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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.