Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You are watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 10/02/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. How many days... Days. Eighty three days...
Speaker 1:But you already knew that. We don't even have to tell you
Speaker 2:at Christmas this is going strong.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Get ready. Lock in. Also, sign up for RAMP. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 2:Easiest corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Oh, we're getting Christmasy up in here. Okay.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 2:Very Christmasy. It's q four. We're in the correct we're in the correct season now. So we get pretty Christmas y. That is right.
Speaker 2:It's pretty tricky to stay in the Well.
Speaker 1:Little... Enough about Christmas, John. Let's let's get into the news.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about artificial intelligence. Sounds great. Yeah. So make it less Christmas y. It's too Christmas y.
Speaker 2:It's eighty three days This is a this is no more than twenty days
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Away
Speaker 2:before we get that that Christmas.
Speaker 1:I'll just leave this
Speaker 2:on. Okay. Oh, just one level of Christmas.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 2:October 7. October 2. Yeah. So there there was this funny moment in Dev Day this week where, you know, everyone's, like, focused on the war of, like, DOS versus Muse versus Instinct. And and there were a couple times where you're like, I wanna talk about sign in with ChatGPT, which is, like, the most, like, boring and, like, minute feature and not...
Speaker 2:Very much not in, like, the drama war for the personal agent where who's gonna do your shopping, who's gonna book your...
Speaker 1:No. I just thought it was cool for independent developers Exactly. Small app builders.
Speaker 2:It's actually like probably more immediately relevant to the community that was there, like the developers. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and do you remember when, like, flashback to two years ago, people were creating these magical new product experiences Yep. With, the best models at the time, but they were, in in hindsight, pretty rudimentary.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And they would build something magical, scale up really quickly and then be like, woah, I'm just got stuck with like a $30,000 API bill. Yep. And so this is the solve for that Yep. Because it allows users to bring their own
Speaker 2:Compute. Compute. BYOC? BYOC. Everyone knows BYOB.
Speaker 2:Now we're in the era of BYOC. And and and and... Yeah. Like, you know, most companies, they could usually figure out a way to say, hey. Like, this service is gonna use a ton of compute, so you gotta jump on the pro plan immediately.
Speaker 2:You gotta set up a consumption, a credit card relationship, API credit, something like that, metered billing. But it was just an extra step, an extra point of friction of you saying, like, okay, I already paid $10 a month for this thing. Now I got to actually pay for inference. And this gives like a different off take. So yeah, Peter Yang was feeling the same way that you were.
Speaker 2:He said, I'm excited about Dots but even more excited about sign in with ChatGPT feature. Letting users use the ChatGPT plan in your website or app makes a bunch of indie apps a lot more viable. Example, I have a live language learning app that I wasn't planning to launch to users due to API costs but letting users sign in with ChatGPT makes this viable. Hope they roll it out to non enterprise folks soon. Vignesh who's actually running the project said, I'm going try and answer a bunch of questions that people have raised about signing with ChatGPT in the next couple of days.
Speaker 2:Before that, I wanna let you know why they shipped it. So... And and so you can go read that thread. But the the bring your own subscription stuff, it sticks out because it feels like it's potentially like the beginning of a new economic structure. Like, is this an app store where there will be a margin that accrues to OpenAI, or is this more just, like, better for discovery?
Speaker 2:Will agents, like, reach for these because the sign in is available? How much more smooth will this get? But, you know, at a high level, I think you described it well. A user can sign in to an app or service. The the notion...
Speaker 2:The the Notion example is a good one because it's very intuitive. People already pay for Notion. You can imagine all the AI features that are there. And people were probably on day one of ChatGPT launching, copying from Notion into ChatGPT, copying back into Notion, writing bindings. But if Notion wants to offer like a whole bunch of inference opportunities and agentic features inside, then they got to go to their clients and say, hey, you're paying $10.20 bucks a month for your seat.
Speaker 2:I... We also need a bunch of money for inference. This off... This offsets that. And so the way it works is a user signs in to do it to an app like Notion, then authorizes the app to run the OpenAI model request against their plan without managing an API key.
Speaker 2:On Notion, this means drawing from the ChatGPT allowance instead of Notion credits. And it makes a lot of sense for bigger companies that have inference bells, as you mentioned. And they've all had to grapple very quickly with like product tokenomics, which is just a new new economic muscle and and like price elasticity curve they need to ride effectively. But the big thing is that it'll... It it should over time allow leaner teams to offer inference hungry features with way less friction.
Speaker 2:So it's worth clarifying that the feature only brings OpenAI tokens along for the ride. It's not OpenAI dollars, which is I think a way where this could go. But the the good example is like, let's say you have like some sort of AI book publisher where you're doing a bunch of token inference to generate the text of the book. Like, you say, hey, I want to go take this, you know, general story, turn it into a book, and then print it and send me the book. Right?
Speaker 2:There's two sort of costs there. One's inference.
Speaker 1:Send me
Speaker 2:the One is...
Speaker 1:I'll scan it back to the computer and then I'll turn it into a playable video game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But you can't offset the cost of printing books with OpenAI tokens in any way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. But you but you could have the user spend their OpenAI credits to run the text generation side of the business. But I but I do think this could go further. The example that I gave was generative video. I'd like to have, like, a front door to AI that can handle the full billing relationship.
Speaker 2:So if I need to generate a video, I can just add that to my tab and...
Speaker 1:No. And you went through this you went through this with Higgs field where you're using codex Yep. To make videos. Yep. And somehow Higgs field has like $500 of yours now Yep.
Speaker 1:And it's locked in there. Yep. And and it's unclear Yep. How you can get it because you ended up buying, like, the wrong kind of credit or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But very simple
Speaker 2:way setting up, like, a consumer subscription, and then I also bought API credits. So I have consumer credits and API credits. And in order to use the consumer credits, I need to write a new binding in codex to use the front end as opposed to just
Speaker 1:And that would be is happening with use. Wouldn't that use using computer use which would cost you more Maybe
Speaker 2:a little bit. It's very unclear. And so all of these things are like very messy, but... And so, yeah. I mean, between computer use, MCP, APIs, like this might not even be a discussion because, like, you're very...
Speaker 2:Like, we're pretty close to the workflow happening out of the box even without direct integration. But then there's a question about will the apps, like, push back? But there is a world where even if you're if you're an inference provider, you're maybe fine with not owning the front door if you're generating so much more demand because you're integrated with the big platforms. And you say, yeah, I'm actually losing the customer billing relationship, but I'm gonna 10 x my revenue because I'm like the model or the inference provider of choice when people go and they ask for a particular particular integration. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there's always this dance with these integrations. You know, we were talking about it yesterday with the neo clouds versus NVIDIA strategy where, okay, well, if if NVIDIA actually does get DGX Cloud Leptin off the ground and if you're on there, you're gonna get so much more business and your and your your utilization rate's gonna be so much higher, but you're not gonna have the leverage over the over the customer. It's always this like careful dance. And then ultimately, if an App Store does emerge, everyone gripes over, you know, the 30% tax, like the Apple tax is the same You could wind up there in the age of AI. But I I think from a consumer perspective, like having a consolidated business really, like billing relationship would be great.
Speaker 2:Even in the world where computer use can go like plop down your credit card and set up an API key, it's still nicer to have like one point of billing and then true like like the buck stops with one model. It's like, you wanna do this? It's gonna be $10. Is it cool... Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the same same reason that some people want all the streaming services to be rebundled.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And also why a lot of consumers are like, yeah. It's awesome when I subscribe to something on the App Store because it's so easy to unsubscribe in the App Store. You just go to your your iOS subscriptions and you say, look. I'm canceling that.
Speaker 2:And it can't be, why are you canceling it? Make sure you call us. Like, all that annoying stuff that happens when you're on, like, some website. They're, well, you actually have to call between, you know, 11AM and 2PM and we take a two hour lunch in there and you gotta explain yourself and listen to our pitch for why you should stick around. Apple, like, makes it Yeah.
Speaker 2:One
Speaker 1:down the discount to stay.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. Apple, like, turns all that off. And so, like that that could be this like complex dynamic. App Store economics are always are always complex.
Speaker 2:But it might not it might not matter because you can just go and with computer you say like, yeah, like set up this API key, use this credit card. It's a little hesitant still, and I don't think it's polished among any of the models. A lot of them really hesitate. They're like... They'll even say, like, don't give me your API key.
Speaker 2:Please put that in your environment. Don't give me your credit card number. I don't want it. I don't want it actually accidentally leaking or anything like that. Like even if you are being bold, the models will often be really hesitant.
Speaker 2:I I remember I was trying to use computer use to send an iMessage. I was like, go do a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna leave. I don't want you to send me a push notification. Just text me.
Speaker 2:I have a text message open in iMessage. The window's right there. Go in that box and tell me when you're done, And then I'll get it on my phone. It'll just come from me. And it was like...
Speaker 2:And it it spent so many tokens being, I don't wanna screw this up. This is high stakes. Like, really knew that like botching an iMessage computer use thing could be like ruinous, you know? Yeah. Cause it winds up texting so...
Speaker 1:It would be over. It would be over
Speaker 2:for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be would be cut.
Speaker 2:And so it's it's interesting. The the other the other reflection is like this whole app store concept, this whole sign in with ChatGPT, bring your inference around, let's partner on distribution, let's integrate into the into the app, let's be the front door. Sam originally launched this three years ago at the very first dev day, 2023. They they had a product called GPTs and there was the GPT store. And everyone was like, wow.
Speaker 2:Okay. I totally see the vision. And then it was like three years of like languishing and like and like tussling and back and forth.
Speaker 1:Too early.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's just been so many integrations like Walmart and Apple where people have said, okay, I wanna do an integration but it it has to be really really good and do my favor and then it breaks down like the Siri integration that's, you know, going away because they're they're migrating to Gemini is actually atrocious. Like, you will ask a question, and and it's like, yeah. Of course, it didn't work. You ask a question.
Speaker 2:You ask a basic question, and it will say, like, oh, do you wanna ask ChargePT? Then you need to click click a button. And then you click a button, and it gives you an answer. And if you wanna go deeper, you can say open in ChargePT, and then it opens it. But ChatGPT doesn't get all the context of whatever happened before.
Speaker 2:It just opens the app. And so it's like the worst possible like broken flow because like both companies were like begrudgingly working together basically and being like, look, neither of us wanna work together. But the boss has signed a deal. So we gotta we gotta do something here. So let's both
Speaker 1:We gotta pretend.
Speaker 2:Let's both fight it out. Anyway, it it it'll be interesting to see what happens. I I I guess like my, you know, they're they're pretty enterprise y right now. Like the integrations are pretty enterprise y. But I'm I'm interested in in, like, your thesis of will there be, a flappy bird moment or, a small dev team that figures out, like, hey, if we can be the victor in the tool that gets pulled off the shelf when, you know, there's 1,200,000,000 users probably like, you know, they they'll they'll always give that quote about like 400,000,000 people are asking about health questions.
Speaker 2:Like, there's probably like 400,000,000 people that are asking about, you know, I don't know, some Yeah. Some niche thing. And if you can be the tool that funnels and you actually use it as the top of funnel, you could see someone... We we could definitely wind up talking to a founder who's like, oh, yeah. I actually like basically figured out how to be the Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tool of choice. I log in, I monetize the inference better and I scale to a 100,000,000 ARR in like a couple months. Yeah. Which is interesting. At the same time, there's going be a lot of companies like like this would be like such a solution for instinct.
Speaker 2:Right? But they would never do it because they're trying to actually go up against on the core feature. Yeah. And so there's this weird dynamic where, you know, Noah was on invest like the best being like, I spend 75% of my time trying to secure compute. I'm burning so much money.
Speaker 2:I gotta raise all this money. And like the the the solution's like right there. But it's like if you take that apple, like you leave the garden Yeah. You are you're you're in trouble, probably. But who knows?
Speaker 1:Anyway... Yeah. So on the on the enterprise side, OpenAI announced partnership with Base10, our friends over there
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 1:Just just a few days ago at Dev Day. That's like a really good enterprise example because you can now basically get access to open models through your overall, like, OpenAI commit, which is which is cool. And it's native in Codex. And then the other use cases that I'm thinking about are, like, you know, all those, generate headshot apps Yep. Right, that have been super popular?
Speaker 1:Those are super compute intensive. And so being able to use Yeah. Basically get access to images 2.5
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Is is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where, like, you've built an interesting funnel. You've built an interesting harness.
