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Oh yeah, lemonade stands are bad. Silicon Valley lemonade stand inflation is absolutely the worst in the world on mergers and acquisitions. There's this news today about Getty Images calling off Shutterstock deal after UK regulators said that they would have to sell the editorial business for the merger to be approved. And it seemed very odd to me that a merger, merger would be blocked by a regulator when that industry that is consolidating and is maybe becoming more monopolistic is under such insane attack from generative AI. I can't imagine a better defensive move than putting Getty Images and Shutterstock together. This happens. This is, this happens every single time. Like the natural response to your overall category being threatened by an external force is consolidation. Like, it's the only way to defend yourself, to sort of, you know, you get synergies like, like all these companies are pretty established, so it's actually fairly easy to price, you know, exactly what things are. It's a. Much like we have growing companies. You want to merge them or acquire them. It's really unclear because how you sort of price out the future. These companies are declining, so it's very easy. Like you could do a discounted cash flow and understand exactly how much they're worth. It's a very straightforward negotiation. It makes total sense for them to consolidate date. But precisely because they're knowable and understandable, it's very easy for regulators to block them. And you see this happen again and again. You see like pushback on. You saw this with TV and like, like different networks getting together and the various pushbacks happen to that or in telecoms, like the, this happens. This is a natural pattern. The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it, when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry, regulators don't do anything and also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown. You don't want to screw it up. It raises the question of what use do regulators do anyway? In broad, broad strokes. I used to be, I've sort of, you know, I think that they probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know. I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft said take Call of Duty exclusive. So. So who knows, maybe I'll. Yeah, we had a funny moment because we were looking. It's a 3.7.

So it is a go kart that has the bodywork of Porsche. And so you can get one of these. They go like 60 miles an hour or something like that. They're pretty fast. Seems very safe. Yes. So I think if you put a governor on this vehicle, you'd have what you want, which is the vehicle for the kid that is fun, engaging, and highly stylized and made with precision. The group behind this is called.

Approach I would give to people to try is I think the polymarket work resonated because we took somebody who would the whole team like from creatives on internally there to the photographer to the talent. Normally wouldn't be a part of a prediction market campaign. When you think of like Equinox, every photographer we ever hired for Equinox had never shot fitness before. They only shot fashion. All of our design team came from museums that we would poach. So I think like hiring people out of category. You have enough subject matter experts in the business, so bring in people who don't know the category and can bring new things to it. Yeah. When you have a campaign.

You could always sort of draw lessons. So you get to Microsoft at this point, again, I think I wrote at the time, okay, time to give up. I wrote multiple times through the years, they should give up on Xbox. And at this point, Microsoft, was there ever an option after they bought Activision just to make Call of Duty a console exclusive, or would that have been an FTC problem? Well, we'll get to that. That's part of the story here. So Microsoft decides, okay, what we. We're going to actually try a new business model. It's true. Xbox, sort of selling a console, selling, you know, licensing it. We kind of do that, but we're actually moving to being a services company. The stock's doing much better now. You know, like, we have Azure, all the. All these things. What we need to do and the way we compete with Sony is we need to have the exact opposite of the Sony strategy, and we need to lean into services, lean into subscriptions. We're going to do Xbox Game Pass. And the idea of Xbox Game Pass is instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80. Gaming pricing, by the way, really has stayed suppressed probably far longer than it should have been, particularly for these AAA games. But we already got to that with Rockstar. So they're like, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games. And Game Pass, well, of course, no publisher wants to partake in this because they make all their money upfront by selling games to their biggest fans. You know, it's kind of like the movie model. You make a bunch of money up front. And. Yeah. Were they looking at, like, at what happened to the music industry as an example of saying, like, yeah, it's cool to make your product more accessible, you get, you know, more listeners by. Well, that was. That was the bet. You had to make it up in volume. Right. And so this. This why the Series S came about. There's the Series X and the Series S. The Series S was a more underpowered but much cheaper model. I think it launched at 300 DOL versus the X was, I think, $600 or maybe 500. And that was also a problem because you're kind of neutering the X because developers build to the lowest common denominator, not sort of the highest one. So that was one problem. But the idea was we're going to expand the market and they have these package deals where you get an S and you get Game Pass for a year, and it's this sort of thing, and we will make it up and the problem is, no, no independent developer is going to go for that. So they had some of their own games, but they went out and started buying a bunch of developers. So they boug Bethesda, which included, I think it at that point, and. And ZeniMax. Like, they have a bunch of like, great ideas. Those. But those developers just aren't releasing like incredible titles annually. Except for Activision, which does. Exactly. And so the issue. So the issue with buying these companies is they're. What you're paying for is you're paying for their existing business plus the premium. And their existing business was selling single copies of games to all platforms. And what they were saying is we're going to basically force all these studios to take a bath, to lose a ton of money by putting all their games on Game Pass. We'll still sell on PlayStation because we have to, because that's a lot of money. It'd be massively, economically destructive not to. But what we think's gonna happen is gamers are gonna realize that I could be paying $70 a pop on PlayStation or I could go to Xbox and I could pay $20 a month and I can get all these games and that's it. What a better deal. And by the way, we'll get new gamers. People are going to come in and realize, wow, I can get all these games for $20 a month. None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games, pay way less to pay these games. And Microsoft ate it. And they, I think they, you know, the recent reporting was they expected to have 75 million game pass subscribers by this year. They have like 30 million. And that number is actually decreasing. It's not going up. And so it's just been. And so that's sort of the context of what's happened here. Phil Spencer got retired, which, if you retire at that level of a company, you're probably canned, probably too late. The whole strategy disaster. They brought in new leadership and now there's sort of like a reset going on. They're. They're laying off a few thousand people. They say all games production to continue. But there's a real sort of critical decision here. What do we do? Because we ended up getting stuck in the middle, like. And we're just, this doesn't work. What.

