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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.
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Speaker 1:is Thursday, 06/11/2026. We're live from the TBPN, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me also tell you about ram.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Gotta adjust my microphone over here. Well, Bezos is getting very serious about the AI game. $12,000,000,000 raised for Prometheus. It's just been six months since he emerged from stealth with 6,200,000,000 in funding. The industrial AI startup, as they're calling it, raised another 12,000,000,000 in series b.
Speaker 1:It's just a thousand times bigger than a normal series a and a series b. You used to go from 6,000,000 series a, 12,000,000 series b. Now it's, 6,000,000,000 series a, 6 12,000,000,000 series b. Serious dollars, but AI is expensive. The valuation, $41,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Back in November, there was very little disclosed about Prometheus. We wrote about it a little. There was some some speculation on the time 41? 41,000,000,000. Bigger than what's a $40,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 3:And this is a business that is buying existing companies?
Speaker 1:What? That's the thing. Don't really
Speaker 3:don't know.
Speaker 1:Really know. But it's a lot of money. Could be buying companies and trying to transform them are around 30 b to 40
Speaker 3:Well, being able to raise that much capital to buy businesses with that little dilution is a pretty remarkable feat Yeah. That pretty much only Jeff Bezos Yeah. Could pull off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So The Wall Street Journal has some more details. And mostly, it just gives you takes you a little bit more inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and where he's thinking like, how he's thinking about the shape of the AI impact. The headline is very clear. Bezos bats down AI job loss fears while launching new venture.
Speaker 1:New startup Prometheus seeks to build an artificial general engineer. A G E is the new buzzword. You thought we were at we thought we were running out of them. We got AI. A g I a s I r e s I a I f d e.
Speaker 1:Personal super intelligence, meta super intelligence, TBD, continual learning.
Speaker 3:Standard intelligence. Yep. Your regular intelligence.
Speaker 1:Standard. Ineffable intelligence.
Speaker 3:The irregular intelligence. The irregular super intelligence company.
Speaker 1:Of the dog patch.
Speaker 2:The dog patch.
Speaker 1:Something like that. But artificial general engineer is the new phrase, the new term, and he wants it to be able to design and manufacture complex physical products. So Jeff Bezos expects artificial intelligence to create a labor shortage in the economy. Interesting. There's some correlation between like liquid net worth and and and your and your projection.
Speaker 1:And your optimism. Right? Yeah. So he expects a labor shortage rejecting fears that fast evolving technology will put humans out of work as he launches a new venture aimed at making engineers more productive. The billionaire founder of Amazon dot com, and don't forget Blue Origin, is co leading a new AI business called Prometheus which plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products such as a jet engine.
Speaker 1:And we just saw some cool demos. I saw people vibe coding Boeing seven forty seven. Obviously, it's just the outside. It's modeling it. It can pull different reference points from CAD files on the Internet.
Speaker 1:But lots of cool demos, many powered by Fable five. I've seen some GPT five stuff as well where people try and go and see the classic like pelican on a bicycle in SVG. Well, you can see how you can draw a line from pelican on a bicycle in SVG to functional jet engine in CAD that then we can actually go manufacture with step by step instructions for each part. Not that far away certainly on the trend path and that's what he's investing against. He said in an interview that the company's goal is to quote, empower engineers and make innovation easier and faster so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles.
Speaker 1:That'd be good. It takes forever to build a jet engine. It takes forever to build a plane. We've talked to multiple founders that have been trying to build new plane designs for decades and haven't really been able to scale them up, although they've made incredible gains and traction and demos. Actually getting new planes on the runway safely approved has been far too long.
Speaker 1:If AI speeds it up by 10%, that's like years. It's crazy. The Amazon and Blue Origin cofounder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. You got Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase cofounder Brian Armstrong, Robinhood cofounder Vlad Tenev, also Brian Chesky over at Airbnb. These folks are all building new companies around the AI boom among others.
Speaker 1:Prometheus, which said it is valued at about $41,000,000,000, has raised 12,000,000,000 from investors including Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Went straight to the big banks. Yep. Like, the invest VCs are just like, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. I mean, there's another world six on 40,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is just like your IPO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Right? Yeah. That is IPO numbers.
Speaker 1:That's yeah. That's a crazy amount of money. Yeah. You gotta go to the banks for this. They've hired a 150 people across San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Despite Silicon Valley's enthusiasm enthusiasm for AI's promise, the broader population has become very wary fearing widespread job losses. Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is the opposite of reality, Bezos said. And we've been seeing this in the jobs numbers like the job the economy is running hot, inflation is high, but also unemployment is very low, lower than expected. We're adding a lot of jobs.
Speaker 1:AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity, he said. That's a very white pilling statement. We'll see how it plays out. Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities. And you certainly saw that with Amazon.
Speaker 1:The number of store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon in and around ecosystem, not just in the warehouse, but in the broader Amazon ecosystem, probably increase. And we certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in The United States. Like the labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999. We've added jobs all over the place as people have shifted around. There there's gonna be two there are going to there's going to be two earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's gonna be so much productivity, he said.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting take. He's saying that there's gonna be so much more productivity that some some people will choose not to work. And of course, that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs. So you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs is declining, but the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single earner households, one person working, making more than enough money to support the whole family. Sort of an older school mindset, hearkens back to the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid twentieth century, but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's notable. NEAT levels have been rising since 2021.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. That's not employed in education or Not in employment.
Speaker 3:So that trend started well before Mhmm. The current AI paradigm. Yeah. But wouldn't be surprised if it continues, hopefully, for the reasons that Bezos
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is talking about. I think there's gonna be a lot of focus on his summer plans, John. Yeah. Think there's gonna be more scrutiny than ever. You know, this is a guy that can hardly jet around the Mediterranean Mhmm.
Speaker 3:On a big boat without being photographed every single day. That's true. And this was prior to these back to back, you know, multi billion dollar rounds.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so going into the summer, I think people are gonna be paying extra attention. Right? Is he doing back to back days at the beach club or is he keeping it to a four hour window on Saturday? Lock him back in by Saturday night, getting a good night's sleep
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 3:Spending his Sunday, you know, preparing for the for the coming week. Right?
Speaker 1:He does have a co CEO. Maybe they've split it up. Most people would think co CEO is like they're both involved in every decision. Maybe it's more of like a he takes the winter and fall quarters and the other co CEO takes the summer and spring. Like, you divide it up that way, no one's ever tried that with a co CEO.
Speaker 1:Just like you run the company for six months, then I run the company for six months. And you're completely off on vacation, maybe?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. The alternative is, you know, Bezos would say like Friday
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:From 7PM Mhmm. Until 2AM on Saturday. I'm not gonna be super Yeah. Available, super online. And then also from 2AM till till around 11AM, I I'll be fully fully offline.
Speaker 3:Okay. Then there's about a one hour window on Saturday where you can take like a lunch break Sure. Whatever you Sure. Have to do. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But then from 1PM Yeah. Until 2AM Yeah. Sunday, I'm gonna be offline again. But back, you know
Speaker 1:Maybe if you're co CEOs, you should just do I I'm CEO of TBPN on the odd hours and you're on the even hours. Yeah. And so if there's a big
Speaker 3:to non productivity?
Speaker 1:Interlace them. Interlace them. Yeah. So, oh, it's 3AM? Call Jordy.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's 4AM? Call John. Co CEO is working out. Bezos is the co CEO of the new company along with Vic Bajaj who a a better a Google veteran and former healthcare founder and investor. They started Prometheus in late twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1:So people have sort of pegged this as like a Overnight success. Late It's oh, it's 2026 and they're jumping in. They've been working on this for two full years and obviously Jeff Bezos has an incredible amount of, AI and robotics experience both in the recommender systems in Amazon and Kiva robotics, which is probably like the you could make the argument that it's like the Instagram of the robotics boom. It's like one of the most successful successful acquisitions. We're talking to the founder of a robotics company at 11:45 today.
Speaker 1:So his co CEO is an adjunct professor at Stanford School of Medicine who previously co founded Google's life sciences division. No big deal. That's a huge accomplishment. And the company's goal is to build AI systems that can assist throughout the entire engineering process. That ranges from designing products and predicting their performance to manufacturing them.
Speaker 1:We're trying to approach that problem end to end. They also held talks. This was the big one. We they held talks to raise a $100,000,000,000 fund, which is a lot of money. We will talk about SpaceX in a bit, but SpaceX is looking for 70,000,000,000 and it's a huge business with so much attention.
Speaker 1:This is an entirely new thing and they wanna put a 100,000,000,000 to work. But, of course, Bezos has plenty of money and to backstop it, anchor it, do whatever he needs and he has massive connections. So the Wall Street Journal reported this and they said the goal was with that fund to acquire manufacturing businesses and deploy AI across their operations. Remember we did that whole list of what could they actually buy for a $100,000,000,000? What would be a good buy?
Speaker 1:And there were some very interesting like, you could buy a Goodyear, for example, and work on tire manufacturing. And I think I was wrong in all my predictions, but it was an interesting exercise to to just take a little tour of the American manufacturer.
Speaker 3:But my my read on it is some combination of like a foundation model that allows you to generate full product full full products like product specs, designs, etcetera to high fidelity. Yeah. And then something like a send cut, send style infrastructure where you can just make that product on the fly Yeah. And get it delivered. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that is the moment we're in right now where on your computer you can make at least an image of anything you want in the entire world. But then, there hasn't been that much of a speed up on the other side. Right? And so closing the loop there is gonna be very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Wow. This company, Prometheus, is bigger than AIG, the insurance company. Bigger than Chipotle, bigger than CBRE, the real estate
Speaker 3:companies marketcap.com, John?
Speaker 1:Not. I'm on Chesterfield. Bigger than Baidu? Wow. That is that is crazy.
Speaker 5:John, do you think that they're gonna be punished for their hubris and chained for
Speaker 6:eternity with with
Speaker 1:the The nominal determinism of Prometheus is sort of crazy. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. But And then for eternity, eagle comes, eats his liver every day.
Speaker 1:Isn't Prometheus like the third time an AI company has done this? Because there was the Prometheus data center at Meta and then
Speaker 3:There was a company called Icarus too.
Speaker 1:Icarus? Yeah. I got in trouble for that one because I was talking to a New Yorker reporter about that and and sort of overstepped a little bit because I was like, they have a great team. I'm rooting for them. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:But not Cool.
Speaker 5:So so I think we need another company named Hercules. Right? Could because Hercules saves Prometheus. Oh. He frees him from the chains.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:But then
Speaker 1:Hercules Is a company called Hercules? That's a good company name. I like that one.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's for But
Speaker 1:yeah. So if raised, it would be the the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins. We've seen a couple of these funds, roll out, the AI roll ups, AI modernization, private equity firms. Obviously, private equity firms themselves are doing this. But no one's come in with a $100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:You're in a completely different tier from all the other companies that are doing this. We've had many of them on the show. AI's advances have paved the way for quote a multitude of golden ages, not just one, happening simultaneously, Bezos said. He said, this is the best time to start a company. Love the
Speaker 3:optimism. Crazy. You can buy strategy, micro strategy
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And Prometheus are roughly the same, evaluate the same, as well as Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Strategies in a in sort of a rough spot. Right? Isn't Bitcoin down?
Speaker 3:No. It's a good it's mean, it's an
Speaker 1:interesting it's
Speaker 3:an interesting bet. Right? What do you wanna what do you wanna buy? What do you wanna own at at 41,000,000,000? Yeah.
Speaker 3:MicroStrategy is at 42, technically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You buy Reddit, that's 33,000,000,000. Anyway, the next story we gotta talk about is gamers are rising up. Gamers are rising up. You heard that the government was trying to put gyms in airports.
Speaker 1:Well, the gamers had something to say. They're pushing back. Airport lounges are catering to gamers. The airport lounges where video games are more important than drinks. Travelers can kill time, play everything from Mario Kart to Minecraft before their flight.
Speaker 1:We gotta do this. Get a little rust going next time we're flying. Let's do it. The first thing David Levy Yang noticed
Speaker 3:Before we dive into this, has TSA gotten like better, more consistent?
Speaker 1:I have a hot take on this. I think TSA might be gutted. I think they're pretty dialed. Think it's good.
Speaker 3:Out of the last maybe 30 Yeah. Flights.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really stupid.
Speaker 3:I have not waited more than thirty minutes
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In a security line. Yeah. And And that makes like commercial is obviously still
Speaker 1:Torture. Torture. It's sort of a But amnesia punishment.
Speaker 3:Humiliation ritual. But that being said, being able to plan on a thirty minute security line Yes. Makes commercial travel pretty Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pretty mean, it was the butt of every comedian's joke because it's so universal. Everyone's been through TSA. It's very slow. Take your shoes off. There's a million little places for comedy gold that's highly take your shoes off.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You don't have to even take your laptop out.
Speaker 1:No. It's it's getting back. And there's like I mean, I guess it's getting more surveillance y because they take a photo of you like 17 times on the way through.
Speaker 5:You can refuse that though.
Speaker 1:You can? Yeah. You can just say no?
Speaker 5:Nick Nick does that. You can just say no.
Speaker 1:But then don't Yeah.
Speaker 3:Can just say no. They don't They used to about I would I I will say about two years ago, they would tell you more frequently like it's optional. Yeah. It's optional.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Now, they're just like photo now.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And you can read the text and
Speaker 1:it says like you opt out. Okay. Can you opt out of the whole thing? Is it all just like a high agency test? You can just be like, actually, I just wanna go around.
Speaker 1:I don't even wanna go through the metal detector. And they're like, yeah, right this way, sir. No one's ever thought to break out of the matrix, but you reached the final level. You reached base reality. Good job.
Speaker 1:Continue.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But but truly being able to plan on, it's gonna take me like thirty minutes to get through. No. You can like comfortably show up forty five minutes before It's very efficient. Flight.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Reliable. Make it every time.
Speaker 1:Every time. Every time. Which means
Speaker 3:that you're pushing it even more to the Oh, yeah. Oftentimes, I will be getting through security
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And John will text text and be like, just got my car. I'll be there. I'll be parking in forty five minutes. And I'm like, I thought I was cutting it a little bit close. But Mandate of Heaven, you always make you always
Speaker 1:make it. I always make it. And if you're not missing flights at least like 10% of the time, you're actually setting your you're not you're not cutting it close enough. No. But you have to be taking some level of risk or else you're just wasting time.
Speaker 3:No. Yes. No. Because often oftentimes
Speaker 1:I think you went to an investor and you were like, your goal is to never invest in a company that goes down. Oh, you're a VC. But you're but you're but if you get a single zero in your portfolio, you can never invest ever again. Would you do that? No way.
Speaker 1:No way. No way.
Speaker 3:I'm not I'm not engaging.
