Ricker and Bon

Adobe House Records

Business-tech culture podcast hosted by two millennial entrepreneur friends who met in the middle of the desert. Reach us at rickerandbon@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickerandbon/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbon YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rickerandbon Threads: https://www.threads.net/@rickerandbon Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0n1m0eR2sYZU2EFhSwlqX1 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ricker-and-bon/id1367523204

  1. Sep 1

    Nvidia’s $96B Quarter, OpenAI’s Hugging Face Hack, and Jersey Mike’s IPO | Ricker and Bon #439

    Nvidia posted a $96.2 billion quarter, forecast another year of major growth, and set off a conversation about whether the AI buildout is a durable boom or a hyperscaler-funded bubble. Ricker and Bon also get into the reported Nvidia and Hugging Face deal, what open-source AI infrastructure actually means, and why the gap between people who use AI fluently and those who do not may keep widening. They unpack the reported autonomous OpenAI breach of Hugging Face and the state investigations that followed. The conversation turns to whether AI companies, governments and ordinary businesses understand what agents can do when they can work directly with files and systems instead of being limited to a traditional interface. The Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic gets a closer look after a federal judge ruled against it. Ricker and Bon talk through Anthropic's limits on surveillance and autonomous-weapons use, the government's response, and what it says about the demand for frontier AI tools. Trump's proposed 50% tariffs on Canadian autos, parts and steel lead into a conversation about who ultimately pays when a tightly connected supply chain gets hit. They also cover Iran, natural-disaster anxiety, California earthquake scenarios and why a movie like The Dog Stars can make a normal afternoon feel much less normal. Then it is time for restaurant-business analysis. Jersey Mike's, Dave's Hot Chicken, Yum Brands, Blackstone, private equity, celebrity investors, food stocks and the surprisingly serious question of whether restaurant food is mostly mid all make the cut. The episode also includes a Ridley Scott movie review, a detour into the Google AI experience, the evolution of phones and streaming, and the usual weekend conversation. Chapters: 0:00 Episode open and The Dog Stars 3:16 Nvidia, Hugging Face and the weekly tech rundown 10:00 The tech bubble, New York and Silicon Valley 14:20 Nvidia's $96.2B quarter and Canadian tariffs 18:40 Anthropic, the Pentagon and AI use limits 28:42 Reported OpenAI breach of Hugging Face 31:00 AI agents, the GUI and the AI skills gap 35:00 Nepal, natural disasters and California earthquake fears 40:00 Jersey Mike's, private equity and food stocks 49:00 Dave's Hot Chicken, Yum Brands and Pepsi 55:00 Restaurant takes and the cheeseburger origin story 60:00 Basketball stories, The Weeknd and streaming music 66:00 Phones, AI and what comes after the iPhone Follow Ricker and Bon: http://instagram.com/rickerandbon http://tiktok.com/@rickerandbon https://youtube.com/@rickerandbon https://open.spotify.com/show/0n1m0eR2sYZU2EFhSwlqX1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ricker-and-bon/id1367523204

  2. Aug 25

    Evan Marks on Trading, Burnout, Emotional Control & Mental Performance | Ricker & Bon

    Evan Marks joins Ricker & Bon for a wide-ranging conversation about trading psychology, mental training, performance under pressure, and what it takes to execute consistently in high-stakes environments. Evan traces the path from managing institutional capital on Wall Street to founding M1 Performance Group, where he coaches traders, executives, athletes, and other high performers. The conversation examines the nervous system, burnout, fight-or-flight responses, external and internal stimuli, and why trading requires confidence in behavior even when the market remains uncertain. The discussion then moves into emotional awareness and decision-making: naming what we feel, creating mental space, choosing behavior, and understanding the difference between surviving and thriving. Evan explains how intentional practice, emotional range, and the M1 Mental Trading Academy help performers build stronger mental foundations—and why slowing down can ultimately help them speed up. Chapters: 00:00 Opening podcast teaser 00:36 Meet Evan Marks: Wall Street veteran and M1 Performance Group founder 01:36 From market making to hedge funds 05:26 Why Evan coaches high-pressure performers 07:36 What wins and losses do to the nervous system 09:56 Mental health, coaching, and performance 11:48 Neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and the why behind behavior 14:36 Building new experiences and identity shifts 17:36 Training to become a better coach 20:36 Trading plans, uncertainty, and behavioral confidence 23:21 Emotions, mental space, and choosing behavior 26:11 Slowing down to make intentional decisions 28:36 Validation, self-awareness, and performance 33:23 Naming emotions: from good/bad to an emotional spectrum 39:13 The M1 Mental Trading Academy 43:01 Slow down to speed up—and where to find Evan

    Evan Marks on Trading, Burnout, Emotional Control & Mental Performance | Ricker & Bon
  3. Aug 17

    The Lakers' $12.5B Deal, AI's Data Center Backlash, and Goth Night in LA | Ricker and Bon #438

