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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, 03/27/2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Realm.
Speaker 2:The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place.
Speaker 1:Let's go. I like that one.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you like it, John, because it's the only one you have.
Speaker 1:I have two. Okay? Let's be clear. I have this and I also have this. So be aware.
Speaker 1:What is that at the end? I heard some other music. Anyway, let's pull up the linear lineup because we have a great show for you today folks. It's Friday. We have Billy Boman.
Speaker 1:His They're calling him Kendall.
Speaker 2:They're calling him The Bomanator. The Bomanator.
Speaker 1:The Bomanator. You're in if you're in LA, if you're in Hollywood and you drive down the freeway, you will see as you enter Hollywood his name as big as the Hollywood sign basically. There's a massive Fiverr paid for it. And so we're gonna have him in the studio talking about what it takes to be a director of AI video, what that even means, how he's using these tools, what he's using. That'll be interesting.
Speaker 1:Then we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise talking about taking private stakes in private companies public on the public stock exchange. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's up 1300% above NAV. Wow. So that'll be an interesting
Speaker 1:And then we have a lightning round, and we're closing it out with Ryan from Shield AI who just raised a massive round. Defense tech is, of course, booming, and we will talk to him a lot about what AI means in the defense stack. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces, 75% now, of workspaces on linear are using agents, and you should be too. So why is no one talking about Xcelergy?
Speaker 1:I love these titles. Very niche company. It was in stealth mode for five years, but sold this week to Novartis for 2,000,000,000 smackaroos. That's a good outcome. Novartis, of course, is the $300,000,000,000 Swiss pharmaceutical company, and they just paid $2,000,000,000 for basically a five year old company named Excelergy.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's a great outcome. It's a fantastic outcome. This is an interesting story because it's very much like the biotech playbook done right. They bring in the right CEO
Speaker 2:experience. Yes,
Speaker 1:We can go through this.
Speaker 2:$2,000,000,000 exit in five years from your point of view. Is this good? Is this good?
Speaker 3:That's pretty good, yeah.
Speaker 1:Pretty I agree. It's but this isn't this isn't in the sweet spot for typical tech news, but there there are some interesting there are some interesting data points. Amir over at The Information said leading indicator of AI adoption, drug companies like Novo Nordisk. Pharma has long been at the forefront of machine learning. Ozempic Maker says AI agents are shortening its clinical trials.
Speaker 1:People think that it's going to a prompt and saying like, cure cancer. It's not. It's like you have a 10,000 page document that you need to send to the FDA. And if there's a comma in the wrong place, they can just send it back to you and say, there's an error. Like, we don't wanna deal with it right now.
Speaker 1:You're at back at the back of the queue.
Speaker 2:Is that real?
Speaker 1:You can get dinged for crazy, crazy stuff. Like, I I I don't know exactly what I can share, but I've heard of multibillion dollar companies getting dinged for not showing, like, they will list out, okay. We use this centrifuge to run this assay to understand how this chemical separates, but they didn't say they didn't list out who the suppliers to that supplier are. They didn't explain the entire supply chain. There was very little guidance on it.
Speaker 1:Little things like that come up all the time and reading through all the documentation. Of course, most of this, when you're talking about Novo, it's like they have direct line of communication with the FDA. It's different.
Speaker 2:Seeing this headline There are
Speaker 1:tons of situations where you need to like comb through data and organize it.
Speaker 2:When it when it when when some type of public company software CEO comes out and says like everything is accelerating because of AI. Yeah. Oftentimes, I look at the business and if, you know, if revenue isn't accelerating dramatically Yeah. You think like, okay, this guy just wants an AI narrow he's just for an AI narrative But when I see a pharma company do it, no real context on on pharma personally. So I'm like, it must be true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Who who
Speaker 1:No. I mean, I I was working on FDA filings like four or five years ago and there were so many Word documents that needed to be it was the same application for multiple variations on the product that the FDA was going to review. So we actually wrote Python scripts to programmatically interact with the Word documents to basically do like a very advanced version of find and replace. It's like perfect for AI. Yep.
Speaker 1:And it just speeds things up a little bit. You submit a week earlier. You have, you know, you can submit more things, more variations. You can give more information, compile more information, investigate other literature, do deep research reports, what else is out there. Let's review all the IP faster, summarize things, find different threads to pull on.
Speaker 1:Little things like that just squeak out like an extra five minutes here, an extra day there, and it all adds up to acceleration in progress. It's It's not like an overnight all of a sudden everything's completely changed. Maybe that happens. But at least right now, there's clearly, you know, a benefit from this. Overnight success.
Speaker 1:But this was an overnight success, at least for Alex Eggel, Ted Jardenski, Luke Pennington and Jeff Harris, who took academic research, which they've been doing at labs at Stanford and Bern, into what is basically a VC backed biotech company, a drug company. So the goal was simple. What do they actually make? They wanted to make a better allergy drug. So when people have allergies, they you you have a peanut allergy.
Speaker 1:If peanuts come in, your allergy cells, like, flare up and you need to fight that back. So the current blockbuster drug in the category is called Xolair. And when someone has an allergic reaction to a food, allergy drugs act quickly to treat the reaction before it does lasting damage to the body. So the key immune molecule at the center of many allergic reactions is called IgE, and Exelergy's lead program, EXL-one 111, targets IgE. So the goal is to work faster, quiet the pathway more deeply, and ideally last longer between doses to fight allergic reactions.
Speaker 1:And so these will make that less severe. So Red Tree Venture Capital seeded the company in 2021, but they stayed in stealth for about five years. The team announced their first big fundraiser, a $70,000,000 Series A led by Samsara BioCapital. And this is a pretty typical flow for biotech companies, university science first, then they bring on secondary specialist capital, someone with experience in biotech. It's less common to go to, like, the big names that we know, Sequoias, the Founders Funds, the Andreessens.
Speaker 1:They do some stuff in bio, but very often, if it's coming directly out of a lab, going to be IPO ed or acquired in a few years, like that's a pretty traditional biotech VC playbook. And so by February, Exelergy dosed its first phase one patients. So they gave the drug to subjects, and it was obviously looking good because the Novartis deal signed a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How well does that phase one trial need to go for somebody to immediately come in and be like, yep, here's $2,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Probably really well. Yeah. But it is like standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember, the research was done in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, probably earlier than that. And it's building on an existing pathway.
Speaker 1:There's some interesting stuff going on. So Novartis
Speaker 2:This guy is such CEO is Yeah. Such a
Speaker 1:Insane. So, yeah, was like, I didn't want to diminish his accomplishments by reducing it to a playbook, but this isn't his first rodeo. The CEO, Todd Sbodinik, he joined in 2025, sells the company in less than a year. And you've seen the story twice before. When he was at Zeltic, Allergan acquired it for $2,400,000,000 And when he ran Dermavant, he sold that company for $1,200,000,000 in 2024.
Speaker 1:So he's seen a unicorn outcome two years ago and he gets a new job. He's just like, I was gonna take some time off, gets back in the arena and immediately sells the company. So clearly a great operator. And no one was really surprised by this, at least in the stock market.
Speaker 2:Years have
Speaker 4:hit.
Speaker 2:Flat. Join his next company.
Speaker 1:That's a good idea. You just follow this guy Just
Speaker 2:$3,000,000,000 acquisitions
Speaker 1:It's be like
Speaker 2:back to back. I would I think it's a good
Speaker 1:I would love to
Speaker 2:risk a janitor adjusted
Speaker 1:at this company. Yeah. I would love to be a janitor here. I'll actually take all stock. I'll take all stock and I will clean the toilets and get coffee if that's what it takes.
Speaker 1:Because I know what's gonna happen. I've seen this playbook before. Anyway, Novartis, you know, the stock is not really moving on this news because this is very expected. This is part of their playbook. They have made, just last year, 2025, they made $1,700,000,000 in sales of Xolair, the allergy drug that's currently the blockbuster drug in the category.
Speaker 1:And this is a very logical next act in that category. So key Xolair patents are about to expire, so a next generation IgE asset is strategically valuable right now. Novartis' CEO has previously outlined a pretty broad acquisition playbook. It's focused on bolt on deals in core areas. So when they have a business up and running like immunology, like treating allergies, they have all of the sales and distribution, they have an existing product portfolio, the business is working, add things on to extend the viability of that business line.
Speaker 1:And Excelergy fits squarely inside of that plan. Now the $2,000,000,000 acquisition price is not all cash upfront. It is split between upfront payment and there's milestones based on development and commercial targets. So if they all of a sudden, flop in Phase II trials, probably some of that gets clawed back. It needs to actually work and like all of the promises that they made have to play out.
Speaker 1:But they have Novartis behind them to, you know, propel them through that, and it feels like a pretty standard playbook. So good stuff there. And in general, it's just like it's cool. Anyone who's dealt with allergies either personally or with loved ones, it's always a hassle. You know, everyone has a story of like someone was on vacation, they got a drink that had a nut in it and someone, you know, had an allergic reaction.
Speaker 1:And anything that can treat that is obviously good. So another arrow in the quiver of modern medicine, which is great to see. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agency to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me also tell you about Sentry.
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Speaker 2:Let's breaking news. Huge leak. OMG, did you guys know that Anthropic was training a better model this whole time. That's great. Shocking according to Unemployed Capital Allocator.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course, referencing a leak, a scoop.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this will trigger the the team at DeepMind or OpenAI to consider training a better model. It feels like it feels like if if they're doing hey. You're gonna have to respond. So you could see multiple companies training new models based on this leak.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. An interesting story. There's some interesting marketing perspective and how
Speaker 1:you actually roll out and manage like vibes and how you Yeah.
Speaker 2:To me to me, it doesn't seem improbable that there's been a lot of spud talk Sure. On the timeline this week.
Speaker 1:You gotta get gotta start pumping mythos.
Speaker 2:Mythos talk.
Speaker 1:The most powerful AI model ever developed. It's a good tagline. And
Speaker 2:very, very painful for all the SaaS companies out there
Speaker 4:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:That that just sell off Yes. Whenever Anthropic does something.
Speaker 1:So Prinsworth
Speaker 2:It's a vicious cycle now.
Speaker 1:Prinsworth, a little summary of this. Anthropic has been testing a new model called Mythos with certain customers. They call it a step change in AI capabilities, including dramatically higher scores in coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity. I want to know how it will do on Arc AGI v three because all of the models are under 1% completion on that benchmark. It's the one benchmark that is not saturated.
Speaker 1:It's not it's very closely guarded. You can't get into the test the actual test set. You can only see the examples. And it clearly is I still love the benchmark and the team over at ARC for what they're doing. So this is part of a new Capybara series of models, which are largely larger and more intelligent than Opus.
Speaker 1:It's more expensive to run, and it's not ready yet for general release, but they are excited about it. Mythos pricing bets coming in from 0.005 seconds, 100 in, $2.50 out. Subs reprice to $50, $2.50, and a $1,000 plan might be coming. Who knows? What do you think?
Speaker 1:Jordy, Tyler, any thoughts on the new model?
Speaker 2:Well, let's pull up this picture of a capybara Okay. Just to put to would love to see some context. Context. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is it a mythical creature? No. Capybara real. I mean So what's the connection between
Speaker 2:quite docile. Okay. But they can get violent. Let's look at this picture.
Speaker 1:Watch out.
Speaker 2:I mean, look at look at the at the chomp on that.
Speaker 1:This is something we should read into. We should say, what are What do they mean by this? You know, they they it's clearly some sort of vague post. They're telling you they're telling you something that, you know, friendly, cute, but also potentially the end of the world. You never know.
Speaker 2:There's another picture here we can pull up.
Speaker 1:Are you just sending Capybara photos? While you pull that up, let me tell everyone about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles in optic storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 2:I mean, these these are these are nightmare fuel. Look at this, John.
Speaker 1:It looks like a big hamster or a big guinea pig. How big are these guys?
Speaker 2:We'll pull up the next picture and we'll see if he still see if he still still think so, John.
Speaker 1:Do you think we could contain it? Do you think if we had one in the studio, we we it would overrun us or do you think we could keep it
Speaker 2:up? I think
Speaker 1:That's pretty horrifying.
Speaker 2:I think sort of Four or five of these
Speaker 1:could take
Speaker 2:you down.
Speaker 5:Yep. Median weight is between sixty and a hundred and seventy four pounds.
Speaker 1:A hundred and seventy four pounds. That's a that's bigger than my dog. Wow. That's a big
Speaker 2:at the Santa Barbara too.
Speaker 1:This is the metaphor. You know, like these models are getting incredibly powerful. You need to contain them and think about safety and you need to think about how do you keep the capybara safe. You you need to lock it in a in a box in in a cage. It cannot be allowed to run free.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think just back on the pricing thing, I think, like, this is generally right. So basically, point o o five seconds is saying, like, it's just gonna get 10 x more expensive. Yep. Because right now, I think it's something like $10 in, $25 out.
Speaker 1:People are ready for people are ready to pay more though. Like, they're paying a bunch through the API.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, can see like
Speaker 5:Maybe we'll talk about this right after. But like the the subscription, technically, it's the same price, but the limits are going down. So it's Okay. The the tokens are getting more expensive. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and as you see, like, there's, like, this insane compute crunch. Like, I I see that models are gonna get much more expensive as they're getting bigger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it is interesting. I wasn't expecting to be in the regime of, like, subscriptions as long as we have been. Like just talking to Ben and our team about how he sort of bounces around from one subscription to the next, like he'll max one out and then move over to the next one and then move over to the different one. He's like maybe more price sensitive than model sensitive.
Speaker 1:I would always assume I'd always assume that most businesses would just be on an API consumption basis. And
Speaker 5:Just like so so the reason like I'm I'm not hitting the APIs is because it's it is, like, basically 10x more expensive It's more expensive. Than using the subscription. The subscription.
Speaker 1:So you do most of the work in the subscription, which is just I mean, that's economically rational. I I I guess what I'm saying is, like, I'm surprised by how many people who are in a business context still make that decision and how much of a price war we're in, how much capital matters here.
Speaker 2:Well, let's pull up this video because I'm not sure I'm not sure you guys would be making the same decisions with the capybara family of models if you knew that capybaras were capable.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:This is important. This kind of thing.
Speaker 1:What's going on here? They can swim? Wait. This is a human. Is this AI?
Speaker 1:Oh my god. That's really attacking her.
Speaker 2:Wow. This is why they're calling it their most powerful model ever.
Speaker 1:We need to slow down. We need to slow down with the virus.
Speaker 2:It's it's It's horrifying. It's horrifying.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need to we need to slow down.
Speaker 2:I hope they I hope they, you know, keep this with the safety team for for long
Speaker 1:I think I think we need all countries to come together and and agree to to control the Capybara population because that is truly horrifying.
Speaker 2:A lot of chatter on the timeline Yeah. We can around around pricing.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:All of this is to be expected somewhat. Definitely feels like all the labs will have to introduce some type of surge pricing over time.
Speaker 1:Take him as a as a very independent take. He's the biggest NVIDIA stan and he makes a lot of good points. But he's he's making the argument that Anthropic needs more GPUs because he's he's sharing some posts here. To manage growing demand for Claude, we're adjusting our five hour session limits for free pro max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
Speaker 2:Takem is coming on the show Monday. I'm very excited to talk to him. We'll ask him what he thinks about Nvidia.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so a lot of people are getting into polyphasic sleep because of this. So Claude has different limits at different times. So when the limits are in effect, that's when you need to be sleeping. Tyler, have you gotten into polyphasic sleep yet?
Speaker 5:I'm not there yet, but I'm I mean, it it the problem is getting worse. Okay. I think at some point I'm gonna
Speaker 1:I told you I I I told Tyler that sometimes I I indulge in polyphasic sleep. After the show, I'll I'll sleep for an hour and then I'll go about my day and then I'll I'll sleep at night. And he said that's just a nap. It doesn't count. I guess people really are doing the polyphasic sleep thing to monitor to monitor their agents.
Speaker 1:I wonder if that's an aberration for this particular moment in time.
Speaker 2:Would think you would think by you would think you would know one person that has done that and stuck with it. Because I feel like a bunch of people have tried that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Over time. Yeah. And then eventually
Speaker 5:I mean, if if you're trying to get around the limits, like polyphysic sleep doesn't make sense. You just need to basically be nocturnal. Right? Because you need to be like inverse Yeah. What like San Francisco hours are.
Speaker 5:Right? Yeah. So the peak San Francisco usage Yeah. Gonna be like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or just move overseas.
Speaker 1:You could do that.
Speaker 5:That yeah. But the polyphasic sleep doesn't really help. Right? Because No.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's I much better just I I again, you know, have have a have a compute desk or a or a prompt desk that is geographically distributed evenly across the globe. So when your American employee stops the prompting, goes home for the night, then your European colleague steps up and starts prompting on the same project, and then your colleague in Asia can pick up when Europe goes to bed. Something like that. You know what I mean? So you have twenty four seven coverage.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But you that's still like at at during one of those periods, it's still like the peak hours. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because these peak hours are are are based around US US hours. I I was more so there's actually two things going on. There's one where it's like you're waiting for your agents to respond.
Speaker 1:And if it's going to take hours for a prompt to return, you should go take a nap because you're better off checking in on a prompt every two hours for the whole day, for twenty four hours in, you know, in perpetuity as opposed to doing, you know, a two hour prompt, watching TV, come back, do that eight times and then sleep for eight hours. That's four more two hour sessions that you could have been letting it cook and like interacting with it. That's separate from trying to get around these rate limits. Yes. Everyone agrees more GPUs, more CPUs, chips.
