reflected the length of the academic commitment. That's right, sort of an uncharacteristic commitment, he said. I had to go to school for this decade. Very uncharacteristic of typical college engagements. Representatives for Big Boogie and the unnamed Jacksonville institution declined to comment. The Journal has learned that Big Boogie ultimately chose not to enroll, opting instead to continue building his career in rap. That's right, I turned it down, he said. That's right. This story is still developing. We'll keep following it for you. There's another story. There was a couple that.

The Journal has learned that Big Boogie ultimately chose not to enroll, opting instead to continue building his career in rap. That's right, I turned it down, he said.

Wine. When you talk to customers, are they almost always coming to you with a workflow that they prototyped with a closed model, prototyped with a frontier model and they've got it working and now they want to cost optimize or do you talk to customers who are just so all in on open source, they don't even care about the frontier? Because I've seen There's companies when GPT4 came out, they were like, oh, this can process open OCR documents and just organize text data very effectively. Now we're in a coding boom, but we get these spiky intelligence unlocks every once in a while and then the cost ramps up because you're like, I can use this everywhere. And then people want to cost optimize. But are companies typically coming to you with a workflow that they've already prototyped and they feel like is confident they want to match the performance but at a better price? Yeah, I would say they're both use cases. There are companies that have prototyped something with closed models. Once they deployed into production, they realize this is like absurdly expensive. They can't quite scale this and deploy it into the, you know, deploy it into their companies and they start benchmarking open models. And I think they're increasingly finding that open models have become pretty strong on these benchmarks and there's a sort of substitution happening. And there's really a stampede of this that companies starting from AI natives now to digital natives are deploying open models at, you know, really, really rapidly. You also have other use cases, I think, you know, companies that have sensitive data, this is really their strategic asset in many ways. It's, it's what the, what the intellectual property of the company is. And there is increasing amount of discomfort, especially as the models are getting smarter, that by using closed models they're sort of giving away their strategic advantage by teaching the model how to run their business. And I think that's becoming a bigger threat. And we are starting to see companies more sort of philosophically choosing open rates and that they control. And I expect we'll see more of this. How are you thinking about regulation? It feels like GLM 5.2 sort of reignited this open source debate.

Future, but it was fun. Okay, let's rip through them. First one is Anthropic will be one of the largest and most important life sciences companies in the world. We've obviously seen acquisitions. The models are just getting naturally better at bio drug development. At the same time, the big drug companies, they're not asleep at the wheel. They're spinning up their own labs, their own partnerships. Eli Lilly has this Nvidia thing and I'm interested in what, how, how does that look? Because you could, you could in one way say Microsoft is one of the most important biotechnology companies in the world because a lot of tabular data stored in Excel. We saw with Mythos that there were incredible cybersecurity capabilities. They ultimately rolled out Project Glasswing, Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh, Arora. You got CrowdStrike, like they're still a cybersecurity company. And then there's a very powerful model and there's a great partnership there. I would call Anthropic incredibly important piece of the cybersecurity supply chain. How does this, what will this look like in 2030 for bio. Yeah, yeah. So you're right that horizontal technology providers like Anthropic or like Microsoft touch a bunch of industries and are important to a bunch of industries. I think in the life sciences specifically, Anthropic will go way beyond that. I think that as I write in the article, you know, one of their incredible advantages is how super focused they are on particular areas. And they, the past few years they've been very focused on coding. They've excelled at coding. They built the best coding models, and that's let them grow so quickly in the coding arena with cloud code and so forth. And the big question is like, what's their next big focus area? And it's becoming increasingly clear that next big focus area will be biology and the life sciences. It's something that Dario, the CEO, is personally very passionate about. He's written about it a lot. He, he, he's trained as a neuroscientist. So I think they're going, I think they're going to go all in on life sciences. I don't think it's going to be like, you know, they're serving, they're just serving the life sciences industry as one industry. And honestly, even in the past, like week or two since I wrote that article, I feel like it's started to snowball more like one big data point. One interesting data point was John Jumper, who led the alphafold work at DeepMind and won the Nobel Prize alongside Demis as Office just left DeepMind to join Anthropic which was an incredible get for them. Yeah. And really brutal loss for Google but I think that that's telling and and then just this literally 2 days ago or 3 days ago anthropic announced this new product that's like Claude for life sciences and they also announced they're actually going to start their own drug discovery program and the way they phrased it because to your point like all the big pharma companies are their customers today the way they phrase it is like we're just going to focus on these like small orphan neglected drugs like they're not interesting to pharma companies anyway. We just want to do it so that we can learn firsthand about the drug discovery process. But I think this is the first step and I do think that over time Anthropic's ambitions are to develop their own drugs like essentially to eventually become a pharma company themselves. As crazy as that sounds today that is crazy. Talk about tsmc it's not.