This is a natural pattern. The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry, regulators don't do anything and also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown. You don't want to screw it up. It raises the question of what use do regulators sort of do anyway in broad, broad strokes? I used to be I've sort of, you know, I think that they probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know, I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft's to take Call of Duty exclusive. So so who knows, maybe I'll yeah.

Inflation. I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable expensive things. But. So anyhow that's a GTA 6 but we're, we're back. Oh, so the console, the console era. So the way I think about Xbox is you go back to Microsoft and Microsoft had this whole thing, this is pre iPhone. This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. And the idea that we're going to, we already own the desk via the PC, we're going to own the pocket via the phone. And people always to say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They like they came up with a Windows CE in like 1999. Like they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room. And, and we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed. And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and foremost people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the Internet in their living room. And so you're selling a multi hundred dollar sort of console to people who want to play games. But people who don't want to play games aren't going to randomly start buying consoles. What actually ended up taking it over was things like the Fire Stick or you know, Apple TV Beta played this. I still think it's like probably the, the best solution but it's way too expensive. Now the Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase. But Fire Stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast, you had Roku tv, you had you know, these which ended up being. It's not that it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right. There was this new front page to online services to be built. They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uber OS of self mutilation because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because it's a games console that's way too expensive to achieve this. But then also they killed the Xbox where Xbox 360 was pretty competitive and that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after that with the Xbox One, I think, which was super expensive because it had the Kinect built in, that sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing. And it had all much more like restrictive drm. Things is going to be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around what we're gonna realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it, so they rejected it. So their vision, which they didn't achieve, also killed their console. And so I wrote over a decade ago and the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets. I think first and foremost for Microsoft, but also for me because I from the beginning is like, they need to kill this program or they just spin it out or get rid of it. These stated goals, which made sense from a corporate perspective, were not achieved. And it is continuing to exist because it exists. Yeah, and I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from, from 2011, 2013, when Microsoft was in the dumps. And you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been like $40 for like a decade. And. And the one thing the employees has like, well, we still have Xbox. All the cool kids over there. Like it was such an important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox, even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve. Yeah, what do you think the naming scheme says?

Review? Yeah. Can we get a GTA 6 review? No. Well, I feel. I feel compelled. Number one. I feel Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging, what, $80? Yes. Like, you're gonna get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take. No, they should be charging, like, $200 for this. I know. GTA 6 is, like, the last great game. Yeah. Like, you think about every. It was boastfully all made pre AI. Like, it is the pinnacle of this AAA craftsmanship. Years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears. To the extent where you have, like, the Twitter analysts, like, counting cigarette butts outside of the series to see, like, how much crunch are they in right now. I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA the love of the game. Literally the game. The GTA 6 gamers are insane. So I always tread in this water, like, very, very carefully. But no. So I feel compelled to buy GTA 6 just in honor of it existing, even if I don't know if I'm ever going to play it. So I'm going to do that, and I'd be happy to pay. Yes. $200. Like, $80 is ridiculous. They should charge more anyhow. Yeah. We had the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online, complaining about the price, and said something like, you didn't have. You had 10 years. You couldn't save up 80 bucks, whoever you are. Like. Like, I know kids that do lemonade stands, and they clear, like, 100 bucks. Yeah, you know. Oh, absolutely. I want, you know, the old $20. I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that. Although, unfortunately, with inflation, I think now it's sort of, like, expected. It's unbelievable how expensive things are.