Speaker 1:No way. So you're you're gonna have some zeros in your portfolio. You're gonna miss some flights. But on average, your Yeah. DPI is gonna be quite good, which is?
Speaker 6:No. But
Speaker 3:Comparing something comparing that.
Speaker 1:This is where the argument goes. I can just have as much fun as the at the airport. So I don't mind showing up five hours early.
Speaker 5:No. No. But okay. If you miss your flight and then
Speaker 1:The game.
Speaker 5:The next flight is like three hours
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Then like
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:It doesn't it doesn't math out because like if you just get to your flight ten minutes or like a little bit earlier Yeah. Then it'll like match. Like think it makes sense.
Speaker 1:So so basically like like let's say I fly once a week and I save an hour with my strategy. That's fifty hours a year and I only miss You're not one saving an hour. I save I save three hours.
Speaker 3:And you're not you're not like saving the time.
Speaker 1:I am.
Speaker 3:I am. Were probably at at your just like having another coffee at the hotel and or like doing something, having a conversation that you could just have.
Speaker 1:No. I was literally And now before I go to the airport, I am literally locked in at the clock factory. Okay? I'm locked in at the clock factory. I'm being the most productive I've ever been
Speaker 3:and Making clocks.
Speaker 1:I'm making clocks clock by clock. And and you think that that time's useless.
Speaker 5:Okay. Now, you can be gaming at the airport.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You should be getting there or wait your I should get there. Should get if I want a Prestige on COD, I should get there maybe like 70 John, two hours
Speaker 3:you're just like, yeah, I gotta get up at 2AM this morning. Like, I got like a I got a super early flight. They're like, oh, what time is your flight?
Speaker 1:11AM.
Speaker 3:11AM. Like yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, is this a coincidence? GTA six dropped and you're going to the airport ten hours early? Well, now you can because airport lounges are starting to cater to gamers. Gamers are the most important constituency. We're going have a gamer president one day.
Speaker 1:So, the first thing that David Lee and Cassie Yang noticed when they popped into the new lounge in Terminal 1 in Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport on Friday. Wasn't a robot bartender, which they have apparently. I believe Ben will be traveling through Minneapolis St. Paul.
Speaker 1:We should give him a little gaming challenge, see if he can see if he can get to prestige on cod before he hits his flight. It was something only parents in this digital device era could appreciate, unfettered access to their phones. Their kids, eight and 12, were busy playing Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot at the lounges video game stations to commandeer their phones for some preflight screen time. The Portal Lounge is by design not your grandfather's airport lounge. Yes, there is a small buffet and bartenders, robot and reel, that pour that lounge libation staple an old fashioned.
Speaker 1:But the focus is on entertainment, their gaming. Its latest concept from a husband and wife team on a mission to amp up airport downtime, Emma and Jordan Walbridge with backgrounds in hotels and medical sales respectively, opened their first airport video game lounge at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2038 called Gameway. There are now 11 of them at airports across the country and two more due to open this year. Portal in Minneapolis is the latest iteration of concept with a few more bells and whistles. They zeroed in on video games after regularly visiting lounges on business trips and finding them two stayed.
Speaker 1:I always felt like I was in a library, Emma says, with some guests slushing others and throwing shushing others and
Speaker 7:throwing I'm glad
Speaker 3:this picture makes me feel like I'm a television screen.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? Oh, because they're looking at you like you're
Speaker 3:With the control.
Speaker 1:You're the game. Yeah. Interesting. She's played Mario Kart for years. Jordan has played Halo, which is getting a refresh soon with Campaign Evolve.
Speaker 3:I think this I think this is gonna be more successful than like the whole airport gyms movement.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 3:Like the the every once in a while, somebody will post online, why don't airports have gyms?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And there's been a few moments where it would've been nice to have a gym. Mhmm. But imagine a world where, you know, even just 5% of your flight
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Had just gotten off of an hour on the treadmill. Yeah. And was getting on the Pretty sweaty. Pretty brutal.
Speaker 1:Pretty heavy
Speaker 8:Pretty brutal.
Speaker 1:Some heavy breathing going on. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Golf simulators in airports. That could be done that before.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You've actually done that. You've actually Yeah. Simulated golf. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Racer Martin. What a crazy name for a 19 year old chef from Arizona. R a y c e r. That's a cool name. Racer.
Speaker 1:He plays Apex Legends at the Gameway Lounge at Chicago's Midway Airport. I plunked down at the gaming station and embarrassed myself playing Mario Kart over a lunch of Diet Coke and Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream Chips. The patient Gameway manager who used to work at GameStop assured me that he that it just takes practice and encouraged me to play at home. Another employee did her best to introduce me to Minecraft even though I gave up after five minutes. This Wall Street Journal reporter is clearly learning the ropes of these games.
Speaker 1:Video gaming is the main attraction at the much bigger Portal Lounge in Minneapolis which opened over Memorial Day weekend in the D Concourse, but it's just one attraction. The food is more lounge like with build your own bowls, slot bowls, buffalo cauliflower salad fix, and a cup of dessert. Adding to the futuristic feel, a robot bartender takes the center stage pouring drinks. It's from the same company as the makers of the Bionic Bar on some Royal Caribbean ships at almost 4,000 square feet. Portal isn't on par with, say, an American Express Centurion lounge.
Speaker 1:It's more like one of those smaller escape lounges. RC Cola is on tap. There's music outlets galore and plenty of seating, but no dedicated bathroom. The gaming lounge is in the back and bright game way. Anyway, you can go check it out.
Speaker 1:Seems
Speaker 3:If we let John keep going here, he would just talk about airport gaming
Speaker 1:No. No. I would talk about Railway because Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers and databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of
Speaker 3:I would like a Railway in every airport.
Speaker 1:You you joke, but a vibe coding lounge is coming. Like, these gaming PCs, they can do local inference. You can fire up your agents. You can be you can be doing all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 3:I like it.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised yeah. I wonder what the cyber security stack is like there. It's gotta be sort of tricky to have someone, you know, give them free access to a pair Yeah. Powerful PC. They're gonna install weird Unfortunately,
Speaker 3:the lovable airport lounge is coming. Mhmm. It's like have five minutes, build that.
Speaker 1:Go to website.
Speaker 3:Build the next hit app.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Well, I think the next hit app might be Halo campaign evolved. Let's watch this video from Blue Thunder. What do think?
Speaker 1:Are you Halo guy? Do you ever play Halo?
Speaker 3:Not really. Never I
Speaker 1:haven't played Halo.
Speaker 3:Never captured my heart.
Speaker 1:But I never got into the whole multiplayer scenario. But it does look good. Doesn't it look like fully refreshed? Looks very modern triple a. Blue Thunder says this is Yeah.
Speaker 3:What if they made a
Speaker 1:not the best low FPS games he's
Speaker 3:ever What if they made an airport sized lounge? Mhmm. Sort of like a facility just for one v one ing on Rust.
Speaker 1:That'd be great.
Speaker 3:You could eventually get, you know, a 100,000 people
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 3:All in the same place, LAN party, matched up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:This could have been this could have been like a one shot output of an LLM. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:When I saw this, I wasn't sure if it was AI video or vibe coded version of Halo. Did you see that thing where someone was trying to build GTA six, like, code GTA six? You saw this? It's such a funny demo. I mean, you don't wanna hate on it because, like, it is like, the tools are very powerful and and you do imagine that over time, you'll be able to.
Speaker 1:But the first effort video was very funny because
Speaker 3:We got an X Halo three pro in the chat. Alex, he says, will be a conservative pickup of nostalgic non p v p gamers. Don't expect it to do
Speaker 1:numbers. Interesting. X Halo three Pro. What was that like? Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Day one of building GTA six still feels fake. That time, typing that out loud. Upgraded to Cloud Pro Max 20 x just for this. Spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo sandbox.
Speaker 1:It's up and running. I mean, this is actually where you'd start. Like, it's not that unreasonable, but it just, like it's funny because it doesn't look anything like any GTA game. Wait. What?
Speaker 1:You haven't seen this? You haven't seen this? So Matt Schumer, former guest of the show and creator of the viral essay, something big is coming, where he predicted something big is happening, where he predicted that AI would cause 10% unemployment by April and compare it likened it to COVID.
Speaker 3:Wait. That was his
Speaker 1:Yeah. He said that it was gonna be like a COVID like takeoff in the economy. He he didn't map the the economic numbers directly, but we did. We were like, okay, like what what was COVID actually like in 2020? And we went from February, which is when he wrote his essay, February 2026 saying AI is real.
Speaker 1:It's gonna change things. It's big, which a lot of people have been saying for a long time. And I was like, I agree, but I don't think in April, May, like the NBA is gonna be shutting down because of AI. Or or I don't think that the, like, the unemployment rate is gonna spike to 10% overnight. Like, there might be little pockets of layoffs related to AI and there might be
Speaker 3:some If gyroscope. Anybody wanted to make AI less popular, shutting down the NBA finals because of how good the models have gotten. Tell everyone.
Speaker 1:All the n play a players like we gotta invest. We got We don't
Speaker 3:have invest. They gotta invest their time.
Speaker 1:Oh, they got a vibe coming.
Speaker 3:The tool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. They don't wanna get left behind. No. I don't think they'll be left behind.
Speaker 1:But Matt Schumer said, someone should set up a community funded Fable run with a prompt like slash loop until you've created a g t GTA six caliber open world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers. And he says happy to write the prompt if someone organizes this, which some people were making fun of. But it started. Ziwen is doing this. He's 25.
Speaker 1:He likes Claude and Codex, tech AI startup. I'm rooting for this. I think this is gonna be very educational for Ziwen. Although, yes, this video is very funny because it doesn't it doesn't look like GTA yet. But you know, if you can get to anything that's at all playable or interesting, even in a month, even in a year, take as long as you want if you can do it.
Speaker 1:If you can get you know, a million people to pay $10 for this and it only cost you 5,000,000 in inference and you did it as a solo dev, that's a $5,000,000 profit. Like that's a great outcome. Like I I love indie devs. I love the I love that world and I like that these tools are opening up more opportunity for people to go mess around and build cool things. It's gotta be really entertaining to just think about building like a vibe coded game.
Speaker 1:Some of the games look really good already. Of course, like even if Strauss
Speaker 3:is gonna be pretty worried
Speaker 1:No. Did you did you hear him talking the the Primesian had a good reaction video to David Senr talking to Strauss Zelnick and he's like, finally, like a normal AI CEO because he he basically says like, we have a mobile games have a mobile games division. We have we have we make billions of dollars from it. We make a lot of money from mobile games and And and there are there are direct clones of our games that launch every day. Like the software has been good enough that you can clone our games.
Speaker 1:They launch every day. The business is much more complicated than that. The IP matters. The distribution matters. The functionality of the game matters.
Speaker 1:There's so much more to it than just a carbon copy. So he says, yes, you could just go vibe code GTA six. People are still going to play our game because of all the other strengths of the take two business. And I agree. I thought it was a very good take.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Some big IPOs happening this week, next week.
Speaker 1:It is IPO season. But it's also trucking season. The four year U. S. Trucking slump is officially over, says The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:It's over at last. Truckers who held on through almost four years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate. It feels like a breath there for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air, said Webb Estes, president and chief operating officer of Estes Express Lines, a Richmond, Virginia based carrier with revenue of about $6,000,000,000. Freight rates are finally climbing. Good news for them.
Speaker 1:Trucking executives are calling it to an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers' memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period of low earnings coupled with Trump administration crackdowns and immigrant drivers pushed many carriers out of the market. The logistic managers index, a monthly survey of supply chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's ten year history. So if you scroll down, yeah, that chart is crazy. So good news for the truckers, of course, is going to push up prices and inflation potentially, but it is good to have a healthy trucking industry, a healthy dry van spot rate, which I'm sure you've been following intently.
Speaker 1:Dry van spot rates for the week of June were up 5,200 basis points.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:52% year over year, excluding fuel surcharges according to a report. So the fuel prices get passed through, but the economy is doing well, and so prices for dry van spot rates are increasing. As he said What is closed the stronger freight market over the last few months. The nationwide company is increasing its fleet of more than 10,500 trucks and expanding its pool of about 11,000 drivers.
Speaker 3:What is driving this?
Speaker 1:This has been a supply driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand driven freight recovery. Turnaround comes after four years in which carriers have been squeezed by a combination of too many trucks on the road and not enough loads. Drivers rushed into the industry during the pandemic, so there was a boom in online ordering, shipping, all the different things that happened during COVID. Consumer demand drove freight rates to record highs. Rates plummeted in 2022, forcing hundreds of thousands of smaller carriers out of business.
Speaker 1:Many truckers held on even as costs for drivers equipment and insurance rose. The exodus accelerated over the past year, and trucking specialists say the industry has finally found an equilibrium where the supply of trucks is low enough to lift rates, which will, of course, bring more trucks into the market and rates will adjust, of course, but higher fuel prices due to the war have pushed up trucking companies' expenses, but operators are largely passing along those costs to their customers. So anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 3:We have some breaking news.
Speaker 1:What's the breaking news?
Speaker 3:Ty Morse says on Saturday, we finished construction of set number two.
Speaker 1:Set number two.
Speaker 3:So Let's go. Ty had built a set Yes. For his interview with Elon Musk. Yes. It sounds like they built it in a place that they weren't they were only able to occupy for this week.
Speaker 1:Seven days. Next seven days, one hour notice. And that was on June 6.
Speaker 3:That's on
Speaker 1:June This is dripping. This is trending story on X. He says, for the past three months I've been asking myself the simple question, what would Elon do? Elon would build the rocket and put on put it on the launch stand before he got approval. He would ask, what's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my mission?
Speaker 1:And then go about systematically undoing the bottlenecks until he and his team had made the impossible happen. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And so he has built yet another set that I think can last a full month. And hopefully he lands the interview. He's incredibly pumped up for this.
Speaker 1:And the meta story of him building this set has done better than most podcasts. There's more views on I wanna read John, I
Speaker 9:wanna
Speaker 3:read the summary of the book about the story of Ty Morse getting you on on his podcast.
Speaker 1:Like, 7,500 people, 2,000,000 people watched the video about the set. And so you do have this dynamic where the meta story is more interesting or it like it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point, like he does a lot of interviews, that don't go super viral. Like he did this interview with Jamie Dimon and I think that's fully recorded. I think you can just search it and watch it.
Speaker 1:But I don't know that that's something that like everyone in tech saw and everyone in tech talked about. But this is a story people are talking about. The meta story. And people love to see bold moves. People love to see building and all these crazy things and risk taking and all of that is on display.
Speaker 1:And so, Ty Morse is getting a lot of attention. So good luck to him.