And there are versions of that arrangement that I can sort of get on board with. Where I get much more worried is when the government is taking an equity stake and putting that stake on its balance sheet. There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is just like the sort of picking winners effect of, okay, well now all of a sudden the government which sets policy has a direct financial interest in making sure that these particular companies win. And I think that's bad. I think there should be an opportunity, I think there should be an opportunity for some Neo Lab or some other type of startup to come in and compete. I think that's great. Competition to the frontier AI industry suddenly becomes like a threat to the government's balance sheet. If in a world where the government has a big equity stake, there's also corporate governance issues that I think are pretty complicated. And one other thing that no one has explored at all, but. Oh, go ahead. One thing that stands out to me the most is like, I don't think some American is going to feel like, oh great, I really feel a part of this AI boom now that the government has effectively an account with Morgan Stanley with a bunch of equity in it. And even if you ran the numbers to divide it all up into for every household or citizen, it's not, it's an, it's an amount that would effectively be equivalent to less than a stimulus check. And we've sort of like run that, we've run the experiment of, we've run this sort of like stimulus check experiment. I think it did help a lot of people at the time, but it didn't, it certainly didn't like fix anyone's life. It wasn't like, okay, now I don't have to worry about rent next month or now I can buy a home. Right? It didn't solve any of people's like fundamental problems. And so I think. And neither with this. And so the direct, like distribute the shares directly doesn't solve it. Holding it on, you know, the, you know, country's balance sheet doesn't solve it. And so anyways, I'm with you. No, I mean, I think it's like, it's like what the stake gives people that if it's directly going onto the household's balance sheet is again, it's like a symbolic thing. And look, it's also not like no money, right? Like I think 5% in Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI Space X, Google, maybe in video to you throw in. You know, I think that divided by the number of American households, if the AI industry also does well if you sort of model out growth over the next five, ten years. Like I think that's like, I think that's five figures, you know. Right. Like I think it's like, you know, it's again, it's not life changing sums of money for anyone, I don't think, but I think it's, it's real money. I think it's worth comparing to some of the ideas that people have around. If somebody's trying to put a data center in your backyard and you go, well, I don't really want a data center in my backyard. And then they say, well, what if you were going to get $800 a month for the next 10 years? And they're like, oh, okay, that starts to be material because that is an amount that is more significant, consistent. There's some element of effectively cash flow which is what allows a household to thrive. Right. And so I've just consistently been a lot more excited about these more targeted proposals because I think every person in America has every right to ask, well, why would I want this data center in my backyard if I can still use ChatGPT or whatever AI tools I want if it's somewhere hundreds of miles from me? Yeah, I'm kind of with you about like that it's better to pay the directly affected, like the data center community, stuff like that. Better to structure these kinds of things that way. But if you wanted to do a nationwide equity thing, and it's not the craziest thing, the one other thing about the government directly having a stake in addition to like, I don't think it ends there, I think the government will use that stake to control the companies in all sorts of ways. And where that gets interesting is if you combine an equity stake with effective government control over all sorts of aspects of Frontier Lab, you know, content, moderation policy and various things like this. Right. Usage monitoring and stuff, suddenly the Frontier Labs could begin to appear to be an instrumentality of the government. And that is bad from a public perception perspective. It's bad from a foreign sort of dealing with foreign governments. Right? Because people won't trust American AI as much. But the other thing that I guarantee you no one has thought about is there's case law in America about like if a private corporation is doing something at like strong government compulsion, there are times when that can intersect with like, like basically the law will consider the company to be an instrumentality of the government. And the kinds of laws that apply to government agencies suddenly apply to that private firm. So for Example, like due process, the Fifth and 14th Amendment, the First Amendment, like these kinds of things where, like, you don't have due process rights if you're like, if you're mad that United Airlines canceled your flight, you don't have due process rights with respect to that. But like, you do have due process rights when you complain to the government about things. Right. And like, those things are really, really valuable. They're also not the kind of things that we associate with like, fast moving firms. And so you're inviting like a whole host. United Airlines is the fast moving firm relative to like the DMV and AI labs are like a thousand times faster than the airline companies. So we're going to leapfrog to DMV speed, which is crazy to think about. It could be like public utility is what I would say. Like, and you would be. I think people would be surprised how quickly the government continuing on the current policy trajectory, but with a equity stake, how quickly you have a colorable argument that the labs have essentially been turned into public utilities and that they are basically government agencies and therefore they should be regulated. You know, government agencies are highly regulated entities in America. Right. And yeah, I think that's, I think that's plausible and not something a lot of people are thinking about. Yeah, walk me through the, the. How you process the somewhat.