VR really attracts these, like, visionary, visionary chats. The coolest guys that are willing to go that seem. No, no, I'm actually, I could make that joke, but I won't. But just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time, to ride through the hype cycles and just like, keep building. I think Big Screen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product. He's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet. Like, so committed to just, like, winning. And so I really appreciate that. About the category. Yeah. Let's see how Apple's doing on.

Well, we have some heartbreaking news. Heartbreaking news. Apple has scrapped plans for a cheaper Apple Vision Pro display and is winding down work at Samsung. This is from MacRumors. Really hits me and the other three Apple Vision Pro fans particularly hard. Brutal. Who did I talk to? I talked to somebody who said that they actually are a daily user of the Apple Vision Pro. I thought I was in the top 1%. Was it the founder that's making? Yes, that's right. He says he watches it. He uses it every night or something like that. That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously, the product never really found product market fit, although we have one in the studio. We've been having fun with it. I still think it's an incredible piece of technology, but little bit of a chicken and egg problem. The developers never showed up and it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on, but to watch Lawrence of Arabia. But when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it. What did I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it and I watched Godfather Part 2 and Master and Commander. Master and Commander. That's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you want to be in the cinematic feel. Feel like you're on a warship. So Apple has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a lower cost Vision Pro. This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That, at least was my thesis, but Apple disagrees with me. What do I know? So the supplier, Samsung Display, expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember, there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged who had been working with the acquisition of Oculus and they'd been improving the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect, they were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display, but on a very linear trend. And allegedly what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, we know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays two years out, three years out, four years out. Now, what's the problem with the one that's four years out? Well, it's amazing, but it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line. It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce. And there's crazy low yield. So in chips in Displays, yield, rules, everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times, you want to get 99.9% yield. 90%. In the early days when you're prototyping a new technology, you might be getting just, just a few percent yield. And Apple said that's fine, we'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting edge displays. Jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it, but we'll have the best product and that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years, I thought it would just naturally get cheaper. It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. We haven't seen someone pick. Do you think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies? Maybe. Yeah. In, in, in VR. Because I don't. They're, they're certainly not stopping R and D on their specs and their, and their sort of everyday glasses product. Yeah. And so it might just be that, that they studied you and found that you're built different and you're one of one, the only person on earth. Yeah. No, no, I mean truly like sitting down and watching a full movie is a rare experience today. People aren't reading, they aren't watching movies, they're just scrolling. And people seem to be satisfied with their phone. And also the nature of a Doom scroll is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer, although obviously people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to be played by actively scrolling, which is something that doesn't require virtual reality. Certainly not enhanced by virtual reality. But then also sometimes you want to read the comments, sometimes you want to send it to a friend, sometimes you want to fact check it and ask AI about it, or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile. So I think that the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a Doom scroll session are obviously much, much higher than watching a film which, which you just put on and hopefully you don't pause it at all because you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes as scrolling means more and more, maybe the VR experience is less and less relevant. So the cheaper display on the Apple Vision Pro or maybe the Apple Vision Slim or Mini or something, I don't know, they could have used a different name. Pro always left the door open to just the regular Apple Vision at a more approachable price point, but the cheaper display that they were working on would have cut the headset's pixel density roughly in half. That's not what they need to do at all. They need to keep that pixel density because that's the best part of the experience. The move likely reflects Apple's broader shift towards smart glasses. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper Vision Air yeah, that's the term in October 2025 to fast track its Ray Ban style glasses effort. This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October 2025 with an M5 chip which does very little. Slightly better tracking. I think you can run some applications at slightly higher fidelity, but it is by all accounts essentially an identical device. But they are long overdue for a proper refresh. If they were taking this seriously and thinking about this as a true growth driver, I think they have recognized that this was an experiment that needs to be put on the back burner.

We got to pull up this video because we were talking about exactly this. The 964 Cabriolet Junior is a Porsche 964 that has been shrunk. Actually shrunk. Exactly what you said. Look at this video, Cory. Whoa. This is what you asked for. Fully customizable. And look at this. It looks normal size, but wait until this guy gets in it. This is amazing. So it is a go kart that has the bodywork of a Porsche. And so you can get one of these. They go like 60 miles an hour or something like that. Like, they're pretty fast. Yes. So I think if you put a governor on this vehicle, you'd have what you want, which is the vehicle for the kid that is fun, engaging, and highly stylized and made with precision. The group behind this is called End of Stay. S T A Y has periods after it. So I imagine it's some sort of acronym, but what a while. They did it. Yes. They did it. They did it. I'm interested. You can see the YouTube video here. The preview of the 964 Turbo Junior High Performance version. It's an absolutely crazy, crazy video that I got organically served to me. And I was like, this is what we've been looking for, for sure. This is exactly what we were talking about. I need one. I think you do need one. Anyway, GPT live a new generation.