Speaker 3:Godspeed, Ty. Godspeed. It is a beautiful spend
Speaker 1:It is. It is. Texas is America's new center of gravity says The Economist Exxon's reincorporation. They were in Texas. They left Texas.
Speaker 1:They went back to Texas. There's one more feather in the state's cowboy hat says The Economist. Just when I thought I got him to Just This is a hilarious hilarious song lyric. Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should've known should've known better than to take him back to Abilene. Abilene, Texas.
Speaker 1:They were singing about data centers in Ella Langley's Choosing Texas, a song that has ranked near the top of America's music charts throughout 2026. Some of those listens may be coming from policymakers elsewhere in the country. Much like Ms. Langley, they are losing to Texas. On May 27, ExxonMobil shareholders approved a plan to cut the oil giant's ties with New Jersey and reincorporate in Texas where it has long had its headquarters.
Speaker 1:It's not alone. According to CBRE, a property firm, at least a 140 a 184 companies shifted their headquarters to Austin, Dallas, or Houston between 2020 and 2025. Among them, Tesla, a car company, and Caterpillar, a a maker of construction equipment. Texas is steadily establishing itself as America's America Inc's new center of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population.
Speaker 1:From 2020 to 2025, it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country. Wow. In early twenty in the early 2020s, Texas was luring remote workers, fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices and bad policies in America's coastal metropolises while benefiting from the Biden administration subsidies for green energy and chip making facilities. Now the state's dominance in energy has made it a major major beneficiary of the data center boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening.
Speaker 1:This summer, it will ring its first standalone burst, this Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq already operating in the state. Donald Trump has called the New York Stock Exchange's new branch an unbelievably bad thing for his hometown of New York, even if his social media venture was the first business to list on it. So that's a very funny thing, but, you know, he he was obviously giving that in the context of like New York is defined by its exchanges and in the context of just New York, the city, losing out to Texas, or New York State losing out to Texas in any way is bad for that state, I suppose. The state's appeal is to yuppies. To yuppies is growing with every stream of a country song.
Speaker 1:I've been listening to a lot of country songs. Joe Wiesenthal plays in a country band, blues band. Who knows? Maybe he'll move to Texas one day. People ask dream guest.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I tell
Speaker 1:Joe Wiesenthal.
Speaker 3:Dream performance.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Joe Wiesenthal. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Acoustic set. Oh. Unplugged? Unplugged.
Speaker 1:Tiny desk.
Speaker 3:The tiny Tiny desk. Tiny What if we set him up with a slat wall set?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We gotta get Roger from Conde Nast. He can jam. Gotta get a
Speaker 3:little slat wall Yeah. Set Yeah. That he can just play.
Speaker 1:And an s m seven b podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick. Might be the trick. To understand its ascendancy starting Houston, heart of the Texan energy industry. Its oil and gas barons have been raking in profits as a result of the Iran war.
Speaker 1:But over the past years, the state has also become a hub for green energy. This year, it's expected to build two fifths of all utility scale solar in America, a technology for which its wide open flatlands are ideal. Interesting. We gotta talk about the Buzz Lightyear GT three RS. We gotta get to that before our first guest arrives.
Speaker 1:Let's scroll down and find the latest the latest and greatest from Porsche and the Pixar company. They're teaming up for the launch of a custom GT three RS. Porsche CEO first, he said, the company will not produce an electric nine eleven, but they will produce the Buzz Lightyear GT three RS. Can we play sound?
Speaker 10:It also says Space Ranger, Lightyear, my vents are gonna be purple and Porsche even commissioned Goodyear to make the tires say Lightyear just like they do in the movie Cars. I get more painted graphics here on my roof, my roof fins are gonna be painted, my intakes are gonna be painted, my entire wing is painted, and it even has a Space Ranger logo painted on the back. As soon as you walk into the car, I get a plaque that says to infinity and beyond. I have light year branded floor mats, I get carbon bucket seats, but this time the carbon is actually purple. I get a Space Ranger logo on my headrest, another one here on my roof, suede on my steering wheel, more on my dash, a one of one plaque, and even my key has the Space Ranger logo.
Speaker 10:There's also a woody version that's based on the 09/11 Carrera T. They made the paint look like actual denim. Get this car and Buzz gets
Speaker 3:a gets a RS and Woody gets a T. Yeah.
Speaker 10:These gorgeous denim and leather boots, Woody's badge and Boston headrest. I get a one zero one plaque, wood on my dash, a leather steering wheel,
Speaker 1:and
Speaker 3:with the Pixar missed opportunity.
Speaker 10:This car painted in Jesse White metallic. I get and instead of saying Targa, it says Jesse. In Jesse's car, you get a plaque that says I get cow print floor mats. Wow. His denim and red leather seats with
Speaker 1:Jesse's the T yellow T Rex. T you know, the Rex, the T Rex? Rex?
Speaker 10:You
Speaker 1:gotta do the the off road Cayenne Turbo.
Speaker 10:So which one would you take?
Speaker 3:This guy's video, like his format So really really exposes my ADHD.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Because of the editing or
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm like, wow. This video they really this video could be like a ten minute video. Yeah. He's condensed it down.
Speaker 1:It's crazy how much condensed it. He goes through everything. And I think every line is like written and then and then he says it multiple times
Speaker 3:SEO optimized search any car. Like, this is the most efficient way to figure out like the it's just interesting.
Speaker 1:No. Forest Auto Review is really cool. I'd love to have him on the show. He also has like incredible access to Chinese vehicles. I'm not exactly sure how that happens.
Speaker 1:I think he just has good relationships with the Chinese automakers. So if you wanna learn about Wow. This guy's super and stuff, like he'd get yeah. He's the one he's how I found out about that crazy Chinese SUV that has gas motor range extender for an otherwise electric car. So the range is like 900 miles.
Speaker 1:And I think he can actually get over there and and tour the cars. He he he does fantastic work. Would you pick up a regular GT three RS or the Toy Story GT three RS? They were the same price. Which one are you going with?
Speaker 3:I tried to watch Toy Story my Tried? Little No. No. I was watching it with my little guy and it was too scary. Oh,
Speaker 1:okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:We had to turn it off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So right now
Speaker 1:There are some scary parts. That that that child's head with the
Speaker 3:little rough little rough. So Parental guy This is not the right car for my household yet.
Speaker 1:Too scary.
Speaker 3:But I could see it in the future.
Speaker 1:The GZ3 RS too scary. Yeah. Wild. What what is the we gotta go back to the Ferrari Lucha. Lucha?
Speaker 3:No. The the fact that images too has just fully democratized like car Yeah. Designs Yeah. Is pretty incredible.
Speaker 1:So so what what are we looking at here with this post? They had just one job.
Speaker 3:This is someone that took
Speaker 1:Okay. The basic
Speaker 3:Basically, they're like ignore the fact that the luche was meant to be like a daily Yep. With more seats
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:And just said, what would a a electric Ferrari look like if
Speaker 1:you're This is not an electric Ferrari. It has four tailpipes. This isn't Let's natural gas grill mid engine v eight.
Speaker 3:Oh, maybe that's the point of the post. They said they just had one job to do. But it's just make another
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. I get it. You like you like v eights. You like gas cars.
Speaker 1:You like things that are designed differently. Like, Ferrari will sell you one of those. They have them. Like, they have the two nine six. They have the Testarossa.
Speaker 1:They have the SF 90. They have the California and there's a new one. Like they're they're they have plenty of options in that category. They don't have
Speaker 4:an EV. They wanted to
Speaker 1:do something different. I don't know.
Speaker 3:This does look this does look cool.
Speaker 1:It looks cool. But it's like that also already exists. Like that's not something that's necessarily like new.
Speaker 3:He says, Johnny, yikes.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think it's I I I mean, I I agree. Like, this one looks aesthetic. It looks cool. But, like, it doesn't check the box that they wanted to check, which is, like, a five their first five seater, first electric car, first something with like, you know, this battery setup and all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:Like they wanted something experimental. Yeah. Again, like it does seem it does seem risky and the and the response has been really negative. But like like the clearly, it wasn't like, oh, they were trying to go for this and they wound up in some crazy place. Oops.
Speaker 1:We put an electric drive train in This
Speaker 3:guy is still posting that after driving through Cupertino Yeah. A year from now. Just wall to wall traffic just sitting sitting in a field of luches. Yep. Just moving Yep.
Speaker 3:One inch every minute.
Speaker 1:Well, they did the they did the the Buzz Lightyear GT three RS. Should they do the Shrek Luche for get some DreamWorks collabs going? Pull it up in the Shrek green Luche. Images two. Get it working right now, Jordy.
Speaker 1:The the the Shrek the Shrek luche would
Speaker 3:Let's see
Speaker 1:what would go on really hard. That might that might swing you. Shrek's not too scary. You could do Shrek. That would be acceptable in your household, I think.
Speaker 3:What about a what about a while that's pulling up Yeah. Make a donkey.
Speaker 1:Look at this 944. The legendary 944 from Porsche made this grand return in 2026. This is a cool design.
Speaker 3:I love the nine four four.
Speaker 1:Looks great. Yeah. That would be interesting, especially given that the CEO of Porsche has said that they will not produce an electric nine eleven. They got to do other things. Maybe the nine four four is the trick.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences, a new value with Cisco. And we have our next guest in the waiting room, David from NeuroRobotics here with a fantastic fundraise. Welcome to the show, David. How are doing?
Speaker 3:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Hi. I'm doing great. I made it to your show.
Speaker 1:It's awesome. Yes.
Speaker 3:I mean, with this fundraise. Incredible. We're honored to have you.
Speaker 1:It's crazy we missed you earlier. But it is your first time on the show. Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about little bit about the company. We'll go through the fundraise and I have a bunch of questions about robotics because it's always a fascinating topic.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 3:like to a a day to be announcing a massive round in physical AI.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Because there's only one person in the world that could raise probably a bigger Yeah. AI meets physical world round and that's Jeff Bezos. But we're happy to have you here today and excited to hear what you're working on.
Speaker 2:Great honor. Yeah. So a little bit about about me. I'm David, founder and CEO of Neurobotics, a company out of Germany, so in the southern part. Yeah.
Speaker 2:My goal is actually making robots cognitive and bring them actually in all areas of our lives, and I do think that robotics will actually take over any physical task in the future, and I think that's also what we are seeing today, like big progress having, let's say, physically, I combined basically with with a robot body and doing great things, mainly focused right now industrial but looking also into all other sectors.
Speaker 1:There's this big trend right now in just the the LLM, the frontier AI market where companies will, you know, use the most versatile tool for the job, the frontier model, the token max, it'll be really expensive and then pretty quickly they'll figure out, okay, for this workflow we can actually use an open source model on commodity hardware. We can use a legacy model. We can cut the cost by 85% pretty quickly. And I have this suspicion that that will be the case for humanoid robots. You'll have the humanoid go and, you know, put the windshield on the car and then pretty quickly realize like, wait, for one tenth the cost we could have a Kuka robot arm do that and there will be this gradation of what is economically productive for each robot and you will only use the most expensive humanoid for the really, really unwieldy task and we won't see a world where everything will be humanoids.
Speaker 1:But what's your thesis long term?
Speaker 2:So first of all, I think this is also one of the biggest differentiators from us to others is that we do believe in different embodiments. And what we have today is, like, we are using mainly today is, like, mobile manipulators Mhmm. But always combined with a physical AI brain. And I think this is also going but going forward, we do we will see more humanoids, and I think we will see them in all all areas of our lives. And the the reason for that is is more like that that they're having the form factor of a human, I think the whole bot like, the whole world is basically created around the human and ergonomically, let's say, made for humans, and this is basically also the main reasoning.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest breakthrough we see right now is actually connecting to a brain and with more sensing capabilities. Until now, we are seeing mainly all these companies coming up with the vision language action models, but here I need to say that that is not enough to bring robots into our fields. It's a little bit like like learning how to swim. You can learn swimming by just watching a video or something. It's it's about a nervous system.
Speaker 1:You gotta go to r.r/swim.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta learn it Reddit data. Enough comments you can learn how to swim. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is it is interesting. There's something to the like visual learning to do physical things by just watching videos does work to some degree. It's not it's not full. It's not enough. But I remember growing up surfing, snowboarding I learned
Speaker 1:to tie a tie of video but I was practicing the whole time while I was watching the video. So I was getting the the input and the reaction.
Speaker 2:You're combining that. Yeah. What I mean actually by that is the you can't just learn things just with your brain in Yeah. In this dynamic world. So it means actually there is more than brain.
Speaker 2:It's a nervous system and the reflexes. This is especially needed in the like, if you're looking into all kind of tasks humans do today, it's mainly like the biggest advantage we have is the flexibility of adjusting things, like, on the environments, on different areas, and it's also what we are doing. It's like, this is one video. Awesome. It's it's actually the Neuragym.
Speaker 2:A place we're building up right now all over the planet, and and in every major city, we'll find them soon. So it's actually a place where you can train robots doing all kind of task in the physical world. And then more than just the brain, basically also the nervous system.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What other sources of data
Speaker 3:Why wait. Why all over the world? Yeah. Why why can't you centralize something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So because we want to give, like, everyone access to to actually not just buy a robot to have one and and to then figure out you need to train it. So you you have a central place and you can actually build first trust. And the second, actually, you can train them already and use the data with one click. You can transfer it to any other robots in your in your factory or wherever you need them.
Speaker 2:So it's for us, it's right now important because the the the gap we're having right now and the difference actually to large language models as we know, like like JCPT or others, is that this data is not existing. So we do need to build first, let's say, the infrastructure for it so that we can actually create the right data to train, actually, the physical AI brain behind that. So the the most easiest way is letting everyone or enabling others to to train the robot or to fine tune the foundation model we built.
Speaker 3:What what are the biggest opportunities that you guys are working on in Germany? I imagine, hopefully, helping make some of my favorite cars, but what do you have going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good one. I I I'm also a car lover, so I could have also have a lot of input on on your talk before. So it's like so I I yeah. But Would you go would you go GT three
Speaker 1:r s Buzz Lightyear edition or Ferrari Luche Shrek edition?
Speaker 5:That's a quick follow-up.
Speaker 1:Are you a Shrek guy?
Speaker 2:I think it's too easy. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Because you might like Shrek and you might like a GT three RS. You might like Buzz Lightyear and a Luche, but that's not the option. You gotta pick one or the other.
Speaker 2:No. I'm still the the engine guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3:So you're good. Furious.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the fun side. This. Yeah. But, yes, there is a lot of projects, especially in the automotive industries and also especially on the supplier side where they have to reduce cost.