Are like very. Are both. Are both compared to almost everywhere else in the country, quite AGI pilled. SF obviously more so. But look, governments all over the world are waking up now because I think both. So, so, you know, the mythos fable thing in and of itself did probably quite a bit to accelerate that. But then the other important thing that happened that you have to keep in mind is there's a lot of people, there's a lot of governments across the world that fundamentally, even though they might not admit it, they do fundamentally look to America for sort of intellectual leadership. And it's like there's been an argument of like, well, look, this whole AI catastrophic risk thing, like, do we really need to take it seriously? Well, it doesn't seem like the Americans actually take it seriously. Right. And that was a colorable argument until about two weeks ago. And the US government placing export controls on a frontier model was such a costly move and such a crazy and radical move to make. It was clearly made out of a position of fear. And everyone in the world saw that. And people wake up when they realize that the US government is genuinely scared about something that they wasn't previously on their radar. People do wake up to that. And so I think that both throughout our country and then also throughout the world, you will see more people kind of taking the AGI pill. Now of course, the other thing about the AGI pill is that like a lot of psychoactive substances, it comes in waves, you know, it hits you in various waves and it's like, whoa, I'm really AGI filled now. But you don't even know how AGI filled you're going to be in a year, you know, like that. But there's also the export control cope and I would love to know where you stand on that, which is that it's not fear based, it's economic and it's akin to, well, we don't want to. We also don't want to export Coca Cola because you might figure out the secret recipe and it's just a good business and it might be purely about distillation and not necessarily that a foreign government would use this powerful model against you or for nefarious purposes, but instead they might just steal the golden goose that you have cooking. I mean, yeah, look, and actually I'm kind of curious to see how it resolves. There is some future world where like for some combination of regulatory risks and safety concerns, but also competitive concerns like distillation, the frontier models are just like, kind of like less visible to the public or it's like there's somewhat more friction involved in getting to the true frontier. Friction and cost. And that might happen downstream of market incentives just as much as it is of economic incentives. But no, I don't think the government is playing any kind of five dimensional chess here. I really think this was about 6D all the way up to the 6th dimension string theory stuff. No, I don't think so. I really do think that what it looks like on the tin is in fact what happened that they got, you know, there was legitimate fear. Maybe that fear is to some extent, it might have been fear that was grounded in some degree of ignorance about the actual technical risks of AI and like what is a severe vulnerability versus what is not? That seems quite likely to me. And it also might have been a fear that was maybe agitated somewhat by the political valence through which anthropic is viewed. I myself have argued this that like what anthropic does will inherently be seen as riskier and more dangerous and bad. And what their competitors do will be seen as like good and innovative because the government has a particular posture toward anthropic. Yeah, but at the other side of that is like they have been the most vocal about the risks. Yes, well, of the labs outside of like the Eliezer Yuda Kowskis of the world. But yes, yeah, I would say of, of the labs they have been. And like that's part of what started this whole animosity. But now it's, it's like this weird thing where I think political, political differences of opinion and political animosity, personal animosity, color the fear as much as some degree of ignorance, as much as the fear is also legitimate. Right. So fear is coming from like a bunch places. And fundamentally the government's not wrong to be concerned. But yeah, I think that's where the actual controls basically came from.