Speaker 1:We are continuing to be chip constrained. Even Anthropic appears to be chip constrained despite incredible fundraising and partnerships with hyperscalers, it really is a vindication of everyone who is saying, like, AI is not a bubble and that the models will get better and that these crazy deals that Sam Altman's doing and Daria's doing and Google's drawing down their cash flow and Meta's drawing down their cash flow, like those all look really good in hindsight. Correct? Do you disagree?
Speaker 2:I think in general, yes.
Speaker 1:I mean, last March, like a year ago, people were like, $50,000,000,000, $100,000,000,000, $200,000,000,000. Is this stuff that useful? Is it slop? Is it actually gonna be that useful? Are these things toys?
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, they're they're reasonable for this thing, but what's the real economic value? Certainly, it can't be more than like $20 a month or $200 a month. And now there's like lots of people that are maybe they're only paying a few thousand a month because they're using a bunch of subscriptions, but like they're pretty close to justifying like, the Jensen, like, 250 k a year per engineer thing. Like, that doesn't feel that far away from companies just saying, like, yes. I I I I give you the permission to spend $250,000 a year on AI inference.
Speaker 1:Do be as efficient as possible as you can with that budget, but you have my approval. I believe that with the with that $2.50, you will generate more than that in in value. As Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think the big thing is, like, there's gonna be more use cases that that light that have a similar level of product market fit
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:As code gen
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That that use tokens on the level that these code gen tools do. Yeah. And we haven't fully identified those yet. There's some early evidence
Speaker 1:Yeah. That agents
Speaker 2:Yeah. Will will drive that. But like I would say an example is like, it seems very obvious that models will be very useful for making financial models. But do you need to make 500 financial models per day? No.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. That is interesting. And so there are areas where the models are gonna be incredibly, incredibly valuable
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Incredibly important, used by everybody in any given field Yeah. And yet they won't necessarily generate, you
Speaker 1:know There there is there there are some people that that would need to make 500 financial models a day. Like, I think Rokana makes like hundreds of trades every single day. Yeah. And so if you're doing a proper, like, full DCF pulling every SEC filing for a company and you're doing that hundreds of times a day because you're trading
Speaker 2:Or he might have hundreds of individual positions Exactly. Want real time
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Models Sort of like
Speaker 1:rebuilding a Bloomberg terminal Yeah. For yourself. I think he needs I think Bloomberg exists and maybe should should work there. Anyway, as soon as we're speaking of the government, let's move over to the preliminary injunction read the Pentagon Supply Chain Risk Designation. Before we go to Dean Ball, let me tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data.
Speaker 1:Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So the news is that Anthropic has been granted a preliminary injunction re the Pentagon supply chain risk designation in California but is allowing stay for one week.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people like the tech community broadly came away with this prediction that this wouldn't hold, that this was, you know, that whatever you thought about how you work with the government and the the Ben Thompson thesis, there was, you know, the the supply chain thing wasn't really gonna stick. It was it it wouldn't necessarily hold up in court, but we'll see where it goes. Dean Ball says this is a devastating ruling for the government, finding Anthropic likely to prevail on essentially all of its theories for why the government's actions were unlawful and unconstitutional. One of the things she mentions is a is the huge range of Amici briefs. I don't know how to say Amici Briefs supporting Anthropic Hey, Zero
Speaker 2:finally a word that John I lost it. Can't nail instantly. Okay. You have an incredible mind that we did find.
Speaker 1:We found my limit. We found my limit. On a personal note, says Dean Ball, some friends and allies of mine on the right who have been angry at me for my own words and actions and all of this, anyone who thinks I spoke out for personal gain or trivial reasons against an administration I served in is crazy. Yet people forget that Dean Ball served not in the first Trump administration but the second Trump administration and he was like, look, I wrote the AI policy thing. I worked on that.
Speaker 1:Like, this is not the right path. And so a It's a meek.
Speaker 2:And it's the plural of amicus.
Speaker 1:It's this is brutal for me because I studied Latin and I should be able to nail this because I know it's a Latin word. Anyway, it was a hugely costly decision for Dean Ball, but this judge's ruling shows why I did it. This is a staggeringly illegal act by the government. That is why I'm particularly honored to have been implicitly quoted in the ruling for calling this what it was when secretary Hegseth made his initial announcement, an attempted act of corporate murder. He's standing with the corporations.
Speaker 1:This case continues, Anthropic has scored a very large win here. The real victors, however, are all red blooded Americans who are, as the founders would have said, jealous of their liberties. I love it. Well, congratulations. And hopefully, everyone can just go back to building good models.
Speaker 1:You know? All this all this nonsense in DC has been a huge a huge side sideshow, side project, side quest as as the race for compute is so much more important. The race for capabilities is so much more important. And so the other scoop is coming from Axios. Sam Altman apparently told staff he tried to save Anthropic in the Pentagon clash.
Speaker 2:Which he apparently thought was somewhat ironic given that said competitor openly Blasted. Openly blossomed Yeah. On any podcast Yeah. That they go on. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, last anthropical story, IPO. They're trying to go public as early as q four with a potential 60,000,000,000 raise. They're racing. And so let's go over to Cauchy and see who is likely to announce an IPO this year.
Speaker 1:Anthropics up at 70% on this news. They jumped up from 46% to over 70%. OpenAI is at 49%. Jersey Mike's still beating them both, 75%. So New Jersey Mike's heads out there.
Speaker 1:They do very well in the App Store. I like the sandwiches. SpaceX is at 94.
Speaker 2:Discord also sitting at 63%.
Speaker 1:Discord. What a crazy story. I love Jason Citron so much, the founder. But he is out, I think. And he has he's just a just a wild wild founder story.
Speaker 1:I made a whole video about it. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Console.
Speaker 1:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of AI IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We gotta hit the management section. One last note on AI before we move on to the really important thing real estate.
Speaker 2:OpenAI has surpassed a 100,000,000 in annualized run rate 100,000,000 ARR. Ads pilot. Yeah. Launched six weeks ago. It's expanded to 600 advertisers and plans to launch self serve advertiser access in April.
Speaker 2:I am close to setting up a new account
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And or just churning momentarily Yes. That I get to experience the ads. Yes. You know I love ads. I mean, the first guy Being
Speaker 1:from The Wall Street Journal that we know and love is a very good omen. Clearly, something's going on. They're happy with each other because they're working together. Yeah. I mean, truly, like the alpha for the audience is like new ad platforms often deliver really good results before people figure them out.
Speaker 1:Big companies move slower than you. If you can be the first person to advertise, figure it out, you know Sean Frank at The Ridge is thinking about it and maybe you should be too. Not to do an ad for ads, but we love ads on the show and we love new ad platforms. And we also love vibe.co. We're DTC brands, b to b startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV.
Speaker 1:Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. So
Speaker 2:What's this news before we go on? Okay. Apple's talking about opening up Siri to rival AI services. Weird. I don't Bloomberg?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Apple's relationship with OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Guess who wrote this story?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna guess the Gurminator.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 4:Of course.
Speaker 2:Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistance
Speaker 1:part of
Speaker 2:the Siri overall.
Speaker 1:Do we need to give him the Let's give
Speaker 2:him the golden scoop.
Speaker 1:Tyler, hold up the golden scoop award for Mark Gurman. The Gurminator has has received the Golden Scoop Award for
Speaker 2:It's for you, Mark.
Speaker 1:03/27/2026. Congratulations, Mark Gurman.
Speaker 2:It's an honor.
Speaker 1:Your scoop wins the Golden Scoop There of the we go. Yeah. The scoop. That's good. Scoop.
Speaker 1:Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop.
Speaker 1:Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. There it is. Scoop.
Speaker 1:There it is.
Speaker 2:Headline is incorrect by the way.
Speaker 1:The scoop is on fire.
Speaker 2:It's it's
Speaker 1:We don't need no
Speaker 2:to open Siri to outside AI assistance, so this implies that things like ChatGPT
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Gemini, etcetera could be allowed to take effectively take the place of Siri. The company is developing new tools to allow Siri budget. Chatbots installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri Assistant, enabling users to send queries to services like LLMs. The change is part of an attempt to turn around Apple's fortunes in AI where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers and could allow Apple to generate more money from third party AI subscriptions through the App Store.
Speaker 1:Oh, because you upgrade through there. That would be good. I think that's part of it. I think there's also the antitrust angle, which is that they have had to allow you to change the default search engine in Safari for a while even though they have that relationship with Google. When you go to the Safari search bar and you just type in some random words, it searches Google.
Speaker 1:You can actually reroute that to ChatGPT. I did it. ChatGPT is like, I don't use it like I use Google. Google, I use for like really, I want like a five millisecond query. So it the the time to actually load ChatGPT and then give you the full answer was not the best experience.
Speaker 1:But I have wanted for a long time to reroute the Siri button on the side of the phone to just ChatGPT instant fast, ultra fast, just get just talk to me. But every time I do it I say ChatGPT, what's the history of the Roman Empire? And it loads and it says working with ChatGPT and then it like takes a little bit too long and then you get like a short note and then you can open it and it it just sort of like you're always fighting in the UI between like are you talking to Apple intelligence or are you talking to Siri or are you talking to ChatGPT? And you sort of go back and forth. So we will see where this goes.
Speaker 1:If I I would be very surprised if people shift away from the default. Like if if Apple iPhones ship with the Siri button just clearing their distilled Gemini model or whatever they're going wind up doing there, that's probably what most people are going to use. But it's exciting that at least there will be some competition in the market. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.
Speaker 1:Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs. So Barry Diller just paid $11,000,000 for JFK's favorite new JFK's favorite new New York penthouse.
Speaker 1:Favorite New York penthouse. Not There you go. Favorite new because of course he has passed away a long time ago. An entity linked to the billionaire purchased Karen Pritzker's co op at the Carlyle, the same unit where Kennedy famously stayed during his visits to the city. In the fifties and sixties, John F Kennedy stayed in a duplex penthouse at the Carlisle Hotel so often that it became known as the New York White House.
Speaker 1:After his assassination, his widow and two children, Caroline and John Junior, lived in the Manhattan Hotel for about ten months. What's the longest amount of time you've ever spent in a hotel? I don't think I've ever done more than like a week or two. Ten months is a
Speaker 7:is a that's a rough
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I never I never went through an I never went through an era of my young adulthood. That's like
Speaker 1:sort of a crazy move.
Speaker 2:That I could Yeah. Could have afforded to stay in a hotel
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Permanently. Yeah. But now that I'm I a
Speaker 1:was walking in some hotel the other day and I was like, I wonder if I could like live here. Like
Speaker 2:It just doesn't it's just like with with kids, it would just be would just be Now
Speaker 1:an entity linked to Barry billionaire Barry Diller has purchased Kennedy's favorite penthouse for $11,000,000. Diller bought the co op unit from another family of prominent Democrats. Film producer Karen Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotel Fortune bought the apartment for 12,000,000 in 2007. Pritzker put the apartment on the market for 12.9. It sold for 12.5 in 2007.
Speaker 1:Interesting that the Chicago high end penthouse market has not moved that much. The Carlisle opened around 1930 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, one of New York's most storied luxury hotels. It's known for iconic venues like Bemelin's Bar, Cafe Carlyle, a cabaret space that has hosted legendary performers. A portion of the building was converted to co op units decades ago. Kennedy stayed at the hotel so often, starting when he was a still a senator in the nineteen fifties that a direct phone line was installed for him in his regular duplex suite.
Speaker 1:That's cool. After his assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to the hotel but stayed in a different suite. On rainy days, the Kennedy children played in the lobby. The two bedroom apartment includes a large foyer with an art deco staircase, the listing says. An expansive corner living and dining room has views over Central Park.
Speaker 1:There's also a bookshelf lined breakfast room and a corner solarium with a wet bar. Oh, speaking of wet bars, forget apres ski because homeowners are now building their own bars in custom spaces where they can relax and get toasty after a day on the slopes. This is also from the Mansion section of the journal today. For Brian Healy, what comes after a day on the mountain sometimes takes precedence over the skiing itself. When he built his Lake Tahoe area vacation home in 2019, he spent about $800,000 to build a bar area on the main floor of the house.
Speaker 2:Well, it's
Speaker 1:an dog.
Speaker 2:Which he can ski to from the slopes It's pretty good. Of North Star. That sounds great. So maybe not ski in, but ski out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. He said, I've joked that I designed a bar and built a house around it.
Speaker 1:This is good. This is this is this is my dream. I'm gonna build a movie theater and then build a house around it. That's what that's my goal. What would yours be?
Speaker 2:John John was sending me a listing
Speaker 1:Surfing a bill one of those endless waves. That's what you need. You need an endless wave pool. You know what I'm talking about? What are those called?
Speaker 2:Wave wave pools.
Speaker 1:Wave pool? Yeah. There's like
Speaker 2:Pool wave pool? Yeah. Wait. Why are
Speaker 1:you not excited about this prospect of having a house that's built around this endless wave pool?
Speaker 2:Is this I a live in
Speaker 1:Oh, I guess you just go to the ocean. Yeah. You could just go you could just be be be walking dozens from the beach. Anyway It's hard to beat. Healy fifty one is an Ireland native.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's hear it for Ireland. He runs an energy company in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a royal flush. I got to meet this guy.
Speaker 1:After a day on the slopes Healy and his pals head to the space dubbed Healy's Bar leaving their gear in the storage area of the Truckee, California property. And sometimes other skiers end up at Healy's home after getting lost while skiing through the trees. It's an open door policy. He says we invite them in for beer. This is our inn.
Speaker 1:We need to head over to North Star and get lost and wind up at his bar. Oops. Oops. We're lost. We're lost.
Speaker 1:We don't know.
Speaker 2:I know some former guests that are neighbors with we'll we'll work on connecting.
Speaker 1:Could you spare a Guinness for us for two Irish chaps who've gotten lost?
Speaker 2:I feel like I've read like a children's story of like wandering in the forest Yeah. And then like, you know, some character offers you something.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's like bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Usually that can send you on
Speaker 1:Seems good.
Speaker 2:Kind of a crazy Yeah. Saga.
Speaker 1:That seems good. So for Alpine sports lovers, warming up with a few apres ski drinks after a day on the slopes is a time honored tradition, says the journal. But instead of heading to a crowded bar for cocktails, more and more wealthy homeowners are hosting friends at private bar areas with high end mountain inspired finishes. Real estate agents have said this. In addition to providing entertainment spaces, these cozy areas become additional focal points within the house like a fireplace or a wine room.
Speaker 1:Look at that. People are having a lot of fun with the bars. They are creating spaces where the party keeps going and where the kids want to come back and hang out. These bars have features like specialty ice makers, dishwashers, okay, decorative lighting, dramatic finishes. That's not that specialty.
Speaker 1:I was hoping for something really crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Does he have any what what kind of what kind of games does this does this bar come with? Do we have darts, pool?
Speaker 1:Axe throwing. Axe throwing. Let's get the millennials
Speaker 5:The old millennial.
Speaker 1:We we do things differently around here.
Speaker 2:Honestly, any space can actually be turned into an axe throwing but
Speaker 1:This sounds good. They're coming off the mountain doing a jacuzzi and going downstairs for an espresso martini. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2:Pretty good.
Speaker 1:It's very nicely designed. I love I love the finishes. I think this is a fantastic fantastic choice. Bruce Johnson, a retired lumber executive, and his wife, wellness coach Peggy Duffy
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for lumber executives.
Speaker 1:Executives. They keep mahogany flowing through the global economy.
Speaker 2:Official wood of business. The fact that we don't have a mahogany sponsor
Speaker 1:I think we're I think we're looking at Bruce Johnson. We we gotta get we gotta get get connected to this guy. He might be able to might be able to send some mahogany our way.
Speaker 2:The official lumber partner of TBPN.
Speaker 1:So they wanted an inspire a mountain inspired aesthetic for the bar in their Edwards Colorado home which is about ten minutes from Beaver Creek Resort. Their daughter-in-law interior designer Jackie Johnson worked on the $200,000 space which has open wine storage columns and sconces wrapped in brown suede. The downstairs space also includes a sauna.
Speaker 2:I gotta I gotta show you after the show, I'll show you a video of me at Beaver Creek
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 2:Around twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1:What are you doing?
Speaker 2:I was riding in the
Speaker 1:Double core. Was riding
Speaker 2:in the Rain Park and my buddy was filming. Another buddy was sitting Okay. Kind of like on the basically next to the jump. And so one buddy films me.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I land, catch an edge and end up like entirely on my head sliding on my head like body suspended above. And my other friend friend doesn't actually see me Okay. Having this horrific crash. And so my other friend is just like sitting there like this, like, thumbs up to the camera. And I'm just like, chaotically getting thrown across the landing.
Speaker 2:Good good fun.
Speaker 1:Okay. We gotta learn about winter forward fabrics because that's important if you're trying to create this opres ski vibe. Jackie suggests using winter forward fabrics such as alpaca fur, heron hides, and mohair. I like alpaca fur. That sounds lovely.
Speaker 1:In designing his bar, Healy looked to it his Irish heritage for inspiration using green leather bar stools. That's our signature color over here. A green marble countertop and vintage green glassware. It's it's Irish influenced in a little LA at the same time calling it a modern but not necessarily nightclubby vibe. He likes to drive around Martis Camp, the 2000
Speaker 2:This isn't giving you a little bit of a nightclub vibe?