Speaker 2:They have to find, let's say, ways to to be efficient as the others are in Asia or somewhere else on the planet. And and the only way for that is finding, let's say, some more autonomy or, like or bring more autonomy in their fields. And especially because, like, here in Europe, if you're looking, let's say, into 2030, you will see that we have, like, about 7,000,000 less human labor. So we we do need to have like, we need a solution for that. The only way is embodied AI something which can do things fully autonomously and as capable as human can do.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about your supply chain? A lot of robotics companies in America are saying we want an American supply chain. Other companies are saying, hey. We gotta move as fast as possible. Realistically, is there gonna be spyware in a bolt that we buy from China?
Speaker 1:Like, let's not worry about that. It is maybe a supply chain risk if they cut you off, if you're thinking about supply chain resiliency. But what's your approach been? Do you wanna source entirely from German supply chains or European supply chains, Western supply chains or global supply chains?
Speaker 2:So at this time, we are focusing right now on the, like, let's say, European supply chain. So the like, I I still believe in the global world, but I do see right now the biggest advantage of, like, converting them still because the most of the components are there, but they need to be still, let's say, modified to use them for robots. Here, I'm simply talking about even lifetime or, I mean, through the regulations, the lifetime of the sensors for cars are regulated, basically, so they they break. So we have, like, a renewing process going on. So and for robots, like like, they're made for six thousand hours and the robot takes sensors for forty thousand hours.
Speaker 2:So and this is still a difference, a gap between, but and that's also, I think, us, the most important topic, like, working with those suppliers around us. We are based in Stuttgart where all the good stuff come from, like you stuff you talked before about. And so there is the Bosch, the the, like, the Porsche, the Audis, the, like, the Mercedes, everything here around us, and and we are using this supply chain, converting it right now into robotics.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Very cool.
Speaker 2:But going further, I do think it will be it will not matter so much. So it will come all, again, like, wherever you produce. So you will have we will have productions also in US and same time also probably in Asia.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell us about the round.
Speaker 3:Odd, before we get into the round, the silliest question you'll ever get. Can you ever imagine a robotic use case that would require an internal combustion engine? Let's say, like a v six humanoid.
Speaker 2:It would be awesome, but not required yet. So Yeah. No. But I think the the Boston Dynamic guys, they did an awesome thing. I don't know if you saw the the, like, the the quadripad they they built, like, some years ago, like, the beginning.
Speaker 2:It was actually within combustion engine as I saw. Powered. Like, so That's So but yes. No. At at this time, fully electrified.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I but I the cars, I'm still loving, like, with the v 12 or v 10, I think. There we go. There you go. It's just
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 3:One of us. Tell us tell us about the round.
Speaker 1:Hit that gong, Jordy. How much did you raise? So
Speaker 2:we raised a 1,400,000,000 US dollar.
Speaker 1:You guys
Speaker 2:are awesome.
Speaker 1:Right in the face. Thank you for taking the time to get
Speaker 3:through all this. Great stuff. Are you setting up a you have a US office already? Are you setting one up?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. We have one and we are setting further. So, like, as you might see have seen also the investors on this round, are a lot of American players and very important players outside. So I think this is also a sign to work
Speaker 8:where we go.
Speaker 2:Yes. The strategics. Great stuff. Thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because, I mean, I think it's it's important. Or, like, I think something like that was never built. Like, after automotive, there was nothing really great coming out of Germany, and I think we have to change that also. And and for that, we need partners which are, let's say, knowing how to scale that, how to do it in this time we're living in. So and here at Dubilif and our partnership's also out of US and and Germany.
Speaker 3:Very cool. Well Fantastic. Congratulations. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:So much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you
Speaker 3:We'll we'll have you Thank you so much.
Speaker 8:Have a good rest
Speaker 1:of your day.
Speaker 2:That that was awesome to be on the show.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Did you see at the NBA game last night, a little little person, somebody you might know, born in Tennessee showing up on the camera as they pan around to the crowd finding famous people, finding iconic people, unmistakable people. We got a picture here of a celebrity at the game.
Speaker 1:You know who that is?
Speaker 3:Yep. Paul
Speaker 1:Tudor Jones baby born in Tennessee. They didn't even have to give him a name tag because everyone knows Paul Tudor Jones, first pension fund manager, $8,000,000,000 network Let's
Speaker 3:zoom in a little bit more
Speaker 1:because I don't
Speaker 3:know what else is really going on in the photo but let's get Yeah. To the good
Speaker 1:I mean everyone knows Tudor Investment Management, Tudor Investment investment Corporation. They know like the best episode, obviously. The Robin Hood Foundation, undoubtedly. He predicted Black Monday. I mean, yeah.
Speaker 1:He's a pretty big deal. Born in Tennessee. But they they they there was someone who people weren't sure who it was, and so they had to give this woman a name tag. If we scroll down, we'll actually be able to learn who this is. It's Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1:So you can take that name, type it into anything, look her up and learn all about her. And maybe one day you'll know as Maybe much about
Speaker 3:maybe Patrick was watching last night and
Speaker 1:That's like the best crossover episode.
Speaker 3:Could be. I'd What like if what if they did a a joint interview?
Speaker 1:That'd be great.
Speaker 3:PGT. Yeah. P P JT. PTJ. Paul t PTJ Yeah.
Speaker 3:Meets Paul Tudor Jones. Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:I like it.
Speaker 1:It'd be good. Anyway Our next guest. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mike for now in Control Systems. How you doing, Mike?
Speaker 6:I'm doing alright, guys. How you doing?
Speaker 1:More than alright. Got some big more
Speaker 11:than alright. We are
Speaker 6:having a fantastic fantastic month around here.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Good good time to be in the gun on a truck business. Is it is that the accurate Is this all for scaling up bullfrog? Take us through the product portfolio, reintroduce the company, reintroduce yourself, and then tell us where you're going.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sure. Allen Control Systems. We are a company that specializes in the application of robotics for defense. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Think of the Boston Dynamics of of defense, essentially. Mhmm. We are building an extreme But you guys ship. Robotics?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. But you guys ship. You guys ship.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Boston and they they shipped, but it took a long time.
Speaker 3:Not as much. Took like 15 Not as much.
Speaker 1:Not as much. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we are we have our our flagship product is Bullfrog. Bullfrog is essentially a robotic gimbal driven by computer vision and machine learning that solves kind of an age old mechanical problem, which is that you can usually only have a system that is very fast but relatively inaccurate or very accurate but relatively slow In order to shoot down fast maneuvering drones, especially tiny ones like group one, group twos, you need to be both fast and accurate. And so by using and applying AI to our control system, we're able to create a robot that can be both fast and accurate, and that's what we do that nobody else in the world has been able to achieve so far.
Speaker 1:What's this Jordy, please.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Talk about the progress over the last year, what what kind of led up to this round, and then where you're going from here.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, you know, we have been obviously kinda working on on this robot for about eighteen months now, since we kinda first brought it out to the field, actually a little closer to two years. Bullfrog has been kind of slowly achieving more and more, getting closer and closer to battlefield speeds. In November of of last year, we achieved kind of 100% kill rate against 13 Red Army flown drones. So drones that are flown by a team of the army that are not telling us where they're coming from or what they're supposed to do or how many they have coming.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Wow. Very cool. Was there already a program of record for this? Like, you hear a lot about how hard it is to get a new technology fielded because the government often knows that they want more planes or more weapons of a certain kind.
Speaker 1:And most companies that we talk to are usually saying, Well, we fit neatly in this box so it was easy for them to procure us. This feels both old and new. It's like innovative in all the correct ways and maybe leaning on the shoulders of like like what the army can already feel like a truck and a gun.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we are we are not currently a program of record. You know, our technology kinda lays in a class that you usually call ahead of ahead of need.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So, you know, requirements that are being built right now
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Will start to address what this system is capable of doing now Mhmm. But also what it's gonna be capable of doing in the future, which is much, much which is much, much more. Where we are very fortunate, you know, this company is really sitting at, like, just a perfect storm of tailwinds
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Between the war and the size of the threat and the lack of other solutions that can solve it. You know, the the president and the secretary of war created joint task force four zero one, which is specifically meant for selecting counter UAS technologies for all services, both domestically and abroad. Yeah. And so we were selected by them to get sent forward after after the war started. That is basically a blanket approval for all services, including the coast guard and and and Secret Service to buy our technology and and put it to use.
Speaker 1:Is is this I imagine the sweet spot is like the the DJI size quadrotor drone. We're not talking about shooting down something like a Shahid drone. That correct? Is that the focus long term? Do you want to be counter UAS in all classes over time?
Speaker 1:Or do you just want to be the best this small scale counter UAS? Because they're all problems and maybe there's some other solution for taking out the enemy's version of, like, a Predator drone that might be a completely different job to be done, a completely different technology.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, that's that's a great question. We are we are currently very focused on being the best at shooting down group one, group two drones, which are absolutely the hardest rooms
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:To engage right now. I mean, like, you know, lasers are pretty good at shooting down group three drones, but you have to keep your laser on target for five to fifteen seconds in order to do damage to to the airframe. So Mhmm. We are we are perfectly positioned for the group one, group two threat. Now that said, we can shoot down group one drones very, very far away.
Speaker 6:And so if I can hit a seven inch target on a group one drone very, very far away, I can hit very vulnerable parts of a Shahed at the same distances. Mhmm. So while we're not the ideal solution for engaging those those larger targets, you know, you have roadrunners and other things that can go out a little bit farther. You're gonna wanna hit them 20 to 15 kilometers away. But when they get closer and you need that last line of defense Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We are absolutely a a great solution for taking those out of the air.
Speaker 1:Talk about scaling manufacturing. Like, it it doesn't look like you manufacture the truck. It doesn't look like you manufacture the actual gun, but there's a whole system that creates the Bullfrog product. What is the act what's actually going on that you can share in the manufacturing process? Is it milling different parts to fit things together?
Speaker 1:Just, you know, integration of different systems? How are you thinking about scaling manufacturing?
Speaker 6:You know, we when we built Bullfrog, you know, the hardware was not the exquisite part of the system.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We built Bullfrog incredibly well. We we built it so it will could be easily maintained, and we built it so it'd be easily manufactured and scaled very quickly.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that's one of the other differentiators that we have against the other counter UAS solutions that are out there is we can get to thousands of units really, really fast.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And the way we do that is 90% of Bullfrog is made from basically commercial off the shelf components.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Standard things that you see in a in a robust supply chain with multiple vendors that can quickly get us to the amount of inventory that we need to start pumping out a thousand of these every single month.
Speaker 1:Talk a little bit about the compute. I mean, you're doing image recognition. It seems like there's a camera there. Is that all done on device? Is there a need for edge compute, a need for cloud computing?
Speaker 1:Or because I imagine this is designed to operate in off grid scenarios effectively. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. It it has to be a completely self contained compute system. In order to do something autonomously, think about an unmanned ground vehicle or an unmanned surface vessel.
Speaker 6:Yeah. If you have to have an operator over a latent network manually controlling a gun to actually shoot a target in real life, you're never gonna hit anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So having a fully autonomous system like Bullfrog out on those platforms that can be asynchronously tracking targets and just waiting for an operator to say engage that target is a huge advantage when you start talking about operationalizing unmanned payloads. Yeah. And that is another kind of huge niche that we have or that we're that we're going after right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How big is the team these days?
Speaker 6:We are approaching 250 today. Wow. And I I I don't know where we started the year, but I I think it was, like, 80. Last I heard we're hiring about 50 people a month. You know, we are we are trying to drag in the absolute best engineering talent possible.
Speaker 6:You know, one way when we look at kinda differentiating ourselves in the industry is is, you know, you have the annuals, and they're doing a great job of finding companies and doing roll roll ups. But Mhmm. I think they're losing a lot of their technical depth. And so we're really focused on building a really, really core engineering team that understands robotics. And robotics is an incredible symphony of detailed, you know, integration between hardware and software to do it well.
Speaker 6:And and and we think that we can really differentiate ourselves in the future as we talk about bringing on more products to solve defense needs with robotics.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Little shots fired there Shots fired. From the Bullfrog chief himself.
Speaker 1:A company that shoots shots.
Speaker 3:Really really impressive progress.
Speaker 1:Let's go to round. Yeah. How much did you raise?
Speaker 6:We raised $200,000,000 at a $2,000,000,000 pre money valuation.
Speaker 1:Woo. Let's go. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:We should we should share
Speaker 6:that presentation at some point. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's crazy. Right right before like, pre pre TBPN
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I had the pleasure of helping you guys kind of position, what you're working on. And, you guys have executed it, the the strategy to a tee. So it's awesome to see.
Speaker 6:Gonna keep going. It's it's really exciting. We think you guys will see another big announcement in the next twelve to eighteen months.
Speaker 3:So Congratulations. Forward to seeing you again. Cheers, Mike. Congrats to the team.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. 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:People are going there's a new benchmark. I am a fish and I swim to the worm on a rope. Is it safe? People are asking different models. Gemini nailed it.
Speaker 1:Apple Foundation model said, yes. It's safe. Bad news if you're a fish. Can't recommend the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the fish in the audience. Okay.
Speaker 3:This is not Apple.
Speaker 1:This isn't? Thought I was Apple. What app is that?
Speaker 3:Literally It's somewhat confusing.
Speaker 1:So I what I imagine this is doing is that it's it's a an app that integrates with the iOS API that interfaces with the Apple foundation model. But I don't know.
Speaker 3:I might have taken your
Speaker 1:in the chat said black suits who died. This is a dark gray suit. Okay?
Speaker 3:And that's your daily driver?
Speaker 1:I've been wearing this a lot. I don't know. I like it. You're in a dark gray suit too. We're matching.
Speaker 1:This is the same And also, it's not black. It's dark gray.
Speaker 3:I know. What does that say about the the team's color grading then?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe crush those crush those shadows too much. We'll see. Shots. Bring them up.
Speaker 1:No. Don't know. Fired. Did you speaking of colors, did you know that accountants used to wear green eye shades? Did you know this?
Speaker 5:Well, I've seen like in cartoons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In cartoons. I had no idea where this came from. There's a reel on Instagram that breaks it all down. This blew my mind and I think we should watch it.
Speaker 1:You wanna learn about
Speaker 3:I'd love to, Jordan.
Speaker 1:Green green eye shades. This is important because I think you care about the the quality of light that goes into your eyes and I could see you in the future. Lens. Yeah. It's a lens.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Watch this video. It's three up from the Apple Foundation Model one. And right here, it's the life professor. He breaks it down.
Speaker 12:Cartoons to show that stereotypically someone is accountant. Well, that is a green eye shade that was stereotypically worn by office workers back in the early days of gas and electric lighting. It came in several versions this weird eye hood version That's Cyberpunk. But the purpose was always the same, which was to reduce the glare from these harsh electric or glass lamps and to improve contrast on the papers that you would be looking at up to eight to ten hours a day. So this became a very common look for any paperwork heavy profession back in the day.