    Ricker and Bon open with the platform question every podcaster eventually asks: how did Spotify win the culture war while Apple Music and Apple Podcasts still struggle to feel social? They get into discovery, desktop apps, short-form conversion and why technically polished products do not automatically become the cool products people use. The tech rundown starts with a proposed futures market for computing power and the economics of aging data-center hardware. That leads into SpaceX's expanding AI-infrastructure costs, Starlink growth and the question of whether spending on AI is outrunning the business paying for it. From there, the show detours into Silicon Valley, Blue Mountain State and An Extremely Goofy Movie: college nostalgia, Goofy's unemployment crisis, X Games-era Disney synergy and the surprisingly deep economics of a cartoon dog going back to school. The guys compare AI-assisted software building with traditional development, explain how GitHub keeps code and dependencies connected, and react to Google's enormous shared codebase spanning products such as YouTube, Maps and Waymo. If regulators ever forced Google to spin off YouTube, separating the technology could be as difficult as separating the business. Then the Lakers take over the show. Ricker and Bon work through reports of a $12.5 billion agreement involving Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, compare recent NBA-team valuations and sale prices, and debate what brand, location, ticket demand and taxes really mean when a sports franchise changes hands. Weekend hour goes to goth night at The OffBeat in Highland Park: dance music, warehouse afters, tortas, awkward approaches on the dance floor and the strangely perfect names Los Angeles nightlife gives itself. The transportation discussion pits Uber's platform strategy against Waymo's capital-intensive robotaxi operation and Tesla's long-delayed promises. Uber and Pony.ai want to deploy more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities, while the hosts argue that Waymo is already delivering the strongest rider experience in Los Angeles. They also cover Apple's China-specific AI model with Alibaba and the regulatory bargain required to bring Apple Intelligence into that market. From there, the conversation moves to beneficial-ownership reporting, anonymous LLCs and whether accountability changes when companies can hide the people controlling them. The episode closes on data centers and public backlash. The hosts argue that the opposition is not always anti-AI: data centers have become a visible symbol of inequality, infrastructure strain and a buildout whose long-term demand is still uncertain. 0:00 Cold open 1:23 Show open and podcast clips 8:09 Spotify vs. Apple 12:18 Compute futures and SpaceX AI costs 13:50 Goofy goes to college 24:36 Wrivid and AI workflows 27:42 Google's monorepo and a YouTube spin-off 32:51 The Lakers' $12.5B deal 46:04 Goth night at The OffBeat 52:34 Uber, Pony.ai, Waymo and robotaxis 56:25 Apple builds AI for China with Alibaba 57:16 Anonymous LLCs and ownership reporting 65:49 Data center backlash Follow Ricker and Bon: http://instagram.com/rickerandbon http://tiktok.com/@rickerandbon https://youtube.com/@rickerandbon https://open.spotify.com/show/0n1m0eR2sYZU2EFhSwlqX1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ricker-and-bon/id1367523204

  4. Jun 29

    Are We Getting the Foldable iPhone?

    We talk the foldable iPhone, Michael Jackson's death, and Trump passports. Some other notable news:Micron delivered one of the most stunning quarters in semiconductor history, reporting roughly $41.5 billion in fiscal-Q3 revenue, up about 346% year over year, and guiding next quarter to about $50 billion with an 81% gross margin. The read-through is that AI has turned high-bandwidth memory from a boom-bust commodity into a scarce, contracted input for the next generation of compute.SpaceX's record IPO unwound almost as violently as it launched, with the stock falling 31% in four sessions from its June 16 peak and erasing more than $600 billion of market value. A 4.2% public float, a $20 billion bond sale, newly listed options, August lockup risk, and a $4.9 billion 2025 net loss all collided in one of the clearest market-structure lessons of the AI trade.Oracle disclosed about 21,000 job cuts and directly tied the reductions to AI adoption in its own annual filing, even as it expands AI cloud capacity through major data-center deals linked to OpenAI and Meta. China also reclaimed the world's-fastest-supercomputer crown with LineShine, an all-domestic CPU-only system that hit 2.198 exaflops under U.S. export controls.A fatal Tesla crash in Katy, Texas, reopened the self-driving accountability fight after the driver said he had been using Tesla's partially automated driving system and both NHTSA and NTSB opened investigations. Robotics funding added the other side of the physical-AI story, with about $55.8 billion raised so far in 2026 and Figure banking a $1 billion Series C at a $39 billion valuation.The runner-ups: FedEx beat expectations and completed the FedEx Freight spin-off, onsemi agreed to buy Synaptics for about $7 billion to push deeper into edge and physical AI, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pressed AI companies to disclose data-center emissions, water use, land use, and energy sources. The 30,000-ft view: Q1 GDP was revised up to 2.1%, PCE inflation ran at 4.6%, markets repriced toward possible Fed hikes, Nvidia's Vera CPUs entered full production, and the mega-IPO pipeline still has Anthropic and OpenAI queued. If you want a prize, send us a DM: instagram.com/rickerandbon tiktok.com/@rickerandbon youtube.com/@rickerandbon