Speaker 1:There's a little bit of a nightclub vibe. It's not necessarily nightclubby though. I think it's I think it's more Irish influenced than little LA. Anyway, to create an atmosphere of informal fun, apres ski entertaining spaces are often placed near amenities such as pool tables, golf simulators, hot tubs, and saunas. Developer I like that we're getting claps for that.
Speaker 1:Developer Robert Covington put eighties video games like Pac Man next to the lower level apres ski bar of a home he recently built in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The roughly 7,400 square foot home asking 13,000,000 is located near the base of Mount Winner. Is that how you pronounce that? Winner? Werner?
Speaker 1:Werner? And guests can access the basement bar directly from the outside. There's another bar in the in the living area upstairs. The goal is to provide additional gathering spaces throughout the home. You need a lot more seating for families on a ski vacation.
Speaker 1:For some homeowners, Opry Ski Entertaining is more of a state of mind. Jewelry designer Jane Berg, 64, and her husband, marketing executive Kevin Berg, 70, built a house next to the slopes of Colorado's Aspen Highlands.
Speaker 2:Is it a state of mind, or is it just having a drink after skiing?
Speaker 1:It's a state of mind. Okay, Jordy. Stop asking questions. Sliding doors in their kitchen face the mountains and open to a terrace with fire pits. So the couple end up using the entire primary level of their home for opere ski party c.
Speaker 1:Anything's an apres ski entertaining space if you're in the apres ski mindset.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Often Jane a local local chef and a bartender to set up the open format kitchen, which has two sinks, one of which gets used as an ice bucket for drinks. People ski in and ski out of here, says Jane. The home has an outdoor ski track near the hot tub where guests leave their skis. This seems this is this is gonna get me more into skiing. Like
Speaker 2:When you see a picture like this of champagne in the snow, does it give you does it you have like a primal reaction to that?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And you know what song plays immediately? Cherry Cherry Lady. Have you ever heard this song?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:It's such a good song. Let's play it. Let's Let's play play it just a little bit so we don't get demonetized. But as soon as I see this image, this is exactly what it plays. This is like that vibe perfectly.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Anyway, go listen to it. Modern Talking is the artist behind Up next. Cherry Cherry Lady. Up next.
Speaker 1:What do we got? A retiree. We got what? We got Graphite. Code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 1:Graphite help teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And you know what else we got? Gemini 3.1 Pro. You thought they were done? They did another model.
Speaker 1:They trained another model and they released it.
Speaker 2:The rumor
Speaker 1:And with a more capable baseline they're
Speaker 2:working on another model.
Speaker 1:I I I don't know. I don't want to comment, but it's entirely possible. And with a more capable baseline, Gemini 3.1 Pro is great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.
Speaker 2:A retired pitcher's home with a gym inspired by Fenway asks 23,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 1:Where
Speaker 2:is Game James and his wife, photographer Ryan Shields, spent years designing and building the house just North of San Diego.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:James Shields was a star pitcher in the major leagues for thirteen seasons. When he and his wife decided to build a California home in 2018, they were amused to discover that the lot they selected was shaped like a baseball diamond. Mhmm. We looked at each other and said, I guess it's meant to be. It's meant to be.
Speaker 2:They bought the Rancho Santa Fe property the next day for 1,800,000.0.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The pair spent the next few years designing and building roughly 13,500 square a Wow. Square foot house with a gym pool, putting green and bowling alley.
Speaker 1:Bowling alley is underrated. I know some of you folks have seen There Will Be Blood, the bad things can happen in bowling alleys, but great things can happen in bowling alleys. I know Jordy hasn't seen There Will Be Blood. Tyler, have you seen There Will Be Blood? No.
Speaker 1:You haven't? Wow. Ben, you got a task. Team
Speaker 2:homework this weekend.
Speaker 1:Team homework. Must be I mean You don't know about
Speaker 2:Okay. First question is what kind of rig are they using in the bowling alley? Because we learned earlier this week
Speaker 1:You don't Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that maintaining these bowling alley machines
Speaker 1:You can't win. You can't win because if you go with the good machines, they're from the fifties, it's gonna be a nightmare to maintain. You're not gonna be able parts and you're not gonna be able to find mechanics because they've all retired. But if you go at the insider, everyone's gonna be making fun of you.
Speaker 4:If you
Speaker 2:have a If you $23,000,000 home, how much is a reasonable amount to spend on your bowling alley maintenance? Because if you're willing to spend 5% annually
Speaker 1:I think you have to America. Yeah. You have to you have to get a couple of of CNC machines and be ready Here's
Speaker 2:a tip.
Speaker 1:Here's a tip. Own parts.
Speaker 2:Here's a tip. Yes. Start up focused on bowling alley maintenance.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Build that, then buy this home. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Then you
Speaker 2:won't have a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that's a good solution. I love The care
Speaker 2:now looking to spend more time in Idaho. Mhmm. Let's give it up for Idaho. Love it. Where they own property and have several horses.
Speaker 2:The Shields are listing the 2.4 acre California property.
Speaker 1:You got a horse?
Speaker 2:Nicknamed Big Big Game James by teammates and announcers, Shields played for teams including the Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres, and the Chicago White Sox. As a lifelong athlete, he put a lot of thought into the gym at the Rancho State.
Speaker 1:I love this massive door that slides open. They have 16 foot tall glass windows and doors with steel latches instead of doorknobs, wood paneling covers.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up this picture of big game James getting in a fight on
Speaker 8:the field.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't want to be his contractor on this project.
Speaker 2:Wait. So I can't tell. So he's on the right. He's swinging for the
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:He's swinging. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because he's a San Diego guy. He's on the rays. Stingrays.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Okay. You're acting
Speaker 1:I think.
Speaker 2:Wait. You're acting like I'm
Speaker 1:a Wait. No. Wait. Wait. Or is he Red Sox?
Speaker 2:No. He's the White Sox. He played for the White Sox, the San Diego Padres, and the Kansas City Royals.
Speaker 1:Okay. So which one is he?
Speaker 2:So I think the Padres must be the
Speaker 1:no. No. He because there's a Rays. Wait. Who is in this image?
Speaker 2:They just pulled a
Speaker 1:random Okay. So the gym has a brick brick wall to evoke Fenway Park where Shields took a swing at Coco Crisp in 2008. So that's like one of his finest moments. So he rebuilt the the house to He's like that that
Speaker 2:swing was a memory I want to cherish forever.
Speaker 1:Honestly, respect. I I I think I would remember that forever. Well, we should move over to some more heartwarming stories in the Mansion section of The Wall Street Journal today. The feel good tearjerker moments, three real estate agents won't forget. We'll just read one, but prepare to not have dry eyes, Jordy, because it's very heartwarming.
Speaker 1:So in December, Lauren Toronto, a real estate agent at Coldwell Coldwell Banker, was at a $12,750,000 listing in Naples, Florida. It was a five bedroom, neoclassical home located just one house from the beach. This house has a castle like feel
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:With rotunda
Speaker 9:We have
Speaker 2:alpha in the chat What
Speaker 1:do we have?
Speaker 2:From Woods Athletics. He played for the Rays too. We go.
Speaker 1:Wow. We really know nothing on sports. Well, thank you. Thank you for correcting us. Padres are the San Diego team.
Speaker 1:Thank you. It's really it's really bad. Anyway, so this house is a castle like feel. It has a rotunda ceilings, turrets in the rear. Yes.
Speaker 1:It also
Speaker 2:It would like help becoming ball knowers.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Everyone's like, you guys are like ESPN for tech. I'm like, what's ESPN?
Speaker 1:Anyway, it all this house also has a curved mahogany staircase that serves a focal point when you enter the home. This real estate agent calls it the wedding staircase and it lived up to its name that day. So she'd been at the property for an open house but it started to rain so she decided to close-up early. As she was outside taking the signs down for the open house because it rained, She sees a couple in wedding attire on the beach across the street trying to take photos. They'd just gotten married.
Speaker 1:The woman was wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet and the man was in a sports jacket with a white boutonniere. She invited them to finish up inside and get out of the rain. They were soaked and the bride's hair was pretty wet. So she dried them off as best she could and the couple and their friend who was shooting the photos came inside. They climbed the staircase and took a few more photos.
Speaker 1:The couple were adorable in their twenties and extremely appreciative. I didn't have any champagne in the refrigerator. So we just toasted with water and plastic cups. It was informal but a darling and magic moment and made their day in my day up. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's cute. Very very cute. I love it.
Speaker 4:Well
Speaker 2:I got but we gotta change the story.
Speaker 1:We gotta change the together. Okay. We're going we're going over to Drew Barrymore. She put a Westchester home on the market two years buying No? No.
Speaker 1:No. I'm just
Speaker 2:I'm in disbelief.
Speaker 1:Wait. About what?
Speaker 2:Putting it on. Which one? How could she put on the how could she relist this home?
Speaker 1:Well, let's find out. Maybe the Wall Street Journal did some gumshoot reporting and got to the bottom of why Drew Barrymore is selling her house just two years after buying it. So she was fed up with her long drive to the Hamptons. So the actress and daytime talk show host, Barrymore, started looking for a weekend home in Westchester County when she saw a circus seventeen hundreds mansion for sale. Wow.
Speaker 1:That is very old. Barrymore said she felt a karmic connection to the Harrison County property. I or Harrison, New York property. I walked in and I was like, I know my family's been here. I know that I have work I have work I have to work on this house.
Speaker 1:I know that I'm supposed to be doing this. Said Barry Moore, 51 years old,
Speaker 2:who was And just immediately flipped it.
Speaker 1:Flipping this in two years will be my life's work. It was it was like a strange spiritual calling. She lives in Manhattan with her two daughters primarily. It turned out she actually did have a connection to the area. Her great grant her great aunt, the late actress Ethel Barrymore, had a home in nearby Mamoronek where an enclave known as Barrymore Lane is widely believed to be named for the family.
Speaker 1:Barrymore bought the roughly 12 acre estate for 4,400,000.0 according to property records. She did an extensive renovation. She did she has a deep interest in interior design and has considered pursuing it professionally. Between Pinterest, thrifting, and a can of paint, there's nothing you can't do, Barrymore said with a laugh. But roughly two years later, the actress is listing the property for 4,990,000.00.
Speaker 1:Remember, she bought it for 4.44.
Speaker 2:Well, she put a lot of money into it. The renovation. So she's flipping it at a loss.
Speaker 1:I think so. The renovation took longer than expected, she said, and the family lives have changed in the interim. The estate includes a roughly 5,600 square foot five bedroom main house, a pool, a pool house with an additional bedroom. Barrymore said she previously owned a home in Sagaponic, New York, but the distance from the city and the weekend traffic to the Hamptons became untenable as her children's schedule filled up with social and sporting activities. Harrison, by contrast, offered accessibility and charm.
Speaker 1:The property located roughly an hour from Manhattan is a short drive from the picturesque picturesque Rye in Bronxville, while nearby Bedford has drawn celebrities. The median sales price for a home in Harrison is around 1,100,000.0. The property's expansive, acreage gave Barrymore a sense of being close to nature. It's really like being in your own personal park. There are tons of deer.
Speaker 1:There are pheasants and ducks. There are rabbits. When she purchased the home, Barrymore said she thought it would only need a cosmetic renovation. Instead, it turned into an complete internal gut with much much of the plumbing, heating, and air conditioning replaced. Barrymore also revamped the Ground Floor and to open up the kitchen which felt dark and boxed in.
Speaker 1:It took a year of engineering to figure out how to accomplish it. Well,
Speaker 2:wonderful opportunity for somebody that wants to live in Westchester.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. You you got a
Speaker 1:Go check
Speaker 2:it out. You got a celebrity to handle your remodel for you
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You do. Effectively at at at for for less than the dollars that were actually put in.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about MongoDB.
Speaker 2:Great to have you
Speaker 1:on. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:And our next
Speaker 2:And now.
Speaker 1:Is here with us in the TBPN Allergy Chat.
Speaker 2:Here he is.
Speaker 1:Billy Boman. Good to meet you. How are doing?
Speaker 4:I'm really good.
Speaker 1:What are
Speaker 2:you Yeah. How's your week?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. What is your life like right now? Are you just getting blown up by everyone?
Speaker 4:Probably. Okay. Yes. I haven't even had time to check all the DMs yet. I'm just really doing my best just to take care of everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was shocked. We were we were live on the show Yeah. Reading about this whole thing because we we had seen we had seen the ad on the one zero one.
Speaker 1:I saw it in person. Drove right by it.
Speaker 2:Hard to And then I we texted Nick, one of our producers, and he you seemingly responded within an hour or something like that. It was very fast. So Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Been perpetually online.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 4:glued to the screen to not miss anything.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So yeah. So anybody that missed it, there is a massive Hollywood sign scale. Yeah.
Speaker 4:30 feet tall. 30 feet 30 feet long, wide.
Speaker 1:230 feet wide.
Speaker 2:And on on a hillside that I haven't seen any out of home advertising on Yeah. Before so I wanna Yeah. I wanna get the whole story. Like, let's start I guess at the beginning. How how did this happen?
Speaker 2:Were you on Fiverr, very active, or you were friends with the Fiverr team?
Speaker 4:So actually, no. The creative director, Nir Rifua, so shout out to Nir for making this happen Cool. Reached out to me and basically, do you want to do this? And I thought, like, first of all, you're joking? He was not joking.
Speaker 4:Then secondly, right, it's just a print, like, it's a billboard. Right? No, no, we're building the sign. And I'm like, oh. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right. And then, like, as they're sending mock ups and stuff, I could see, like, it's actually someone is this, like, the sheer scale of it. So it's Yeah. In the works since October. I don't have full insight into the full production.
Speaker 4:I've just heard the kind of the stories from the team, so full shout out to the Fiverr team and especially Eli Pier who who is the guy doing this. He pulled off the impossible together with the entire Fiverr team and
Speaker 1:the Yeah.
Speaker 4:Family who kind of just made this Yeah. What do say?
Speaker 2:I'm never gonna personally, I love ads. I'm never gonna look at any hillside the same way ever again Yeah. Because I'm surprised they were able to pull us off Yeah. Even with the city.
Speaker 1:It's remarkable. Take us back to the beginning. Like what did you did you study? What did you study in school? How did you get into your business?
Speaker 1:And then I wanna sort of go through how AI is affecting your work. But just start as far back as you think is relevant.
Speaker 4:Right. Sure. How the hell did I end up here? Yeah. I typically start with like it's nature and nurture.
Speaker 4:Right? So like creativity is the only thing I'm good at, like I'm terrible with everything else like bookkeeping or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I grew up in a creative family. So my mom and dad ran a small advertising agency my entire life. My mom was the
Speaker 2:kind of exactly.
Speaker 4:Shout out to mom and dad.
Speaker 2:Dream upbringing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Grap designer and dad was the art director and I grew up, you know, with like putting little little micro machines in Xerox and just kind of making collages and all the all this stuff. So super creative. Yeah. My my whole family, my my sister works as a game designer. My my brother has done all kind of web design, runs a Dungeons and Dragons start
Speaker 2:up.
Speaker 4:So like we're all Oh, very creative. That's that's all I do. I'm classically trained. I studied at Beckman's College of Design in Stockholm. Probably haven't heard of it, but Stockholm, mean, it's Yeah.
Speaker 4:It was a pretty good year in Stockholm. Yeah. So classically trained. Ended up going into fashion for whatever reason. Worst decision of my life, but I did.
Speaker 4:I love clothes and just like aesthetics and Yeah. How to bring ideas into garments. I worked at All Saints, H and M, bunch of different brands designer doing clothes. No way.
Speaker 1:So you would actually decide like where the buttons go on
Speaker 4:the shirt. Yeah. Exactly. That level. Drawstring length of the hoodie and all Really?
Speaker 4:You know, all the all the stuff.
Speaker 2:That's Why was it the worst decision?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, so it's like, you know, you've seen Devil the Wears Prada. Right? Yeah. That's how it actually is.
Speaker 1:Okay. So people have really big
Speaker 4:mean, strong you it's it's constant to this like, you should be happy to be here. Oh, okay. In the worst, it's like toxic. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:You can get into the sustainability part of it, blah blah blah. But like, there's no career prospects. You're basically, we say, licking ass for ten years and maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe you'll be the creative director.
Speaker 1:Yep. With a big Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So not something for me. So eventually, I pivoted to tech Mhmm. Where it was like this is back in 2018, 2019. So then, that was like job security, like all the fun design stuff was kind of going on there, building like branded experiences on web and mobile. I worked at PayPal in Sweden, in Vodafone, a bunch of different brands Cool.
Speaker 4:Until I ended up in an AI startup in 2023.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 4:Stick up timing. Yes. Exactly. This was early. This was I'm tinkering with Midjourney since mid twenty two.
Speaker 1:That Yeah.
Speaker 4:Very first one came out and I'm like, I can actually get like a hovering sneaker in the air. Yeah. And it looks like something. Before then, was disco diffusion and Dolly and all these kind of weird, like a retro AI now, guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Vintage. Vintage.
Speaker 4:Vintage AI. Exactly. So from there, we did a bunch of stuff over 2023 with which Chapter has they're called? It's a German AI startup and eventually You were in German I was working remote from Sweden. So remote
Speaker 7:Oh, okay.