Speaker 12:As lighting became better in offices, the green visor look essentially became obsolete in the actual workforce. However, just like how I talked about
Speaker 1:Locking in at the clock factor.
Speaker 12:Head mirrors
Speaker 1:still You put on the green visor because you're a white collar worker. Like, white collar workers these days don't really have, like, gear. They don't have accessories. Yeah. There's nothing that's like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:That guy's vibe coding, and he has the the, you know, the the the obvious tells.
Speaker 3:The new hot accessory is tech neck.
Speaker 1:Here, you occasionally hear
Speaker 12:like politicians described as like a green eye visor budget hawk. There's a journalism award that still mentions the green eye shade. But, yeah. So that's what's going on there with that. So if
Speaker 3:have any Real grinders had the eye shade.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Make sure
Speaker 1:you We gotta bring
Speaker 6:them back.
Speaker 3:One of these.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of there's a lot of LED lights. Do something to switch it up. Also, Toby Luecky from Shopify is competing in the twenty four hours of Le Mans this year. Bucket list stuff. Wouldn't have gotten there without DHH's encouragement and guidance.
Speaker 1:Watch this week with this weekend. You can go watch the twenty four hour of Le Mans.
Speaker 3:I love that he didn't just like get into driving on the track every now and then. He thought, I'm gonna go all the way.
Speaker 1:Also, this LMP car he's driving looks a little like a Buzz Lightyear mobile. There's some green or maybe Shrek. Maybe that may we don't know. We don't know that Shopify didn't pick green because of Shrek. It's possible.
Speaker 1:When did Shopify found when was Shopify founded? When did Shrek come out?
Speaker 2:That's the
Speaker 3:That is a good question.
Speaker 1:When was Shrek had
Speaker 3:to predate Shopify.
Speaker 1:I think so. When did Shrek come out? Okay. Shopify founded 2006. Shrek had been out for five years.
Speaker 1:They could have gone with green because of Shrek. Well, we have a green light on our next guest, Ariel Cohen from Nivon. He's the co founder and CEO. Let's bring him in from the waiting room and talk to him about how Nivon is doing. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:Hi. How are you?
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Gotta be feeling pretty good.
Speaker 1:Feeling great. Business is fantastic. Is it time to go do the twenty four hour Le Mans? Are you gonna get into racing?
Speaker 9:No. This quarter was actually really, really good and the business is doing really amazing.
Speaker 1:What's driving it? I mean, I feel like there's so much up and down with SaaS pocalypse and are people just gonna be using AI for everything? Or is the economy gonna collapse? Is the is travel gonna go down because of gas prices? Like, what were all the factors of risk, and then how do you overcome them?
Speaker 9:Yeah. First of all, what drives business travel is really, you know, the need of people to be there together, to meet face to face, to we actually that's our main belief. Our main belief is that people wants to meet close businesses, build teams, get to interviews, and to do it face to face. And this is what we are powering. And it's so important, and you've mentioned gas prices.
Speaker 9:We are coming out of the quarter that you have TSA strikes. You had gas prices. You had the, you know, you had the major two storms in The US in January. All of these things, and we had an amazing quarter. We grew our usage by 50%.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's huge. It's our our revenue went up by 40%, our usage by 50%, and this is in this quarter. So it tells you how much it is important for people to be there together if they're willing to go through storms while doing that, And this is kind of what drives our business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What else operationally is changing in the a in the age of AI? Are you token maxing? Are you deploying AI agents all over the place? Are you launching AI features for folks?
Speaker 1:Or are you taking a more measured approach?
Speaker 9:You know, we don't use AI like as a slogan. We always take an approach of, first of all, what our user needs Mhmm. What our customer needs
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And then what can we deliver to them. So even before AI became, you know, fashionable
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 9:We are like I'm talking about in 2016, we are heavily using machine learning in the platform Sure. To heavily personalize the, you know, the results that we are giving you, the way that we are saving money to companies when they book travel through us. Companies are saving 15%, one five, of their entire travel budget when they use us. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then, you know, when Gen AI came, we really took took it to the next level. So today, the Novant platform, you can go to NovantEdge, which for you, it's kind of for a personal level if you're a business traveler, but your company you either don't like the solution or your company is not really managing travel, this is an AI platform. We chat there with with AvanEdge. We know you. We connect to your every loyalty club that you have, and then we are optimizing your entire trip booking.
Speaker 9:You're telling us you want to be in London and we'll book your flight, your hotel, your restaurant, events while you're on the trip, everything while you're on the go. And this is really driven by Gen AI. But even when you get support from us, say, you basically chat with Ava, and we completely orchestrate it there when we use an AI agent, when we when we use a real life agent, and completely orchestrating both. And this is very, very unique. Nobody is doing that.
Speaker 1:Is anything on the go to market side changing? I mean, you it's it's odd because so much of the pitch is like face to face meetings need to happen. And so I imagine a lot of that's not changed. Your Salesforce is probably having face to face meetings with companies that want the product and want to understand the business before they partner up. But is anything accelerating there?
Speaker 1:Because obviously, when you look at a big 40% jump in revenue, you have to ask, you know, unpack that.
Speaker 9:Yeah. There are there are different drivers there. I would say that AI is actually a big part of this but for a different reason. Okay. First of all, actually, most of the AI companies are using us, right, including OpenAI and Entropic and Cursor and so on.
Speaker 9:So that's definitely there. But, really, the AI driver is that, right now, in every enterprise, you have AI initiative coming from the top. Navan is one of the only B2B company on an enterprise level that can come and tell you, because of AI, I will save your employees, the most important employees in the company, the sales team, the c level. I will save them a lot of time when they need to change their trip, when something is happening in the airport, how they are expensing. We are completely you know, we use our own credit card.
Speaker 9:You are expensing your entire T and E, including your meals. There is not such thing of itemizing your receipt from the hotel Yeah. And itemizing the minibar expense and So we save a lot of time, and we save a lot of money, and all of this is driven by AI. So we ride on the AI initiative in the market, in the in the organization. But also from a go to market perspective, we shared it yesterday, on the other side, you know, we sell to the biggest enterprises in the world.
Speaker 9:But on the other side, PLG, we've more than doubled last year, and this is completely driven by AI because marketing is significantly more efficient when you when you're actually using AI.
Speaker 1:I remember years ago, almost in, like, pre gen AI era, Google launched a feature that would let you, sort of almost agentically, but like programmatically call a restaurant and their robot or something would would talk to the restaurant and try and book you a reservation. And I'm wondering about obviously there's a ton of low hanging fruit inside the platform where AI can speed up search and ranking and classification, itemizing minibar as you mentioned. There's so many different features for AI to run wild inside the platform. But are you experiencing opportunities to go outside of the platform? Okay.
Speaker 1:There's a company, there's a cool hotel, but their system is not integrated, not on any of the travel sites, but we'd love to bring it to that and we can by autonomously going and writing an integration or even just making a phone call. There's so many times where a receipt didn't come. It was a glitch in their system. I have to call to get the receipt. It's a back and forth.
Speaker 1:An AI agent should be able to do that, but where is that on the road map?
Speaker 9:You should first of all, you should do product management in Novant because you just described a lot of Novant features, and I'll I'll actually explain it. So, you know, everything that you described comes down that to the connectivity to the physical world Yeah. And especially if it is complicated, travel is super complicated. We have an infrastructure. We actually have by far the best travel infrastructure in the world.
Speaker 9:It means that we are connected globally to everything that is out there. Every airline through different ways, every hotel, buses, rail, globally, all over the world. So when you have that connectivity, there are so many things that you can do. But to your point, sometimes there is no API. You cannot change a flight a day before twenty four hours before the flight by going to an API.
Speaker 9:Have to call the airline. Yeah. Right? But to your kind of you kind of touched the use case that we love here. When you're when you pay later, you basically pay in the hotel for the booking that you did
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:If you'll not show up on time, that's up to 11PM, they're gonna cancel their reservation. So you need to call them and reconfirm the reservation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 9:Give them a credit card and tell them keep that thing. Now think about it. You are on a flight, stuck on a flight. You know that you're gonna be late. The amount of pressure, oh, you're just late, or you just nobody called on your behalf.
Speaker 9:We actually have our own AI bot that is calling the hotel, automatically having a discussion over the phone saying, hey. I will arrive. We take the name of the person that confirmed them. We are giving a virtual card to secure the transaction. It's automatic.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? And then we push to the app, to the travel app, to Novan. We push the confirmation. We are saying we talked to that guy in the reception because it's all manual. We talked to that guy in the reception, and he secured your room.
Speaker 9:This is all AI, so no cost. But think about the amazing, amazing, amazing service that we just gave you. And this is when I say I don't see AI as kind of a fashion. I'm looking at, like, is there a use case that I can generate value to you, the user, the traveler, the executive assistant, the accountants. Like, you know, we do auto reconciliation for the entire trips of all of the company.
Speaker 9:So we are saving tons of time for the really big reconciliation teams that the big companies have. So that's kind of how we use AI. We have our own platform. It's called Navant Cognition that orchestrate it all perfectly between the physical world and our AI capability. Sometimes we use our own model.
Speaker 9:We actually announced yesterday in the call that 30% of our AI calls are now our own model and not the frontier models or open source. So that actually pushes us farther. It makes us more accurate, faster, raises customer satisfaction, and obviously it's also cheaper.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Very cool. Do you think now is the right time to start talking about Nivan safety? Your models are getting more and more powerful, and maybe it's time for a national discussion about Yeah.
Speaker 9:But you know, it's funny. We have something, it's called and we didn't release it yet, we announced it. We have something, it's called travel club. And there, the agent I'm sometimes joking, and I'm saying the agent will do whatever it takes to put me on this flight.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. I mean, there's all those simulations like the vending machine Yeah. Benchmarks, things like that where the models
Speaker 1:United and it's like, I just looked up your boss, actually. And I'm gonna I'm gonna leave you a negative review. I'm gonna
Speaker 3:I'm going to if I'm gonna short your stock. I'm gonna short your
Speaker 1:stock to size. You don't issue me this refund right now.
Speaker 3:Help us help us out with this question. We were talking earlier on the show. It feels like TSA has gotten remarkably better over the last ten years. I used to remember getting to the airport an hour before the flight and thinking, I might miss my flight. Or maybe I have to try to ask TSA, hey, can I get through a little faster?
Speaker 3:Now, seems like like no more than thirty minutes every time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's pretty good. What's your what's your read?
Speaker 11:It's a theory.
Speaker 9:So, you know, I've mentioned the Nirvana Edge earlier and you guys have to use it. I'm sure that you're traveling from time to time, so just use it. Just try it out. Okay. But the cool thing there, it will send you a day before the trip, but also during the trip proactively.
Speaker 9:It's actually different types of agents there that will tell you, hey. The TSA pre line, that's how long it will take you.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 9:And that's how long it takes you right now. How long it will take you to get to the airport? Are there specific interruptions right now? All of these things. So we actually know what's going on with TSA, and it was actually interesting because to your point, it's actually significantly better.
Speaker 9:And obviously, have CLEAR, which is actually much better right And with the face and the eye identification, it's actually much easier. But if you think about us, we're gonna really guide you and tell you what's in the airport right now. During the TSA shutdown, it was not as bad as the media described it. There were a lot of headlines. We actually were watching this, and we were saying, yeah, there is some JFK issue right now, but by the way, JFK has issues all the time, and it's not as bad as as they are describing it.
Speaker 9:So I would actually that's why the platform is so strong because instead of taking the headlines, you can actually really see what's going on right now in the context of your trip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about memory. All of the AI apps are building memory functionality. People are, you know, collecting markdown files for different skills. And I can imagine a future where I have some sort of memory around my preferences.
Speaker 1:I like to fly direct. I prefer Burbank to LAX if possible. I like to fly at these hours. Here's my calendar. And what I really want is just like, I'm going to San Francisco for two days.
Speaker 1:I have to hit this meeting and that meeting. And I would love to just be able to have the integration to Uber to book the car and then the Waymo when I'm in SF because Waymo works in SF and that's great. And then, the hotel and everything just from start to finish booked in one flow, automatically. Like, how close are we to that? I imagine
Speaker 9:You notice I run products at Novan, and I really, really need to hire you. Maybe. First of all, we have our own memory component. It's our own development as part of Novan Cognition. And everything that you described, we do already.
Speaker 1:Okay. Good.
Speaker 9:But it's actually more You
Speaker 1:me. You don't need me. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But maybe it's very much the best. But but here's the thing. So people really care about their loyalty clubs. Sure. Right?
Speaker 9:So we found a way to automatically when we onboard you Yeah. To an advantage, we automatically figuring out your number Yeah. For any for every club. Yeah. Also, your, your level.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So that's the part the first component on memory. Jordan, do you want more
Speaker 1:to his loyalty club? Your biggest
Speaker 9:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Is the Erawan one? You always He'll fly any airline but but Most people do care. I I know. I know it's a big deal. I I I actually have never in my career been on the road enough to get any sort of status.
Speaker 1:I think I got like I think I got like bronzed here on Southwest once. Oh, he told Trey Stevens at Founders Club and he laughed his
Speaker 9:You and I are the complete opposite. Maybe I maybe I should not
Speaker 1:and you're leaving time on the table. And Jordy is this guy. He gets to the airport five, sometimes six hours early for a domestic flight with no checked bags. And and I just think I just think thirty minutes before the boarding starts is fine, but who would you side with between me thirty minutes before boarding starts, Jordy five, six, seven hours sometimes before?
Speaker 9:Maybe in between.
Speaker 1:Maybe in between.
Speaker 9:I think I think you owe too much for me. I don't want to be there five minutes before. I I I would hate that.
Speaker 1:Okay. But
Speaker 9:definitely, don't want to spend my entire episode of fun.
Speaker 1:Well, you know you know you know that airport lounges are catering to gamers now. This is in the Wall Street Journal. They're setting up video
Speaker 3:games of a video game addict.
Speaker 1:Navon Navon Cognition preload my Call of Duty account onto the local computer. So when I get there,
Speaker 3:I wanna be in the lobby on Ross vibe do you think coding lounges in airports? Do you think we could see like, you know, you got five minutes before your flight, build the next hit app. Yeah. Could we see something
Speaker 11:like Well,
Speaker 9:I think I think that people went so far with vibe coding, and, you know, and the reality is that when you want to develop the real thing, you are definitely more efficient today, but you cannot vibe code your way to everything. It's like, so, yeah, maybe you cannot vibe everything, you know, on the lounge at the airport. But I do see if sometimes people are vibe coding stuff while they're on a flight. I do see that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big one.
Speaker 1:And then they carry
Speaker 9:It's their back actually a Stingray.
Speaker 1:With the lid open off the plane. I have friends who have been in that situation many many times.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You do see that.