  5. Jun 17

    SpaceX's $75B Record IPO, Fable 5 Regulation & OpenAI's $1T S-1 Filing | Ricker and Bon #429

    SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11 and began trading on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX on June 12, raising roughly $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation - the largest initial public offering ever, dwarfing Saudi Aramco's $29B record from 2019. The stock opened at $150, jumped more than 20% intraday, and closed its first session at $161.11, up about 19% from the offer price. With about 556.6 million shares sold, SpaceX instantly became one of the most valuable companies ever to go public and gave public investors their first direct stake in Starlink and Starship.The U.S.-Iran confrontation that has kept the Strait of Hormuz contested for months drove another volatile week in energy markets, with crude having spiked toward triple digits earlier in the standoff before easing back toward the mid-$80s as diplomacy gained traction. Roughly 27% of seaborne crude moves through Hormuz, and analysts have warned prices could spike dramatically if the chokepoint stays disrupted. By Friday, Iranian media described a draft deal that would lift oil sanctions and reopen the Strait, with reports of a possible signing in Switzerland as soon as the weekend - sending crude down about 2% to near $85 and lifting risk assets.OpenAI said on June 8 that it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, the clearest signal yet that the AI leader is moving toward a public listing. Reporting puts the targeted valuation in the roughly $850 billion to $1 trillion range, building on the $852 billion post-money valuation from its March 2026 raise led by SoftBank and Microsoft. OpenAI has reportedly tapped Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to lead the deal, with a possible listing window stretching from September into Q4 2026.At WWDC on June 8, Apple unveiled Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant with conversation history, personal-context awareness, a dedicated Siri app, and customizable voice and pacing - the long-delayed AI overhaul it has been under pressure to deliver. The company also showed iOS 27, refinements to its Liquid Glass design language, new family-safety tools, and the next macOS, named Golden Gate. The event doubled as Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO; John Ternus is set to take over in September.Tesla and Elon Musk's xAI unveiled a joint project called Digital Optimus, billed as the first major outcome of Tesla's roughly $2 billion investment in xAI. The effort fuses Tesla's humanoid-robot hardware and efficiency with xAI's reasoning models, and Musk said a user-ready version could arrive within about six months - targeting roughly September 2026. The reveal deepens the cross-pollination between Musk's companies and lands alongside a June 12 signal from Musk that Tesla's partnership with Nvidia is heading to the next level.Anthropic launched the Claude Partner Network - including a new Services Track and Partner Hub - and committed an initial $100 million to help consulting firms, professional-services providers and specialist AI shops deploy Claude inside enterprises. The company said it will expand its partner-facing team roughly fivefold with applied AI engineers and technical architects, and reported early traction of more than 40,000 firm applications and over 10,000 certified consultants. It is a clear move to win the enterprise layer, where adoption is gated by integration and services rather than raw model quality.If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

  6. Jun 8

    The Death of Weightless Software: $80B AI Bets, 142K Layoffs & GitHub Revolt | Ricker and Bon #434

    The weightless era of software is over. This week the AI buildout slammed into the physical world: concrete, copper, electricity, water, and capital. We map the paradox of record wealth at the top of the stack and intense friction everywhere else. Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise, its first major stock sale since the 2004 IPO, to fund an estimated $180 to $190 billion in AI compute capex for 2026, with Berkshire Hathaway taking a $10 billion private placement. Broadcom posted a record fiscal Q2 of $22.19 billion, AI chip revenue up 143%, and Marvell shipped the first 102.4 Tbps switch that Jensen Huang called the next trillion-dollar company. SoftBank overtook Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company after pledging 75 billion euros for 5 gigawatts of AI data centers in France. The bill for the combined ~$700 billion buildout is landing on workers: 2026 tech layoffs have reached roughly 142,000, and employment for developers under 26 has dropped nearly 20% since 2024. GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, with power-user bills jumping from about $29 to $750 and outliers hitting $3,000. NVIDIA and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark to run 120-billion-parameter models locally, Anthropic filed confidentially for a roughly $1 trillion IPO, and Ohio suspended its data-center tax break as a citizen petition aims to ban hyperscale data centers. Community consent, water, and energy are the real bottlenecks. If you want a prize, send us a DM:instagram.com/rickerandbontiktok.com/@rickerandbonyoutube.com/@rickerandbon

5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Business-tech culture podcast hosted by two millennial entrepreneur friends who met in the middle of the desert. Reach us at rickerandbon@gmail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickerandbon/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbon YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rickerandbon Threads: https://www.threads.net/@rickerandbon Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0n1m0eR2sYZU2EFhSwlqX1 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ricker-and-bon/id1367523204