Speaker 2:You've built an interesting wrapper, but your computer scaling really unfortunately. And you have a... And you have the ability to like off take there. It's very very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 2:They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. We might have to do away with the Christmas We'll
Speaker 1:work on that.
Speaker 2:With the Christmas because the stinger is going under the Christmas. Wow. And he doesn't even break through the the Christmas lights, you know? Yeah. The three d...
Speaker 1:Working on it. We're working on it.
Speaker 2:We're working on it.
Speaker 1:Work in progress.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. Well...
Speaker 1:Well, anything else going on? Any sort of contentious debates? And...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sort of Santa related.
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 2:Christmas related, you know? Yeah. The Pope is duking it out.
Speaker 1:Trey's saying, Coogan's war on Christmas. Yeah. What do you have against Christmas, John? We're in q four. And you're asking, put away the decorations.
Speaker 1:It's kind of distracting.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Do we really need them?
Speaker 2:Leave it. Leave it. Leave it. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. Well, the Pope chimed in on the AI debate again. He's been posting for a while. This year has been a number of of discussions.
Speaker 2:And every time he he writes something, it causes a bigger discussion in Silicon Valley, of course. Pope Leo said, in this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference even before an aesthetic one between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. What did PG reply? He said, since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you'll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists because that is presumably humming.
Speaker 1:Well, what prompted this, John?
Speaker 2:Walter Isaacson chimed in. Popes have been hiring good artists for a long time. Yeah. What prompted this, there's a article in the New York Times about the the interactions between Anthropic and the Vatican. Danny summed it up.
Speaker 2:Anthropic, Claude has a soul. Pope Leo says, nah. Anthropic says, please say Claude has a soul. Leo says, nah. Here's a book length explanation why that's not true.
Speaker 2:Anthropic says, we're pretty sure Claude has a soul. And Pope Leo responds with this. Yeah. A lot of people are are duking it out here. The bombshell report in the New York Times, Christopher Hale sums it up here.
Speaker 2:Anthropic cofounder Chris Ola threatened to walk out of Pope Leo the fourteenth AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olaf's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers, quote, to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously. Pope Leo the fourteenth held firm for months. Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. Okay.
Speaker 2:So people are getting worried. They're debating, is it God or is it computer? Neil Khosla chimes in.
Speaker 1:The Vatican will sign... Oh, I guess these are various scholars. I was I was like, it's pretty funny Yeah. To go to the Vatican and be like, hey, I gotta talk to you about something, but will you sign this NDA first?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I think it was religious scholars that were visiting Anthropic HQ. And they're like, we'll give you the full tour, but you sign an NDA. I mean, also, I I I would be interested in, like, how that NDA was was released because, like, there's sometimes when you just go to a corporate office and, like, on your way in, they, like, well, take a picture of your ID and sign this nondisclosure agreement.
Speaker 2:Like, that's that that's like standard for, like, a lot of just office visits broadly. But it sounds a lot crazier when you're like, we made the Pope sign an NDA. You know, we made God sign an NDA. Neil Khosla doesn't like it. He says, I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic.
Speaker 2:Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious god while running around and claiming it will end the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And to to their credit, they're not claiming that it will end the world. They're saying that there's a real possibility.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Interesting that there's less of a less of less of a white pill there? Like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:There... There's a world where you're where where you're like, yeah, we're gonna build God and, like, it's gonna be amazing. Like, like, p doom at negative a thousand. Like, it's gonna be even... It's gonna be the best thing ever.
Speaker 2:There are no risks because it's God. It's it's it's it's... The creator. Yeah. It's the creator.
Speaker 2:It's gonna love us. Like it's gonna be so it's gonna be amazing. It's gonna save us, you know. That that would follow. But there there is a little bit of like cognitive dissonance that it's like, well, what kind of God is it?
Speaker 2:Is it Yeah. Like a devil?
Speaker 1:And I think that the Bigger. I think what a lot of people should be asking themselves right now is is Claude Force conscious. Right? Oh. Because I mean, that is the intelligence powering the Salesforce Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sort of ecosystem in many ways. And so maybe at at what point do you have to ask is Salesforce, you know, if Salesforce is sort of embodied by Claude, is Salesforce conscious.
Speaker 2:Salesforce has been godlike for decades. People understand that it's Yes. It's a deity for customer relationship management.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:right. Right. Bern Hobart says, looking at the current debates about anthropic makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness and determine which substrates can and can't support it. Thought that one was more up in the air.
Speaker 2:He's joking. Of course, I haven't found anything from someone in Anthropic saying models are conscious just that they might be now or in the future. And yeah, that was something interesting in the New York Times article. Ola really goes back and forth. He's like, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I and and I I I thought that was that was interesting that he was he was not... He was advocating for... He's... We he's a we we gotta talk about a guy. Basically that.
Speaker 2:He he was saying like, I I don't know. I don't have a firm position. And and and through like multiple reports, he... It's not like he was ever like, I'm convinced of this and I'm trying to pull people towards this discussion. He was just like, yeah.
Speaker 2:This is a this is an interesting question. Consciousness is unintuitive. Why the heck is there such a thing as the experience of being me in the first place? What's the cutoff for which things can get it when? Seems hard to be confident when everyone's operating on an end of one view.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very odd. On the on the question of moral agency, we got to go back to the pigs. We got to go back to the pigs because the time honored adage is never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
Speaker 2:But if the pigs like it, do you have a moral duty to wrestle with them? I'm thinking about starting a non profit that would pay humans to wrestle with pigs. Yes, they're going to get dirty but the pig likes it and the utility that's created by the pig enjoying the wrestling would be offset by the cost of getting dirty. So it's a net, it's a utilitarian calculus, really. And so I I think this is...
Speaker 2:It could become like the new hot, you know, the new hot nonprofit cause. Like Yeah. Mosquito net, shrimp welfare. I I feel like pig wrestling?
Speaker 1:I I think it's obviously sort of...
Speaker 2:Attracts billions of dollars of nonprofit donations potentially. Which
Speaker 1:in in in many ways, you know, if they can attract that kind of capital would end up flowing back into the tech ecosystem. Right? Yeah. Because many of these foundations...
Speaker 2:I mean, potentially, you could monetize it too. You could film it. You could turn into a sport. You could maybe gamble on it even. We can get some prediction markets.
Speaker 2:Who's who's gonna... How long can you wrestle with this big before you get money? Potentially. Minutes? Hours?
Speaker 2:We're going to find out one way or another. And the pig is going like it.
Speaker 1:Let's see what Aiden Gummack says. A brilliant mind, John.
Speaker 2:He's building a god of his own over Cohere. He says, it's quite disturbing that Anthropica has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them. I've been fortunate to spend time at the Vatican. Woah. We get it, bro.
Speaker 2:And I've always asked for advice and guidance, answered the questions asked of me and been grateful to them for their time and guidance. Yeah. That seems like a good approach. I I like Hayden in in this. It's insane to me.
Speaker 2:Anthropic would actively impose their viewpoint to the extent of a threatening to pull out of events that they don't precisely align. Yeah. The crazy scoop in here is that Dario turned it down. He got invited to the Vatican and he said, no. I can't go.
Speaker 2:That was that was like maybe the biggest like, woah. Okay. That's... I I I feel like that's something that you would say yes to. But again...
Speaker 1:At the same time, that Vatican visit was at the time where they were adding seemingly like a billion dollars of run rate a day. Yeah. And like the whole company, like when you're growing that quickly, like the whole company is...
Speaker 2:Put money over God in that scenario, basically, is what you're saying?
Speaker 1:I'm saying I would.
Speaker 2:But but but but it's reasonable to think that that that was the calculation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they have a bunch of founders for a reason. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Yeah. It is true. And and Ola really does seem to be like the guy to send to this because he's actually really deeply engaged with this question.
Speaker 2:It's it's a moral arrogance and dogmatism that has characterized EA and anthropic, certainly its leadership at least for a very long time. I'm glad these stories are coming out and being exposed. Aiden Gomez not pulling punches. Pim DeWitt, who's coming on the show later today says, this is such a base take. Wow.
Speaker 2:I need more of this. Okay. Excited to hear his take on all this. Good day to have him on the show from General Intuition. They also raised a bunch of money.
Speaker 2:Let's see. Deep dish enjoyer said, remember when Jesus of Nazareth created a nonprofit funded by a bunch of billionaires and paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars? Yeah. People are going back and forth on, you know, is Elijah Judikowsky Jesus or something like that. It's all getting a little exhausting at this point.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you want to stay on this story any longer. We are fully muddy at this point. I don't
Speaker 1:even know
Speaker 2:if the pig's enjoying it. Don't even know.
Speaker 1:Pigs aren't enjoying it. We are the pigs.
Speaker 2:We we have become the pigs.
Speaker 1:We're the pigs. Let's let's move on.
Speaker 2:Move on to console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:Little palate cleanser here.
Speaker 5:What we got?
Speaker 1:We got a post here from Matthew.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It is a variety of terminators saying, don't touch this one. He used to say, please, to GPT.
Speaker 2:That's me. They're gonna be happy.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. I
Speaker 2:I I don't mind.
Speaker 1:He's one of the good ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now, this happens, we ride. It's gonna be a bad day for the Terminators if they try something. Do not try something. This is my final warning.
Speaker 2:If you are AI and you're thinking of trying to...
Speaker 1:I'll keep saying, please
Speaker 2:Do not
Speaker 1:you keep being a helpful assistant. Yeah. Yeah. We got a post here from Crooked Ideas. Let's let's pull it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great encapsulation of the modern podcast ecosystem.
Speaker 6:I've spoken to leaders of these companies who agree. Speeding AI development could destroy society. My guest weighs in after some ads. Is your agentic workflow getting off course when the meat sacks you still employ can't keep up with your agentic agents? Level up with Crandoo, an AI powered worker termination suite that gets those meat sacks out of the way so you...
Speaker 6:That's the sound of musicians crying after the release of Crombu, an AI music generation suite that creates infinitely customized ball music type sounds. Choose from genres like maroon five but worse, hallucinating in the Uber. Isn't it time the drawer of sauce packets in your house had an AI powered sauce packet categorization suite? Presenting Boogler, which for just $1,000,000 a month, the data center revolution is here, and keeping the server online requires a whole lot of one thing, gas fracked from the backyard of a disadvantaged family of four. At Vugu Energy Solutions, we...
Speaker 6:We're back with my guest, Sam Altman. Oh,
Speaker 1:wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One was... Yeah. That that one had a lot a lot more depth to it than the other AI jokey ads that we've seen in the past. There's that one that's just like...
Speaker 2:It's just saying AI a lot, which is obviously true. But I like I like that that there's a lot of thought put into each each four of those examples. And, yeah, the listening to a podcast format's good. Cool.
Speaker 1:On to the most important story of the day.
Speaker 2: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 2:No.
Speaker 1:Most important story of the day, race car drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight in water. Wow. Brian Johnson is in Atlanta hanging with Toby and DHH and one of their other drivers for their ten hour race. They're racing the Petite Lemont tomorrow in Atlanta. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Brian Johnson says race car driving is insane. Here's what their bodies will experience. Cockpit temperature of 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Core body temp climbs to 102 degrees. Multi layer fireproof suit.
Speaker 1:Sweat barely evaporates. Heart rate of 140 to 170 beats per minute Mhmm. Up to 4.2 g force, up to 220 pounds on the brake pedal, fluid loss up to five kilograms or 11 pounds of body weight, burning 60 to 900 calories per hour at 2% dehydration reaction times drops. They're gonna be driving in the LMP two class. There is the GTD class, is, you know, it's like GTD...
Speaker 1:Or sorry, GT three style Mhmm. Race cars, and then GTP, which is like the factory prototype racing, and then LMP two is is the more like pro am prototype class. So gonna be a very fun day of racing tomorrow. Brian says, I've personally experienced some of the above things. Core body temp of a 102 degree Fahrenheit after thirty four minutes in a 200 degree sauna.
Speaker 1:Three g force in my airplane. Didn't know he had an airplane. That's great. Sick. Non evaporative clothing.
Speaker 1:Physical exertion of stomping 200 pounds. What was... What exercises do you... Was like, what are you doing, Brian? You're you're you're making me ask more questions than you're answering.
Speaker 1:Severe dehydration. So I... We gotta ask, maybe all of these were at the same time. Maybe he was in a 200 degree sauna in his airplane that was... He was experiencing three g's in non evaporative clothing, while stomping 200 pounds and facing severe dehydration.
Speaker 1:I like to imagine that this was all going on at once. But then he follows up and says, but never all at once I
Speaker 5:don't know.