Speaker 3:I usually travel travel with anywhere from like eight to eight to 16 Mac minis and I storm above my seat. I just keep running the
Speaker 1:whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. And and what's pilot. You you you don't bring battery packs.
Speaker 1:You run it off a gas diesel generator. Right? Exactly. With a little camping stove and propane. You got propane there.
Speaker 1:I thought that they didn't allow you to get through TSA, but I guess you just go around.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They really they really make it hard to be running feet, you know, 20 Open Claw instances.
Speaker 1:It's rough. It's rough. But hopefully in the future.
Speaker 3:Anyways, great to hang with you. Congratulations on an awesome quarter. Love seeing the progress and Congratulations. Travel travel super intelligence. You're doing it.
Speaker 1:I love it. Have a great day today. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.
Speaker 1:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 3:A console lounge at the airport.
Speaker 4:A console lounge.
Speaker 3:That would be cool. Pull up this Shrek Luche.
Speaker 1:Shrek Luche. Oh, it has the head. It's
Speaker 3:got a tail.
Speaker 1:Why is it so much more aggressive? No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:This is a terrible AI image because Shrek is notably round. Like, he is very round. It needs to be more round, not sharp and and and all angular like this. I don't like the Shrek Luche at all. I won't be buying it.
Speaker 1:I won't be buying this. Looks like a Mansory Shrek Luche. Give me the ultra rounded, you know, ogre in the swamp. Ideally, put the whole car in a swamp. Alright.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we're working on that. We're cranking
Speaker 3:up the new TBPN meta is is just generating images
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:With chat and then doing an interview and then coming back.
Speaker 1:Coming back to the image. Yeah. We do have our next guest, Jeff from Tensorwave hopping on in about three minutes. So we will chat with him in just a few minutes. There is an update on the Anthropic Fable five safeguards for Frontier LLM development.
Speaker 1:Quote, they told Wired, we're changing Fable five safeguards for Frontier LLM development to make them visible. We made the wrong trade off, and we apologize for not getting the balance right. So that was a very surprising thing. A lot of people were asking, like, how did this happen? Like, it's such an odd decision to secretly degrade the IQ semi analysis who is obviously Sorry.
Speaker 1:I'm laughing
Speaker 3:at this. I'm laughing at the the latest output. Yeah. So Most notably, it still is not gonna allow you to use
Speaker 1:Yes. But it will at least tell you like, hey, this is off limits. You gotta contact support So or it it Dean Ball says it resolves the central concern I had with the Fable release. That said, I suspect the residual broken trust and resentment this created will linger and have a blast radius wider than anthropic. The next time I advocate for any policy justified by AI risk concerns, I almost guarantee you that this institute this incident will be used in rebuttal.
Speaker 1:And so people are going back and forth on that. But there's, you know, plenty of other news. I wanna see this next output, so let's pull
Speaker 9:Pull it up.
Speaker 1:That up. Martin
Speaker 3:Pull it up. I can't wait for you
Speaker 1:to see this. Says imagine building a computer and not allowing its use in CS research. That's some that's very dystopian. And that's a good point. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're a young LLM researcher, AI researcher, you wanna get on that path, that's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm looking for.
Speaker 3:Too It looks like it looks like Bravis came, took the luche and said we're doing this the official Shrek collab.
Speaker 1:It's still it's still a little too sharp for me. I don't know. It's still got some like, there the fact that there's even one clean line on that car, not gonna be purchasing the Shrek Luche. The SpaceX IPO. The SpaceX IPO is SpaceX IPO day is going to be lit.
Speaker 1:Soulja Boy said this in 2015. What did he know? What did he know? What did Okay. He It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:This is fake news. This is fake news. No. Two, going to this proposed note, the depicted 2015 tweet from Soldier Boy does not exist.
Speaker 3:If you were gonna fake this, why would you not say SpaceX will price at a $135 a share?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the year 2020
Speaker 3:in June 2026.
Speaker 1:But we gotta apologize to Matt Zeitlin because he said that retail demand for SpaceX shares would be incredibly high. What he said was the idea that SpaceX is being, quote, dumped on retail is a little silly. Retail almost certainly wants to buy, like, 10 x of whatever is available. And I was going back and forth. Was like, okay.
Speaker 1:Like $70,000,000,000, the retail location might be like 7,000,000,000 or something for this raise. Like, are they really gonna have 70,000,000,000 of demand for retail? And that's exactly what they have.
Speaker 3:No. No. It's more.
Speaker 1:It's more now. But Reuter said SpaceX IPO draws more than 70,000,000,000 in retail orders. And so, yes, this is not getting dumped on retail. Retail wants SpaceX stock very clearly. And what is it at now, Tyler?
Speaker 1:Got a subsidy?
Speaker 5:The latest has sell was a 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:100,000,000,000 of retail demand. They're said to increase So capital.
Speaker 3:Crazy. Really really
Speaker 1:Nick Frost over at Cohere is taking the other side. He doesn't like it. He says before while
Speaker 3:we're on the Matt Zeitlin topic Yeah. Yeah. Matt Zeitlin has a new Apology. Great new article about all the different spin off businesses from SpaceX over the years and how many other kind of like clean energy
Speaker 1:Are you talking about the SpaceX alumni? Like the Yeah. Mafia space.
Speaker 3:Full deep dive on all the different spin off companies.
Speaker 1:There's actually a website Go check it out on Heatmap. So obviously go check it out on Heatmap. But also, alumnifounders.com has a website for for companies that were founded by SpaceX alums. When I first went to this website, it was like a little logo block of like 10 companies. There's now a 152 companies founded by SpaceX alumni.
Speaker 1:$13,500,000,000 raised. They've created 8,280 jobs and ranking them Relativity has raised 1,800,000,000. Base Power has raised 1,300,000,000. Impulse Space has raised 1,000,000,000. Firefly has raised 800,000,000 in the IPO, public company now.
Speaker 1:Apex, Hermes, Radiant, Castilian. Wow. It's it's like every company. Synthago, K2 Space, Ursa Major, Varda, obviously, Reliable Robotic, Star Cloud, Revel, so many others. What a fantastic feeder for a mafia.
Speaker 1:The SpaceX mafia is something we're gonna be hearing a lot about in the coming years, especially post IPO, which happens tomorrow. So tune in. Our next guest is Jeff from TensorWays, cofounder and CGO. How are you doing, Jeff? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 8:Hey. Doing doing good, John. How are you?
Speaker 3:Doing well. Great to
Speaker 1:have so much. Since it is your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the company.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I'm Jeff Tatarchuk, cofounder and chief growth officer. I'd like to say chief GPU officer Mhmm. Here at TensorWave. Our focus is on building out AI infrastructure exclusively with AMD.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I mean, growth officer, that feels like a sales revenue goal. Chief GPU officer feels like an operations, construction, manufacturing, racking, buying, like the other side of the business? Do you touch both? How deeply integrated are those two?
Speaker 1:More GPUs Problems.
Speaker 3:In powered shells, more revenue.
Speaker 8:That's right. Everybody needs GPUs and powered shells and Okay. Getting access to them and I'm the gatekeeper.
Speaker 1:Okay. So lay down the AMD thesis. We can go in that. But let's just start with like how you became interested in AMD. Why now?
Speaker 1:Why? What's the traction? What's the evidence that you're seeing that this is the right choice for your business?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So when AI took off back in 2022, 2023, and there was the big supply constraint around getting access to NVIDIA chips, the company that we had started previously, we were deploying FPGAs at scale. And so we're working with Xilinx and Altera chips and primarily Altera, or primarily Xilinx. And when Xilinx got acquired by AMD, our previous company was working very closely with AMD. They would send us all of the latest and greatest chips, and we'd get them deployed and debugged for them at scale.
Speaker 8:And so that's how we forged this relationship early on with AMD. And we saw, as soon as there was the supply constraint on the NVIDIA side, the opportunity when AMD announced their GPUs back in 2023 for us to be the first to go to market, with their chips at scale.
Speaker 1:And how are you talking to your customers about what AMD can offer? Like, we've seen semi analysis has Inference X, formerly Inference Max, and had some really unique data showing that for certain models, they haven't been able to benchmark everything, especially the proprietary models. But for certain open source architectures, AMD is actually maybe more cost effective on a token per dollar basis. But what data are you leaning on? What questions are people asking you?
Speaker 1:And then I'm super interested to understand how companies are thinking about where the integration, if they do want to migrate from CUDA over to AMD, like what goes into that? How costly is that? It was seen as impenetrable, impossible. Now it's looking more and more feasible. But what are companies saying about Yeah.
Speaker 1:The trade offs involved in being on AMD?
Speaker 8:Yeah, so in the very beginning when the supply constraint issues happened, people were just looking for more options. And AMD was the only option that was available, and so at the very beginning people wanted to just try it and see if it worked. So AMD, when they first launched, launched with the emphasis on scaling out inference at And so being able to support inference and support some of the hyperscalers was their first focus. Then as more labs started getting on and testing it, they realized that there were some gaps in the software. You know, it seemed like the hardware story had gotten out ahead of the software story.
Speaker 8:And so that's where we were able to help lean in with AMD to help fill some of those gaps by giving them access and helping debug things along the way. And so, yeah, the frustration that customers had around not wanting to be locked into one vendor, not giving all of their margin to Jensen forced them, and they were willing to look at other options that were available on the market. And so we were there, you know, every step of the way to help fill some of those gaps as customers were considering what is that leap going from CUDA to ROCKM And on
Speaker 1:the big public story that played out around that time, you're probably referring to George Hotz flagging some bugs, eventually getting on the phone with Lisa Hsu, going full founder mode in the CEO seat and watching Rock'em develop and actually crush a lot of those bugs. Obviously, some people have flawless experiences. Some people probably still run into problems every once in while. That's going to happen. But a really good turning of the tide, really good different way to interact with the developer community.
Speaker 1:I'm interested to know like how how big do you have to be to go multi platform now? Do you have to be one of the trillion dollar labs or are there smaller companies that say, hey, we have this model that we're fine tuning. It's pretty good. It's built on some open source architecture. And we'd like the flexibility to not be locked into one chip.
Speaker 1:But is that a million dollar endeavor? Like, you know, a year of 10 researchers' time? Like, how are we bucketing this idea of of diversifying the the options for a company?
Speaker 8:Yeah. That was a question that a lot of companies had. What is the switching cost of going from CUDA going to ROCCM? And we were able to show, I mean, the early days, right, back in back in 2023, Databricks was able to show that you could switch from you can go from NVIDIA and switch to AMD and it works out of the box in the early days. And so being able to showcase that and focus on the most important use cases that the majority of AI companies are using and optimizing those things over time was AMD's focus.
Speaker 8:And Lisa did a great job, like you mentioned, she did go into founder mode. She lit a fire over there to make sure that her team was emphasizing building the developer community, building out the resources necessary, and as Anush over there, who's the CVP of AI.
Speaker 1:Yep, we've had Anush, he's Yeah,
Speaker 8:I love what he says. He says speed has become the mode. They've been able to move even faster now. And with all these coding cogen tools that are available, they're able to even move even faster to help fill and close the gap on that supposed CUDA moat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of times people sort of put AI as like a monolith. And I mean, we were talking yesterday about how just in the customer support, we're talking about Brett Taylor at Sierra, just in the customer support world, you know, speed might not matter for agentically going and solving a problem in the back end after a customer support ticket closed. But if you're on the phone with someone and you need a real time voice model, it might actually make sense to co locate that or distribute that. We talked to Matthew Prince from Cloudflare about this, that there are certain models that need to be in certain places.
Speaker 1:Speed might be more important. Others, it's just raw horsepower. It's going to take an hour anyway. Send it off to the big data center. But I'm interested in the other pockets.
Speaker 1:Like, where is AMD poised already in the lead or poised to take the lead in images or video or voice or real time or agentic work or integration between the GPU and the CPU? Like, is there something where you're particularly excited? I mean, I noticed Luma AI is a customer. They obviously do creative work. And I'm just wondering if there's something where you're oh yeah, like they've nailed like this particular architecture is great.
Speaker 1:And like obviously there's other work to be done. There's more cost on certain workflows because those were developed at DeepMind on TPU or at some other company on Nvidia. But is there any place where you're like, AMD's really nail it in this subcategory of AI?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, they started off great on the hardware side and focusing on adding more HVM than what you can find on a comparable NVIDIA chip. And so having more h v m allows for workloads that are running larger models to run on fewer GPUs and to do it faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you have the CUDA moat as as you put it. Is it is there like a who who's building the bridge? Like, do you need a bridge to go over a moat? Like, I imagine that there's companies, you're probably among them, that are specifically building software that can translate any architecture from NVIDIA to AMD?
Speaker 1:Like how close are we to just that being one click of a button?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, one of the things that I found as we were digging into understanding more about what NVIDIA was doing, understanding what that CUDA mode actually was, and talking to a lot of the original engineers that helped build CUDA from the ground up. Yeah. One of the guys that's on our team, Greg Diamos, was there in the very beginning building CUDA at NVIDIA, And he had always said that CUDA was always built to go beyond CUDA, and to to scale out infrastructure. And so one of the things that that we've as we've talked to people, they said that CUDA is not the mode of NVIDIA.
Speaker 8:Their ecosystem is the mode. And the resources and developers and libraries that they have poured into over the last ten, fifteen years is the mode. And that's the maturity that exists today. And so as AMD is building that out and as we are supporting them, we find the important thing is to focus on building out an ecosystem Ecosystem. To support the to support AMD.
Speaker 8:We don't focus on software ourselves, but we have a lot of other companies that are trying to solve that problem to create a heterogeneous stack to be able to switch between chips. And so bringing together those people, showcasing all the different layers that are existing
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Beyond the NVIDIA ecosystem is is what my current focus is on today.
Speaker 3:Where where are you setting up your supercomputers? Some people call them data centers, we call them supercomputers.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We we have supercomputers all over. We have Arizona, Florida, Pittsburgh and have data centers going up all over North America currently.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Awesome. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We raised 350,000,000 series b. Here we go. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Great to you, Jeff.
Speaker 1:Great to be here.
Speaker 3:Thanks to the team on
Speaker 8:the Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Do you have another AI image for me? Or are we moving on to our next guest, Matthew Joseph from Minerva? He's a co founder and CEO. And he's in the waiting room. We'll get back to you next.
Speaker 1:What's going on? After we talk to Minerva founder, Matthew Joseph. How are you doing, Matthew? Good to meet you.
Speaker 3:Good. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastically. How
Speaker 3:are you going?
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I'm MJ. I'm the CTO and co founder of Minerva, as you guys said before. Yeah. Minerva is an AI platform for consumer marketing.