Last year, I believe. Yes. In May of last year. Yeah, May of last year the executive orders were signed. I came on the day that the executive orders were signed and we said, we're going to. We're going to build a nuclear reactor and turn it on by July 4th right here on this site. At the time, the site was a patch of grass. Yeah. And July 4th was the deadline. Look, Valor hit it out of the park. There's a lot of awesome companies in the pilot program, but if you actually look at the eo, Valor just absolutely smashed it. I mean, we didn't just go critical. We went critical twice. And we went to thermal power operations and we went to electricity production and we did it outside of the national labs. So we really just hit it out of the park in every dimension. And I'm incredibly excited and proud of the Valor team. So you're moving very quickly. You're outside of the national.

Doing great. How's it going, John and Jordy? It's been a little bit. It has been too long, but great to see you've been cooking. Break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest with Velar Atomics? I don't think you can be holding the gong right there, Jordy. There's no fundraising yet. We're just. We're turning reactors on. Oh, well, this is not the best reason ever. Anybody will give you money. Come on. I guess I have a deal. All right. All right, let's go. What happened? Wasn't laid. Oh, man. We had a really fun day yesterday here on the site right now, screen. This is the word to 50 reactor. Yeah, our first power reactor. And yesterday we made electricity for the first time. It became the first nuclear startup to ever make electricity. And we did it with Nvidia. We powered an Nvidia Spark. It was a lot of fun. That's remarkable. Big milestone. So reset for us. I mean, you're not here announcing fundraising, but how big is the team? Have you outgrown El Segundo yet? Where are you going next?

And show you, pitch you on a couple cars. Because we found a man who mounted a driving simulator on a moving G wagon. And many joked, wouldn't it be easier just to drive? Others pointed out there was already a driver behind the wheel. Weird caption on this, but putting a racing simulator in the back of a convertible G wagon truck. What do you think about that? This might be. This is pretty. I mean, but is it just simulating the drive that he's on? I think so. I don't know. Actually, what's funny about this is those side monitors. This might just be AI slop anyway, but the side monitors are way too far out. I feel like if you cut the corner, drive past the truck, you might completely knock that off and maybe get injured in the process. Probably not recommendable. Not advisable from a safety perspective. Anyway. The second car is the new Bugatti. So Bugatti just dropped a new car, and it has a very, very interesting style. We might need to pull up some images of this car to really inspect it. But look at this design. The white, the black stitching. It almost looks like a comic book. Let's find some pictures of the Bugatti Mistral Blanc Eternal with real porcelain details, because it's a bold choice, But I want to know, do you like the look of the. Of the new? Tell if you're messing with me. No, I think this is a real. I think this is a real one off Bugatti. Yeah, yeah, funny. Meme Mistral Blanc Eternal. The Special. I mean, I think it looks cool. The Blanc Eternal references Veyron Black Eye catching, Black and white. My review is that it looks like a good car, sir, but do you like this, or is this too over the top? I mean, it would certainly be. If I had a list of specs that I was excited about and I was shopping for Bugatti, this would certainly be in the. I would expect in the nine thousands. Right. So there. Yeah, there'd be, like, you know, maybe 9,000 specs I would do before this. But I still think it looks cool. It's just. It's hard to make a Bugatti look bad. That's a good challenge for anyone out there if you can spec a Bugatti on their website and make it look bad. You think the Shrek Bugatti looks good? I think it looks incredible. It's in my top five. We got to pull up the Shrek Bugatti. Can someone generate that? Generate the Shrek Bugatti, Tyler. The Shrigati.