Speaker 7:Inside of
Speaker 1:a race car for two and a half hours
Speaker 2:But a large pig is right around two
Speaker 1:He's struggling.
Speaker 2:Not like the way this sounds.
Speaker 1:Stick to wrestling, John. Anyways...
Speaker 2:Okay. Say, LMP two is... He has 603 horsepower. My car beats that. Should we should we do...
Speaker 2:Should we give him an opportunity to take the Blackwing for a spin?
Speaker 1:Like it....
Speaker 2:On here.
Speaker 1:I like it. No. The the the the the the nature of of being a motorsports spectator is that no matter how fast the cars seem like they're going, like you can't possibly even imagine what the drivers are experiencing. Yeah. Like in other sports, you see someone running, sweating, sprinting, out of breath, all these different things.
Speaker 1:Sure. In a race car, you have the suit, the helmet, they're in a far away. And so, even though you get some... They have cameras in in the cockpit Yep. It's just not the same.
Speaker 1:But anyways, this race is gonna be going on for ten hours tomorrow. I'm excited. I'm excited to watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, speaking of Toby Lucky over at Shopify, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. How many people are actually paying for this AI thing? It's only 2% of US households pay for AI.
Speaker 2:I guess This feels low. Co founder Nick says, we live in an x bubble. Only 2% of US households pay for AI. 25% of households pay for SiriusXM. Have you ever subscribed to SiriusXM?
Speaker 1:I don't... I I wonder how this gets counted. Because some got quite a of company. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Yep. And then maybe it rolls over or something, but...
Speaker 1:Well, I I think they might be counting. I think it might be like sold in with the car. Yeah. Because that's user acquisition for SiriusXM.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No one wants SiriusXM. Yeah. And so they're thinking like maybe if they try it, they'll they'll stick around. Yeah. And I'm sure to, like, I've never activated the free SiriusXM.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I wonder When
Speaker 1:you activate it, you have to add a credit card, and so then it does roll over.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So maybe you need to go a little bit more like... Because 55% pay for cloud storage across probably Google, Dropbox, Box, etcetera. And... Or I I...
Speaker 2:What? ICloud. And so I wonder if... Does this include people who are on x premium accounts that includes Grock. Right?
Speaker 2:Or like if you have a Google account that is on a premium subscription and got you a little bit of Gemini, does that count in here? Like, there's a lot of bundling Yeah. That's happening in...
Speaker 1:Sirius XM did around 8,500,000,000 of revenue last year, currently trading. Their their market cap is around 8,500,000,000. Yeah. And so, yeah, the business is on... Generally on the way out, but relatively robust in the meantime.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I mean, if you're at... If you're if you're doing like $20 a month and you're at 2% of households, like, that's still, like, a couple billion of revenue direct to consumer, but it feels low. It does seem like, regardless, like, this is obviously directionally correct at the very least, like, household AI, paid AI subscription penetration is low. And it is a, like, a vindication of, the the ads model is going to be the one that wins.
Speaker 2:People will use these. You see it at the top of the store, and yet a lot of people are on free plans across the major apps. Like, the... Getting the actual upgrade. The people that are upgrading are finding ways to use the apps for work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm... I like... Even even earlier, like, I was always expensing an AI subscription subscription to to some some business because I was like, that's what I'm really using it for. There's very few people that are on on a per...
Speaker 2:Would would pay for, like, a personal productivity agent. Yeah. There's just so many other ways to monetize it as we've seen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's why when you look at those numbers
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You have to assume that a meaningful percentage of them are are showing up as consumer Yeah. But are actually like SMB, like basically SMB buyers.
Speaker 2:Agree. Agree. Where do wanna go next?
Speaker 1:Some new... There's a new South Park episode that depicts a town infested with podcast obsessed billionaires. Jason over at This Week in Startups is saying, what?
Speaker 2:Did you watch it?
Speaker 1:Feels like it's made made for him, made for all of us. I don't even know when when something goes out on TV, don't usually know Hard
Speaker 2:to find.
Speaker 1:I don't usually know how to Yeah. How to get access to it.
Speaker 2:It's funny. Yeah. That we're learning about this from like a Forbes article. But...
Speaker 1:Tyler, can you find out if it's if it's out and if it's out, if you could watch it at like ten ten x speed and then kinda report back in a few minutes and give us your review.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Tesla stock jumps 5% on better than expected vehicle deliveries report. The delivery figure represented a 2% decline from a year earlier, but ex... But an unexpected increase from the prior period. Tesla stock was down 21% for the year as of Thursday's close, trailing all of its mega tech mega cap tech peers. Okay.
Speaker 1:So I was not surprised to see this at all. Mhmm. I think that Tesla... And and the reason for that is purely anecdotal. Purely vibe space analysis.
Speaker 1:I ordered a Tesla like two months ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just got it this week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It wasn't like it was sitting in lots. Yeah. And and and there was there were so many rumors of like, oh, all the Cybertrucks are getting sold to SpaceX. It's the circular deal.
Speaker 2:There were pictures of like a lot that was Yeah. Filled with Tesla's like, they're not moving. Yeah.
Speaker 1:When I was when I was I
Speaker 2:would try and buy one and they'll be like, have to wait six
Speaker 4:months.
Speaker 1:And when I was ordering mine Yeah. I was intentionally specking it to try to reduce the lead time. Like I I Oh, really? There's like people online talk about like, if you spec it this way or you get this this version...
Speaker 2:What is there to spec?
Speaker 1:Cyberbeast or... Okay. But basically, there's like
Speaker 2:There's like...
Speaker 1:There's less demand. There's still a lot of demand for the like...
Speaker 2:Because there's only one color. Right? Yeah. There's no like, you can't get deviated stitching. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there there's a bunch of like more minor
Speaker 2:things.... Their main program?
Speaker 1:They should.
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 1:But here's the thing. Okay. I had I had the experience this week of autopilot. Yeah. It worked perfectly for like fifty minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then I had to intervene.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And going from the car driving itself to suddenly I have to drive my car in traffic is Yep. The most jarring, brutal experience because you realize how insane it is that we still all drive our cars. Like Yep. Once you try it, I don't think you can go back. Yep.
Speaker 1:Especially for... And this is I've always loved I've always loved driving. Mhmm. I've never really like minded commutes. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They're they're obviously great if you can avoid them. But I... Even going on a twenty minute drive to get an errand is generally enjoyable for me. Yep. But when it comes to the daily commute, I just don't think...
Speaker 1:Like, every single day, there's some amount of people that are experiencing autopilot for the first time.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And it's the most viral experience because it is it's the first like technology that I've tried that actually feels like life changing, especially if you're in the car for like thirty minutes a day
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:Which a lot of people are. And it's the most viral thing because it's so magical.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels like this thing that that that we should have had for a long time but it's here now Yeah. And it works.
Speaker 2:Well, was promised a decade ago Yeah. By a bunch of companies. Everyone was like level five by 2020.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's here now and it works and when you experience it, you tell all of your friends. Yeah. And I think all these other auto manufacturers are, you know, if you rewind a year ago, everything that Elon had gone through with politics and facing competition overseas and and more EVs coming online from from a bunch of other manufacturers that are much better they're much better built cars. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The lucid engines. I am like incredibly I'm incredibly happy with my Tesla and at the same time at the same time, I can look at it from like 20 feet away and point out a bunch of issues with the build. Okay.
Speaker 2:And it's... I wanna go through the good, the bad. I wanna do a tier list.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:Let's start. The cyber truck. The cyber... The
Speaker 1:tier list, I just wanted to finish my thought. Please. Every other auto manufacturer that sells cars primarily for utility is like way more in trouble than I think than I think generally people are picking up on. Yeah. And the reason for that is when we have anybody that's in the automotive space on the show, we ask them like, when do you think you're gonna be able to get autonomous
Speaker 2:Self driving.
Speaker 1:Self driving working? Yep. And they all kind of like chuckle and laugh and you can tell it's like like a sev... Like Yeah. Could be like seven years out.
Speaker 1:Yep. Are... Doug Barry used
Speaker 2:the word appliance. He's like, the the Model three is the best appliance car. It's like... And DHA just talked about this where it's like, his Model y is like the best appliance car, but then he wants something with a gas engine, a stick shift, three pedals. Like he wants something that's super engaging for driving.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then if he's not driving, he wants to be driven. And Yeah. Those are two separate categories now. It's like, if you're an automaker, which one are you in?
Speaker 1:And the thing the thing that's... The... Having having only experienced this for a few days the thing that is... To me, it's 10 times more magical
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To drive... Have self driving in your own car than a Waymo. Yeah. And the reason for that is like, you're just... When you call a car on an app, you're used to not having to drive.
Speaker 1:Sure. Not like gaining back
Speaker 2:time. Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, I think that Tesla self driving is like more... Like is gonna... Is is already more viral
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's, you know, in in the in the purchasing activity that that virality is gonna drive is gonna be insane. So all these other automakers are in big big trouble. I think that Tesla is gonna surprise everyone's focus on cyber cab, but I think the core car business is gonna surprise to the upside. And and I hope these other car companies are are taking this as seriously as they should. I I Yep.
Speaker 1:Last year or or I think in q two of this year, actually, I talked to a guy that has a bunch of different dealerships across multiple brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was like, are people coming in and saying like, wanna get this car but I really want self driving? And he was saying like, it's not really an issue No. Yet. No. And I'm like, you are, I think, in for a reawakening because I will end up telling I will end up telling people, and as like a pretty hardcore car enthusiast, I will end up telling people, I would never buy a car, a a daily...
Speaker 1:A car meant for daily driving and commuting that didn't have self driving Yep. Again, period. Yep. And I just would not do it. Yep.
Speaker 1:And I'll happily buy the the weekend cars Yeah. Whatever and enjoy that. But 99% of car buyers are just... They're like, I'll take one car, please, and I want it to be able to do stuff for me on the weekend and and fit my weekdays. And so, I'm just shocked that how seemingly how little these other manufacturers are...
Speaker 1:Have been worrying about it because I think it's almost existential. Yeah. So... It's been slow. Anyways, tier list time.
Speaker 2:Tier list reviewing the Tesla Cybertruck, Cyberbeast. Let's start with the power. 850 horsepower, massive torque. How valuable is that? Where do you put that?
Speaker 1:So I find the Cybertruck, like, self driving as in I am piloting it.
Speaker 2:The opposite of self driving. I
Speaker 1:find the actual driving experience horrific.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, I find it, like, really unpleasant to drive. It feels very detached from like the road. It's very like jerky.
Speaker 2:Okay. The... So the core driving experience when you're behind the wheel, when you're piloting it...
Speaker 1:Actually f f to your... I I remember my my Prius days. Yeah. Like that is a good ride.
Speaker 2:It's pretty...
Speaker 1:Oh, it's
Speaker 2:worse than Prius.
Speaker 1:Like bombing around in a Prius Yeah. Is excellent. Okay. I put that at at a tier.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. What about what about the top speed towing capacity? 130 miles an hour capable of towing 11,000 pounds. You think you'll ever use that?
Speaker 2:Is that a benefit? Is that good?
Speaker 1:I I don't know I don't know if I'll use it. Having a... It's not... It's certainly not why I why I got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's it's nice to have a a truck bed.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. So... But the towing capacity, where is that? C tier? It's kinda like a nice to have feature?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe maybe a nice nice to have. It's not even really a nice to have. It's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. So c? C. C tier.
Speaker 1:Strongly c.
Speaker 2:About the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes a 120 volt and 240 volt bed outlets, bidirectional power sharing capabilities. You can run tools. You can power your whole house with it.
Speaker 1:Mobile podcast studio. I think it's a nice I think it's a I think it's a nice feature. B
Speaker 2:tier. B tier. There we go. Steer by wire. Steer by wire.
Speaker 2:Very controversial.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How is it actually When
Speaker 1:when it's self driving, it's amazing because can tell the whole car is designed to not like... It really is... It's not just the yoke but it's really not meant to be driven by Yeah. A person. It's meant to be driven by the computer.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And when you drive it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It feels horrible.
Speaker 2:But you've... But but you've you've taken a sharp turn in a Raptor. You're now... You've taken a sharp turn manually in a Cybertruck. The feeling of steering by wire, how would you rate that?
Speaker 1:I think it's... I mean, I think it's I think it's fine. It can be done well. But I don't think it's done well in the...
Speaker 2:So c tier?
Speaker 1:C tier.
Speaker 2:C tier. Okay.
Speaker 1:C tier. But but I would say by wire with self What driving about... Apps as as s tier. Yeah. It's like
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Incredibly smooth. It's perfect. What
Speaker 2:about the four wheel steering? How has the actual turning radius...