Speaker 4:That's, you know, happened as So I did that and eventually they pivoted. We parted ways and at that time, like 2023, I'd been posting some spec ads just like a little bit more art directed, maybe I don't want to toot my own horn too much. But maybe for the time, it was like just a couple of levels up what most people were seeing and all of a sudden, my DM is like people from like the first AI agencies, monks, the big agencies, like we have to rep you. That's You have to do AI with us. All organic on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Explain explain what what what the workflow was for those first ads. Is that static images that are AI generated, then you're doing text layout and something like Figma? Or is it video from start to finish that you're cobbling together? Are you doing like mixed media where you're using some stock footage, some AI video, editing together after effects?
Speaker 1:Like what's the workflow?
Speaker 4:Well, that's where we are kind of now.
Speaker 1:Back Back then then?
Speaker 4:Back then it was like just getting anything that felt realistic
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Had a bit of grit and texture to it that was Sure. This like, you know, sheen plastic
Speaker 7:Yeah. Mid journey look.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:All in the industry.
Speaker 1:So you were able to get away from that with the Yes. With with the correct prompting?
Speaker 4:Correct prompting is having an eye for art direction, angles, lighting. Yeah. And then editing. Yeah. Editing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. Well, on on a where where to put the logo and you just get get like good pacing and everything into so it feels like an ad. Mhmm. That's I think was back then really kind
Speaker 1:of Interesting.
Speaker 4:A bit a bit lame
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So to say. So so back 2024, did a bunch of work, did a music video for Hardy and Fred Durst, Valentine's Whiskey.
Speaker 1:Limp Bastard.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh. They really lean into AI so much.
Speaker 1:Ben over
Speaker 6:there Really?
Speaker 2:Know who Limp Bastard is.
Speaker 4:They've done a ton of AI videos. Yeah. Fred Durst and Limp.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I remember like the original the original cover art for their for their big album was I think it was airbrushed, but it looks like AI art now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Were just so we were just asking the founder of Suno yesterday on the show what artist has leaned into AI the most. And he didn't he didn't want to name names Yeah. In part because he actually knows who's using the products, he doesn't and and a lot of them want to be quiet about it, but he didn't have, like, a really clear answer on, like, who's leaning in the most. But that seems like leaning in quite a bit if in 2024, you're like, we're gonna use this to make Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. A lot of crazy kind of glam rock video, all kinds
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of matters. And and there's so many times when an album comes out and they can they have the budget for one classic Yep. Music video or two or maybe three and it starts to get low budgets like, oh, let's use like a DV camera for this shoot or let's not bring the let's not rent a soundstage for this. We'll do something a little more organic.
Speaker 1:Yep. Maybe do some tour footage for this one and stretch the budget further. But, you know, you can with AI, you can probably just do a video for every single
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Mean, that's the real opportunity. Think people are still it's like staying in the live action box
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Which is a fine box Yeah. When you're doing live action. But like the truly and we can get into that later. Scale and the test to just do different specific stuff for different channels Totally.
Speaker 3:All this stuff.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We haven't really gotten there
Speaker 1:yet Cool.
Speaker 4:On the client side. Yeah. They don't know what to ask for. Yeah. They just know they should be experimenting with it.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:So but yeah. So then 2025 Okay. We did like So
Speaker 1:you're wrapped at this point by agencies, or they call you?
Speaker 4:A lot of agency rep at that point slowly built. Again, I was nobody on social media. I I mean, I'm not, like, 30 k on LinkedIn. I'm not some huge guy.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 4:like, I have a huge sign, but but not a huge guy. So it's building a following, building building attention. Yeah. And then eventually, that kind of formulated into a huge huge projects over 25. So Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We did activation campaign for Taylor Swift. We worked with Lewis Capaldi with Google and YouTube Yeah. Universal Music Group, bunch I mean, yes. A lot of a lot of real big brands together with Wonder Studios and a bunch of people I just got to know got to know over the I mean, I worked with Dave Clark back in the day 2024. Sure.
Speaker 4:If you hang out on LinkedIn, you'd seen
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Seen Shadowkeep.
Speaker 2:And what is your what is your team look like to execute on all this?
Speaker 4:Great question. It's it's growing, but it's the the biggest bottleneck for us is actually finding people, like on the artist side. It's super difficult to find people who ask like the right circumstances. So I also teach at Sweden's like biggest creative school called Bergs School of Communication. They have, at least what we think, the world's only AI program at this One year in classroom, government funded Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I'm there for three weeks. So the ones with a little bit of a freelance appetite, they tend to come to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's So like It's a great recruiting strategy.
Speaker 4:Part of the talent funnel is really good. I mean, like Promise, the AI studio, they bought the Curious Refuge, if you saw that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:AI online education. Cool.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. So so many questions. So like on the projects that you mentioned in 2025, what what does a team look like for an individual project? How quickly are you completing them? Like how would how would you compare those projects to the same type of production from, you know, a decade ago?
Speaker 4:Sure. Sure. Well, it's really different, I would say. I mean, everyone has a different take on this. I think having a lean and mean squad is better than it was like, we used 30 artists.
Speaker 4:Like, you can do that, but that creates a kind of a too many chefs problem,
Speaker 2:I think. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We have to have like a really strong lead and then delegate that. So structure is also everything in an AI Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's a cost thing. You're running a small business, a creative agency.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like Yeah. Every incremental person that you bring on is just eating into that Absolutely. Overall project fee.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. And some are more efficient with prompting and others are not. I mean, the big cost is not necessarily on the credit side, it's hours, the human hours that's still Yeah. And that's the key on, you know, as you know, it's not what did they say, Kay Kay, the the LA news channel. I mean, he just pushed a button.
Speaker 4:I mean, that's the classic trope. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's definitely that. Yeah. But smaller teams that can do more, I guess, is the is the short story Mhmm. Of it. And it's super different.
Speaker 4:Like, I wish there was a formula, always this. Always that, you
Speaker 1:know. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 4:But having a lean and mean squad of four or five. I think for this Lewis Capaldi, we were seven artists in total working under the Wonder Studios umbrella who And facilitated
Speaker 1:and for those folks who are joining you and working with you, do they have similar paths where maybe they were classically trained in art or design and then they narrowed down at some point to fashion or typesetting or typography or visual design or or video editing. And then this sort of allows them to zoom back out and and sort of almost retreat to the more classic train, the more aesthetic driven work?
Speaker 4:Something like it. I mean, I think the AI kind of family, the global one, we come from kind of all walks of life I mean, you have, you know, Gossip Goblin or Zach London? No. He's he's blowing up right now. Okay.
Speaker 4:He had a, I think, Hollywood Reporter article about him as well. Yeah. He's an ex anthropology student. Interesting. So like, the beauty of this stuff is that it's not only ex industry peeps.
Speaker 4:Of course, you have also live action directors. I have a weird non linear design career. Sure. People come from documentary
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But all kinds but again, or just because what truly matters is what's what's in here Yeah. And how you can articulate
Speaker 2:And just an obsession with using the tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can
Speaker 4:that this never ending. The
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm sure you've seen
Speaker 2:How has your stack evolved? Like, what models what models were were you using in 2024, 2025? I'm assuming you're constantly trying all the new tools.
Speaker 4:Right. Yeah. I mean, up until '24, I guess, mid journey was king and queen and the it was everything. That was definitely a big model. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Then you kinda had Flux and a bunch of other more indie ones coming in and the scene becoming more competitive, which is great. I think that's I mean, I think that's also what's happening with Sora, know. Yeah. Not everyone's going to make it. It's just a testament to a healthy market.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's how
Speaker 9:it So should
Speaker 4:then as Google kind of entered the chat like really bigly
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:To use
Speaker 1:a vo three and
Speaker 4:banana. Vo three, not a banana. The Google Suite has become kind of industry standard for for us. So definitely using that a ton. Okay.
Speaker 4:And then of course now, Cling three, C Dance two. They're kind of king of the hill Okay. Now in AI video.
Speaker 1:How is your access
Speaker 2:to Over over VO three.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's it. Stands right now.
Speaker 1:Yes. How is your access to Sea Dance three or Sea Dance in general? We've heard that there's like long queues, there's rate limits. It's it's not something that
Speaker 2:Billy Boman does not get limited.
Speaker 4:Well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the Dreamina CPP, so creative partnership program. And I've had pre access for
Speaker 2:Told you. A month or so? Don't ever rate limit Billy Boman. So, yeah. The man with his own Hollywood sign.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You don't want
Speaker 4:You gotta have C Dance. They're rolling it out now and a fascinating kind of play there, at least from the rumors I've heard, is that US might be kind of the last on the list. I agree. Because as Europeans, we're kind
Speaker 2:of So why is is their model better because they just downloaded every Hollywood film, every history and
Speaker 4:We can always speculate. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, that's the the dataset and the training that went into Yeah. Sure is, you know
Speaker 2:So it's basically higher value data than even YouTube. Right? Because YouTube is like Potentially. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that Although although it feels like at least trailers for every movie are on YouTube and I would Sure. Assume like there's that like every Marvel fight scene gets clipped and is on like the movie clips channel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that almost that that'd be like if LLMs were only trained on content above paywalls.
Speaker 1:I guess, you're right. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's all kind of what you say, the inner workings of this So
Speaker 2:How how is the concept or the like how is prompt engineering evolved? Because there was a period
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With just regular LLMs where everyone was obsessed with prompt engineering and then the models got it much better and of course everyone still has their own prompts and now skills and things like that. But for the average the average user is not even really caring about prompt engineering at least with text now because the output is just good enough for so many different use cases.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I love that topic because I think prompt engineering was one and synthography and all these kind of titles around the stuff. Don't I don't care, man. It's like making images, whatever.
Speaker 4:So it's like people tend to want to make things more fancy than what they are Mhmm. Because they want to hold on to the old idea
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That getting good output is technically difficult.
Speaker 1:And that's
Speaker 4:just gone.
Speaker 1:Yes. That is just And that was the that was the case with like you're a master of After Effects or Photoshop and like that you're a master of the tool. And so even if your ideas are mediocre, it's like, you're the only person that can actually instantiate anything. So if I just give you Yeah. These technical moats
Speaker 4:are around. Exactly. It used to be that way. Yeah. So Stephen Bartlett Yeah.
Speaker 4:Devourer of the CEO Yeah. This brilliant PDF article on LinkedIn last year that's called Your Mote Is Dead. Yeah. And that just summarized all of that. But but back to your question, prompt engineering has changed a lot in the sense that the models have gotten so much better understanding natural language.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Like you don't need to go super fancy. Yeah. I mean, I do sometimes because the boring answer, it depends on what you're
Speaker 1:I remember old mid journey, you'd say like, not don't do six fingers.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 1:Please please please do five fingers.
Speaker 4:Right. All the negative stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You and you put in like the lens and the and the color grade that
Speaker 4:you Which you can still do.
Speaker 1:You can still do that. You can do some of that yeah. Some of that got, yeah, just abstracted. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and you can still bring it in. And I think that kind of goes back to like Mhmm. Everyone that comes into this industry from different walks of life will have a new perspective because they sit on a type of terminology and vocabulary and also taste and Yeah. And craft.
Speaker 1:And that goes to the anthropologist who's gonna come with a completely different set of language and get very different results.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Or or even me. Like Yeah. I'm not a live action director
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:At all. Like, again, I'm a weird designer guy Yeah. But I have a lifelong passion for movies. Mhmm. I've done my fifty thousand hours or whatever.
Speaker 4:Like, I could go mean I mean, the You
Speaker 2:should go movie for movie with John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you seen Borat? Yeah. Oh god. Classic.
Speaker 1:It's a classic.
Speaker 2:It's actually Sorry. Sorry. It's a running running joke.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's the only movie that he's seen. I've seen a lot of movies. I I love movies. But we joke about it.
Speaker 2:But he's also Do you think people are how good do you think people are at spotting deepfakes today? Because people I think would like to think they're good at spotting it, but there's so many videos out there Yeah. In 2026 that people are like, oh, that's AI or that's not AI.
Speaker 1:I've gotten caught a few times. I've noticed. These funny vehicles, if it's a funny vehicle and it looks like it's filmed on a
Speaker 2:It's gotten to the point where people will be debating like physics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:that that is not impossible. And they're like, well, look at this study.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But I think Runway put out a pretty funny post a couple of ago about like basically an AB test of like Yeah. It mixed AI and and Oh, and I think they used real start frames, so like an actual photograph and then one was just the real Continue. And then the other one was animated with AI. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:Anyone can go and take that test right now, but like Yeah. We're we're we're there. Like on Bruce one
Speaker 1:The New York Times ran a similar thing with poetry, literature, science fiction Yeah. Sure. Yeah. All around AI generated content versus non. And a lot of the New York Times readers preferred the AI generated content.
Speaker 2:What industries so you're getting hit up by artists, you're getting hit up by companies that wanna make ads. What industries are or what is there anyone that's like not hitting you up and saying like, we're never gonna do this? Because even I I think people were pretty surprised when Gucci came out. Like Yeah. This was a
Speaker 4:was sending them a queen, all the big fresh
Speaker 2:Yeah. They came out and said like, yeah, we're making, we're doing and and there was it was they had an interesting approach where some of the images just looked exactly like normal Gucci photographs and then they had like some GTA esque Mhmm. Images that like clearly were were generated. Right. And and I thought that was an interesting decision because if they just came out and were like, we're using AI but it looks real.
Speaker 2:Yep. I think people would have had like less of a negative reaction.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then some of the stuff was just like obviously CGI. So kind of muddy did a little bit. But who is it seems like everyone is now starting to experiment. Yeah. But who is there anybody
Speaker 4:So so I would say overall for us, like being a Stockholm Sweden, maybe we don't have as much access to the big narrative stuff as you guys have here. Yeah. Will will that change? Maybe. But mostly for us it's been branded content and commercials.
Speaker 4:Just because like the the ins we have with agencies, just how we position ourselves,
Speaker 1:that's Yeah.
Speaker 4:Our bread and butter. I'd love to do more narrative. Yeah. If I ever had time, I would do more short films.
Speaker 1:I just
Speaker 4:don't have any time.
Speaker 1:Also, it just does feel like it like in terms of the actual workflow, doing a three hour, two hour, three hour movie from start to finish Yeah.
Speaker 4:Don't do
Speaker 1:it. It's going to be iffy to say, okay, does the character look exactly the same two hours later?
Speaker 2:What is what is the what what advantages are companies getting? Is it speed, cost? Flexibility. Like, even even not quality, but yeah, flexibility, like, can they do scenes that they never would have question and
Speaker 4:I think my kind of favorite sound bite that anyone can steal is, I'm not going to copyright it, but don't spend less on budget. Spend more on imagination. Don't spend less on budget because that's just like, you're just going to paint yourself into a corner if everything is about like Cost reduction. Cost reduction like Yeah. In this media landscape with Yeah.
Speaker 4:Everything that's going on on every platform and then get ever competitive and now ads are going to look better than ever. The rising tide lifts all boats, right? Yeah. So like, I just think that's a completely backward strategy. So rather
Speaker 2:couldn't there be an argument for keeping the budget fixed but having more variation You can the underlying creative?
Speaker 1:I think that's exactly what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah. He's saying that that if you're if you're a brand and you're spending a million dollars on creative assets and you say, great, AI is here. I'm only going to spend a 100 k.
Speaker 1:Well, your competitor is going to spend the same million, but they're to get 10 times, maybe a 100 times as much content, as many variations Yeah. As much creativity Yeah. And they're going to
Speaker 4:smoke you.
Speaker 1:And so Or even just the competitive
Speaker 4:nature of the content because we can fucking put the camera on an arrow Yeah. Flying through a battlefield and over the monkey and then squirrel takes it up like anything. This guy's a director. Anything. Like, totally.
Speaker 4:So so, I mean, we're waiting for those briefs. Just to our earlier point, clients haven't gotten there yet. Sure. Don't know. It's just like, oh, here's we want to do a live action ad.
Speaker 4:Can we do it with AI instead? It's like, can we fit in this old box while the old box is gone? You can kind of do anything. So that's what's really exciting. I mean, did a protein bar ad with a Swedish Knicks.
Speaker 4:They did Kardashian has a big face a couple of years Yeah. Anyway, the brief was to like fly down through the clouds. Mhmm. A girl is glamping in like Okay. Argentina and she eats a bar and then feeds it to a capybara that starts twerking.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:You capybaras can get violent, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. But these were very friendly,
Speaker 2:the capybaras. This is a this is a good use case for AI because capybaras are some of the most docile creatures until they're not.
Speaker 1:Until they're not.
Speaker 2:We we played a video of a capybara attack earlier on
Speaker 4:the You might
Speaker 1:have saved a life by using AI to generate the capybara instead of using real animal handling.
Speaker 4:And there you have, know, the the sustainability issue as well. Like, okay, the the the carbon footprint of flying to Argentina Yeah. Doing all this the traditional way. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Good luck. And, you know, we could measure like, you'll never win Yeah. The sustainability argument against AI as well.