There's another story. There was a couple that climbed to the top of the Empire State Building yesterday. Did you see this? I did. And they put up a flag. And they got married or they proposed or they got engaged. Proposal. And brands have immediately jumped on it. Let's go. Let's give it up for some advertising. No, there's backlash already. Jack Appleby said. This is so, so embarrassing. These brands think they really did really think they did something. Loverboy is the worst. Congrats. You put your logo on a fl. Really innovative stuff. The lack of originality and clever thinking in modern social media is just ridiculous. Everyone had the exact same idea. There's a meme. We gotta get on the action. And what's interesting is that a lot of these are beverage brands. It looks like drink culture. Pop drink. Hi yo Drink. Loverboy Drink Spritz. Bulletproof. I guess that's bulletproof. Coffee Fashion Nova. New York City. Just the account. New York City. I don't know. Petco. Stop breaking treats in two. It is a fun meme format, but brands always. It's very, very hard to break through if you're just piling on the top. Meme. What do you think? Yeah. So this whole thing was when I first saw the video of the flag going up and they kind of botched the flag. I'm not gonna lie. It seems like they didn't fully anticipate the wind conditions that day. The flag was quite hard. The writing on the flag was quite read. I would have liked to see them erect like a full size billboard up there. Something permanent. Yeah, something more permanent and certainly more legible than the flag. And then the quote was, when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. But then they were just kind of making out and proposing. That's kind of cool. And yeah, just. It felt like it has a little bit of like the AI cadence to it or like the don't love your job job your love. Yeah, I mean that's, that's, that's. It make a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. Could be a little more terse, I suppose. But anyway, I just don't know if they were. I'm still impressed. It's just hard. Yeah, it was quite impressive with, with a climbing. How did they. Did they climb up from the sidewalk or did they take the elevator and then hop out and then start climbing? Because this wasn't like an Alex Honnold from the base. Free climb, free solo attack. How fast is this helicopter going, by the way? That's just the lens, baby. This is a 600 millimeter lens. Lens compression, Jordy. You're learning optics looking through a telescope. Basically, Dave says, quick tip for goth couples from the Matrix. Make sure to account for wind speed. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So anyways, very, very cool. Very. Pranks go and stuff. It's like, it's not. It's not going to be there permanently. It's easy to take down. I heard a recording of a helicopter pilot who was dispatched sort of emergency response nypd. And I think with helicopter pilot, they're like, alert, sir, we have two individuals on the top of the Empire State Building. He's like, that sounds cool. He's like, that's awesome. Why are they up there? They're like, oh, they're not supposed to be. They're trespassing. He's like, oh, okay. Bummer, but still impressive. Anyway, yeah, good story. Good story for them. I don't know if it made the sort of maybe political impact or whatever impact they were trying to have, but happy for them. And congratulations to the.