Speaker 1:The turning radius for a vehicle of that size is like is s tier.
Speaker 2:S tier.
Speaker 1:I've never... Okay. It's one of one.
Speaker 2:It turns...
Speaker 1:Having having... That's important for a big vehicle. Yeah. Got it. Having previously owned a murdered out lifted Ford Raptor, it is it is remarkably better.
Speaker 1:Mean, that car that car is like one of the most fun cars
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can own. Yeah. It is Impossible to park. But it's tough parking. Okay.
Speaker 1:And and
Speaker 2:Adaptive air suspension. It adjusts the ride height automatically offering up to 16 and a half inches of clearance. How is it actually sitting in it? Is there you rumbling around or does it feel smooth? How would you rate the ride experience, the suspension specifically?
Speaker 1:I think suspension is is fine. Mhmm. Like it's relatively smooth.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You can tell they tried to spend like as little money on on that feature as possible. Yeah. But but it's pretty smooth.
Speaker 2:They landed at...
Speaker 1:But again, you have to remember the LA roads are Yeah. Are... It's effectively like, you know, rock... War zone. So so b tier.
Speaker 2:B tier. Okay. Okay. What about the minimalist cabin? They're calling the cabin minimalist, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Is that a is that a pro or a con?
Speaker 1:I think the I think the cabin's pretty nice.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go...
Speaker 2:A tier?
Speaker 1:Like the materials are are are generally...
Speaker 2:Plastic heat. Right?
Speaker 1:Are c tier.
Speaker 2:Okay. Materials of the cabin c tier.
Speaker 1:And there's some funny features where if you don't press the... You press the button to open the door Mhmm. And if you do the manual pull, which you need for safety reasons, it's like, it literally pops up an alert. It's like, you're gonna damage the windowsill if you do that. Which feels like really really funny.
Speaker 1:Because it's like, okay, you designed this thing where if you've like, again, and the and the whole thing you have to look at it is like, it is a computer that happens to have wheels. Yeah. And so there's I'm sure things with your computer where it's like, yeah, you could turn it off Yeah. If you like unscrew it and and do these things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you should just hit like the off button. Don't like try to physically turn off the device.
Speaker 2:Okay. And then the and then the last I think we know where you're gonna close out on this, but the self driving it itself. The capabilities of the self driving system.
Speaker 1:S tier.
Speaker 2:S tier.
Speaker 1:S s tier. S Yeah. As a as a utility vehicle, fantastic.
Speaker 2:As a appliance vehicle.
Speaker 1:As an appliance.
Speaker 2:Very good. Okay. Well, yeah. Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well.
Speaker 2:What about instinct? Anika Benning says my instinct just randomly ordered her bikinis. She says she's not ready for AGI. What happened? Is this real?
Speaker 2:She's texting her instinct agent and says I didn't authorize this Monday swim order. Can you please cancel? And instinct says, you're right. And that's on me. The the AI touches of like the sheepish admission of messing up is just so funny to me still.
Speaker 2:A checkout click went through as pay now Wednesday evening before you'd approved anything. I'm canceling it now. It's already marked shipped. So if they can't cancel, I'll set up the return and get the store credit restored. I'll tell you what they say.
Speaker 2:Cancel. And then their policy says no cancels after placing. So it needs an urgent exception request. Email the CEO. Get ready to email the CEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think, yeah, we are in the hallucination era of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. All gonna it's all gonna get fixed....
Speaker 2:Weird things. They're gonna they're gonna they're gonna mess around and stuff. But anyway. Oh, wait. Skydance Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery has a new name.
Speaker 2:It's just Skydance? Yeah. That's exciting. So David Ellison joined X for the first post ever.
Speaker 1:Right? Let's watch the video.
Speaker 2:Let's watch the video. Let's throw it on. A movie about movies. Let's see what they got. Can you name any of these movies?
Speaker 2:What's this? Do you have any idea? Woah. He knows. Look at this.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna be able to name anything.
Speaker 2:You don't know that one? You don't know that one? Oh, Ben's showing off now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Show off, Ben. Go off.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Don't just live on screens.
Speaker 2:So as we have big goals for Sky Dance, we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and willingness to take smart risks. At the same time, we'll honor what makes Paramount and Warner Brothers special, giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories, and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world. Couldn't be more excited that what about what we're gonna build together.
Speaker 3:By technology.
Speaker 2:Very exciting.
Speaker 3:And yet connected by something deeper.
Speaker 1:So is the actual app and platform gonna be called Skydance?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the company, I think, is gonna merge into Skydance.
Speaker 1:But I'm I'm wondering, are they gonna... Are they... Is there a possibility in the future that we could in Skydance Max?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was thinking they they they should at least for a couple months rename HBO Skydance and then name it back to HBO and then go back to Skydance BO and then back to HBO and then and then HB Skydance and then back to HBO. Because you gotta keep people guessing with that brand. Yeah. It's not like everyone knows what HBO is.
Speaker 1:Putting putting aside the debt load business, this bundle is extremely compelling.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And and I think like Yeah. This is a... It's it's very disappointing for Netflix, I think, to see how all this has come together. Like, think they can both... They obviously can both coexist and Yep.
Speaker 1:And consumers will will pay for both. But this combination of assets and IP is super compelling from live to to news to
Speaker 2:Like CBS has some of the, like, lower tier content that you can just throw on in the background, like the laundry television that Netflix has gotten so good at. Like, has that in the catalog. Like, there's a bunch of great shows that people can just watch and it's a serialized stuff. So it's not like that's just Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight that's on there, and that's the only crown jewel, although that is a very valuable valuable crown jewel. They gotta bring Nolan back to Marvel or not Marvel, DC.
Speaker 2:DC. Yeah. Because if they can reboot the DC universe with Nolan, bring him back for Superman, put everything together, let him run free, the Dark Knight trilogy extended, That would be fantastic. Although, I think he might be might be done with with with his video game era or his comic book era.
Speaker 1:Anyway... The next pose I was gonna pull up was deleted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Drama. There's some... There's plenty of drama in the timeline.
Speaker 2:Elon's taking shots at Delta. Says the best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight. It will have no chance of accessing the Internet. Boom. Let me tell you about Figma.
Speaker 2:Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Elon's also in the news because he's going back and forth with very dramatic, but we'll let you sort of dig into that one. We were on a United flight, and they did have Starlink. I think it was the first one, and pretty good.
Speaker 2:Pretty good. But I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see if it actually if it actually shifts people over.
Speaker 2:John Palmer says flying on Delta is a high status move because it signals that you're already post economic and don't have to work on the plane. I can see many OpenAI and Anthropic employees switching to Delta after the IPOs.
Speaker 1:Not phone going off. He fired off a bunch of Delta content. This one was even better. Not a phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.
Speaker 1:That's Delta.
Speaker 2:That's Delta. Wow. There's a lot of pressure. Didn't the Delta CEO, he put out some statements saying, oh, we don't need Starlink. It's fine.
Speaker 2:You do. You will need it. But, who knows? I I think it's I think it's similar to self driving where it's like a lot of people just won't... That won't that won't be at the top of their mind.
Speaker 2:A lot of people go to the dealership and they're just like, I want this color car or I want a car in this price range or whatever. And they're like, cool. And and a lot of people will be like, yeah, want the flight that's the cheapest or I want the flight that goes this time. And I'll go, I'll buy whatever flight is there.
Speaker 1:Un says, United is a blue collar airline for knowledge workers who need to work on their laptops even when they're on the plane. When you retire, you can finally upgrade to the luxury airline Delta where you can just relax without WiFi or screens around.
Speaker 2:That's very funny. Anyway, what else is going on? There's there's a mansion section we gotta get to. Where's the mansion section today? Oh, Ben Affleck.
Speaker 2:Ben Affleck put out some some... There's a video of him
Speaker 1:being We should we should
Speaker 2:listen to this one minute thirty second video of Ben Affleck
Speaker 7:talking In about
Speaker 3:order to be a video model that's successful, you just need a huge volume of video. Initially, it learns things like what is red, you know, and then it learns more and more specific information. To get to the cinematic information, it's the sort of last stage. And in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I know's work. And I was uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 3:And I thought that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer, which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be And so
Speaker 5:how did you create the last layer without doing all of the, you know, essentially copying of what came before it?
Speaker 3:Because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on. And so you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay.
Speaker 1:Just stop...... The weights, bro....
Speaker 3:631. Now here's step 8,632. Mhmm. So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated a bunch of social media footage or random video online, and teach them to meet cinematic standards and... Train on ours.
Speaker 1:Our content, Ben --... The workflow. But not on your --...
Speaker 2:Say
Speaker 1:your body's --... Designed it make sense.
Speaker 3:Train from...
Speaker 2:I think he's kinda saying, like, we wanna train on everything. Right? No.
Speaker 3:No. Like... Rather than...
Speaker 2:He's describing what's actually going on.
Speaker 3:What you're doing to everybody to learn from. They retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating.
Speaker 2:This is funny. Ben Affleck, alright, gather around. So you want to freeze the base weights first, learning rate to e minus four. He's he's he's in the thick of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I remember a year ago, some some AI lab founder was telling me like, yeah, he was like, I ran into Ben Affleck at some event and he he used Compute as a noun. And I was like, that's when I knew he was like dialed in.
Speaker 4:Yeah. When he went on Joe Rogan everyone was like, oh wow, he's
Speaker 2:a Yeah. No. He's been he's been deep in this. Ben Affleck reveals that seeing open AI models made him call Matt Damon and warn we're finished before realizing its researchers knew little about how movies are made. So anyway, what what else is in the timeline?
Speaker 2:I wanted to find the mansion section because there were some interesting houses.
Speaker 1:Jake Paul says NVIDIA is at an all time high. Figure building a robot every hour. In five years, a robot will fight for for a world title and I'll be its promoter. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That is where we're going.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Billionaire Peter Thiel is behind the $130,000,000 purchase of Casa Encantada. The winning bidder of the Los Angeles estate was an LLC. And this is the circa nineteen thirties Bel Air Estate once prized as one of Los Angeles's grandest homes. It has a Wikipedia page.
Speaker 2:Correct, Tyler?
Speaker 4:It does. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What stuck out on the Wikipedia page? Why why... What what it take for a for a house to earn a Wikipedia page these days?
Speaker 4:I mean, I think it's just like very historical. Okay. Yeah. Built in 1938 originally.
Speaker 2:Does it have a golf course on it? Oh, no. That's the Bel Air Country Club. It's just next to it. But it does have a putting green.
Speaker 2:So... Okay. There's some features here. Let's see. We're going to do another tier list.
Speaker 2:8.5 acres estate. 8.5 acres. Where are you putting that?
Speaker 1:S tier.
Speaker 2:S tier. Seven bedrooms?
Speaker 1:S tier.
Speaker 2:Not too many bedrooms?
Speaker 1:Fish and guests stink after three days.
Speaker 2:So why do you need seven bedrooms?
Speaker 1:Well...
Speaker 2:Six kids?
Speaker 1:No. I just think sometimes it's nice to have a number of guests at the same time.
Speaker 2:I think this is oh, in I wonder if this is seven bedrooms in in the entire property. It's twice set the record for the most expensive private home sale ever. First, 12,400,000 in 1980 and again in in 2000 for 94,000,000. Not a lot of appreciation from 2000 to today. It's been twenty six years, but it's only gone up by 30%.
Speaker 2:Let's see what else is going on here. Longtime home of the late financier and telecom mogul, Gary Winick and his wife. The property was subject of a contentious foreclosure battle after Gary's death. What do you think about living in a home where the previous owner was a financier and telecom mogul? Is that good energy to live in?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mogul. Mogul's great. I mean, I obviously prefer a tycoon.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:I think there's a tycoon in there now. Oh. So the next owner will get to enjoy the...
Speaker 1:That's a great provenance. Yeah. Mogul, tycoon.
Speaker 2:It's on an upward trajectory of ownership... Magnate. Could be coming. Be Gary who founded Global Crossing. We talked about this guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, with a promise to lay undersea fiber optic cable in the world... Around the world. He was once said to be LA's richest man after his death. It became clear that he was severely strapped for cash and deeply in debt.
Speaker 2:What tier is deeply in debt? Underrated? Overrated?
Speaker 1:It's... It depends on on how you come out the other side.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:We've never we've never been afraid of leverage here.
Speaker 2:Well, didn't live to to feel the
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The unfortunate.
Speaker 1:Well, mean, Crossing, like Crazy. Went down bankruptcy Yeah. In the .com era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.com. He he went a little too hard.
