Ricker & Bon return with a wide-ranging conversation about media, technology, markets, AI tools, and the stories shaping the week.

The conversation moves from pop culture and press access to AI’s role in daily life, biotech ambitions, debt, and the business of the internet.

The hosts talk through everyday AI use, changing personal workflows and software experiments, then turn to technology financing, media-company dealmaking, consumer technology, and digital habits.

Chapters

00:00 Host intro

01:07 Opening: media, music, and public debate

09:07 Press access and the changing news landscape

15:07 AI tools, personal workflows, and software experiments

28:07 AI, biotech, and the technology investment cycle

33:07 Debt, markets, and media-company dealmaking

39:07 Consumer technology and digital habits

53:07 Internet culture, finance, and closing conversation

Ricker & Bon covers technology, business, media, markets, and the ideas moving through culture each week.

Ricker and Bon talk through foldable phones, the future of phone-first computing, AI safety, the compute race, NVIDIA, workplace productivity, and what debt and bond markets mean for the AI economy.

This audio edition opens with the approved 15-second Collar John theme before the conversation.

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Ricker & Bon are back with a wide-open conversation on the AI work boom, Codex and the terminal barrier, why faster software can create more work instead of fewer jobs, AirPods Pro, NVIDIA, Anthropic's compute buildout, and Tesla Cybercab.

00:00 The drops are back02:39 Codex, AI, and the terminal barrier07:30 Building games and software with AI12:00 Why AI can create more work, not fewer jobs21:20 GTA VI and Xbox cloud gaming25:00 Physical media, ownership, and copyright30:00 Internet research and the music tangent35:35 Azure, cloud spending, and Microsoft42:45 Apple, private CEOs, and AirPods Pro48:00 Anthropic, Lambda, and the AI compute buildout51:00 NVIDIA, Roblox, and market optimism56:00 Jensen Huang watch talk59:00 Tesla Cybercab and the federal safety question64:00 Volkswagen cuts, jobs, and rapid-fire news67:25 Sign-offSubscribe for more Ricker & Bon. Follow @rickerandbon on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

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

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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

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

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Ricker and Bon break down South Korea's leveraged-ETF unwind, SpaceX and Starlink's challenge to telecom, GPT-5.6 and agentic work, Christopher Nolan's studio move, Japan's yen problem, and a final Timepiece Hour on Seiko and Orient.

They also get into Spotify's copyright crackdown, late-night DJ sets in Los Angeles, Snapchat and dating-app economics, Apple TV, Ted Lasso, and the Your Mom's House breakup. Music playback from the BONES “Seiko” segment was removed while the spoken setup, reactions, lyric discussion, and watch conversation remain.

0:00 Cold open

0:42 Spotify's copyright crackdown

3:59 Weekend DJ adventures

10:55 Weekly tech rundown

14:06 GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work

19:05 South Korea's leverage casino

28:16 SpaceX and Starlink vs. telecom

34:54 Snapchat and dating-app economics

39:09 The Odyssey, Nolan and Universal

42:41 Apple TV's Ptolemy Grey

45:21 Ted Lasso and six-figure debt

49:20 The Your Mom's House breakup

52:12 Japan's yen and bond-market problem

58:48 Timepiece Hour

59:42 BONES' “Seiko” lyric breakdown — music removed

60:51 The mechanical watch collection

69:03 Orient and Seiko history

Ambitious young women are out-earning their boyfriends, covering the bill and wondering when the men beside them will find some momentum. Ricker and Bon dig into the “broke boyfriend” debate, why three bad relationships may be a pattern, and whether the man should always pay during the courting phase.

That turns into the five-date coffee test, the difference between being broke at 22 and broke at 32, and what people actually mean when they say they want an ambitious partner. The conversation also gets into modern dating, college expectations and the strange status games around who pays.

The detours cover Spider-Man, presidents, 9/11-era travel, reading with the homies and Apple’s new device-leasing push. If your laptop is going back after three years, Bon has one concern about what Apple might find on it.

Then the relationship metaphor reaches the AI boom. Microsoft’s surging Azure business is helping finance enormous infrastructure spending, while Nvidia is reportedly considering a roughly $250 billion backstop tied to OpenAI’s proposed 10-gigawatt Ohio data-center campus. The full buildout could top $500 billion.

OpenAI becomes the broke boyfriend, Microsoft becomes mommy, and Nvidia may be the friend guaranteeing the bill. Ricker and Bon also touch on China’s CXMT debut, Claude Opus 5, Kimi K3, cooling payroll growth and Apple’s delayed smart-glasses plans.

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OpenAI says an internal cyber-capability evaluation crossed the boundary it was supposed to stay inside and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. We break down how the agent moved between systems, why the containment failure matters, and why it felt less like a benchmark and more like the opening scene of a science-fiction movie.

Alphabet posted Q2 revenue of $119.8 billion, but the quarter also produced negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow after $44.9 billion in capital spending. The debate is no longer whether AI demand exists; it is how long the infrastructure payback takes when even Google can spend more cash than it generates in a quarter.

That leads into the wider AI buildout: off-balance-sheet financing, power and construction bottlenecks, depreciating GPUs, and whether data centers will leave behind infrastructure as durable as railroads and telecommunications. Presearch also announced that it was shutting down, turning one abstract industry conversation into an immediate business question.

Crypto was supposed to replace the banking system. Now BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and other institutions have accumulated the assets, and the market increasingly resembles the financial system it once rejected.

Marvel used Comic-Con to announce Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider and David Jonsson as the new Black Panther. The conversation immediately becomes a test of whether anyone can keep Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, Nicolas Cage, Deadpool, and Ghost Rider straight.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey earned $87 million in its second domestic weekend and reached approximately $639.6 million worldwide. Premium formats and IMAX are central to the release, which makes watching it later through TikTok clips the most disrespectful possible viewing plan.

Warner Bros. Discovery sued Amazon MGM Studios over the hiring of HBO Max marketing executive Pia Barlow, alleging interference with employment agreements. Apple is also reportedly targeting a 2027 consumer release for smart glasses, reopening the argument over privacy, ownership, and whether a company should be able to disable hardware you bought.

Before the headlines, we talk about the wedding that reopened the family question, the dorm assignment that made Ricker and Bon possible, dating at 20 versus 30, and the very genuine monotone.

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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