Anyway, on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal. It's the world's creepiest office and people won't stay away. This is the New York complex vacated by IBM has become a magnet for urban explorers. We have a video of this place and if you're a scrappy startup looking to expand, this might be the key to success. The ultimate lock in factory in sort of rural New York. I think we'll get into it. So this is in Somers, New York. I don't know exactly how far away that is from Manhattan. Yeah. So if you were like a Neolab and your name was like Ominous Intelligence. Yeah this could be a great sort of HQ potentially. You know, your first little micro data center. Very James Bond villain sort of vibe. And yeah, looks like you could make it know, really, really homey. How far is it from Manhattan? Let's see. Okay. It is one hour. You can be in the city in an hour. That's. And imagine walking these halls late at night after a long day at work. Yes. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be creepy at all. Yes. Robert Carlton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms. I just said stop. It's over. The 62 year old retired engineer recalled. Soon he said three pursuing New York state police troopers emerged from the treeline and arrested seven juveniles. The criminal charge, Trespassing on the former IBM campus here. Disrespecting international business machines. Don't do it folks. The long vacant site has become a magnet for so called urban explorers who, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other unused disused structure they can breach. Enough of the graffiti. Yeah. Do you think putting here we gotta figure out how much. All over international businesses. Yeah, exactly. What was the, what was the IBM? AI Watson. Watson, the machine. What do you mean was? Was probably still at the frontier. Still at the frontier. It was super intelligent. At Jeopardy. The global Urbex, which is short for urban exploration phenomenon. Urbex isn't new, but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring more curiosity seekers. Police in Livingston, New Jersey recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston Mall property. Jacksonville Beach, Florida police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered Adventure Landing amusement park. Going into an abandoned amusement park, that is thrill seeking at its best. We are aware of a TikTok challenge to explore. To explore the property. Who's doing these TikTok challenges? Should they, should they be allowed to post those? This is, this is dangerous for some people. I mean seriously, you go in there, there's a lot of broken glass and you know, who knows about the structural integrity of a building that hasn't been inhabited in years or decades? Could be very. Is it on the market? Well, we have some news about that. I don't know if it's actually on the market, but I imagine if you make them an offer they can't refuse, this property could be yours. So Sebastian Capital, the Manhattan company that manages the 723 acre site that's a lot of size, says it is beefed up security and appreciates helps from from police. So I'm shocked by the YouTube comments. Yes. That are wholly coming to the defense of this building. They're saying I hate there's a class of people who see something like this and feel compelled to start breaking things. Why do people vandalize these kinds of places? Interesting. I can't believe these are all the top comments. I can't believe people go in there busting up the place. That's crazy. I would have sort of expected people to be on the side of the urban explorers, on the side of the TikTok challenge challengers. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said a 15 second clip isn't worth a criminal record. Don't do it if you've already been arrested. You're not the first call we've taken this month and you won't be the last. Proto says he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Summers town court clerk said some defendants received a six month adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, meaning charges will be dropped and their arrest will be sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe and preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces and a zeal to document discoveries and that they're careful and know their limits. Quote. It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble, said Bradley Garrett, a cultural photographer and author of the book Explore Everything Place Hacking the City about his own Urbex adventures. He sees urban exploration as a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes into intellectual curiosity about history and culture. So you go, you break into this abandoned building and then next thing you know you're an IBM consultant driving enterprise value for S&P 500 companies, traveling businessman. Could happen. Who knows? Could happen. Raghav wants to turn it into an Amman. Amman would be good. Data center. Seems obvious. Depending on what about the first Amman with a data center with some local AI. So quickly. You asked about the price. In 2016, IBM sold the property for $31.75 million. And it's owned by a LLC that shares a Fifth Avenue address with Sebastian Capital. So everyone suspects Sebastian's in on the deal. A plan to convert it to a private school foundered during COVID and Sebastian said it is considered. Yeah, foundering is like failing. But yes, foundered. So floundered would be another appropriate term for what happened, but it did not. It was not successfully converted into a private school, obviously. But if you. If you want to take a wild swing, go pick it up. Make Sebastian Capital an offer. Let's see. I wonder what it would trade for today. Lots of work to be done. Car and drive quickly. Tyler had something on the IBM complex. Yeah. So, okay. Planning to go 1.1 million square feet. Historically, you'd see like, I think something like around 10 watts per square feet. Okay, maybe it's a little bit higher tech, right? This is IBM. It is. An estimate I think is reasonable is around 20 megawatts. 20 megawatts? Yeah. So you're looking at a small data center. Is there any natural gas in the ground? Can we frack. Can we put solar panels on the roof? Can we build a nuclear reactor there? What are our options? If we want to get this thing churning out tokens, we want to turn it into a token machine. Interesting. We should go check it out.