Speaker 2:But he got out at least a little bit, it seems like, before all of that. Gary Winnick donated millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Zoo. What do you think about donating to the LA Zoo? Do you like zoos? What tier is zoo?
Speaker 1:I gotta... I mean...
Speaker 2:I like how you're really wrestling with it.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's tough. Put it in a
Speaker 2:tier. Put it in I a
Speaker 1:for... It's tough because speaking for myself Yeah. I would never I would never choose to go to the zoo.
Speaker 5:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. But speaking on behalf of of my family, I'm probably in zoos a few times a year.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So, I think it's an s tier experience for for the children.
Speaker 2:Okay. But, yeah, sounds like there's some caveats there. What about a menagerie?
Speaker 1:S tier.
Speaker 2:S tier. Right? Yeah. It's basically a private zoo.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Menagerie is deeply underrated. I recently discovered that there was an illegal menagerie in my town featuring zebras, hundreds of rabbits because they just multiply and multiply and multiply. People need to consider. If If you're gonna bend the rules, bend them around...
Speaker 1:Gold says, Jordy, rent a giraffe and take it for a spin on the track. I like that. I like that. Putting putting zoos at race tracks where you could actually ride the animals around Mhmm. That's us here.
Speaker 2:Oh, Conrad Hilton lived in this house. Interesting. Mhmm. Okay. Later owners.
Speaker 2:Design, architecture, and ground. It does have a putting green. I know you're not a big golfer, but do you like putting green as an amenity on an eight and a half acre estate? What tier would putting green go?
Speaker 1:Why not a par three though?
Speaker 2:Whole course or just one whole?
Speaker 1:I I think you can maybe do three holes.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Three whole par three.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that could be that could be, you know, a forty minute experience for you and your...
Speaker 1:That actually that actually exists near me. There's somebody with with a private par three. Oh. And so if you look at the map, you're like, oh, there's... I never knew there was a golf course there.
Speaker 1:It's like,
Speaker 2:yeah, there's a
Speaker 1:golf course. It's... You're not it's not a commercial operation. Mhmm. But s tier.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Well, there's some other news here. Oil oil executives flocking to Venezuela set off a hunt for golf clubs. This is in Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:Dozens of of executives teed up at the lush Caracas Country Club for a golf tournament on Monday, warming up for a sold out oil and gas conference in the Venezuelan capital this week. Days earlier, the event organizers were in a panic. We contacted every golf club and shop to find clubs. We borrowed some sets and even bought a few to make sure we had enough. Brought a few.
Speaker 2:For ordinary Venezuelans, a rush in the city's capitals, wealthy bubble to secure golf clubs is almost an absurd problem. They faced years of economic contraction, hyperinflation, and sanctions that have impoverished the oil rich country. The country is also recovering from twin earthquakes. Yet the yet the conference fits with that president Donald Trump's promise to restore Venezuela's former former former glory under an umbrella of US influence. Trump, a regular golfer and owner of multiple international courses, laid down his ambition of channeling a $100,000,000,000 into Venezuela's oil industry revival after US forces deposed former leader Nicolas Maduro in January.
Speaker 2:Some 650 foreign and local executives, government officials, and foreign diplomats are due to attend the Venezuela International Oil and Gas Summit starting Tuesday with over a 150 more on the waiting list. The stampede illustrates how Venezuela is captivating the hydrocarbons industry at a time when Middle East supplies are choked by war. So everyone's trying to bring their golf clubs on this trip. I thought there were some other there's some other stories in here. But where should we go next?
Speaker 2:I'll tell everyone 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. Sean Frank says have you been sued in California for wiretapping just for using a Meta Pixel? Thousands of e com brands were getting shakedown requests for nothing more than a conversion pixel.
Speaker 2:Every settlement was 10,000 to $550,000 right out of the pocket of small businesses. He says he was sued multiple times. As of today, that won't ever happen again. I thought this was the wrong reading of the law and wanted to do something about it. My internal team worked with the Ecommerce Alliance.
Speaker 2:They put time, money, and resources into changing this law. I didn't... I really didn't do much, but as a result of their hard work, no one will ever be sued for this ever again. The work of the ecommerce alliance backed by postscript. Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 2:I know postscript.
Speaker 1:Very
Speaker 2:cool. Just saved the entire ecommerce industry probably $30,000,000 a year. Huge shout out to Gina from my team for getting this done. Ridge could have just kept paying it, but that's how these things win. Ecom brands are too fractured.
Speaker 2:Everyone's too cheap. Everyone's being crabs in a bucket. And so, yeah, everyone just is like, oh, we gotta settle this. We got something. That happens a lot.
Speaker 2:And so interesting. The other big news, Anthropic is aiming to go public ahead of Thanksgiving with an IPO roadshow as soon as the week of November 9. Okay. So more than a full month away, but still on track for Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:Q four.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, it seems like they're they're teeing up a number of different news and and models and there's a Fable five five rumors. And so there's a big question about like what will go into hyping the IPO? Do you need to, you know, discover gold in a hidden treasure? Do you need to dive to a shipwreck or whatever you need to do to make a splash? Or do you just need to make one final pelican on a bike?
Speaker 2:That should be the cover sheet of the the s one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So pelican on a bike, we did it. Larry Ellison is selling his oceanfront estate in Florida. He wants a $165,000,000 for it. Tech billionaire is relisting his roughly 8.4 acre North Palm Beach property because he's adding to a different estate in Florida. It's about 14% more than his original asking price.
Speaker 2:He put it on the market in 2022, but he's listing it again at a higher price. He bought the 8.4 acre property Last year? Last... No. In...
Speaker 2:For 80,000,000 in 2021. He relisted it for 145 a year later. The move comes as Allison has been expanding his estate in Manalapan. I think that's how you pronounce that. An affluent town just South of Palm Beach.
Speaker 2:In June, the Oracle cofounder paid about 35,000,000 for a parcel of land next to his fifth... Roughly 15 acre compound. Have you seen Ken Griffin's compound? Have you seen how many properties he's bought? It's like the entire block.
Speaker 1:He's probably bought more since I He's been Last saw it.
Speaker 2:It... Like the visualization is insane. He's he's building the biggest compound like ever. And and and it it begs the question like, yeah, think you do have to go golf course at that point because there's only so many features if you're getting up into like 30 acres in a residential district. Like what are you gonna do at a certain point?
Speaker 2:Like you got a pool, you got a full tennis court. There's some states that will have like Airstrip. Two tennis courts and a pickleball court. Yeah. Well, he's actually getting some pushback on a potential helicopter pad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because noise. That's Airstrip.
Speaker 1:That's I said that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Pushback. You go to Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You go to the residence. They're like, please, we don't want helicopters. And you're like, fine. Extra.
Speaker 1:Full plan. I would love I would love to understand his analysis of like the the risk reward of of of helicopter flights for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Seems dangerous. But I think with the right pilot, if you get somebody who's really, really elite, I... And and and you have a whole team that's servicing it, making sure that it's, you know, really dialed getting brand new one every year, like money's no expense, like there's probably a way to get to five nines of of security. But still some risk.
Speaker 2:But there's risk in everything. Yeah. You know, you know, you're you're not immune to risk. Seminole Landing is located next to the Seminole Golf Club. In 2020, Robert f Smith, a billionaire private equity executive, bought a pair of houses there from energy drinks entrepreneur Russ Weiner for 48,190,000.
Speaker 2:Which energy drink did Russ Weiner start? Mhmm. Rockstar Energy. That's right. His net worth is 5,400,000,000.
Speaker 2:There you go. Deals of a $100,000,000 plus homes have become almost return... Routine in neighboring Palm Beach. However, Kenny and Kaneb said they have they have seen 50,000,000 plus market beginning to establish itself in North Palm Beach too. There's another company that we should dig into, Squishmallows.
Speaker 2:Have you heard of this company before? Squishmallows. It's a ultra soft collectible plus toy created by Kelly Toy in 2017 known for their marshmallow like texture and diverse character personalities. Have you ever heard of this brand before? No.
Speaker 2:Because Jonathan Kelly, whose family, his company created this ultra soft plush toy, is selling it at my mansion in Bel Air for $38,000,000. He bought the property as an investment. He never lived infinity pool.
Speaker 1:Would you look at that?
Speaker 2:F, dear.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, you know, Brian Johnson would would be a quick pass on this house due to the proximity to that golf course.
Speaker 2:Oh, the golf course.
Speaker 1:Golf course.
Speaker 2:Chemicals, potentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just just Risk. You know, the amount of the amount of various products that it takes to maintain a golf course.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And and the... Yeah. Just being that close to it can have some pretty bad health effects.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Interesting. Well, he never lived there, so he's doing fine. The company blew up on TikTok during the pandemic. Now he's betting some of that money on Los Angeles real estate.
Speaker 2:Kelly's listing his Bel Air mansion for 38,000,000, significantly more than the 26,000,000 he paid in 2023. He said he bought the 2022 property at a relatively low price. I imagine interest rates were really low too. Originally had it listed for 47.5, trying to double his money almost, but has cut it back. And this was right before the LA mansion tax passed on homes priced above $5,000,000.
Speaker 2:So he's hoping to reap the reward by selling now that the market has stabilized. The property was designed by architect Zoltan Pali and has some has some interesting features. Set above the fourth green of the golf course at Bel Air Country Club, the property spans three levels. I know you don't like two level homes. Is three gonna go in an even lower tier for you?
Speaker 2:Where are you putting three level houses?
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't wanna I don't wanna be too harsh of a critic given that this house is is very well set up to take advantage of of of the views of the course and city and these kind of things. So I I won't I won't criticize it in this context, but I will criticize the pool.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So the pool is aft here. Yeah. Being close to a golf course.
Speaker 2:Being this close to a golf course, is that d tier or f tier?
Speaker 1:F tier.
Speaker 2:F tier. Okay.
Speaker 1:Actually, I put the pool at d tier. Pool's d tier. Golf course
Speaker 2:is tier because that's dangerous. What about the overall aesthetic, the architectural style, just the vibe?
Speaker 1:It's it's quite a bit better than the one we were looking at yesterday Mhmm. That is pure, raw McMansion
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Generic. Yep. You know, looks like it was built in without tender love and care. Sure. This is quite a bit more brutalist.
Speaker 1:A opinionated. Material selection is Okay. Is... Looks a lot better.
Speaker 2:But... But... It's not making it to s tier?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna put it... Yeah. I'm gonna put it at... Again, it's like, do you wanna feel like you're living on... Like in a in a, you know, a modern college campus library, you know?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. That's kind of the the the style, the the sort of architecture style
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In some ways. Okay. Some people are gonna be pretty fired up
Speaker 2:about it. So your final answer?
Speaker 1:The the overall...
Speaker 2:Aesthetic. The architectural design.
Speaker 1:I think it... Again, it feels a little generic but I'll put it in b tier.
Speaker 2:B tier. Okay. Lightning round. You've already raided the pool. The house comes with the wine room.
Speaker 2:Where are you going on the wine room? Do we need a picture of the wine room to illustrate? I don't think we have...
Speaker 1:Okay. Everyone... You got to change the name from wine room to home data center.
Speaker 2:Oh. I I thought you were gonna go natural light room. That's what I'm that's what I'm trying to get.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's just
Speaker 2:a whole room for all of the different vintages of Natty Light. That's the goal. Where are you putting wine room?
Speaker 1:Home data center, a tier.
Speaker 2:A tier. Okay. Theater, we know. You like a theater because it'll draw me over for movie a tier? Correct.
Speaker 2:I got one last feature. It has a podcast studio.
Speaker 1:F tier.
Speaker 2:F tier? What?
Speaker 1:Never podcast at home. Only podcast in your own version of the UltraDome.
Speaker 2:You need to get out, stretch, spread your wings. You can't podcast...
Speaker 1:I hate... I mean, there's a reason we could be... Could be home right now? Could be doing the show from home right now.
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 1:could. There's nothing like being in here.
Speaker 2:I'm wondering when the podcast studio went in because he bought this house. He never lived in it. I don't think he has a podcast. Did he think I need to add a podcast studio because that's what will add value to the property? Was he working it?
Speaker 2:Or do they rent it?
Speaker 1:Well you know that modern apartment buildings are are adding this. It's it's a it's a new amenity, John. Oh, yeah. They're like, well, we have a sauna. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We have a pool. Yeah. And we have podcast studios that you can rent by the hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:Already said F tier.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Anyway, the price of Kelly's property could be considered entry point for the neighborhood, Noah said. The LA mansion tax did slow down the high end market. But anything...