Speaker 1:Interesting take. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Any yeah. Any any I feel
Speaker 1:like the AI industry has very much been on its back foot playing defense on that saying, no, no, it's not that it's not that better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The example the example that I've always used in the in the in the film entertainment context is the idea that, you know, somebody making a film would fly out 50 people to another continent to get scenes that would ultimately take maybe sixty seconds Yeah. Just to tear it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's yeah. It's certainly gonna be more sustainable to like do the right few hit the keyboard in the right way Yeah. For enough times to get an output.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what advice are you giving to creatives? Because what you've done is exactly what we've talked about on the show Yeah. And what I think the general point of view at least from the tech industry is, yeah, if you wanna resist AI, you're gonna you might like feel better about yourself for some amount of time, but eventually you're gonna get steamrolled by somebody who is loves doing the same type of thing that you're doing is just gonna use a different tool set. So, yeah. What what advice are you giving to creatives across their kind of career on how to how to actually lean in?
Speaker 2:And I think there's a way to lean in and get just as much satisfaction, have just as much intensity of the creative process and just as much joy.
Speaker 4:And control now. Yeah. We're getting there. And truly, don't even have to choose anymore. I I typically say it's not about AI or it's AI and.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Because we also did a recent like a Super Bowl commercial for a big airline. All the talent were shot green screen. Yeah. We background and relit them, put them in like a beautiful cloud environment and all this stuff.
Speaker 4:So you don't even have to choose anymore. Yeah. You can keep the human talent, the human performance and all that stuff. But the the choice the advice for creatives, well, just test it. Don't say blah until you tested it.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Like, and if you have tested it and it's not for you, well, then wait or stuff but this is not gonna go away. Yeah. I I just fully accepted that that like this is not gonna go away. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I was also scared like I I'm not I'm not I've not always been this like happy go lucky optimist.
Speaker 2:So you started absolutely printing.
Speaker 4:Well, we'll see. The jury's we're doing fine. The jury's still out. But to that note, there's more opportunities than ever. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The ad world is in kind of flux of, like, we need stuff in two weeks. You'll get good luck with CG and live action. You can kind of Okay. I don't always want these two week briefs, but you you can help. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, do this
Speaker 2:You'll take the the six month brief.
Speaker 4:Yes. Yes. Too long for AI, would say. Keep it about a month, a month and a half, I think, for for a couple of ads or like thirty seconds But
Speaker 2:still that is dramatically more than just like typing into the box what you want. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because it's like just going into an AI project. You have to think about casting. Are we doing an AI phase or are we that we could where you can choose all the looks, demographics, everything?
Speaker 4:Or are we doing like What what
Speaker 2:feedback do you give the various labs on what they're doing badly today?
Speaker 4:Right. So I mean, we are in a bunch of these creative partnership programs and it's great because you do get the feedback and it can be anything from like the the if that's what you mean, like the AI providers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like the five the the six finger thing
Speaker 1:Cheaper, faster Yeah. Better with a certain style.
Speaker 4:Sure. Sure. I mean, what we're doing is what I call like live art directed realism. Yeah. That that that's if it doesn't look like a movie frame, it's not good enough
Speaker 1:for us.
Speaker 4:Okay. Like that's that's where kind
Speaker 1:of Yeah.
Speaker 4:My base level is. So I've we found a really neat I mean, you've seen some of the work maybe. Yeah. I have I sent it up if you wanna pull it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:If it's not there, it's not good enough. So like realism, that's others focusing on animation, other focusing stylized claymation. There's you again, you can Yeah. Kind of do anything. What I want is better, more human focused interfaces.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. I think that's like making the tools more human and
Speaker 2:less More SaaS.
Speaker 1:Sorry? More software. Like software Like
Speaker 4:using the product. Like Yeah. Actually like I I wanna queue
Speaker 2:up You just want a chatbot that you can just No.
Speaker 4:God. No. No. We don't I mean, I don't generate in in OpenAI. Exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe Have you have you thought about getting into like the vibe coding world, building the tools that you want or having your team work on that, building a harness around all of the different models
Speaker 4:actually VibeCode in. Okay. To some extent, there's a really neat web flow plug in that you can use to as a bridge to Yeah. To get into the to bring Claude in into there. Sure.
Speaker 4:So there's just no time. Yeah. Of course. I I hear a lot of people feel the same like they're just the exhaustion of keeping up. It's insane.
Speaker 4:I mean, I do my best and I try to focus Mhmm. You know, branded content ad stuff that we're doing. But I do wanna
Speaker 2:How many Super Bowl ads do you think you'll do for the next Super Bowl?
Speaker 4:We'll see, man.
Speaker 2:Like like over five?
Speaker 4:There were AI Super Bowls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I but I figure you're gonna get at least a
Speaker 1:Do you think next year there'll be more than half? More than 25%?
Speaker 2:I would I would guess
Speaker 1:that I think it was like
Speaker 2:more than half 2%. Use AI. Year.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Exactly. Somewhere Background replacement. Yep. Relighting.
Speaker 4:Yep. You know, combining.
Speaker 1:Even even just like there is a new AI driven rotoscoping tool that just replaces the background and that's AI, but it's just a replacement for sitting there and cutting out something.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All these kind of menial tasks Exactly. That no one loves to do.
Speaker 4:It's just like a machine Yeah. Is better at that. Yeah. Can we let the machines do it?
Speaker 1:Little blemish replacement.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What I don't want AI to do is like writing the scripts, coming up with the ideas because that's the fun stuff for us. Will we get there? Maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But right here, right now, it's trash.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's not at all where it's at.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What what does the integration with Fiverr actually look like? I it it doesn't sound like I can get you to make me a Super Bowl ad for $5.
Speaker 1:No. So so so so is Fiverr just a is Fiverr just a way to meet you? Is is this just more of like a a marketing partnership for Fiverr to open up people's minds about the type of people that they could hire?
Speaker 4:Sure. Great question. So besides the name Fiverr Yeah. You know, that's kind of stuff Yeah. Always there's a lot more high budget stuff on Fiverr
Speaker 1:these Okay.
Speaker 4:And what we're doing with the hub Yeah. Is that they've curated like a really solid selection of some of the best and with different styles also Yeah. That you can go and hire. Now because like our experience as well of talking to agencies like, yeah, we found this guy on Instagram and DM'd him and it was terrible. Like trying to find people who are vetted and really good industry pros is hard because there's like a handful of people in the world that does this at a level that is good enough for commercial production.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think that's like the opportunity they're presenting on on the hub, like come and work with these people.
Speaker 2:Here's here's an interesting question. So I've always felt that at any given point, at least when it comes to kind of startup style design and branding, that there's only maybe like a 100 people in the world that actually do great sort of like leading edge work. Mhmm. I've always thought that was funny because we for so long, you know, millions of people can make a website, can make, you know, product design, etcetera. And yet there's still like this small group of people that actually are pushing the frontier and kind of like leading from a style standpoint and kind of like setting setting the tone, setting the the actual taste makers.
Speaker 2:Do you think that that will stay the same with AI? My my expectation is that is that it will to some degree. It feels like an iron law almost that at any given point, regardless of the tool set, there will only be a small number of people that are true, true tastemakers.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. I mean, this is true already today. Like, if you are on socials, lot of people are asking for work. Yeah. Like, kind of mid I mean, people are new.
Speaker 4:People are kind of happy amateurs playing this stuff. Most people might not have a
Speaker 2:And there's still there's still demand for for kind of the middle of the pack. Sure. Yes. It will always It's just that you're not gonna get the, you know, the the like, quickly people identify the 100 or and and realistically, it can get down to, like, 10 or something
Speaker 4:like Something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think what's happened is that this the the floor is raised, but so is the ceiling. Yeah. So, like, really standing out is also more difficult because Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like people make awesome stuff. Like there's so many talented people in the in the industry. So Cream will rise to the top but it's also more competitive because as the baseline, anyone can make a cool fight scene now. Okay. What's next?
Speaker 4:Like what's what's actually makes us tick, so to say?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Where how are you building the company? You're you're here in LA because you have your own Hollywood Sign, but you're based in Stockholm. Stockholm.
Speaker 2:You're building out the team there or do you Yes. Remote?
Speaker 4:We we really really kind of what do say, step by step, brick by brick, really really Mhmm. Carefully selecting who we bring into the team. So we have two assistants at home now holding the fort. Shout out to you guys for Mhmm. So we could be here.
Speaker 4:But like to our earlier point, it's really difficult to find people. Yeah. So what's been a good funnel for me is working with teaching the stuff as well and Sure. Identifying some of the leading talent that are kind of AI native that grow up kind of going to school with this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 4:They might need more traditional schooling in terms of tools, art direction, and stuff that they don't have because How to work with clients? That too. Yeah. That too. Being able to take a brief, all this stuff.
Speaker 4:So really really slowly and like human at the at the front and center of everything. Mhmm. But we have like a temporary office. I mean, it's literally just been me and my co founder for the last years doing this.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 4:So we're some type of yeah.
Speaker 1:It's Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Amazing. I mean, it's so so fun to talk with you and because like, we haven't had we we've had plenty of kind of creatives come on the show that are using using the the different tools quite effectively. But nobody that's just like made it like Yeah. I am gonna recreate the modern ad agency.
Speaker 1:I I I think people sort of wrote off how like the models are so amazing and so it's so magical when you fire off one prompt and you get something that looks real that people just completely wrote off the middle, which is like actually making a product of Yeah. Like a a story or something. We had this idea for an an AI video that would be me and Jordy on the microphone throughout history different like big innovations. So the invention of the steam engine, the invention of the telephone, the invention of the, you know, Wilbur Wright launching the first airplane and we're there like sort of talking about it and we and we generated a still frame, tried to animate them between it was just like it was quickly turning into like a multi week process that should have been like a month that we budgeted. But we were like, let's spend thirty minutes on this and like hopefully we'll make it work.
Speaker 1:We never quite got it there, so we just never published it.
Speaker 4:You know what you should do? Should you should film it.
Speaker 2:You have
Speaker 4:a green screen here. Yeah. Yeah. Mean, just your background places. Oh.
Speaker 4:It The voices are real.
Speaker 1:You don't have
Speaker 4:to clone your again, you don't have to choose. It's AI
Speaker 1:and That's really good.
Speaker 7:So we like
Speaker 4:You have everything here, so we could do it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Last question. Aura recently partnered with Chrome Hearts for a ring. Yes or no? Was this something you'd
Speaker 2:pick up? Is this something you'd reckon?
Speaker 1:Is this fake news?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Departed already. Well, for the record, I don't I can't afford Chrome Hearts just yet. You know,
Speaker 2:it's Hey. Let's next Super Bowl season, you might be crummed up.
Speaker 1:Might be. Might be. Okay. Well, it's been fantastic.
Speaker 4:Likewise. Likewise.
Speaker 1:Thank you so
Speaker 2:much for coming down. I'd to meet you.
Speaker 1:We should definitely work together on something. Let's figure out something to work on. Yeah. That'd be amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Follow-up. I'd love it.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Lambda.
Speaker 1:Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And that brings us into the Lambda lightning round, and we are kicking it off with Benjamin Miller from Fundrise. But first, will pivot that camera around, show you the entire TBPN UltraDome, and we will show you the Lambda cloud because we are in the Lambda lightning round right now. And I believe we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise in the restream waiting room, so we will bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome. We'll try that again to bring him into the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on? Hey, guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is the first time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?
Speaker 7:Alright. Alright. So my name is Ben Miller. I'm cofounder and CEO of Fundrise.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:We are an alternative investment platform. I think the largest direct to investor platform of the country. Been around fifteen years. We've democratized investing into real estate.
Speaker 1:Tonight's success.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Real estate, tech tech and private credit. We have 2,000,000 customers. We just took our our fund VCX public last week on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:We love NIC.
Speaker 2:How doing. As long as long as as as long as I've been following Yeah. Like tech closely. Yeah. So so it's very very cool to have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let let's get into the recent launch because we've obviously seen it all over our timeline. I had a friend of ours messaged John and I yesterday seeing something. He was like pissed off. He was like, did did did
Speaker 4:So we all miss
Speaker 2:anyways Oh, yeah. How long has it been in the works? Come together because it's not spin up and, you know, there's a lot of moving pieces.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, it's it's so funny because when we started out, everyone told us a bad idea, which was we were we democratized investing into real estate. This is about 2021. 2021, everything was hot, hot, hot. Real estate was hot, tech was hot, And we were foolish enough to think about, like, well, what else could we do that would be really painful and hard and new?
Speaker 7:And so we we came up with the concept of why don't we try to expand into democratizing investing into private tech and to venture capital? And we're different than the normal approach. We we usually start by going in the front door of the SEC. So we go into the SEC and say, this is what we want to do. We can we create a public venture capital fund?
Speaker 7:And no one had ever done that before. It took us about two years going back and forth with the staff, and we created the first, you know, the first it's a venture fund, just like any other venture fund, except anyone can invest in it. And we launched at the end of I think in about the 2022, and then and then stock market collapsed, everything in tech became negative. So we were super lucky because we we started investing at the bottom of the cycle. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so and so that's how we got access. I mean, you know, when we got access to Androle and Anthropic and Canva, like, people were were, like, very bearish on tech. Yeah. And and that's like so people are like, how did you get these great names? I was like, well, it's you know, we we picked good names, but it was also there's a lot of luck there.
Speaker 7:Time. So anyways, I I I I've given you the story, but I don't wanna keep I you know, if you wanna
Speaker 2:ask Yeah. Keep yeah. Continue continue because yeah. So so so two years working with the SEC, you you you actually create the fund, but it's not publicly listed at that time, it's just available in in your in your product? To the public.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. This is something that people in tech weren't familiar with, but you can be public and not be publicly traded.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so we were it's a public venture fund. It was, you know, we're filing, know, public reporting on the SEC's web EDGAR. And and so we ended up, you know, raising about half $1,000,000,000 across a 100,000 investors. We have a 100,000 investors. The fund had had a lot of good returns, like within three years, it had been up like 85% or something.
Speaker 7:It was especially in the last year, it was up 65% the last twelve months.
Speaker 2:And that's and NAV. NAV is NAV being up 65%.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, mean, it's just the mark of typically, it's just the last round, you know, what was Anthropic's last round? What was what was, you know, Vanta's last round or Canva or whomever. So we we, you know, we typically mark to the last round valuation. And, you know, we invested in, like, OpenAI and Databricks and all these companies, like, three years ago.
Speaker 7:So it ended up doing pretty well.
Speaker 1:It's really good.
Speaker 7:And then so then we when we said
Speaker 2:You're like, I'm
Speaker 1:in the
Speaker 2:wrong business. I should've just been a fund manager.
Speaker 7:I was in the wrong business. Real estate is so much more brutal than tech. Let me tell you. It's a it's a lot nicer to be an investor than a builder. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What
Speaker 2:what do you guys look for on the actual asset side? I'm assuming some of the positions are direct, some are, you know, you've you've bought into SPVs, like, how do you how do you qualify on the on the asset side?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, our check size grew over time, so now it's like it wants to be like 20 to 50 to 100,000,000. And the way that we did it is that we and we have Fundrise is 200 people. We have a 100 software engineers. We built, you know, a fintech platform with millions of customers and payment processing, and then we built a real estate AI product called Real AI.
Speaker 7:And so we have, like, a whole AI, like, initiative. And so that's how we really, like, got comfortable with the different products. How we got to Anthropic, I think, early, is that we were building with it, and we're like, oh my god. This is such a better enterprise product than anything else. Go down the list.
Speaker 7:Like, it it was it was almost 80% other than Andoril, which I don't have any killer drones, we were, you know, we really it's every time I see a company come to me, like, I got I got sort of saw some flow for deal and and replet. And I said, like, I just don't know. We don't use the software, so I can't I can underwrite it with by paper, like an MBA underwriting. Mhmm. But it like, without being grounded in the as a as a true user.
Speaker 7:Like, I just it's so that was that's our process is a combination of being using it, building with it, and then if we build with it and we love it, we usually hunt it down. We usually, like we we're not reactive typically. We we are, okay. This is a great company. How do we get this?
Speaker 7:How do we get into this company? How do I harass the the CEO and the executives and It's
Speaker 1:Matt Grimm's worst nightmare. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, I'm going
Speaker 7:direct with Andrew all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I mean, that that's
Speaker 9:the right
Speaker 1:way to do it. And I think that that's something that is like underrated and I think a lot of investors don't necessarily know how far you can be away from the cap table.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What yeah. What what is your pitch to companies? Is it is it that, hey, we have, you know, a 100,000 people in this fund. They they're excited about your company, they want exposure, this is a better way for them to get it than investing in the third or fourth layer of some random SPV and and or or or how do those conversations typically go?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, you know, if you've you've you're around, like, half the time it's just relationship. It's just like, you know somebody, they get to know you, they get comfortable. I mean, at least half the time, it's just pure relationship driven. Sometimes it's like more of a hard pitch.
Speaker 7:And so, like, Ramp, for example, which we invested in and has done done really well, that took a couple of, like, turns of the wheel. And but but Ramp is sort of very marketing minded. If you probably have any sense of Ramp, they're very, like, aggressive and thoughtful and
Speaker 2:We know. We know a little bit about it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right. Right. So, this is like their part of their DNA is product marketing. So, we said to them, we know we have 2,000,000 customers.
Speaker 7:Like, 2,000,000 people. Like, why don't we work together at Invest in Ramp and see if you guys can see if we can be helpful. And and we went out to half our customer base to a million people and we were the most successful partnership they've ever done. Wow. Like hundreds hundreds of customers.