I like it. There's other news. SpaceX apparently is maybe working on a phone at the very least. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow, before SpaceX went public, they were showing investors a prototype of something sort of like an iPhone, AI enhanced, maybe thinner. The Wall Street Journal has some reporting around it and it's an interest. Elon's denied this a bunch, but the reporting seems pretty good at this point that at least it was. It's hard to see why he wouldn't at least take a shot at is kind of my, is my point of view. He has one of the greatest telecom companies ever created. Yep. Global satellite network. Theoretically over time any person on the entire planet could have an Internet connected, you know, SpaceX device with Starlink. It makes a lot of sense. The other factor that I've just continued to think is, is quite interesting is I think that the App Store as a moat has, is, is being diminished by AI. There's just so many things. There's so many things. There's so many apps on my phone that like five years ago I used a lot. Today I don't use at all. So an example being like I don't even need like the weather app because I can just be like, I can ask Chad, give me the weather for the next week. Obviously not. Yeah, and I don't even need that because I can just be like vibe, code me my own beer app today. No, but obviously it's not like an efficient way to use like, like it's not like it's probably better to just open the weather app, but at the same time I'm very used to it. The other thing is like even things like surf reports, like I'll just pull a surf report in chat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's a lot of like the long tail of apps are no longer like a lock in to the iPhone for me and I assume a lot of other people. Okay, yeah, we gotta have a chicken and egg debate about this. Let me finish reporting the SpaceX news and then I want to ask you to dig into the source of why that's happening. But first. So SpaceX developed an early prototype of an AI focused handset. The device is said to be slimmer than the iPhone, runs proprietary operating system, uses XAI technology built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. So they're not vertically integrating the chip like Apple Silicon just yet. But Elon has FAB chips before for Tesla, so not out of this not out of the question. Elon Musk reportedly demoed the prototype to potential investors during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow. The product fits with, with Musk's broader everything, but it's still early and may never ship. Rumors about a Musk built phone have circulated for years. There's videos on YouTube with like tens of millions of views that are like, the Tesla PI phone is coming next week and it's all just completely fake clickbait. But it, the demand gets you every time. It doesn't get me every time. Stop it. But Elon's actually, you're sitting there in your Apple Vision Pro. You see the video and you're like, I shouldn't click it. I know it's click it. I know it's fake. And then you click it and you're like, ah, they got me again. Yeah. No, it is ridiculous. But Elon has had to comment on this many times. He said the idea of, the idea of making a phone makes me want to die. He said in October, but if we have to make a phone, we will. Funny, funny way to say it. In February, he denied a Reuters report that SpaceX was building a phone that could connect directly to Starlink satellites. Posting on X, we are not developing a phone and no one is commenting on this right now. So very, very early stage. My question about apps, I think you're right. The number of apps, it used to be every month there was a hot app, every year there was a hot app. Specific apps for specific things. What is driving the collapse? Because when we talked to Mark Pincus yesterday, he said that Apple is not pushing small apps. Like Apple is not a. The App Store is not a reliable source of distribution for Vibe coded apps for games for anything. And so back in the day, he was able to grow Zynga on the Facebook platform, which was very open. And you could go viral within Facebook for a completely separate piece of software, not just content. And then you could keep that customer relationship, monetize that customer relationship off platform forever. Not the case anymore. Also just discovery people don't open up the App Store as much, I think, and say, oh, what are the top apps? Oh, what are the recommendations? I would love a new entertainment app. They're like, no, I got one new app, please. One new app. That's not a behavior. But why? Let me go to the App Store. I would like one or two new apps, please. Yeah, yeah. But why? Doesn't happen. So why is it not happening? Is it because the super apps are getting more super in the sense that you don't need, you used to need a, you needed Snapchat for stories, you needed TikTok for vertical video, you needed YouTube for long form. Now Instagram can satisfy a lot of those things. If there's some new features feature that pops up, Instagram will add it very quickly. As you mentioned, ChatGPT and the AI chat apps can do a lot of other things that you might need a separate app for. But is it that the apps consolidated or is it that Apple pushed that? It's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is like we had 10 years of very real innovation around what types of applications were possible or needed on a powerful mobile device. And so I think that you just had like saturation right there's. I still, I've said this a bunch of times on the show, but given that, you know, rewind to the chatgpt moment, I would expect there to be a lot more like net new hit apps in the app Store. And today if you look at the top charts, obviously dominated by World cup related things, but it's sports betting like streaming apps, the Trump accounts are doing very well. And so it's not like if I'd fallen asleep at the chatgpt moment and woken up today, I'd expect to go and be like, okay, there's probably a bunch of new popular hit rapture. And it just turns out that AI has been an extending innovation for a lot of existing apps. And so I just think the combination of LLMs and chat apps being able to just do so much for you and going to continually be able to do more for you and Vibe coding is again a positive tailwind for anybody building potentially a new device. Even if it was, especially if it's based on Android, but even if it was an entirely new operating system. Elon built a new operating system for Tesla, but that's not the Elon goal. He's not the open platform guy. When Twitter, when he purchased Twitter, the API got smaller. Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not saying Tesla's open ecosystem. You can't deploy a different self driving system onto your Tesla. It's a closed system, it's a competitor to the Apple ecosystem, it's an equally walled garden. But it would be his. I'm just saying it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to take a crack at a new device. Oh, there's a huge incentive to. I completely agree with that. No one wants to be locked in the Apple ecosystem. So you want to build your own ecosystem or your own walled garden. But the idea that it would be a non walled garden is sort of. It would be an uncharacteristic strategy, I think.