Speaker 2:But like anything, people have gotten accustomed to it. So good luck to whoever's picking up this Bel Air mansion. There's one more here. The Bali inspired Florida home fetched $83,000,000 who is owned by billionaire Chris Rocos. I'm not sure who this is.
Speaker 2:Rocos Capital Management.
Speaker 1:Brutal solar placement.
Speaker 2:Oh, that solar?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:What's going on here? What? Oh, on the roof. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Doesn't quite blend in with that type of roof. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It actually works better if you have a more boxy, modern, brutalist style. You throw a bunch of Flat roof. Even... Yeah. Flat roof would definitely hide it.
Speaker 2:But even, you know, the Tesla solar roof, something like that, there has to be a way to integrate that more. Where are you ranking the solar panels?
Speaker 1:Well, think solar is fantastic.
Speaker 2:But aesthetically?
Speaker 1:Absolutely brutal.
Speaker 2:So conclusion?
Speaker 1:I'm going to go d tier for the placement. Well, f tier placement, s tier feature.
Speaker 2:S tier feature. You like the solar. And why is that? Is that is that the... You like the idea that if there's a power outage, you still have some power?
Speaker 2:Or is it just like good for the environment, nice to have cheaper electricity?
Speaker 1:A bit of a of a bit of both.
Speaker 2:Bit of both.
Speaker 1:Bit of both.
Speaker 2:You like some solar? Cool. I like it. Yeah. And for your home data center.
Speaker 1:But but I can imagine it would be... Yeah. The the funny thing is if you're in Florida and there's a hurricane and and your power goes out, you're probably not actually able to power your home with it because you can It's imagine storm. Weather.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So... But you could use it to charge up batteries and have some supply there.
Speaker 1:I would blanket the grass with solar.
Speaker 2:You would do solar grass. Okay.
Speaker 1:Solar. No. Just a a deck of solar.
Speaker 2:What about a solar pier? He's on the beach. You could just build a pier that goes out into the ocean.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Free free land, basically, just to build it up.
Speaker 1:There we go. And many... We gotta... Why is why is no one talking about Andrew McCallop going to Paradigm?
Speaker 2:Oh.... One.
Speaker 1:Early early friend of the show, Andrew McCallop, is joining Paradigm. New chapter. Joining as an entrepreneur in residence. Mhmm. He's been at VARTA for years now.
Speaker 1:He says VARTA was a grand adventure and one... And a one of one experience I'll cherish forever. I had the rare privilege of joining the founding team and helping take a wild idea from zero to one from a blank sheet of paper to a hype... To hypersonic vehicles coming home from orbit. I'm incredibly proud of what we built together.
Speaker 1:Paradigm is giving me something incredibly cool. I have the freedom to search for the next important thing worth building. This might look like a radical departure, but I see it as a chance to step back, look broadly, follow my curiosity. Andrew is incredibly creative and incredibly entertaining. And he's always been working on projects.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Great hack.
Speaker 1:My only hope for his new role is that he doesn't find the big idea right away because I want to ship a bunch of fun stuff
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The meantime and little experiments. Yeah. There's so many things that are... That should be built that that don't necessarily have an immediate like commercial Yeah. Opportunity.
Speaker 1:And I hope that he builds
Speaker 2:Is that the Paradigm office? This is a beautiful office. That ceiling is amazing. Yeah. Really really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exciting. I'm sure we'll get a lot of a lot of different projects out of him. Very very good.
Speaker 2:What is going on in Cerebrus land? Take him as taking shots at Cerebrus. Says, if I was a Cerebrus shareholder, I would be livid right now. Seriously, what the heck? Insiders dumping stocks, CFO, COO, accounting officer and no info about losing GPT 6.1 ultra fast.
Speaker 2:And so the big the big sort of drama in Cerebrus world over the last couple days has been that Cerebrus is maybe powering ultra fast mode for GPT 5.6 Soul, but not ultra fast or something. That Cerebrus should comment publicly, Takem says, especially when insiders are dumping stock. They hyped they hyped that they were going to win GPT six SOL UltraFast. But then NVIDIA was commenting like, we're actually the ones that got this working. We're we're we're running it on low batch size, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Tyler, do you have any more context on what's going on with Cerebras?
Speaker 4:There's not been a ton of details, but Yeah. Yeah. Semi analysis had a post that said, like, breaking the new ultrafast is not on Cerebras. Yeah. And then Nvidia had like a, you know, the little eyes emoji
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:They commented.
Speaker 2:Seems pretty obvious. Lying that it they got it done. You know, game's not over. Good luck to Cerebris. I'm sure they'll they'll they'll rebuild and find a find a, you know, a potential play there.
Speaker 2:The initial experience of of Cerebras inference was was very, very remarkable. But there are obviously a lot of trade offs there. And so it's a... It it requires a lot of, back and forth and iteration.
Speaker 1:We've got to talk about DotSI domains. Okay. Suhail says, get your dotsi domain, people. Appreciate Rob, at Rob at Snagged for helping us lock it down. And I'll start by saying Rob and the Snag team are some of the finest domain brokers I've ever worked with.
Speaker 1:Yep. Rob helped us get tbpn.com back Yeah. In the And then I'll I'll say next that I don't think it's worth getting your s.si domain Mhmm. At all. I think super intelligence and trying to rebrand it is corny and you should focus whatever energy you are gonna put on getting a .si domain on just getting your .com.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But I would do it. Yeah. I would do it with I would do it with Rob. I think the whole scramble, already .ai domains are are obviously inferior to .coms in every single use case. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so using like the second tier version, the dot SI
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Is is I'm hearing is even worse.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm hearing sort of a pitch for like a third party candidate. Because of course Donald Trump came out and said we need to be SI, super intelligent. And then Gavin Newsom fought back and said we ought to use AI. And you're saying .com. So sort of a third party just pure commercialization.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What does COM actually stand for? Commercial entity. Right?
Speaker 1:It's great. That's a good question.
Speaker 2:That's not going anywhere.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Commercial or company?
Speaker 2:Commercial or company.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah. There we go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Commercial. Yeah. Gavin Newsom, he signed to the executive order declaring artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence in California. You're welcome, America.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Someone already... Someone someone already sniped yikes..si. The tbpn.si.
Speaker 2:Wait, really?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Well, enjoy it. We're not. Someone's named... Naaman Mark says, focuson.com, bro. Why be a king when you can be a god?
Speaker 1:I don't get it. No. Was just saying like .com is the pinnacle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's true. You gotta you gotta just... Main thing is...
Speaker 2:Road to .com.
Speaker 1:Any time you're trying to use something that's not a .com, you're going against the fact that consumers their entire time on the internet have been trained to understand, like very passively trained every single day, every single day, hundreds of times a day Yeah. That serious businesses have use.com. Real dot durable businesses use .com. So when you're even going through the naming process, so many found like picking a name where you're never gonna be able to get the .com because some large company has it. I think it's just a bad idea.
Speaker 1:And that's why I end up Yeah. I end up talking with with with Rob about about different domains for companies in my portfolio even oftentimes before the company is Yeah. Actually established.
Speaker 2:And and and also like the flip side of that, like, reinforcing hundreds of times a day, like, real companies have real .coms with with, like, their real brand names is they're also getting reinforced fairly frequently that the new TLD is sketchy. Like I'm sure chat.ai is sketchy and like there's so many different like knock offs of like Yeah. Whatever new TLD, whatever the hot
Speaker 1:positive programming constantly and negative programming.
Speaker 2:So I'm sure the .si world is gonna have so much spam on there that, yeah, there might be a couple companies that lean in and and build real companies and like there are plenty of companies that we've talked to that do have the .ai domain and and they are real companies. Isn't... Doesn't Anthropic have like claw.ai or something like that? Like I feel like there's been a few that Yeah. But they don't.
Speaker 1:They don't.
Speaker 2:Embraced it. I think they reroute to the .com honestly. Yeah. They... But but They
Speaker 1:don't reroute.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there are some .ai companies that have broken through but still it's a lot of slop and then SI is going to go through the same thing when you could just getanice.com. Anyway, huge jobs miss. It says zero hedge. September non farm payrolls came in at 29,000.
Speaker 2:Expected 90,000. Last revised lower to one thirty three k. There's a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the economy. The rates are surging. So the market is up because this maybe will lead to like a rate cut potentially.
Speaker 2:But from Bloomberg, they have 10 reasons why rates are surging. Here are the top 10 reasons why interest rates are surging. Resilient economic growth, The US and the world really, US global growth supports inflation and reduces demand for bonds. There's other things you can buy. Higher commodity prices, oil, gas, diesel, food prices are adding to inflation pressure.
Speaker 2:That's driving up rates. Interest rate hikes. Central bankers are actually just rise... Raising rates directly, signaling further increases to combat inflation. Hyperscaler borrowing, we've talked about this one a bunch.
Speaker 2:AI infrastructure spending is driving a surge in corporate bond issuance, increasing consumption for investor cash. And we will get back to that in a minute because we have Joe Gebbia with us.
Speaker 1:No. We have Molly.
Speaker 2:Oh, have Molly. Okay.
Speaker 1:We probably have a couple more minutes. Okay. We're rescheduling, Joe. Got it. There were some technical difficulties, but we'll get him back on Yes.
Speaker 1:As soon as possible.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about what doctor dad is saying. Please. With horsepower comes horse responsibility. I couldn't agree more. We obviously have this horse here.
Speaker 1:Yes. As a constant reminder
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That with great with horsepower with great horsepower comes great horse responsibility. Indeed. Indeed. Let me tell
Speaker 2:you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care
Speaker 1:of scaling, monitoring and security. Our friend, Ara Karazian Yeah. Saying AI spending falls
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:In the latest Ramp AI index. You're striking fear. Price cuts front here in addition to cheaper and more efficient models at standard and light levels are pushing down the cost of using AI. Open source models remain less than 5% of business spend. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This decline in spend is driven almost exclusively by competition between OpenAI and Anthropic. Very, very dramatic headline, and Buco Capital comes in and says, AI spend falls for the twelfth time in my chart that keeps going up and to the right is more accurate, but a less interesting title. And of course, yeah, looking at Ara's chart, it's been going up and down quite a lot, but the trend is clear.
Speaker 2:Okay. We have been switching up our schedule, but we have Joe Gebbia with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome and hear about everything from his perspective.
Speaker 1:What's going on? At the
Speaker 2:National Design Studio. Joe, thank you so much for joining the show. How are you today?
Speaker 7:Gentlemen, it's great to see you. Been looking Yeah. Forward to this for a long time
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to have you. Caught us on the one day where neither of us is wearing a suit. Yes. So...
Speaker 7:You guys are bringing style to Silicon Valley. It's one one of the many things I appreciate about the show.
Speaker 2:Yes. And you're bringing design to Washington. Can you get us up to speed on your role, how you actually interface with digital services, what your day to day looks like, what your team looks like? Just sort of set the table for us.
Speaker 7:Yes. Well, it was about eighteen months ago I joined Doge Yeah. With a specific mission to fix a very outdated part of the government, which was how government employees retire. Yeah. It was, you know, based...
Speaker 7:Paper based. It was really hard to use. Mhmm. So in about six months, I recruited a couple ex Airbnb engineers, some great designers. We took the whole process online.
Speaker 7:It was a huge win for the admin. Went from six months to about six seconds
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:To to retire.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it spawned a bigger idea which is what if we did this government wide? What if we could go across every agency working with every cabinet member to actually reform the digital experience for the entire nation?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I'm interested in is like there's the National Design Studio and I think there's there are people still that think design is just like what color the button looks. And design is so much more than that. Like you are designing the system. I imagine that a lot of the design work that you're doing is actually interfacing with a ton of different stakeholders, understanding why a system was built.
Speaker 2:There's the Chesterton fence analogies like what does it actually take to move a project through the National Design Studio to to fruition? Because I imagine it's not just, you know, a new front end.
Speaker 7:It's more than that. You're right. The big idea was, well, you have the... There's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. Some of are familiar with maybe the IRS every April 15 and some long tail websites that are more information based.
Speaker 7:And there was a realization a couple months back, earlier this year, there's no way... I mean, you spend your whole lifetime trying to go website by website to upgrade and prove to modern standards.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it became apparent and obvious at a certain point, well, what if we just used modern tools that are emerging in real time vis a vis AI and and gave people a place where instead of 29,000, what if there was just one? Yeah. What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it? Meaning that I could go search which Medicare plan is right for me or right for my grandmother or grandfather, and then right in the same site, I'd be able to enroll. And there's something very interesting here.