Speaker 2:We know it's Yeah. Your your customer base is like, I don't I don't know. I I I imagine your minimums are quite quite low, but in general, if people are investing in alternative assets like
Speaker 1:Business leaders. Yeah. Like, they're business people.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, it's it's I thought we did it with Canva too and it and it's just like Canva was so big, it didn't move the needle for them. Mhmm. And I've done it with smaller companies where we were like we drove 25% of their revenue growth in a That's single great. So so That's
Speaker 1:great value add. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a huge value add. I mean, I think it's like we're we're not we're one of our products we love is intercom, which is Fin.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. We love it. We're sponsored by Fin.
Speaker 7:Okay. Well, we're an adopter. We adopted Fin like Yeah. Eighteen months ago. It's and we're and we basically the guy we invested in Intercom and I think we're investing more.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I I think that like, our customer base is so big. I mean, millions of people. We know where they work, we know what their job is, we know where they live, and we have so much data about them. So you said, like, I only want to we did this with ServiceTitan also, because we invested in ServiceTitan before they went public. So I only want small business owners in the Midwest.
Speaker 7:Okay, great. You know what? We can target, and then we can, like, because they're investors. We're not a marketing platform.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So I think that, like, the the idea that I I mean, it's true, but it's novel, is that the people are your it's like a you can have an army of people, like, driving Mhmm. Sales, marketing, brand. I mean, when we listed VCX and when public it last week, huge part of the reason it was successful, like, very successful, was the massive broad based investor group who is very excited, supportive. We call it network investing. You know, the social network and then there's, like, it's actually investor networks.
Speaker 7:Like, we we think that like people are a value separate from their money.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So so you you become publicly traded quite recently. Mhmm. It immediately trades way way way way way above NAV and that creates a problem which is that I, as an investor, could be very interested in the underlying assets. Think you have a fantastic portfolio, but maybe I don't wanna pay way above NAV. Even if I'm bullish on the companies, how how do you think how do you think this kind of like broad based exposure to privates can evolve over time?
Speaker 2:Are you thinking about, you know, future products that would, kind of solve some of these you know, clearly, there's a massive amount of demand. Investors are excited to to be invested in VCX, but, there's clearly there maybe is, like, more evolved solutions to come.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so so funny how these things like, anybody who's ever had any success, like, knows that before that, everybody told you it was not gonna work. Yeah. And so when we when we conceived of this this idea of taking it public, listing it, every single expert told us it would trade as a at a discount to NAV.
Speaker 7:They said it was you know, don't and I and we put it to a shareholder vote. I had thousands of people telling me not to do it. It's going to trade down. And our view was, like, you know, every phase of this process, people have a reason to basically be negative. And so, originally, it was, like, so novel, like, can should you democratize investing?
Speaker 7:And then it was, can you get access to the companies? And then it was, well, now you have access and you've democratized it, but, you know, these investors need liquidity. Mhmm. You know? They they're not they can't handle liquidity, which, by the way, even big institutions can't either.
Speaker 7:I've been through I went through two thousand eight financial crisis and I watched like Harvard endowment have to dump like stuff and so I've I so anyways, so I thought of it as like, okay, they've had great performance. Average client performance was 40% a year. Right? So I was like, great. Like, delivered.
Speaker 7:So let's just give them like clean liquidity and it may trade at a premium. I thought it would, but I
Speaker 2:there was some precedent that it would that it would have traded some premium like Destiny. Yeah. I I I remember at least at times has traded, you know, way above Yeah.
Speaker 7:But but, you know, Robinhood's didn't. So so it unclear. My view you know, I I did a whole, like, Investor Day presentation where I said to people, like, here's why it might trade up, here's why it might trade down, and why it might trade up is that, you know, you can't get shares of Anthropic
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:At par in a liquid wrapper, you know, with no carried interest. Like, you can't get Andoril or go down your list. OpenAI and and and Ramp and Databricks. Like, the idea that you can get these companies in a in a a perfectly liquid wrapper and a low cost regulated vehicle, like, that makes sense to me they would trade a premium. And that's what I I said that's what could happen.
Speaker 7:It could also be that, like, sentiment gets negative. There's a war in The Middle East. Yeah. You know, anything could happen. And so, it traded at a massive premium.
Speaker 7:I mean, massive. It's it's it's been blockbuster success. Yeah. Validated all of our of our aims and hopes. And now, I'm getting the other side, know, oh, yeah, with trades too much of your premium.
Speaker 7:I said, well, it's been eight days. Right? Yeah. It's been eight days. Like, we have more wood to shop.
Speaker 7:Right? We have more things we're doing. We have just announced a partnership with Kraken to tokenize it. Oh, interesting. Tokenization, I think, is going to be really, like, part of financial innovations.
Speaker 7:We've been doing this for financial innovation is key to democratization and key to lowering the cost of intermediation. Mhmm. So, I mean, this is we're super early days here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How have been processing the private credit stories over the last couple months?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I've been doing this for fifteen years. Right? So, like, this is like how it always goes. Already happened in real estate where institutional money, they raise a lot of money, it's successful, they raise more money, it's successful.
Speaker 7:And they just it's you just go until it dies. Like, that's just like how how institutional money works.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, like and so they just did. I mean, it's just there's a cycle. There's a every single sector has a cycle. And when this and and if you don't basically, if you don't have a lot of restraint before you need to, you just always end up in this problem every single time. Every single time.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And so that's what's happening with private credit. I don't think it's as bad as everybody says
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But it's you know, the problem is that you end up with this vicious cycle where once you get negative sentiment, it actually becomes self fulfilling.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. Because there's more people pulling out, less people investing.
Speaker 2:What how big can VCX get? Like, if I'm a major platform VC fund, do I see this and think, okay, I'm gonna have more competition at at series b Mhmm. C eventually, like, is this something that you can think can scale to tens of billions of of AUM? What's your
Speaker 7:Are you a dream walker?
Speaker 1:Are you in my dreams?
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. But I can see where you're I can see where you're going.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, the the the hope and the goal here, I mean, there's sort of two sides to the marketplace. So the next turn of the wheel is I need to convince the best private companies this is good for them. Mhmm. You know, we're one company on their cap table.
Speaker 7:We're a venture fund. To the private companies, we're a venture fund.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You know? It's just like any other venture fund. There's no differences except for our capital, Evergreen. Right? Forever capital, low cost, passive.
Speaker 7:Like, passive long term capital, which to me as a founder and a builder, like, that's the best money around. I'd rather have that than value add, quote value add. So I think that we get to a place where structurally an allocation to passive long term money becomes, like, the best companies get it. Yeah. The best companies want it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and and so, like, kind of a Jack Bogle Vanguard model would be if we can become sort of a structural bridge, then we get scale, we lower the bigger we get, the lower our fees. The lower our fees, the bigger we get. And, you know, at a $100,000,000,000, our fees are, you know, tens of basis points. Right?
Speaker 7:It's super disruptive to the venture industry. I mean, it's good and bad because they're gonna they're gonna want us and hate us at the same time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well
Speaker 2:It's very it's very it's very it's very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean,
Speaker 2:I think, you know, yeah, we never give investment advice here but I think in general for 99% of people, if you're excited about great private companies, you should take
Speaker 1:some good picks.
Speaker 2:An index approach that allows you to have liquidity along the way. Yeah. Makes makes a lot of sense. And I and I think there's like a lot there's a lot more to come here in the category. I would expect it to be oligopolistic in the way that even, like, the platform VC funds are.
Speaker 2:You know, they can all get bigger together. So excited to see more more innovation.
Speaker 1:It is funny. I I you know, we were tracking, like, will VC funds go public? Dan Primak was telling us that that might happen. I never really expected it to go the other way, but it makes so much sense with your strategy where that goes. And the the value prop that you've given to founders at a particular stage just makes so much sense.
Speaker 1:The pitch is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Are you are you hiring like new kind of quasi VC like partners? Are you gonna try to poach from any of the of the
Speaker 7:other That's good question.
Speaker 4:I mean
Speaker 2:because I mean it feels like you're you're building you're building Fundrise which has like millions of investors Yeah. And then you're seemingly like now, basically, like, need to invest in all the products that we love and use. Yeah. I I imagine you'd like some support.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, this is this is in my takeaway, and I guess I don't know if other people have experienced this, but my takeaway is very hard to delegate successfully. There are like like Fundraiser would be together. The founding team's been together fifteen years.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:You know, every year maybe we hire a 100 people.
Speaker 1:Another success too.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like, it it takes a long time to find people who are just like, you can delegate to and they just deliver.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I've I think I've almost never had the experience where you hire somebody I've hired I've tried Go hire the fanciest person with crazy, weird resume. They just don't deliver.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. I know.
Speaker 7:I I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1:I sometimes you get rolled on your sleeves.
Speaker 7:It's done with across different industries and finance and real estate. And and so I mean, like, maybe there's a venture person who could just get access and you just pay them. But I sort
Speaker 2:doubt that. Yeah. I mean, I think I think it oftentimes, the hardest thing is finding undiscovered talent.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But the undiscovered talent is what typically ends up actually being like a game changer in an organization. You know, somebody that doesn't necessarily have the pedigree and that that could be that could be for you, like somebody who's just historically been a software engineer and they're like, I was already always like interested in investing. And then they come in and like bring a new approach to investing that kind of works in the in the structure that that you guys have.
Speaker 7:But I guess like my I guess there's two ways you make money venture. One is that you you discover something before it's the hottest thing ever. You come in early.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:The other one is that you just get access Yeah. When they're already hot and you just ride the product market fit train.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And so I'm hoping this Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's been that's been the the ish. There's been so many attempts at like democratizing the private market within tech and a lot of them end up looking like crowdfunding platforms and then they have this massive
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Negative selection bias Yep. Where they're getting the worst companies Yes, that come on and crowdfund and then the investors don't end up making money and it creates this vicious cycle and then the companies just go away over time. And and this is like, you know, potentially it seems like guiding to the opposite of that which is like you have a differentiated value add. Yeah. You have a product that no other platform VC can offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then you talked about all the the potential like positive flywheel of like Yeah. More capital, lower fees, more capital, lower fees, more investors, you know, more value add. So
Speaker 1:thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the success, the overnight success, fifteen years in the making. The chat loves to see it and we appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 2:Great great to great to finally meet.
Speaker 1:Have a great weekend. Yeah. We'll talk you soon, Ben.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. We are running over, so we'll bring in our next guest, Faris, from Normal Computing.
Speaker 1:Faris, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for Good jumping us to see you. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 3:Hey. I'm Faris, founder and CEO of Normal Computing. Mhmm. So Normal is a company that builds AI software with the world's largest semiconductor companies. So right now, more than half of the top 10 by revenue semiconductor companies use Normal to design custom silicon.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And we're also using that same capability right now to bring new kinds of chips and ASICs to market ourselves, mostly focused on energy. So hyper efficient, ultra efficient ASICs.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Seems somewhat abnormal given your stage to have this level of traction, but continued.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where did the name come from?
Speaker 3:It's a couple of things. So one is, you know, we're right now, the ASICs targeting different kinds of probabilistic machine learning models
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 3:Like diffusion models. So normal is kind of an ode to the normal distribution. But also, there's this kind of broader view that this is really the way that computing should be. Like, this is the more natural way to process and run, you know, AI inference and AI workloads in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about the the the chip landscape where you see the most activity. There's a lot of news from Arm this week around CPUs.
Speaker 1:Obviously, everyone's familiar with the with the GPU. And then the between the TPU and Cerebras and Grok, there's, like, a few other ASICs that are sort of popular, but it feels like there's a much longer tail that you're going after.
Speaker 3:For sure. I mean, so obviously, we had GTC last week. Sure. And Jensen put forward what I think is a really nice equation where he's saying that revenue equals tokens per watt times total available gigawatts. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So what that means is it's there there's two main problems that we should be focused on right now from our perspective in chips. One is increasing the amount of energy that's useful and usable by us and and for us. But the other is improving the energy efficiency that we have in the silicon that we're using. And so there's a few trends. One of those, I would say, relates to the the news that ARM put forward.
Speaker 3:They have their own chip, you know, real hardware for the first time in forty years. Yeah. Historically, an IP licensing business. That's part of this broader trend to, you know, custom silicon and the data center moving to heterogeneous computing, which means that in the future, not that many years from now, rather than having a very small number of different kinds of chips that are running all of our workloads, We're gonna have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of different kinds of chips that are tailored to each workload and application in the data center.
Speaker 1:Are thermodynamic computing chips underrated?
Speaker 3:I think so. Yeah. What do you think? What's
Speaker 1:your perspective? I heard that much about them. I I I don't know. And it feels like it's very early stage. And so it Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've seen some demos, but it's very unclear at the demo phase how much is being done on the actual chip, what the value is. And and we went through this with Grok and Cerebras where there was a there was very early pushback around, oh, well, like, you'll never be able to run this type of model on that chip, or it will you'll need to network a thousand chips together to do anything valuable. And I've I've been surprised, and I think we've seen some narrative violations around Cerberus and Grok. I've used I've used Codex 4.5 Spark on Cerberus, and I know it's good. I know it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We had a founder come on that baked llama onto a chip and made it available at chatjimmy.ai. And like, you can just Yeah. Feel the You can just feel the value. I'm wondering like are should I think about thermodynamic computing just as, another speed versus size or cost trade off or if it unlocks a different a different, like, vector of optimization?
Speaker 3:It is a different vector. So right now, I mean, the two typical vectors that you have, mean, there's three if you include area. But you have speed and energy. Those are typically the trade offs that you're making. But we're introducing a new one, is noise.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So for these kinds of devices, you can't necessarily run like, can't run a calculator or something where you need full precision Sure. Like deterministic calculations. But let's say that you're trying to run something like a diffusion model. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:Which I think is super topical, right, because OpenAI just winded down Sora this week. It was costing them like $15,000,000 a day to run, 2,100,000.0 cumulative revenue. But that's that's the kind of workload that's a really nice fit for this computing paradigm
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because you're taking something that's noisy and approximate by definition Yeah. And mapping it to hardware where the physics maps, like, really nicely between those equations.
Speaker 1:You think that's five years away? Ten years away?
Speaker 3:We think less. Yeah. We think less right now. Less. So our yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think it has to be. So, like, from our perspective, 2030 is a is a key date that we talk about a lot internally because there's a view that, you know, even by 2028, we're gonna have, like, a 49 gigawatt shortfall in terms of power. And so something something has to change, something has to give. It's it could be energy. It could be that we find, like, new sources or, you know, data centers in space or one of these other directions or it's we have a real breakthrough when it comes to silicon.
Speaker 3:That's kind of what we're going after.
Speaker 1:That'd be amazing. Tell us about the round. I wanna hit the gong.
Speaker 3:Oh, awesome. Yeah. I have my own gong behind me too. I don't know you saw that.
Speaker 2:No way. Just for the
Speaker 3:it's a $50,000,000 round. We're calling
Speaker 2:it accelerator round led by Samsung.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong. Led by led by who? Sorry. Missed it.
Speaker 4:Samsung.
Speaker 1:There you go. That's
Speaker 2:And what were you doing before this?
Speaker 3:I was at Google. I was at Google brand and then Google acts afterwards where I met my founders, my co founders.
Speaker 2:There you go. Somewhat of a nontraditional. Yeah. Great idea.
Speaker 1:Like the perfect perfect team for this. Well, congratulations. Very excited. And, yeah, come back on the show. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Actually, multiple times this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Take care. Care.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And let me tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 1:They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we'll bring in Evan Loomis with Overmatch Ventures. Evan, how are you doing?
Speaker 9:Good to meet I'm doing great. It's good to be with you guys.
Speaker 1:Take us off with the news.
Speaker 2:What happened?
Speaker 1:Just hit us with the big number.
Speaker 9:Oh, man. You're you're you're grabbing the gong. Can't I
Speaker 2:can't Wait.
Speaker 9:We we just closed 250,000,000. Yes. Congratulations. Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:We can put it in a bill. We can we can just say a quarter bill.
Speaker 1:Quarter bill.
Speaker 9:It's a quarter Quarter bill. There it is. We raised the money in a couple months. I'm so grateful. Very nice.
Speaker 9:Over the six months. That's another funny little noise too. I I couldn't eat those from my office here.
Speaker 1:It's Friday. It
Speaker 9:is But anyway it's Friday.
Speaker 1:Tell us about the investing thesis. I wanna know about sector and stage. How much are you saving for follow on? How concentrated do you want the portfolio to be? Where are you seeing opportunity in the venture landscape?
Speaker 9:Our our sweet spot is deep tech, defense, and space. Mhmm. There's a set of technologies that are existentially urgent and important for The United States to lead in, And so that is our that is our sweet spot. Mhmm. We do pre through series a.
Speaker 9:Wow. I've got an incredible team. Yeah. Morgan Hitzig, Jordan Blaschig, bunch of other folks. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Typically, at the pre seed, we're doing two to three.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Seed, three to five.
Speaker 6:Wow.
Speaker 2:Back in my day, a pre seed was like
Speaker 9:Five to 10. Pre seed.
Speaker 2:Day was 500 k.
Speaker 1:500 k. Now you're gonna know the mill. Still, I mean, that that feels like, know, potentially like 50 companies in this portfolio. That feels broader. Is that intentional?
Speaker 1:Is that how you see think it will pencil out? Or do you think that concentration will build or you'll wind up taking more bets?
Speaker 4:I
Speaker 2:bet I'm I'm betting 25 max.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's hear it. What do you think?