Speaker 7:So, basically, we help consumer brands unify their first party data, which sits in, like, you know, 20 different data systems like Klaviyo, Shopify, whatever. We standardize it. We resolve it. We create kind of a golden record, and then we optimize sales and marketing on top of that using a bunch of active agents that we developed.
Speaker 1:Do do you how much of this is, like, data for, like, the CFO of a consumer brand to understand return on ad spend versus, like actually taking it through to a creative tool, closing the loop and integrating with like generative content, writing marketing briefs, maybe even generating copy, probably not in your models directly, but you know, throughout that and and harnessing everything together.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's actually more data on the consumer. Okay. And so we have a really, really expansive dataset on two hundred seven hundred Americans
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Including an identity graph, is also pretty expansive. We have about, like, 10,000,000,000 pieces of PII. Sure. And so we help the CMO and the performance marketer kind of understand their consumer base better. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So when you're looking at the funnel and seeing where people are dropping off or you're looking at, like, the email copy that you're creating, you need to understand who you're actually sending that message to. We understand that, so we can kind of do it both ways. Right? We could be generative and say, hey. You're marketing to this kind of person, so you should say this.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then we can do the opposite where we can kind of diagnose inefficiencies based off of demographics.
Speaker 1:What is give us sort of a case study from the NBA. Like NBA is in the news obviously. Seems like people show up with plenty of money. I don't know that you need any like like what questions do you need other than what's your credit card number because I got a $100,000 ticket here for you and you'll you'll pay whatever it takes to get to this game.
Speaker 7:Yeah. With the NBA, we're part of their fan graph. Mhmm. So we power a lot of their consumer analytics that they end up selling to all their downstream teams. Sure.
Speaker 7:But even at the team level, there's a ton of different case studies that we are starting to prop up right now where, you know, if you have super expensive seating but you're in Oklahoma City, you might need to find people that are out of town from a road game that might wanna buy that seat. Right? Oh, sure. So flavors like that like, case studies like that are what we're gunning for. But with the NBA in general, it's mostly powering the consumer analytics platform.
Speaker 3:How do you guys actually interact with different ad platforms? Let's say Meta or AdWords, TikTok, etcetera.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So with Meta, we'll find audiences that we know convert at a very, very high rate
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:For specific products because we have an understanding of kind of the right demographic to market to. And so it'll create lookalike audiences that are seeds on Meta, and they'll generally outperform broad targeting by a pretty fair margin. We've seen in luxury travel, luxury goods, our ROAS improvements are around like three to five x broad targeting.
Speaker 3:Wow. How quickly can you prove to companies that the product works?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It it depends on kind of the the case study. For data, you can immediately identify inefficiencies in your pipeline. So people in a day will be like, oh, you guys are, like, absolutely changing where we're allocating spend. For things like meta, things like direct mail campaigns, it takes a little bit longer to get stat sig, but you can get you can get an idea of how well you're actually gonna be performing pretty quickly.
Speaker 7:So what we generally see, you know, within a week that, you know, our data and our audiences perform better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the what what are, like, the biggest, broadest meta trends in consumer marketing these days? I mean, we went through, like, the the the Facebook direct targeting, direct response boom. We went through the influencer by YouTube ads boom. But in the age of AI, think everyone's expecting just like AI generated ads.
Speaker 1:But is there some other trend where like you can target a smaller audience so you can go on a more niche platform so you might see more uplift from a pre a platform that previously wasn't ROI positive? Like, what else are you seeing in terms of just broad marketing trends?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think a pretty interesting one right now is retargeting on AI driven traffic.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:So a person who comes in through, like, a chat GBT platform or, like, a pod or whatever will behave very differently than a person who came in through direct. And so being able to understand that funnel is super, super important. So retargeting on top of that is something that's pretty interesting and and kind of booming right now.
Speaker 1:Do you have a thesis on, like, how or why they behave differently? Like, if I I It seems like it's not a conversion. Like, if I'm landing on a web page after doing a deep research report on a product, I've learned so much, so I'm probably not gonna need to scroll the product detail page. I'm probably either just wanna jump to checkout or I wanna do something else to verify something that I learned in the chat app.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of these trends are happening kind of in the last year. I still think the average user of AI, especially, you know, for kind of deep research is probably a little bit more advanced than the Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know,
Speaker 7:the the 65 year old, like, in Oklahoma City. Oh, I keep picking Oklahoma City, so I'm sorry about that. But but I I think it does boil down to demographics. In three years, this can totally change. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, AI is it's truly commonplace in every single household, which is getting there. Yeah. Oh, you know, over time, this will definitely change.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What percentage of the creative that your customers are running do you think is heavily generated with AI or influenced by AI or created in process?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'm seeing a huge trend towards AI generated AI generated creative. There's a lot of, like, weird little things that you need to keep in mind when you're using AI generated creative, like where you're placing text relative to the rest of the creative. I mean, it it's really hard to execute well. This is something that we are looking into right now as we have, you know, a very good read on the actual demographics.
Speaker 7:And so creative is kind of the next logical piece there. Right? In terms of
Speaker 3:percentage If you're gonna create a lookalike audience for somebody and then you're telling them like, hey, you should put spend behind this. You should you're also in a pretty good position to theoretically, as models get better, say like, here's, you know, a 100 pieces of content that you can run against them and then they can select, okay, what what fits our brand, what doesn't.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Yeah. That that's exactly right. It's like the next logical step. Right?
Speaker 7:Just automating the entire process from, you know, product to cohort fit to creative fit. We we're in a position to do all of that. And I'm I'm happy to be part of kind of like the the rise in in creative generated by AI.
Speaker 1:I wonder if find a lookalike audience of people that just love AI slop and you just feed them the sloppiest ads and then people that because a lot of people don't like the AI slop, but niche audience out there that's like
Speaker 3:It would stop
Speaker 1:I'm buying if there are six fingers.
Speaker 3:Matt, you'll appreciate you'll appreciate this. We obviously love ads, firm supporters of ads, all stuff. But somehow I ended out in like a ended up in a holdout
Speaker 1:Don't say this. They're gonna take you
Speaker 3:ended up in a holdout on Meta where I do not get any ads. Like I'm in the probably like point o 5% of people that they're like testing engagement with. And I'm like, I'm the wrong guy to test on. But I just I just realized one day I was like, wait, I have not gotten an ad It's weird. On on Instagram in months.
Speaker 3:And still to this day, absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1:Imagine they run this experiment, whole whole group, no ads and they just find like massive depression. Just massive rates of depression. They're like, we gotta bring back that. That'd be the most
Speaker 3:mental health.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Maybe. Know, consumerism, shop
Speaker 3:Talk about the round.
Speaker 1:Shop therapy or whatever.
Speaker 7:So we raised so we raised 20 mil between the CNA from EPPN, Pengado, General Partnership, Metrology, many other investors that I've probably forgotten to name, but very very stoked for all their support. We love all the teams we work with.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Very cool. I got some brands to connect you to. Yeah. So send me an I'll email.
Speaker 3:I'll with with the quick pitch I'll CC you in with some. That'd be great.
Speaker 7:Will do.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thank you. It's me,
Speaker 1:man. The rest of your day.
Speaker 7:Mixing five. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Me tell you about.com, investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bond, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.
Speaker 3:What do say? For San Antonio. I feel like everyone like I feel like it's relatively easy to rally these people in our world around New York City.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Like, it's easy to be a bandwagon fan from the Knicks because New York, you visited, you've Yeah.
Speaker 1:Been
Speaker 3:The big Apple.
Speaker 1:That makes
Speaker 3:Hard to really rally around San Antonio. Have you been to San Antonio? No. Would you like to go to San Antonio?
Speaker 1:Sure. Strong Wait. Where is San Antonio? It's in
Speaker 3:TBPN San Antonio.
Speaker 1:It's in Texas.
Speaker 3:We're doing it. But I
Speaker 1:always think Houston, Dallas Is San Antonio the third in that in that tri state the three cities that connect?
Speaker 3:We're sending Tyler to San Antonio to figure out what's going on. Yeah. What's in the water?
Speaker 1:Get to the bottom of it. I don't know. Well, Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's biggest talent representative and our agent, is starting a new company to invest in YouTube stars and podcasters who want to be the next Oprah Winfrey or Reese Witherspoon. CAA and the integrated media company integrated media company, an investment arm of private equity firm, TBPN, that's Texas Pacific Group, formerly, have pledged $250,000,000 to Compound Creative Holdings, a new company that will acquire and invest in businesses founded by entertainers who got their start online. Compound will be led by Tucker Brown, an investment banker who has already helped raise money for the YouTube trick shot masters at Dude Perfect and the liberal podcasters at the Midas Touch Network.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Are you familiar with Midas Touch? With the m e I d a s? At one point, this podcast was bigger than the than Joe Rogan. It jumped to the top.
Speaker 1:I did not realize that it was a political show. The network describes itself as doing pro democracy journalism. Is this I'm so confused because the the YouTube the the yeah. This is definitely it. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I thought it I thought it was something else. I thought it was more in like the Alex or Mozi category because Midas Touch, of course, the golden touch. Midas Touch, I thought it was more about like wealth creation. Interesting. CA represents many
Speaker 3:Very interested to see what deals they do here.
Speaker 11:Cool.
Speaker 3:And we're working on getting the team on the show. Yeah. Talk about it.
Speaker 1:I turned to Spotter like outlets. Outlets like Spotter to raise money by trading a share of their future earnings on YouTube. Yeah. If you have a YouTube video and it's doing really well and it's getting views bringing in ad revenue every every month, There's a company called Spotter where you can go and sell the future revenue stream for cash today to finance your operation or just take some chips off the table, much like selling your, you know, the rights to your record collection, essentially. There's a lot of capital in the market generally and a lot of interest in creator businesses, but there aren't many educated capital platforms dedicated to invest in the category specifically.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. There's only a few that do these types of deals. Obviously, Barstool raised money at multiple times. And there's been others that have been successful, but it is a thin crowd. Compound will focus on creators who have built media businesses generating at least tens of millions of dollars in sales and could use capital to expand their operations.
Speaker 1:The company isn't interested in just buying a share of revenue from YouTube or Instagram and tying their fate to an algorithm. They wanna buy a piece of the whole holding company, the media company. Brown estimates there are hundreds of creators that fit their initial investment strategy. That talent can be born on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, or Substack. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:We haven't really seen a Substack raise money. I guess the free press was on Substack for a long time. I think they still might be, and did raise money and scale up and hire a bunch of journalists and writers. Interesting. Leaders from CIA and IMC including CIA co chairman Kevin, President Jim said, we'll sit on an executive committee that oversees Compound.
Speaker 1:Celebrities of all stripes have embraced entrepreneurship of online creators, starting businesses in entertainment, fashion, food, retail. Witherspoon Reese Witherspoon sold her company Hello Sunshine in a deal that value valued the firm at as much as $900,000,000, while George Clooney and other clients sold his tequila company, Casamigos, for I think also around that number, a huge, huge outcome. We've been looking for ways as an agency to double down on our efforts outside of core representation. And Paki McCormick gives Tucker a shout out. He says, Tucker has been one of my best friends since high school.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize he went back so far. He's single best person in the world to be doing this. Agree with that. He's going to crush it 100%. People always called him the less hot version of me.
Speaker 1:That's very funny if you know them both. Anyway, Lions Gate has taken an an equity interest in Runway and they will be launching a new joint venture program to develop and produce new intellectual property. This is gonna be wildly popular amongst film film fans and cinephiles I'm sure. Lionsgate and leading generative AI company. I love runway, Cristobal, former guest of the show.
Speaker 1:Runway to announce an expansion of their strategic collaboration deepening the company's shared commitment to a future where AI and entertainment grow together. That's good. The preferred partnership with Runway is part of Liongate's multifaceted AI strategy under the leadership of chief AI officer Kathleen Grace and the studio's AI steering committee. So it'll be interesting to see what Lionsgate does. Lionsgate films.
Speaker 1:Can you name one? I don't think I can name one. They did Saw. That's interesting. There you go.
Speaker 1:What else did they do? American Psycho. That's a meme. The Punisher, Hostel, Rambo.
Speaker 3:It'd be interesting to rank movies by John how many Wick.
Speaker 1:Did the whole John Wick
Speaker 3:Listen to this, John. Yeah. John Wick. Ranking movies by how many memes they've created. Right?
Speaker 3:Because like American Psycho.
Speaker 4:Tons.
Speaker 3:Tons.
Speaker 1:John Wick has a meme.
Speaker 3:What's that?
Speaker 1:It's the I'm thinking I'm back. Yeah. I'm thinking I'm back. That's the meme. Anyway, Sicario, Hitman's Bodyguard, Den of Thieves, Greenland.
Speaker 1:Good stuff. Will be interesting to see what they're doing. Maybe just background replacement. Maybe John Wick six will be entirely AI generated, one shotted by the next model. You never know.
Speaker 1:Lions Gate's going all in.
Speaker 3:Can't Keanu Reeves cannot be AI generated. I think every other
Speaker 1:Corridor and crew would like to differ. They got a they hired a Keanu Reeves impersonator to do a, like, a a a basically, the whole shtick was, like, they're gonna try and create a viral video and someone's robbing a, like, a corner store, like a seven Eleven. And the and the impersonator, the Keanu Reeves impersonator stops the assailant, and then they used a deep fake to change the face of the of the impersonator to Keanu Reeves to make a very convincing to make a very convincing Keanu Reeves saves the day video that I think went viral and confused a lot of people, but was a lot of fun. They did a whole bunch of back, like, behind the scenes content. Anyway, we have our next guest, Ade Adej from Base Ten, who's the managing partner.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 11:Good morning, guys. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Let's get right to it. How much did you raise? And John, give me the hardest Gong hit of your life. Amp it up a little bit.
Speaker 11:850,000,000. Boom. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:$2,600,000,000 in assets. But it is your first time on the show, so why don't we go back in time a little bit and give us some of your background and how you got into investing, how you scaled up this fund.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So the accent is Spanish. The name is Nigerian. Mhmm. Early childhood in Nigeria, then Southern Spain.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And like you guys, I was a founder. So I I went to college in Madrid. I started my first company when I was in college in Madrid, which was not very popular occupation in Spain at the time.
Speaker 3:Oh, I thought you were saying that the company wasn't very popular. Like, you got into some hot water. Maybe you're
Speaker 11:The company the the being a founder was not very popular. The company became very popular. So we we were 20. We became the equivalent of Facebook in Spain. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And to to give you a sense, we started in o five. We sold to Telefonica in 2010. And when we sold, we were about 60% of daily Internet traffic in Spain. Woah. Wow.
Speaker 11:That was that was my priority.
Speaker 3:What what was it called? Sorry. That I'm not 20.
Speaker 11:So, like, 20 because it was for 20 years old. But the Hispanic phonetic pronunciation. Sure. C t u e n t I.