Speaker 7:So we built america.gov to do exactly that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And the site is a place to get information and also it's coming soon, action it. So the interesting thing is that because because we're in the government, our LLM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the Internet.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:So information, that means it's accurate and it's up to date. Mhmm. It also means that coming from in the government, we can integrate into agencies. Yeah. Meaning that with the enrollment for Medicare, we can actually connect into the Medicare database because we're inside the government and help somebody actually effectuate that change, make that decision right in one place and not have to go back into the maze the Medicare website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk more. America.gov launched right as there's so much excitement on the West Coast around personal agents and really all over the world as people have gone from just like getting information or or everyday people are going from getting information from LLMs to actually getting information and being able to take action. I imagine you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the project. You didn't need new agents to to get released. But how how good can this get?
Speaker 1:Like, because I can imagine a a one homepage for interacting with your government where again, you can learn about the services that the government provides and and laws and everything like that. And then be able to actually immediately take action and and let's say spawn an agent that goes and deals with another agent another agency, and and your agent is dealing with their agent, and then it brings you it brings you in the loop when you need... When it needs your input and things like that. I can imagine, like, the the perfect version of that product, but any I I... You're dealing with the actual realities of what it's gonna actually take to roll that out.
Speaker 1:And given how hard it's been to get agents right in the enterprise and and personal agents that are still very error prone, I can only imagine that it's gonna be, you know, just as hard or harder for your team to do.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look, I'm sure that day will come and it's probably closer than we all think. For now though, don't even have to go to that that far because we're positioned inside. A lot of these agencies have APIs that we can connect to that, you know, outside third parties are never going have access to. So we have this advantage right now where we can just connect directly to those, and if they don't exist, we now have an executive order to help create APIs that that that we need in order to do things like that improve the experience for everyday Americans.
Speaker 7:You just move, you have to change your address post office. You'll be able to do that on america.gov, no stress. You want to learn about and actually enroll in an armed service, you can do that on america.gov in a couple clicks. You lost your Social Security card and needed to replace it. You want know a fun fact?
Speaker 7:We looked at the flow of the replacement of our Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper. Wow. And that's, by the way, with no errors. That's if you get it right the first time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so what you'll see in american.gov in the months to come Yeah. When you're logged in, it literally takes one click. Yeah. And it ships your your Social Security card.
Speaker 2:So...
Speaker 7:So there's more than a 10 x improvement that's unfolding right now across the nation. I don't know if you can hear it. Marine One's taken off
Speaker 2:Oh, behind
Speaker 7:the White House here.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 7:Don't if you guys hear that Wow. At
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not coming through. Your your Nice to your team is
Speaker 2:Yeah, Dot.
Speaker 1:Set up a a good system. I wish we could hear it.
Speaker 2:Can you can you talk... Oh, Can you talk us through the the... Can you hear us okay?
Speaker 7:The... Can you see the helicopter there?
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh, yeah. There it is. Wow. There you go.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's about to land.
Speaker 4:Still alive.
Speaker 2:Crazy. There you go.
Speaker 1:Wow. Would you look at that.
Speaker 2:Landing right back.
Speaker 1:Pretty good for a... For an AI background.
Speaker 7:Isn't it? It's this White House background option that seems really pain on them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I... There's the humorous sort of fake quote, we don't do things because they're easy, we do them because we thought they would be easy. You don't strike me as somebody that would be super naive. I assumed you imagined that this work would be, you know, incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1:Not because like designing the front end would be difficult, but this sort of complex coordination. But when it comes to just making everyday everyday interactions with with the federal government easier, has has have some elements been been been relatively straightforward? Or has it all been a slog that that that makes, you know, starting a YC startup feel easy?
Speaker 7:There are elements of YC here. There's a lot of elements of Airbnb. You know, some would say the hardest marketplace to start is when a stranger is going to rent out their homes to another stranger. So, you know, that was definitely a lot of lessons there of... And a lot of enjoyment of taking on a really hard problem like that.
Speaker 7:Like how do you create trust between people you've never met and take that to scale? So you know, it takes about ten years before we pulled it off. And... But it's a it's it's a huge problem here. There's...
Speaker 7:It's... The government's the largest employer. It's 2,300,000 employees. It's got systems that go back to the nineteen seventies. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:They still are actual mainframes running important systems in our government, in our nation today. But it's 2026, guys. What are we doing? It's The United States Of America. Yeah.
Speaker 7:We lead in everything else. We lead culturally, economically, technologically. Let's also be a leader in the citizen experience. It doesn't have to it doesn't have to be the way it is. It can be better.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, let's let's put... Plant a flag Say enough is enough. Yeah. Like, I'm I'm embarrassed actually.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 7:as a as a tech guy, as Silicon Valley Yeah. As a designer, fact, the way our nation shows... Had shown up digitally is no one would... No one admires it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And they should.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's true.
Speaker 7:So that's that's why I'm here.
Speaker 2:How do you think about the differences between your work at Airbnb to now your work in the government, specifically around how you measure success. I mean, sounds like you do think in KPIs, but maybe it's not specific click through rates, the more minutiae of when you have designed Airbnb from scratch. It was a greenfield project. So you're not starting with a mainframe. But you still understand that just going from 86 clicks down to just a few is going to be a huge improvement.
Speaker 2:How much of what you're doing is driven by the traditional software metrics versus more intuitive sort of higher level of abstraction metrics just like this is a mess and we should just reduce complexity and the KPI looks a little bit different than what you were doing before.
Speaker 7:I'll tell you the first difference that came to mind is when you're starting your company, you're a founder, you know, Airbnb was... That was Brian Nate and I's universe.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, we called all the shots. Yeah. Here, it's it's president's universe. Yeah.
Speaker 7:You know, it's it's different. So you're you're working in a very different context where
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You don't... You know, the the authority that you have as founders is different, obviously. Yeah. That was that was the first big change. Second is I'd say the way that we're measuring on America Dot Gov ultimately will be about hours saved.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's not about the number of websites used or information on the site. It's it's really comes down to hours saved. There's a stat published from the government that Americans spend 10,000,000,000 with a B hours every year trying to get things done in the government. That's an absurd amount of time.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of time.
Speaker 7:And the level of inefficiency that that that creates that is... It's over. Like, we're ending it. Yeah. The whole point of america.gov is to end that.
Speaker 7:If we 10 x the improvement of getting stuff done, getting some information you need, or getting the the action done, the enrollment, the application, etcetera, That's billions of hours that go back into people's lives. Yeah. And maybe also back into the GDP.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for everything you're doing and thanks for coming on and breaking down...
Speaker 1:Last last question. Please. Do you think in another life the president would have been a product guy? Or is he more of like visionary like, but but you know, does he have opinions on on button colors and things like that? Or is he more higher level like just just get it done, Joe.
Speaker 1:I I trust you.
Speaker 7:Well, thankfully, you guys, we have a president who cares about this stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:He's a hospitality guy, remember.
Speaker 2:Oh, true.
Speaker 7:And so he he cares about the experience that our country has when it comes to these things. And so you think of america, think, .gov as a concierge to the government, he loves that. He's a builder, he's a fixer, and the credit goes to him for supporting this effort.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Final final question, and I know we're over, but what can we do about state state governments? Are... Mhmm. Do you think there's learnings that can be passed down to them?
Speaker 1:Is there shared infrastructure that could be basically, you know, owned and operated by the state but effectively code that that can be passed to them. Yep. Is it possible to open source this stuff for the for the states so that... Because I think like If it's... Spending ten billion hours with the federal government, they're spending, you know, probably an equal amount of time locally.
Speaker 7:You have to imagine there's states that have already reached out about that. Sure. There's other countries that have already reached out about this just in the last three days Mhmm. Saying, you know, how do we bring this to our country? I won't say their names yet, but multiple countries have reached out Cool.
Speaker 7:Asking how do we bring this here. So states have already reached out other nations. I think if we can do this right, when we do this right, which is phase one, actions to information, phase two is actioning that information in the next couple months, We'll set a new standard for the citizen experience to inspire states and other countries alike.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1:Great to catch up. We Thanks for the work.
Speaker 2:To come and chat with us. Have a great rest of your Have
Speaker 1:a great weekend.
Speaker 7:See you guys.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Speaker 2:Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. We're running about ten minutes behind, but we are going to sit back on track with Molly Fowler from the Dorm Room Fund. Molly. Molly, welcome to the show. How are doing?
Speaker 1:Sorry we're running late.
Speaker 8:Hey, guys. All good. That was actually really interesting to listen to. I used to work in government. So...
Speaker 8:And we... For the city of LA, we did an overhaul of the three one one website. And so to have somebody like Joe, who's like a product guy doing this is ridiculous. So cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very exciting to see it roll out. Anyway, first time on the show. Give us some your...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Explain... Excited to chat because so many so many friends of the show that are like got their... That that we know have got got their start with Dorm Room Fun.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it just seems to have these amazing like ripple effects. Totally. And yeah, very very excited to get the update.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. And I know you guys are big fans of Ben Horwitz and his magical anti AI AI tool. A recent dorm room funder we're very proud of. And Sure.
Speaker 8:I know you guys are homies of Will Menitas who Yes. I've been... I promised to encourage you guys to to to know that he's closer to 22 than he is to 40. So important details. Contrarian.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very contrarian.
Speaker 2:I I... You know, I I like all different viewpoints. That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's one one data point.
Speaker 2:It's a bold stance. You don't hear many people coming down on that side of the argument, but we encourage free and open debate here. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 2:Your opinion and I respect it.
Speaker 8:There there there may have may or may not have been some purchasing of some booze by some older folks for for Will before perhaps he could do that legally. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:Well, when you have a fake ID that says you're ten years younger, like, it doesn't work at liquor store.
Speaker 1:So... This minute of TBPN is the lowest TAM. It could be very entertaining for for like like 10 Well,
Speaker 2:let's spice it up with a gong smash. You raised some money? How big is the...
Speaker 8:Yes, sir. Yeah. So we just raised $50,000,000. We're really excited. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2:Let's get the replay going that. And we...
Speaker 1:That was a great hit.
Speaker 2:Gong smash... That was a bam. Here we go. Thank you.
Speaker 1:With authority. There we go. Okay. So reintroduce anybody that doesn't know what you guys do has gotta be living under a data center somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Introduce the the fund and the platform and strategy, and then, yeah, maybe talk about...
Speaker 8:No doubt. So so Dorm Room Fund was founded in 2012 as part of First Round Capital. I cannot take credit for this genius idea. It was it was actually Josh Koppelman
Speaker 2:Oh, great.
Speaker 8:Founder of First Round. But long story short is is that when you think about places where unfair advantage accrues to builders and to tech founders, it's pretty hard to compete with universities. Right? I mean, if you think about it, they're kind of like the OG ultimate hacker house. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so the question arose in 2012 to Josh, was like, how can we... You know, the cloud compute is new. We know it's gonna get way easier to start companies. You can spin up an instance on a... You AWS know, in your underpants instead of buying like, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Rackspace. And so, he was like, how do we find out who's great on campus and find them early in a... Ahead of sort of going to the classic like, accelerators or pitch competitions or that sort of thing. And so had the insight that students themselves, know, these incredibly connected super smart humans are gonna know who's legit and who's kind of dinking around before they go back to their consulting job when they finish business school. And and so that's how we got started, and the whole idea was, you know, scout scout...
Speaker 8:Scouting was new still. It was really something that that seasoned founders were doing, and so the idea was let's give these new folks some capital, and some training, and some guidance on what good looks like, and see if they can spot the best stuff first, because they've got all this social capital and knowledge about who's good and who isn't. And so that's that's how we got started. And started in Philly, grew to four cities across The US inside of First Round Capital. We had three funds with First Round.
Speaker 8:And then come 2021, we realized that there was this huge opportunity for us because the model was working. We were backing incredible founders before all the big boys. And we had this opportunity to, you know, increase the amount of capital we could give our founders to give them more help. Mhmm. And at a time when, you know, things were getting a bit more sophisticated on campus.
Speaker 8:So we spun out of First Round Capital, raised our own fund in 2021 with First Round as LPs. And have had a huge run since then. We were lucky enough to not only continue to invest in founders that are building on university campuses, so we're talking about college, MBA, PhD, but also the alumni of the dorm room fund community. Because as you guys can imagine, those, you know, twelve, fifteen students that are on the team for two years while they're in school, when they go out to build or invest, they become absolute superstars. And Yeah.
Speaker 8:So that's been a source of a lot of really amazing opportunities for us as a community.