Speaker 9:Oh, I love it. Yeah. You you nailed it. Your if I if I had a gong, would hit it right now, buddy. Yeah.
Speaker 9:We're we're shooting for 25
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:Portfolio companies. Mhmm. We keep about half the fund for reserve. Mhmm. So when guys know this probably better than anybody, but the the winners kind of move fast day one.
Speaker 9:They they tend to break out and you want to make sure you hold enough for reserve for those.
Speaker 2:Are are is The United States overmatched right now?
Speaker 9:In in a What a great question.
Speaker 2:You know, In a way that's like not you know, clearly we still have our exquisite systems and aircraft carriers but it's hard to read into how the war is going. But Mhmm. It certainly hasn't felt like we're in a great spot I agree with it. Given given this kind of mismatch in capabilities. And it Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it feels like our adversaries have just been preparing for the last twenty years for a style of conflict with The United State. You know, basically betting that we are gonna continue to be one way and that how how do we just counteract this threat in a sustainable way? And and so far from from what I'm seeing, it seems to be like it's been a good strategy. So not not not fun to say out loud, but seems like the reality.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a it's it's a great question. It's it's funny. Our name is the intent. Like, the the goal is that America has overmatched capabilities strategically and technologically, which is the point.
Speaker 9:You know, I I don't we we are definitely not overmatched Mhmm. By anybody at all. And and I don't think we ever will be. Mhmm. But we're a little bit behind in some areas.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I'll say that. And I think one of the things that makes our country so wonderful and is that we're like a free people that can do the impossible. Every every technological revolution historically, we've won. Think about it. Like, semiconductors, we invented it.
Speaker 9:Software, we got it. And we're kind of on the end of this software revolution. The next revolution is going to be denominated by artificial intelligence, advanced chips, certain defense and space based capabilities, hypersonics, space offense, defense, robotics, autonomous systems. And so we're going to win. And the reason I'm so confident about that is like, I get to be on Zoom calls all day in meetings with founders that are like actually architecting the future.
Speaker 9:So I feel really bullish, but I also feel behind. Mhmm. You know what I mean? So
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'm I'm not overly negative either. I mean, we talk with like, you know, up to six founders a day. So I feel like we get to see the future where I'm like, okay, if we just let these teams cook for five to ten years, we're gonna have a lot more energy.
Speaker 1:We're gonna
Speaker 2:have a lot more industrial power locally. We're gonna have a lot more, you know, batteries made in The United States, etcetera etcetera. You could just go down the line. But certainly, like, we gotta get into gear and it just feels like we need The one concern I have right now is that there's great talent out there that looks at a massive category that's not even monopolistic and thinks like, I shouldn't start a business in that category because this other company started like a year ago and they've already raised a $100,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I just think for some of these categories we're gonna want Yeah. Like a bunch of
Speaker 1:really Yeah. Tough have a question about that. Our venture capital capital wars, like startup capital wars where there's two companies in a single category and then the VCs are just pouring money in, That's a textbook, like, you're not getting the power law winner necessarily. It's not great for the economic outcome. But is that good for America?
Speaker 9:Of course, it's good.
Speaker 4:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 9:This is great. This is part of wow, there's the eagle. That's Didn't so know you guys had that one up your sleeve. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Of course it's good and this is how competition works and this is why is why we're gonna we're gonna win I'm so bullish about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's we kind of annoying. Don't pick winners. There's always a battle between a bunch of private enterprises and smart entrepreneurs that can go and innovate and the best product usually wins.
Speaker 9:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Yeah. Where are you where are you based, by the way?
Speaker 9:I'm based in Austin, Texas. Moved Texas. Moved back here about a decade ago to cofound a company called Icon
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:Where we three d printed the first house in The United States in 2018, which was kind of my entree into venture, if you will. Venture was not on the cards Mhmm. At all
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Ever in my life. And we we had really good success with that business, and it kind of pulled us really close to the national interest. We picked up major contracts with every branch of the military, the intelligence community, and even won the contract for the moon base. As you guys know, we're going we're going we're going back to the moon Yeah. As a as a country and as a species, and, you can't bring two by four in drywall, unfortunately.
Speaker 9:So we're gonna partner with them to make sure that we've got, like, a permanent civilization up there.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah. What a
Speaker 2:you're saying you're gonna help make it a state.
Speaker 1:I like it. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I mean, Texas is the greatest state in America for sure. We Well, the
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe maybe the Texas don't want the moon to be state because
Speaker 2:Well, maybe maybe the maybe the moon could just be an extension of Texas. Be very that'd be the new frontier.
Speaker 1:County. We're gonna make the moon a county.
Speaker 9:If the Texans if the Texans get there first, then they might try to claim it their own. They might
Speaker 1:they might star state.
Speaker 2:What but last question. What's that what's that drone behind you?
Speaker 1:That's a boring company flamethrower. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh, man. It looks like a drone.
Speaker 1:That's a flamethrower. Yeah. Is it working?
Speaker 2:I don't know if
Speaker 1:you're Fire. You know,
Speaker 9:I I don't I don't have my I don't have the gas canister on it mostly because I've got four little kids. Can imagine. If if they broke in here, it would be really really bad for everybody. So Well, good. But I keep it back here because
Speaker 1:What a design. That is such a good design. I love that thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think you guys need office.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You guys definitely need one for your office too. Definitely. So
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:Well We'll work on it. Great great to meet you, Evan. I'm really glad you're doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure we'll talk to many of your upcoming portfolio companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're excited.
Speaker 9:Awesome. Good to be with you guys. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Much. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middleman and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 1:And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Moda. Moda, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on? Good to meet you.
Speaker 8:Hi. I'm good. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining. Huge week for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Walk us through the the company and the launch. Yes.
Speaker 8:Yes. I'm very sleep deprived right now, so apologize for that. Yeah. So I'm Anvisha. I'm the founder and CEO of Moda.
Speaker 8:Moda is an AI design tool for non designers. Mhmm. People use our AI design agent
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:To create slides, social graphics, like all kinds of landing page mock ups, everything. The difference between us and other stuff is we've created it on a fully editable canvas. So it's not giving you back, like a static image that you can't edit. It's like truly drawing shapes. You can click and edit a text box.
Speaker 8:You can move things around, etcetera. We just announced our 7 and a half million dollar funding round led by General Catalyst with
Speaker 2:General General Catalyst and?
Speaker 8:Pear, the founder of Dropbox. He used to work at Dropbox. So that one's really special to me to have Arash on board.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Yeah. Let's Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:So you came out with a somewhat of a controversial launch. You're the anti SLOP company. Yeah. People control over their outputs. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Take SLOP might come out, but then you can you can change it and adapt it, improve it. Yet, talk about how the launch has gone.
Speaker 1:What been reasons? The pigs at the trough. Some of us like slop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Some of us do.
Speaker 8:If slop is what you want, you can you can get it in Moda. You can get it wherever you want. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:The pro slob company. No. No. Obviously, makes a lot of sense, but take us through the thesis.
Speaker 8:Yeah. For sure. So the launch, this was unexpected. Mhmm. Like, obviously, you know, we put a lot of effort into like, putting together this video, this narrative.
Speaker 8:Shout out to Shon Media who helped us with the video and things like that. The, the unexpected part was, like, the controversy around it. I guess, I mean, I did put a lot of effort into those, like, first two sentences. I think I spent, like, you know, I don't know, many many hours writing and rewriting them.
Speaker 2:You baited them.
Speaker 1:Wait. Remind everyone what the first two sentences were.
Speaker 8:The first two sentences were, we raised 7 and a half million to kill AI slop. Introducing Moda, the world's first AI design agent with taste. Yeah. Now, know the world's first is like Yeah. Triggering to people because it's like, you know.
Speaker 8:You're
Speaker 2:staking out your territory. Yeah. But it's Yeah. And I I think part of that part of that is like I think generally right now there's been so many companies in every category that people have launch fatigue and for better or worse Yeah. Even if something's like cool and a new approach, they will try to find some way to to pick it apart.
Speaker 2:But but yeah, I I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. How how are you how are you seeing the competitive landscape? You know, making slides and websites are things that basically every comp it seems like almost every company in the world is, like, converging on having a product to do something like this. You guys are specializing in it. That'll give you some edge, but, like, how do you how do you see the space evolving?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I'll say a few things. First of all, our our launch had, I think, like, 8,000,000 impressions on, like, Twitter across, like, my video, other content, LinkedIn. We had a absolute insane amount of sign ups. Like, there the market is saying that our this problem is not solved yet, which was my thesis when we started this company.
Speaker 8:And to give a little bit of background about myself, I'm a second time founder. My previous company, Dover, was backed by Founders Fund and NYC, and I've been through product market fit. I've scaled the company. When I went out to fundraise for Moda, I was met with a lot of skepticism. People were like, why are you starting another AI design thingy?
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And I think it really comes down to the details here. I wanna get too much into talking about, like, competitors right now and, like, the landscape and, like, detail. But I will say that, everyone is kind of taking this approach of, let's go with the coding agents. Let's like, Claude is really good at writing code.
Speaker 8:Right? Let's get Claude to, like, slop up a PowerPoint. Right? Like, just like spit out some HTML, looks like a PowerPoint, let's go. Those PowerPoints all look the same.
Speaker 8:They all have like boxes and like, you know, and and then you go and try to edit it. Right? And it's like, you're stuck in like this like weird drag and drop like kind of world, and you don't kinda have that control. So I think that the best AI tools are not the ones that help you save time. They have a place.
Speaker 8:Right? So it's like, a lot of AI tools have this pitch, oh, like, you're a marketer. You can create like a million ad creatives in like thirty seconds. Great. Right?
Speaker 8:They're all probably your slop. I think the best AI tools are the ones that like let you do things that you never could have done before.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? And this is like the magic of Cloud Code and things like that. And we want to do that for design. And I think in order to truly do that, you truly need to actually have like a like, this is a little bit technical, but like an actual vector canvas. Like, where you can put something in one place exactly and move it to another place.
Speaker 8:You can draw things. You can literally create anything in there. Right? And so we took this very different approach where we built an agent that is not outputting HTML. It's not outputting, like, you know, an image like Nano Banana or anything like that.
Speaker 8:It took us, like, months to build this. Like, it just didn't work for, like we we tried, like, five different approaches. It just, like, didn't work. Didn't work. Didn't work.
Speaker 8:Finally, it started working. And, it's just very different from what anyone else is doing. And I think this is gonna really unlock this kind of, like, next level of creativity for people, in my opinion. That's gonna let them create stuff that they could never do before. So I'm very bullish.
Speaker 8:The people who have been signing up, it's kind of been it's been insane. Like, the range is just like there's, like, investment bankers, like, analysts signing up, and then there's, like, sheepskin farmers in New Zealand like and people like messaging me like the craziest shit that they've like done with this product already. And so I'm like, okay, I think we're onto something. And, yeah, the competition's gonna
Speaker 4:be fun.
Speaker 2:Very good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We talked to an AI director Billy Boman earlier today and the the I mean he was voicing over like the need for tools and like he doesn't That
Speaker 2:was his number one request.
Speaker 1:He does not want to walk in a in a text Yeah. And and and he's done this like literal Super Bowl ads using AI, leaning into AI, being very aggressive about it Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the time saving too. He was like, yeah, that our average project is like six weeks something like that. So he's not he's not trying to sell entirely on speeding up timelines. He's trying to sell on how do we do things that we were not Would be possible
Speaker 1:otherwise with this budget.
Speaker 2:With traditional, you know, shooting. So Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool.
Speaker 8:Yeah. One interesting thing just as like a side note that might be, second interesting insight. I've been getting so many support requests that I've just started sending people like a Google Meet link and I'm like, can you talk right now? I'm in this Google Meet. So Just hanging out here.
Speaker 8:Good day. Say it again?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like an open window into whoever wants to talk. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's great.
Speaker 8:It's just an open window. Yeah. I talked to this guy today who's like who works at this like firm in The UK. Mhmm. He set up this like insane Claude plus Moda thing where he has these like his entire like job is like in all these claude.md skill files.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And he has connected it to all these tools via MCP. Yeah. And I was like, how did you even do this? Like, yeah, we have an MCP service, like not even like really documented.
Speaker 8:I don't know how you figured all this He he did some crazy shit. I don't know how he did it. That's crazy. But I've been astounded by the amount of like businesses I've spoken to that are like, we need your API, need your MCP. Like, luckily, have all that, but like, it it's just like the the way that products are getting used right now is completely different than anything I've ever seen.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. It's like everyone wants to like chain together these things. They want like Yeah. This level of like things talking to each other in automation. Like, I've been, you know, building products for many years.
Speaker 8:For a consumer product like ours, I would never build an API on day one. But now I'm like, oh my god, our API needs to be like one of the the like first party things that we that we do basically. So Yeah. That's been interesting as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Someone in the chat mentioned, I I forgot about this, but Google just launched Stitch, like, last week, which is so funny because the whole idea of, like, Stitches transform ideas into UI designs for mobile web application. Mhmm. So it's so funny because fifteen years ago, you would have been getting the question maybe, like, what if Google does this? And then, of course, they they they come out with this.
Speaker 2:But as we've seen with you know, I expect this market to evolve, like, similar to CodeGen where, you know, mass massive market, tons of opportunity to just focus and and, you know, you have an advantage being a nimble startup. How big is a team right now?
Speaker 8:We are five people. Like, the couple friends that I've dragged into this helping me out right now. So we are hiring if, anyone watching this, wants a job. Yeah. No.
Speaker 8:It's been absolutely insane. I think that, in some ways, like, the the the hate is kind of interesting as well because it's like, I've been, you know, getting people, like, retweeting, being like, look at these, like, people, like, raising all this venture capital, like, doing this. I'm like, yo. We're like a five person team. Like, we did not expect this.
Speaker 8:Like, we're just, like, keep it gotta keep up right now. And yeah. But it's been really fun. And yeah. Very excited to sort of see where we go from here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ignore ignore the haters. Keep shipping.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come Yeah. Was great.
Speaker 2:It was great to meet Yeah. Yeah. Congrats on the
Speaker 1:on the big week. I'm sure I'm
Speaker 2:sure you won't have much of a weekend with all the inbound. But Good luck. Good luck building.
Speaker 1:Good to see you soon.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 4:good week. Alright.
Speaker 8:See
Speaker 1:you. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Shopify.
Speaker 1:Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I love that sound cue. But we don't have our next guys. He will be joining in just a few minutes. I'm I'm just laughing about, you know, I I obviously don't wanna diminish a 7 and a half million dollar raise.
Speaker 1:That's a great amount of funding, but it's just so funny to imagine, like, trying to redirect the people. Like, the type of people that are gonna hate on a 7 and a half million dollar raise are not gonna understand, like, well, no. No. No. Look at Google's cash flow.
Speaker 1:Like, they're drawing down tens of billions. Like, you should be more focused on them, But they won't I think that will fall on deaf ears. Well, in the billions is Josh Kushner's new fundraising for Thrive Holdings. They're in talks to raise 2 plus billion dollars. Is this the Thrive Capital offshoot?
Speaker 1:Tyler's happy about it.
Speaker 2:They're saying he's one of the greatest capital raising athletes
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Of all time.
Speaker 1:Bringing AI to industries like accounting and IT.
Speaker 2:I wanna pull up this video from Northwestern University. Researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain.
Speaker 1:Is it is it a scary robot or is it like a nice friendly robot?
Speaker 2:You're not gonna like this robot.
Speaker 1:I'm hoping for oh, that is terrifying looking. What
Speaker 2:happened here? Sound.
Speaker 1:You gotta go back to the beginning. This thing is so wild. Oh, well.
Speaker 2:I can't
Speaker 1:hear What a crazy Oh, they're hitting with a stick. Oh, no. You can't be doing that. Which is why It can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain. Let's play let's play some of this video.
Speaker 1:Let's play more. Because it's only fifty six seconds.
Speaker 2:Playing playing videos is It's kind a lost art form here on TBPN.
Speaker 1:Goes back and forth. But apparently, the leg breaks off and it keeps keeps crawling. It keeps it's the Terminator. Yeah. Not the one that you've seen.
Speaker 1:Let's see.
Speaker 2:It's crazy how terrible it looks. Yeah. It's sending very strong negative signals to my brain.
Speaker 1:Even just like painting it blue would probably be an upgrade.
Speaker 9:This means
Speaker 2:I think now
Speaker 5:I'm gonna get better this is better than when we saw the I think it was the unitary get down on all fours and crawl around.
Speaker 2:That was that was terrible.
Speaker 9:There's some
Speaker 2:very Yeah. But there's just something about those movements that tells my simple human mind to run.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It spikes your cortisol. No. No? No?
Speaker 2:No. Move
Speaker 1:themselves through the world. What else is your fear
Speaker 4:response?
Speaker 2:I would never let anything spike.
Speaker 1:Said you'd make it it it stimulates your your brain. The fear response Well,
Speaker 2:I've trained my cortisol response. Okay. I've trained my my mind to be able to
Speaker 1:Well, so has the Luxmaxing streamer, Clavicular, who has been arrested in Florida. He he was caught in a TMZ mugshot, so that's important news for those who have been following his story. The video is crazy, and we'll see. It's always weird with these stories from the the kick streamers. It like, whether it's all, you know, planted story, whether they, you know, got something to go viral and it's engineered or they did it, you know, by accident.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But I'm sure that there will be more reporting. I believe Taylor Lorenz is on the case. NVIDIA backed startup seeking to counter Chinese AI eyes a $25,000,000,000 valuation. This is from Reflection, Berber Jin writes in the in the Wall Street
Speaker 2:I wonder I am so curious what their traction money. Progress.