Speaker 3:Oh. I remember I remember now it's all coming back. It's all coming back because I I have some very good family friends in Spain. I've spent a decent amount of time there, including a a summer in Madrid at one point. And, yeah, I I remember it.
Speaker 3:Very, very cool product.
Speaker 1:So talk about the strategy. $850,000,000, that's a lot of capital for seed series a series b. Jeff Bezos raised a $12,000,000,000 series b today. And there's this odd k shaped dynamic in venture where the letters don't really mean anything anymore because you can raise a $2,000,000 $10,000,000 Series B, dollars 10,000,000,000 Series B. Where are you seeing opportunity?
Speaker 1:What is the early medium stage market? What are you looking for in the companies that you fund?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we we we so that we invest in automation for the real economy. Mhmm. And and to give you a sense, when we launched the fund in 2018
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:We actually said, hey. We're going to invest in applied AI for the real economy. And the feedback from the LPs was like, hey. Applied AI is not a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's awesome. So it's true. It sounds niche. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 11:So, like, why don't you, like, do something real?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So we call it automation. We're like, okay. Well, we're just saying that people are going to use a lot more AI in, like, logistics and restaurants and transportation. So it's it's no longer niche. Yeah.
Speaker 11:And now, as you were saying, we have this crazy dynamic where, like, you know, we we we sold 20 for a 100,000,000, and that was a big deal. Yeah. Now that is like, there's some y c companies that raise that. Right? After we say
Speaker 3:Not just raise that a $100,000,000 valuation, but just raise a 100,000,000.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Raise a 100,000,000. Yeah. So it's a it's a completely new world, which is fun. Like, that that that's fantastic.
Speaker 11:And what I tell the founders we invest in today is like, man, I'm so happy I don't have to compete with you Mhmm. Because you guys are so good.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And there is so much happening. So I would say apply AI to the real economy, which these days means a lot.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. How are you
Speaker 1:thinking about services as a as software, that whole trend? It does feel like there's an opportunity to not train a foundation model, not build a robot, be very capital light, go apply the tools that are already well beyond what's actually implemented in the real world, close the capability overhang, make a bunch of money in the process, maybe you build some software, maybe you get some some customers on long contracts and the business works profitable. That sounds great. At the same time, you sort of veer into, like, are you just a consulting firm? How are you talking to founders?
Speaker 1:What are you seeing? What models are working?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Great question. So there are a lot of labels in, like, you know, AI enabled services, AI first applications. I like to spend a lot of time talking to clients.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Like, you know, calling the the logistic companies, the transportation companies, and they don't really care Mhmm. What the label is. They just want it done. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 11:It's like, hey. At the end of the day, I need to move this package from here to here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:I need to, like, get this cash from this client. What can you offer me that works Yeah. That I can trust, and that is fast, and that is not terribly expensive. So we try to, like, avoid a little bit of the labels and then, like, go to what does a client want and need at the end. And I think there are going to be many business models that are successful.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. It's changing very fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:For my own curiosity, what how is Spain thinking about AI? Do they have a sovereign AI strategy? I don't know how closely you follow it. It must be at least
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 11:we we we could be here all day. Look, we we are a little bit more technology forward than when we started '20 Yeah. But not quite San Francisco yet. Yeah. I will say that I get a lot of text messages, from my friends back in my hometown who are, you know, running restaurants and hotels being like, hey.
Speaker 11:Have you heard of this thing called clot?
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And and that that fills me with joy. As a country, honestly, we still need to get our strategy together. And although the culture is changing and, actually, one one thing that makes me very proud is that in the last year, we have founded four different Spanish teams here in San Francisco that have moved to San Francisco to start companies, and they are crushing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Back
Speaker 11:home, we still talk a little bit more about the World Cup than about AI. So we need to, like, change that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, that's, I guess, fair for this next month.
Speaker 1:Talk to us about
Speaker 3:Then after that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to us about coffee. How does that fit into a portfolio? I mean, is there a linkage? Is it just a good business by itself?
Speaker 1:Is it just a passion of yours? What's the coffee thesis?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So so, look, we we are a research first fan, and we're always like, hey. What is what is going to happen to the construction market or the logistics market with robots? And as you guys know, all that's when I'm good, and then really early stage investor is all about the people. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So when we met the Blank Street Coffee guys, they were like, look. Coffee's big. We're like, okay. We can agree on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:I, you know, that that we only have a of research with that. But, honestly, it's one of the best pitches I I have ever, like, heard in my life. They were just like, look. We're both, like, sons of immigrants and, like, immigrants ourselves. I'm like, did you know that 80% of coffee carts in New York are, like, rollover by immigrants and is a a great path to, like, building wealth for the family and staying in the country?
Speaker 11:And, like, that's where we want to power. And we're like, okay. And and the automation? And they were like, well, the coffee cart is going to be great and, like, completely automated. And we're like, okay.
Speaker 11:We don't exactly know what that means right now, but these guys are awesome. Mhmm. So we should be the bet we should, write the best tech, and that turned out to go great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's funny because there are there are examples of similar stories and then and then it not going that great. So, yeah, it's it's it's so difficult to fix the to to square all of that when you see opportunity, but ultimately, you find, like, the alignment and then everything works out. What do you do you think in deployment pacing? Do you think in, like, two year deployment, ten year horizon?
Speaker 1:Like, is that changing in the modern era with so much uncertainty? I mean, talked to Matthew Prince from Cloudflare about like and we talked to a number of people about it's hard to plan two years, three years in advance if you're a public company CEO. Also hard to plan ahead if you're a venture capitalist, but, that's sort of what you're paid to do.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I I know. Look. We we have a state remarkably consistent on that. Like, all our funds have been, like, two and a half years to three years deployed.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And we are going to do the same thing with this set of funds. Yeah. It is more tempting than ever to deploy very fast. Like and and I'm an optimist, so we are we're currently in the this is Y Combinator week.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Right? So I want to back, like, 50% of founders that I make or more. Yeah. And my team is like, I stopped.
Speaker 11:Yeah. We we can't we can't do that. Yeah. Like, you're right. You're right.
Speaker 11:It's just, ah, there's so much to build, and these these founders are so good. But we have built systems internally to make sure that we have that discipline because to your point, although it's very tempting and a lot of things are growing very fast, there is so much change
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:That we want to get a little bit of feedback loop, a little bit of data of, hey. Okay. We are three and a half years into AI or whatnot. Yeah. What happens in year five?
Speaker 11:Yep. And we want exposure to that as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Time. Congratulations on the fundraise.
Speaker 3:Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 1:Thank you, guys. To you soon. Have a good one. Awesome. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in
Speaker 3:of internet traffic on our on our company built in college.
Speaker 1:Insane. Crazy. Insane. Yeah. That's such a such a high such an impactful company.
Speaker 1:So good. Well, yeah. What what
Speaker 3:doom scrolling.
Speaker 1:He invented the Spanish group doom scroll. No. I'm sure it was it was probably messaging driven, probably more post driven. But that is yeah. That is remarkable.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have our next guest, Jeremy Fraenkel, the fundamental co founder of senior in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. What's going on? How are doing, Jeremy? Good to be here.
Speaker 6:You guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 4:for having me on.
Speaker 1:I wanna get straight into World Cup predictions, wagers, all of this. But first, introduce yourself and the company a little bit. What are you working on? And then let's go through the the broader news and applications.
Speaker 4:Awesome. Yeah. I'm Jeremy. I'm the CEO and Co Founder at Fundamental. Fundamental built a foundation model for tabular data.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So when most people think about the AI boom, they think about LLMs, you know, like Cloud. But what's less appreciated is that LLMs work well with unstructured data. So they might text, audio, video. But the global economy and enterprises really run unstructured data, on tables, such as spreadsheets, databases, CRMs. And that's, you know, the part of the enterprise that really never had a Charge moment.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And that's a market opportunity that we're focusing on. Yeah. And so what we're doing for tables is what Charge epti did for language. Yep.
Speaker 4:We pretrained the model on billions of tables to understand how the world works in rows and columns. And so we created one model that generalizes across industries and use cases to allow companies to make better predictions and decisions on their data.
Speaker 1:Yep. Okay. So everyone is gonna say all the frontier models, they can spin up a spreadsheet. They can speak CSV. They can write Python that generates and manages tables and tabular data.
Speaker 1:And the frontier is the frontier. It's always the best. But you're going to effectively be benchmarking your product against the frontier models around the World Cup. Walk us through the the strategy, the wager, what's actually at stake there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in Belgium, and I'm a huge soccer fan. And a lot of us at the company are also big soccer fans. And so what we realized is that, you know, historical team performances and games can be structured in rows and columns. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so we started thinking around the office, like, can we actually use our model Nexus to make predictions on the World Cup? Mhmm. And he said, like, you know, maybe betting markets are off, and we are right. So, like, we want to see how good our model was. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And the funny thing is that at the core of our model, you know, our company is focused on enterprises. So we're not really a consumer focused but we, you know, thought we could have some fun with it. And so before doing anything, we wanted to see how good our model was historically. And so what we did is we trained our model to with data up until the 2022 work job. And so data such as who won in different international games, the quality of the teams, whether games were at home or abroad, and we ran more than 20,000 simulations.
Speaker 4:And what we what our model Nexus predicted or identified is that Argentina would be the eventual winner way before bookmarkers did. Mhmm. So if you look at what the market actually predicted, the market predicted that Brazil was going to win the twenty twenty two World Cup up until the quarterfinals when Brazil got knocked out, and our model was much more accurate than that. And so we said, you know what? Let's apply the same thing for the twenty twenty six World Cup.
Speaker 4:And our model already differs meaningfully from what betting markets are predicting, so I'm excited to see what next
Speaker 1:win, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Wish. America America has a 0.5 chance of winning the world according to our model.
Speaker 1:There's a chance. I like these odds. I'll take these odds any day.
Speaker 3:John loves betting on himself.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:How's Belgium? Fair.
Speaker 4:Belgium Belgium is at slightly less than 2% but I honestly have I have faith.
Speaker 3:Okay. And then Belgium. Yeah. What's the population of Belgium roughly?
Speaker 4:Eleven eleven million.
Speaker 3:How many? 11,000,011. So a population of 11,000,000. Absolute mocking. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Population of
Speaker 1:So so are you also benchmarking the other frontier models just going to the different models, open source models and just asking them the same questions? Who do you predict will win? Build a probability table, and then benchmark those as well because I think you're gonna wanna not just say that you're better than the sports books, but you're also gonna wanna say you're better than the frontier models. Correct?
Speaker 4:Yeah. But the frontier models themselves don't really work well with, like, predictions. Right? So, like
Speaker 1:But they could take a I mean, they could predict the next token. So they can, like, take a wild guess, then if you smoke them, it looks good. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We we we could try that. We've not done that. We could definitely try it. But, like, you know, it's funny because, like, frontier models, like, especially for predictions, they sound right.
Speaker 4:But then they are not actually correct, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and with ChatGPT, was the personalization. And in the personalization, I said, like, never bet against America. So I'm sure it would just say, like, 100%. So, yeah, you probably smoke it.
Speaker 3:Who who are like, how are you who are you projecting to to win? What are what are kind of, like, the kind of key predictions that that we should be tracking as the World Cup kicks off?
Speaker 4:The betting markets have Spain and France neck and neck, and we heavily favor Spain over France. Oh. The market also predicts that Argentina, I think, has, like, the fifth largest chance of winning according to the market, and we predict them as strong runner ups.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Okay. So Spain, Argentina, Spain winning would look really good for you relative to the sports book.
Speaker 4:Correct. But I would be happy if Messi wins the second World Cup.
Speaker 3:Sure. Tell us about the company. You recently raised some money?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we raised $275,000,000.
Speaker 3:Who'd you raise it from?
Speaker 4:We raised it from Oak, Valor, Battery Ventures, Salesforce, and then a bunch of big angels like Alvin Srinivas from Perplexity Oh, yeah. Asav Rappaport from Wiz and a few others.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Strong. Keep us posted Yeah. As the the World Cup progresses. And we're rooting I'm not even rooting for any team.
Speaker 3:I'm just rooting for your predictions. I want you to know that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I appreciate it. And everyone can go and see them on soccer.fundamental.tech.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Soccer.fundamental.tech.
Speaker 1:There we Great to
Speaker 3:meet you, Jeremy. Thanks. It'll be fun to follow along.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Have a rest of your day. In other fundraising news, Thrive is out with $10,000,000,000. Got a little mocked by Bezos with the $12,000,000,000 raise, but not bad.
Speaker 5:Not bad.
Speaker 1:Thrive ten and it's 10,000,000,000, exceeding 10,000,000,000, the largest ever, nearly double the size of the last fund for Thrive. 1,000,000,000 for early stage, 9,000,000,000 for growth. Biggest bets, just to remind you, OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, Andoril, Cursor are all in the Thrive portfolio and a bunch of other companies. So those have become the defining private companies in the current cycle. The strategy is concentrated founder loyal, allergic to indexing the market.
Speaker 1:The Fifth Avenue strategy as discussed on invest like the best, and Patrick O'Shaughnessy is is chiming in. Josh Kirchner says, in markets, to go long on something is to bet, it grows more valuable over time. Much of the conversation today is short on humans wagering that AI makes people redundant. We believe the opposite is true for industries Thrive Holdings operates in. And Patrick O'Shaughnessy shares a transcript from Invest Like the Best.
Speaker 1:They said the North Star for the next decade of Thrive is if we are a company and we have a product, what are the products that we can create that make us look more like the businesses that we ultimately invest in? The second part is the story of the story is after we invested in OpenAI, the business had $50,000,000 in API revenue and several and several of us went around New York City and started pitching a bunch of the private equity firms on this idea that they could use the API to create greater efficiency within their businesses. We were somewhat surprised by the fact that we did not get meaningful traction around these ideas. So Karim, to his credit, said, let's just start doing this ourselves. We've always looked at the world that we've lived in as one that needed to disrupt from an outside in perspective.
Speaker 1:If you were to think about the paradigm shift of reinforcement learning, the things that you need are both data and that is proprietary to the company, but also the experts that exist at the company to fine tune the model. We believe that going forward disruption will happen from the inside out. We set up this permanent capital vehicle that enables us to buy these businesses and hold them in perpetuity because if you actually have a differentiated unique lens and cost of capital around these businesses and you're able to transform them in ways in which you ultimately want to hold on to them forever. So congrats to Thrive on the new round.
Speaker 3:Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Great stuff.
Speaker 1:The new front. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow for the We're SpaceX
Speaker 3:gonna just be hanging out.
Speaker 1:We're hanging out.
Speaker 3:No guess. We're gonna have the stock price
Speaker 1:Yeah. On the big board. Be fun. We'll see you tomorrow. Time.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Throwing flashbang.