005: Billion Dollar Ghost Babies

Snake oil salesmen never left. They just learned to code. My friend keeps rockets in the sky, and he still feels like he's losing to a landing page. I tried to tell him why.

So this episode is about that scoreboard.

I walk you from an 1890s snake-oil wagon parked outside a general store in Kansas all the way to a 2026 AI landing page. Same four tricks. Same top hat. Different typography. Then I do the math on what a "$1B ARR, one person" company actually requires, spoiler: it's duct tape and a prayer, and the scaffolding doesn't hold. And I end where every hype-cycle conversation should…