Speaker 1:He is a $25,000,000,000 company. He's running like a $4,000,000,000 a $4,000,000,000,000 company. Like, can he squeeze the pennies out of the couch cushion? I think he can.
Speaker 2:No. No. It's not that. I'm just wondering I'm just
Speaker 1:with NVIDIA to do open source.
Speaker 2:They're this is a tremendous valuation for a company that I don't believe has released a product yet. So whatever they're cooking must be pretty darn good.
Speaker 1:I'm rooting for American open source AI. Same. Play that eagle sound. I'm happy about it. Good luck to the folks over.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in NVIDIA. Ryan. Let's bring in Shield AI. Ryan, how are you doing?
Speaker 6:Doing well. How are you?
Speaker 1:We're great. It sounds like you're really, really great, though, because you have some big news for us. Tell us what happened.
Speaker 6:We do have some big news. We just closed our latest financing, raised $2,000,000,000 at a $12,700,000,000 night. Hit it again. Hit it again. Hit it again.
Speaker 2:There we go. Two heads, one for each billion. There. Wait.
Speaker 1:Did you upsize the round? Have on my sheet 1,500,000,000.0. It seems like the That is a preferred equity component. So guess, technically, you
Speaker 6:can call it 1,500,000,000.0. Okay. Cool. And then as part of the round, completed an acquisition. Really?
Speaker 6:You know, the a company called Echelon Technologies, the leader in physics based simulation Mhmm. For, you know, high end aviation training
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And something that's integral, I think, to the future of AI pilots and autonomy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I mean, with that acquisition, sort of reintroduced the shape of the company software, where are the integration points in the hardware, what do you build, what do you partner on, who are you selling to, is it all government, is there some commercial? I imagine the business has grown. What's the shape right now?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we sell to The United States and friends of The United States. Okay. It's all all government, almost entirely Mhmm. Military.
Speaker 6:If you're not familiar with the company, if your viewers aren't aren't familiar with the company, we have two the the company's focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligence systems. You had my brother on here very early when he started. He's a
Speaker 1:He's great.
Speaker 6:Navy seal. We started the company together. The mission is very near and dear to us. The way that we get after the mission is is twofold. Number one, building advanced aircraft.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And number two, building AI pilots or advanced autonomy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What were you doing while while he was
Speaker 1:In the Navy SEALs.
Speaker 2:Were you were you on the startup path always?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I was doing nerdy things, working at Qualcomm. I had started a company that did wireless charging. I sold that company to Qualcomm
Speaker 4:Cool.
Speaker 6:And then led the wireless charging efforts at Qualcomm. Then my brother, I was getting out of the SEAL teams and thinking what about what he wanted to do next. And long story short, he came into me and said, wanna bring the breast of what's the best of what's going on in the autonomous driving sector to the mission of protecting service members and civilians. His mission was clearing buildings of threats. It was a mission type that had killed more service members and civilians than any other mission type in the preceding twenty or so years.
Speaker 6:He felt like if we could take the best of AI and autonomy, bring it to the mission of protecting service members and civilians, it would be a really impactful thing for the world. Yeah. I thought it was an inspirational mission. I did think it was a stupid business. But my brother's a persistent person, and he he showed me the line, and I'm glad that he did.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take me through the state of autonomy in the flying vehicles that the military operates because there's so many different vehicles from helicopters to fighter jets to cargo planes. Then if I'm correct, the different branches have different versions of the same air airframe sometimes. And so are you selling one piece of software to multiple branches of the military? Are there differences between what you're selling?
Speaker 1:Are you focused on a particular area within the different airframes that are in service right now? Like where's
Speaker 6:the Good biggest question. So the state of the autonomy, I'll say like two components. Number one, from the market side, I think that everybody has reached a point where it's undeniable to the customer base that autonomy is one of the most important things in the future of security and stability. That wasn't the case ten years ago, but I'd say kind of at this point everybody's fully bought in on the need for the capability. With communications and GPS degraded, you need systems that are going to be able to see, think, and act at the edge even if they can't reach back and communicate effectively Yeah.
Speaker 6:With with the pilot on the ground. The state of the technology is is moving incredibly fast. You can build very advanced capabilities. We see, I would say very advanced autonomy deployed on the battlefield. Certainly we have very advanced autonomy.
Speaker 6:What we haven't yet seen is very large scale deployment of autonomous systems. And the focus of Shield AI when it comes to the software side is fast forwarding the proliferation of advanced autonomous systems within The United States and friends of The United States to protect service members and civilians at scale. The hard thing about AI and autonomy when it comes to aviation and frankly any weapon system is sitting at the intersection of enabling very high performance, achieving very high levels of assurance, and supporting very fast development cycles. Traditionally in this business, it's been pick maybe one or if you're lucky, of those three things. You achieve high performance, but it took you a really long time.
Speaker 6:Or it might not be something that you can certify as airworthy or certify it in a weapon system because, you know, there's just too many things that could go wrong. Or you get a very high level of assurance, but it's just really stupid autonomy and it took you a long time to build. Yeah. And so everything that Shield AI has focused on building is basically the industrialization of autonomy to fast forward the proliferation of autonomy by creating basically, you know, pipelines that enable developers and countries and companies to deliver high performance, high assurance, autonomy at the speed of relevance.
Speaker 1:I have a I have a few sort of random scattershot questions to help me understand the state of autonomy in military equipment. Do tanks have lane keep assist? Does cruise control exist on a on a, you know, c one thirty? Like, are are there are are are is is America taking a walk, crawl, run system or are we going to jump straight into, like, AI dogfighting? Because that feels like the Mount Everest of the autonomy challenge versus Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like you're tired and your tank is rolling down the the the highway and you don't wanna bump into the person in front of you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, one of the amazing things about the US military and militaries in general is the the spectrum of capability that's in the inventory. There are literally planes that are 80 years old and still fly. Yeah. And then you have stuff that's that's fresh off the line.
Speaker 6:So you have the full spectrum of stuff that has the equivalent of lane keep assist Mhmm. To the stuff that is fully manual.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:A lot of the focus is on bringing advanced autonomy to the newest systems because that's sort of the easiest to cut in.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 6:And with the amount of technological change and the huge step up in volumes of systems being deployed Mhmm. In places around the world. There's just like ample opportunity to cut that software in as new things are coming off the line. We are starting to see some interest in sort of backwards application of advanced autonomy to legacy systems because certainly things are around for a long time And the more advanced autonomy you can apply kind of throughout your force structure, the more advantage you're going to have. And so certainly we see developments in that area as well.
Speaker 6:Talk
Speaker 1:to me about how your progress tracks with the AI progress in the big labs that we see news from every day. Like the models of the big labs, the LLM companies are getting bigger. They're GPU constrained. They're data constrained. Is that are the advances in the more like consumer focused, coding focused AI labs, is that transferring and accelerating your progress either because you're reading research papers like Google put out one about optimizing KV caches and I could imagine that applies to some The transformer paper might apply to your business.
Speaker 1:Or at least are you getting benefits from like, yeah, like we're able to use coding models to advance what the software that we're writing at Shield AI?
Speaker 6:The benefits are across the full stack. Okay. From development to deployed edge systems. The thing that we do is focus on enabling the intersection of high performance and high assurance at So the same you know it's like these models that are used throughout the consumer space and the amount of progress, see very high levels of performance, you see very fast iteration speed, and then you have things like hallucinations that can be counterproductive. Which is okay if you're writing an essay and make some stuff up.
Speaker 6:But if you're trying to disambiguate between blue force and red force and you're going to make you know, consequential decisions Yeah. Those things are are tougher to deal with.
Speaker 4:Or if
Speaker 6:it's gonna result in your airplane flying into the dirt, tougher to deal with. And so we absolutely use those things and we bring it together with frameworks that impose very high levels of assurance
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:On the decision making of the algorithms.
Speaker 2:What how are how are the various like Shahed systems? Are they are are they primarily what what do we know about them? Are they primarily remote piloted? Are they using are is there any element that's actually autonomous or are they just kind of picking a spot on the map Yeah. And sending it off and kind of just saying like, hopefully we hit our target, at least we'll create some chaos.
Speaker 2:Like, what Yeah.
Speaker 6:Good good good question. So typically, are GPS guided munitions. So they they pick a spot on the map and they send it. And then it's got you know, they they can have some terminal guidance that helps it, you know, like hit something of of value. Terminal
Speaker 2:what is terminal terminal Sorry.
Speaker 6:Terminal guidance is just to make sure that, you know, a weapon is tracking toward something of interest and and so someone And so
Speaker 2:if if one of those goes into us into an area where there's gamming or denial Is it just gonna, like, still do its best to hit the original target? Like, how what do we
Speaker 6:It it depends on how sophisticated it is. I would say that, like, Shahed's by and large and and and our GPS guided munitions. But some munitions will have cameras that like so it doesn't fly into blank pavement. It might be able to see like a truck or something else that would look like a valid military target. They just make small course corrections that enables like a a weapon to hit that instead of an empty parking lot would be the type of corrections that can be made during terminal guidance, as opposed to, like, the the long transit, portion of the mission.
Speaker 6:But, you know, those types of systems and the same so the same challenge exists in The United States when if you're if you're just picking targets off of maps without, like, good intelligence and good updates and the ability to provide, course corrections based on, you know, what you you're you're seeing on the edge, you can end up, you know, wasting a lot of munitions with little effect.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What's been your reaction to the news out of Barksdale, Louisiana? I've seen a bunch of reporting this week around, some unknown drones flying around the airbase. I don't know how much you can share there, but, like, this seems like something where an opportunity to assess some enemy's capability, but it feels like there's drones are like, the thing I've been processing is, like, it's it seems like, you know, historically, you built like an exquisite system like an f 35 and you have a pilot in it, you can't exactly go and test it in in an environment in an enemy environment very easily because you'll, you know, risk starting a conflict or losing the the plane, all these different things. Whereas with inexpensive drones, like, why why would an adversary not just send them out around the world to start testing their capabilities in, a live setting because worst case scenario, you lose the asset.
Speaker 2:But, you you know, it's it's not super consequential when you look at these overall budgets. So
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, good good good question. One, I'm I'm actually not tracking the latest news in in Louisiana. I'll go look it right after the fact, but I can tell you counter UAS is a major problem for governments globally. These things can be hard to deal with and if you engage them kinetically, the question of collateral damage becomes one that is an important consideration.
Speaker 6:The small drones that can harass military bases, yes, are like, you know, other countries can do the same with their largest pieces of hardware. And that's why you see the Chinese like running major military exercises around Taiwan. You know, they could stick to quadcopters, but they choose to use the full spectrum of their capabilities to intimidate and shape the environment. But you did call out something that I think is also very important, which it can be hard to fly your capabilities around and understand their true potential. When you think about some of the security challenges in The Pacific, the distances are so vast.
Speaker 6:And then if you look at the range space in America, it's relatively confined. And so how do you rehearse and think through some of the problem sets when your range space is way smaller than the theater? And that's where capabilities like Echelon, the simulation environment come into play. That's
Speaker 2:your new acquisition?
Speaker 6:That's the new acquisition. And so there's a there's a program called the Joint Simulation Environment that started to get after the problem of we can't rehearse the way that we used to because the domains are so large. Once people had this realization, they're like, great, well, maybe we'll try a simulation. And what they found in simulation is that there was stove piping across vendors. Every vendors had their own simulation.
Speaker 6:Every vehicle platform had its own simulator. And then if you were in space or on the sea or in the air, you had a different simulator. And then by the way, across countries, you had different simulation systems. And so Echelon became the leader in the joint simulation environment, which is one of the reasons we're so excited about it because it is the only multinational, multi domain, multi vendor, and there's one more multi in there, in the world. And it creates this unbelievable foundation to enable not just what it does today, which is training and rehearsal against like high end threats and complex scenarios, but it creates the opportunity to introduce, well, do autonomous systems do in that same sort of environment?
Speaker 6:So the things like collaborative combat aircraft or advanced weapons, those things get pulled into the environment. And now you can see, well, this is how humans and AI are able to work together in these scenarios to inform the designs of those things. And if you continue to play that forward and you see you know, it's belief that in every vertical, whether it's A and D, medicine, like pick pick your thing, vertical leaders will show up when they figure out how to close the feedback loops between, you know, the data aggregation and generation through training, through deployment, and close that loop in their domain. And one of things we're very excited to do with Echelon and Shield AI together, we're the leader in in AI pilots. You might have seen the United States Air Force announcement that Shield is one of the two companies selected to build AI pilots with the collaborative combat aircraft.
Speaker 6:And so we have some great work on that front. And now by taking the simulation leader across services and domains, we can start substantially scaling that simulation environment, augmenting all of the real world data and start closing that loop to build extremely high performance AI pilots that we're able to test against the authoritative threat models with the authoritative blue force models and also train US and allied forces to fight effectively with those AI pilots as part of their formation. So we're very excited about it in the short term and on a decadal basis.
Speaker 1:Decadal basis. I like that term. Yeah. Decade thinking in decades literally. I've never heard
Speaker 2:that before. What what is the actual interface what are the like the interface of Echelon Yeah. Look like? Is it is this like am I thinking like flight simulator type of thing or is it more, you know, you're just kind of running a simulation and seeing seeing
Speaker 6:Yeah. So so so you can think of it a very simple view would be like a flight simulator. Mhmm. But, you know, with a proper as you've seen, like, a flight simulation dome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Very very realistic physics, very realistic sensor models to include radar, night vision, EOIR, or regular light cameras, appropriate physics, appropriate red forces with, like, not just, like video game style, but these are the actual capabilities across like the electromagnetic and visible spectrum that really enables very advanced training and understanding of performance.
Speaker 2:Yep. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congrats on the progress and have a great rest of your
Speaker 2:I'm really glad you guys are building this company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This feels extremely Yeah.
Speaker 6:I appreciate it. Thank you. Love the Gong, by the way. Thanks to the the two Gong strikes.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:Of
Speaker 1:It's massive progress. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on, Ryan.
Speaker 1:We're we're we're glad and and thankful for everything that you're doing with the with the rest of the team. So thank
Speaker 2:you. Alright.
Speaker 1:Day. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context in beta starting today. Go check it out.
Speaker 2:Bill Ackman is saying he's likely down 20% year to date now. He was, I believe, took a big position in Meta not too long ago.
Speaker 1:He had some Or takes. I don't know. It might might pencil out. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think it's it's still I'm still like
Speaker 1:people are.
Speaker 2:It'd be silly to be bearish on Meta over the long run, but certainly
Speaker 1:Capital bloke gave some more context on what's happening in the market. He said the market is just a guy staring at two screens. One has Truth Social. The other is Anthropics blog. In front of him are five buttons that say software, semis, European defense, energy, and gold.
Speaker 1:Trump or Anthropic post and he hits a button to make those stocks move 5% up or 5% down. It is it does feel like that's the nature of the market these days. Signal had a funny screenshot here. Someone built a or assumingly vibe coded an app that turns any TV into a retro flip flap split flap display. These are very cool.
Speaker 1:You've seen these. They flip around. You see them in old airport terminals for when the flights are leaving. Wayne chimes in and says, I'm very likely gonna build this with Claude Co. This afternoon and post a link to a free download to this thread because this is absolutely ridiculous to to to suggest that someone should pay a $199 for something that probably took about eighteen minutes to make.
Speaker 1:And Yash, the creator says, I will look for your post. And exactly one minute later, open source my tool to render your efforts a total waste. Try me. And so there's a little bit of a of a standoff in the vibe coding world. I thought that was very very funny.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else you wanna
Speaker 2:Lastly, some text from q one of last year. Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon. Looks like Doge is making progress. I've got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.
Speaker 2:Elon reacted heart.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And he says, are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others? Zach says, wanna discuss live?
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:And Matthew Zeitlin, former guest says, you can tell who is used to antitrust investigations.
Speaker 1:Well, stay safe out there. If you're planning on bidding for some IP and you're two of them, you're chatting with the richest man in the world, yeah. Maybe stick to a phone call. Who knows? Well, good luck out there
Speaker 2:and It will be an interesting weekend Yeah. Of news. The markets are now closed which means
Speaker 1:We can go to where do we go on the weekends? To the beach.
Speaker 2:Well, was gonna say it means that you wanna be refreshing Truth Social. Yes. You wanna stay up to date.
Speaker 1:And it's it's red. We closed way down. The S and P closed down 1.67.
Speaker 2:Good opportunity to touch grass. Yes. But next Monday, we've got Take Him, Logan Bartlett. We got Cody Ko joining. We got going Cody Ko going back to back with Brett Adcock.
Speaker 1:Let's go. The You wanted
Speaker 2:Never before on a podcast Never before on a have we had Cody Ko and Brett Adcock back to
Speaker 1:I'm very excited. I've been a huge fan of Cody Ko for a long time. I watched a ton of his YouTube videos.
Speaker 2:Yep. It
Speaker 1:will be very fun. Anyways Leave us five hope you have. Podcast, Spotify, sign up for newsletter, tbpn.com. We will see see Monday. Monday.
Speaker 4:Flashback. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Flashback.