There's other news. SpaceX apparently is maybe working on a phone at the very least. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow, before SpaceX went public, they were showing investors a prototype of something sort of like an iPhone, AI enhanced, maybe thinner. The Wall Street Journal has some reporting around it and it's an interesting story. Elon's den denied this a bunch, but the reporting seems pretty good at this point that at least it was. It's hard to see why he wouldn't at least take a shot at is kind of my, is my point of view. He has one of the greatest telecom companies ever created, global satellite network. Theoretically over time any person on the entire planet could have an Internet connected, you know, SpaceX device with Starlink. It makes a lot of sense. The other factor that I just continue to think is, is quite interesting is I think that the App Store as a moat has, is, is being diminished by AI. There's just so many things. There's so many things. There's so many apps on my phone that like five years ago I use a lot. Today I don't use at all. So an example being like, I don't even need like the weather app because I can just be like, I can ask Chad, give me the weather for the next week. Obviously not. Yeah, and I don't even need that because I can just be like vibe, code me my own beer app today. But obviously it's not like an efficient way to use like it's not like it's probably better to just open the weather app, but at the same time I'm very used to it. The other thing is like even things like surf reports, like I'll just pull a surf report in chat. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's a lot of like the long tail of apps are no longer like a lock in to the iPhone for me and I assume a lot of other people. Okay, yeah, we got to have a chicken and egg debate about this. Let me finish reporting the SpaceX news and then I want to ask you to dig into the source of why that's happening. But first. So SpaceX developed an early prototype of an AI focused handset. The device is said to be slimmer than the iPhone, runs proprietary operating system, uses XAI technology built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. So they're not vertically integrating the chip like Apple silicon just yet. But Elon has fab chips before for Tesla. So not out of this, not out of the question. Elon Musk reportedly demoed the prototype to potential investors during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow. The product fits with Musk's broader Everything app vision, but it's still early and may never ship. Rumors about a Musk built phone have circulated for years. There's videos on YouTube with like tens of millions of views that are like, the Tesla PI phone is coming next week and it's all just completely fake clickbait. But it, the demand gets you every time. It doesn't get me every time. Stop it. But Elon's actually, you're sitting there in your Apple Vision Pro, you see the video and you're like, I shouldn't click. Click it. I know it's. I know it's fake. And then you click it and you're ah, they got me again. Yeah. No, it is ridiculous. But Elon has had to comment on this many times. He said the idea of making a phone makes me want to die, he said in October. But if we have to make a phone, we will. Funny way.

Of course. In other news, Jersey Mike's is filing for initial public offering. Jersey Mike's is going public. The sandwich chain Jersey Mike's filed for IPO today. It's looking for a $12 billion valuation after being acquired by Blackstone last year for 8 billion. Let's give it up for Blackstone. Yeah, they needed a win. They're getting a nice 50% markup in just a year. Jersey forced out of buying single family homes. Yeah, they had. That's not true at all. There hasn't been any, there hasn't been any regulation around that whatsoever. Joking. They do own 95% of homes, apparently, something like that. No, it's like, it's like half a percent or something. It's low. But Jersey Mike's has 3300 locations across the US and Canada. Plans to open 300 shops in the UK and Ireland. Peter Cancero Foundation, Jersey Mike's founder. Who's not named Mike? You would assume he was, but the founder of Jersey Mike's is in fact named Peter. He started the business in 1975 when he was 17 years old. Wow. Young. Overnight success. He actually founded the business when he purchased a sandwich shop In Point Pleasant, New Jersey called Mike's subs with $125,000 loan that he got from his then football coach who was also a banker. So you're incredible. High school football in New Jersey and you have an idea to buy a sandwich shop. Coach was like, this guy's a star. I should give him a six figure SBA loan also. 107, $125,000 in 1975 is like $25 million by today's standards. Also, that's just such a, such a. For me at Least personally, at 17, if I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account, I was feeling like the king of the castle. Yeah. So $125,000 to buy a sandwich shop. We don't really know what the financials were of the sandwich shop. It's very possible that, you know, it was just such a slam dunk deal that even a 17 year old could operate it. This is a no brainer. It might have just been a no brainer, but clearly $125,000 in 1975, just using inflation, not investing in the market, not compounding using the general CPI inflation numbers, that gives you $775,000 in today's dollars. So if you're a 17 year old football player, just go to your football coach and say, hey, can you, can you loan me three quarters of a million dollars. Ch in the chat says, coach, I need a one hundreds. Yeah, you might be able to go to your coach and, you know, basically get the financing to set up some type of neo cloud. Yeah, so he. So he grew the company for almost 50 years, 1975 to 2025, basically, before transitioning to chairman this April. Former Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison now leads the company. The ticker will be JMKE Jersey Mike's. So go check it out.

Yeah. There's some rats out there that can be quite excellent roommates. Are you rat guy? I thought you were a mosquito guy. I thought you like mosquitoes. I do like squirrels. Squirrels, okay. Squirrels. Yeah. I feel like I have a bond with squirrels. They're sort of the aristocratic squirrel in my yard. I look at it and I just salute. People have said you have the mind of a squirrel. They have? Yeah. They've said that I have the mind of a rodent. Yes.