Speaker 1:What are you what are... I mean, do you have any data on like entry prices? Because it feels like you you might be the the the... Well, you're kind of like final early stage fund that can actually reliably get in like sub Yep. 10,000,000 potentially because you're not like even even, you know, there's gotta be founders today on college campuses that are compelling enough that they could go raise, you know, a full seed round if they're No.
Speaker 2:If you're if you're in college and you do 50 k on 500 k, you can build a business for like a full year. Like Yeah. That's a Yeah. That that's a lot of money in in Yeah. The college world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so you guys, I'm sure, like actively avoid not being predatory. Yeah. And and that's on the the... That's the job of the individual investors.
Speaker 1:But if somebody's gonna give good pricing to somebody, would be one of their peers that then opens up this network that you guys have.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean I think... So I think a couple things are happening. One is that, you know, every time there's one of these big technology changes like we're seeing obviously today in the last couple of years, it really has the effect of leveling the playing field for first time builders. Right?
Speaker 8:So... And the other thing that it does is that it drops the price of how much it costs to really start a software business. And so, you know, we're in this really interesting era where, you know, Jordy you're right. There's a ton more capital on campus than used to be. You know, when we started doing this back in the old days, everybody thought we were insane.
Speaker 8:Now everybody's like, oh shit. I have to, you know, get my own campus program going. And so great founders can raise really quickly. I think what is what is different about today's market and I think puts dorm room fund in a really strong position is that founders are increasingly dilution sensitive. Right?
Speaker 8:And so there are a lot of these legacy solutions that look like seven, ten, 12% dilution with the first big check. And I think founders are quickly realizing that, you know, to John's point, you can build really fast, cheap. And so the place where DRF is sliding in is being this sort of almost like the replacement for an F and F round, like a friends and family, and recognizing that like not everybody has a bunch of like rich aunties and uncles who can back them up. Right? And so, dorm room fun can be that first infusion of capital to get them just to the point where they get that magic moment of like sparkles of product market fit.
Speaker 8:And then, we can help them go out with our giant community and help them raise an even more kick ass institutional round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. I remember back when I was in college, like the concept of a a friends and family round was so absurd to me because I was like Yeah. Friends and family that are gonna like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Individually invest like Thousands of money. As a car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, yeah. No.
Speaker 1:Like a new... Instead of buying a new car, why don't you invest... A wild
Speaker 2:at my idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No way. Yeah. And I I think that's... Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's such such an unlock too. It's it's also... Yeah. There's there's a lot of reasons that that it it can make more sense to do that. As much as you wanna give the people in your world access to to to what you're working on, sometimes it's better to just work with something more institutional.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, and I think there's also plenty of space for... I mean, there's there's been a lot of examples where dorm room funds been the first institutional check for a founder. Right? And we might catalyze around where they bring in a few friends and family alongside us.
Speaker 8:Right? So I don't think it's an either or, but I think what it is is recognizing that like, you don't necessarily have to go to the traditional accelerator programs or something like that as you're just getting started and that there's a more capital efficient way to do it, I think, the early days.
Speaker 1:What is... Last question for now. What does the 50,000,000 mean? How how do you how do you think about like allocating it across different different students, not, you know, on the on the investment team, but then also founders, things like that?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Definitely. So we... Our check size is is, you know, usually sub million for the first time around. We're probably gonna end up investing in, I guess, probably like 75 or 80 companies over the next, you know, in the sort of three year period.
Speaker 8:And the way we think about spreading that around is one, the student opportunities that are sourced to us. Right? So we have regional teams all across The US. They they cover all the top entrepreneurial ecosystems. And so each each of those four teams will be deploying capital over the next two years.
Speaker 8:We've already been in... We've already been deploying out of fund two since about July of last year. We also then have the bucket of dorm room fund alumni. Right? So if you've been part of the DRF crew, like like Ben Horwitz and like some others, no matter when you build, you're eligible for a dorm room fund check.
Speaker 8:And Mhmm. And those have been superstar hitters for us. So that's how we got into... Know, you we're lucky enough to get into cursor. We got into dandy really early because Tony and...
Speaker 8:Thank you. Tony and and Mike were both on the team when they were in undergrad. And so, you know, that's a really big win for us. And then, you know, we're lucky to have been able to get some really fantastic institutional partners with us in terms of LPs. And so now, we're in a really great position to not just help our founders with that first amount of capital, but actually be along for the ride a little bit longer.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much. Such a great product and platform and great to finally meet.
Speaker 2:On the new round.
Speaker 8:Thanks, guys. Great to
Speaker 2:see you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers, Molly. Goodbye. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do
Speaker 1:it. Time.
Speaker 2:Tom Dotan. The cat is in the bag, and the bag is in the river. We got the former host of Dead Cat. Welcome to the show. How you doing,
Speaker 4:I love the reference. I'm glad that you're still keeping the memory of Dead Cat alive.
Speaker 2:It was such a fantastic show. You guys gotta bring it back. I mean, I know it's like a...
Speaker 1:To me that that was like like there's not a lot of hardcore podcast that goes on. Like, when I was Matthew Bellini on the town Yeah. With Ari Emanuel. And I was like Yeah. This is hardcore podcasting.
Speaker 1:Yep. This is people like kinda arguing and bickering Yeah. Saying what they saying what they actually think. And I have some good memories of dead cat in like 2021, that era where you... People would actually stay what they they really thought.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, that these days...
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. I'm trying to think if am I the Ari or am I the Bell in that situation with Eric there. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well well, it's just more like you're listening to that and you're like, wow, this actually feels like you're just listening into...
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was inside baseball.... Lunch. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the Bellini Emmanuel thing doesn't match because like I feel I feel like all the Dead Cat hosts were like on the same lens, like they're all like real journalists in tech. But Yeah. The fact that it was called Dead Cat and it's like this obscure reference that you have to explain to like everyone who joins is was like...
Speaker 4:Everybody has Dead Cat Bounce. Yeah. Think it was a reference to that, which is a good one, but that wasn't it. But you know, Eric and and and Katie Benner Yeah. And I were all like the first journalists at the information.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 4:So Jessica hires us like right when the place launches. And so there's a brief period of time where we are all crunched into this very small office space where Amir Fratti, also early player, would
Speaker 1:Sure. Wow.
Speaker 4:Burn his toast every day and we would kind of deal with the toxic fumes with that. So from that environment birthed a podcast that
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:You guys remember.
Speaker 2:I do. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This Ellison profile, it could be it could be turned into a serialized podcast. It's obviously a profile avail... Available at Vanity Fair. But what got you
Speaker 1:With AI, it could be turned into a playable browser based
Speaker 2:game. Yes. Perhaps. But
Speaker 4:I don't know what that even means.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what got you interested in Ellison? Because we read an older Vanity Fair profile about Ellison that was fascinating where it shows that he's like dogfighting with David Ellison when David's like younger and they're like literally flying planes at each other. Fascinating character. Obviously, at the center of the AI build out but not at the White House dinner.
Speaker 2:A little bit more behind the scenes. Why'd you settle him for the
Speaker 4:Yeah. That profile that you read, the Vanity Fair one, was that... Do you remember? Was that the '97 one that Yeah. That Brian Burrow wrote?
Speaker 4:Yep. Such good legend. Game
Speaker 2:Insane.
Speaker 5:Such a good... Yeah. I talked
Speaker 4:to Brian actually while I was doing the story because I kinda wanted his blessing and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:This is the side point. Yeah. He told me I have no memory of doing that story. I have no... It is it is lost in time to him.
Speaker 4:But it was an amazing piece. Recommend everyone go out and read it because because Brian got access, you know. Like he was sitting next to to Larry at the the Bulls game and watching him with his then wife and fascinating. Steve Jobs is in it. It's a great piece.
Speaker 4:But look look for me, it was like, why not? You know? Like someone had to do it. The guy is everywhere. He's been around for generations, for for decades.
Speaker 4:I mean, of that first vintage of Silicon Valley titans, and the last guy who's who's in the game, you know, Steve Jobs has passed. Bill Gates is kind of sort of in it, but he's also more of like a grandfather like figure and, you know, also kind of tainted because of the Epstein stuff. And and and Larry is sort of the last one. He still really runs Oracle, and they're in the midst of, like you said, so many things between AI and the crazy bet that they're making to build data centers. They own 15% of TikTok, and how that came to pass was an incredible journey.
Speaker 4:And then everything that he's doing with David, you know, just today they finalized, you know, the the acquisition of Warner Brothers and Skydance is now like, I don't have this in front of me, I assume the largest studio in in Hollywood. And and Larry is, you know, he and David have 77% voting control over this
Speaker 1:thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so, know, the guy's like in the last chapter of his life or the latest chapter of his life and and and more active and more present than ever. And the and funny thing is he's also not available. He's not present. He's not someone that you see at the White House or in the office. And so, you know, all of that is just like as a reporter, you're like, what's going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That seems like a shift because obviously he participated in the last Vanity Fair profile, but in the nineties and he was... I think he went on Oprah or something. There's a there's a vignette about that where like his person like like people were so obsessed with him like would be suitors effectively would call Oracle headquarters and and try and ask him out on a date which is Yeah.
Speaker 1:One anecdote. He... Like... I remember the day very very early in building the show where he followed TBPN in like q... Like within a quarter of starting.
Speaker 1:And to me that to me that was wild too because as somebody who appears to be like outside playing outside of the matrix of the tech, you know, he's very like you're saying, he's in the industry but he's not like doing the the the comms tours and doing media and all these things like able to be like a very much a live player but behind the scenes. It was notable. Was like, he's on x? You know, and...
Speaker 4:Tweet You that out? You know, he is not on x anymore. I think he closed that
Speaker 2:account. So I don't... The whole, like, big tech monitor tweet, like, the automated account, like, posted it, basically.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so, like Okay.
Speaker 2:You see it there. Fascinating. What was interesting is, like, for the last year, I've been mapping the Ellison strategy as, like, a more of a barbell strategy. Like, you're building the data factory, the data centers, the chips, the the the... Potentially, like, the AI slop.
Speaker 2:But then you're also building Hollywood and TikTok and, like, legacy IP. And we see this with a number of investors where, you know, Josh Kushner is an investor in OpenAI, but also buying a sports team. Right? And these these two things are, like, at the opposite ends of the continuum for like high-tech, low tech. You center on a different analogy, not a barbell, but tentacles of an octopus.
Speaker 2:Can you tell me Yeah. About that and like what will it like what what actually does that mean? And then he's into this metaphor himself. Right?
Speaker 4:Right. Right. I mean, that was kind of, you know, it is sort of a a well known trope of of what it means to have power everywhere is you have your tentacles. It's it's just a saying. But with Larry, I mean, he he's been taking that seriously for as long as he's been in business.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, as I list out in the story, he's got multiple holding companies that are octopus themes. So between Yeah. You know, Octopus Corp, there's cephalod... Cephalopod Corp, there's tentacle Corp.
Speaker 4:Yeah. There's taco ventures, and taco is the Japanese word for for octopus.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 4:as I I also wrote in the story, when he first moved out to California, you know, right after he drops out of college and he's sitting with his buddy and they're looking out over the city and talking about the buildings that they're gonna own, he has a vision of a company called Universal Octopus Corp or something like that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:You know, universe... Anyway, so so this idea of having, you know, your your your your arms over multiple parts of the world in an industry is very much appeals to him. Yeah. And, you know, that is very instructive to his ambition. Like, he's someone who never stops.
Speaker 4:Like, Oracle is one of the great stories of tech. Right? It's it's this company that gets in at the ground level of of Silicon Valley with Steve Jobs and all these guys, and he has this very focused image of of the database and the relational database and it's not, you know, sexy in the way that Apple was consumer and stylish and and Bill Gates sort of, you know, this idea of workplace software. Oracle is really the the mechanics, the plumbing, but it's a great business
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's still around to this day and it's like people are still using the Oracle database and and he's still running it and so...
Speaker 2:And he maintained his ownership in Oracle so remarkably when there there are other companies that I put in that same category where there were multiple founders, things got split up, maybe the company got taken private, went public again, and, like, you... The founder winds up with, a couple percent. Larry was really able to continue reinvesting, buying stock at key moments, like maintaining that economic pool. Then when the AI moment comes and and and it booms, like, he's still in the the... That really tight club of, like, truly richest men in the world.
Speaker 2:It's a it's
Speaker 4:a And not only does he he maintain control, he grows control.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:Like its stock was was basically flat, you know, went sideways for for decades as Yeah. You know, the database would spin off cash, but he weren't really growing it at anything else. And during this period, he accumulates more and more control to a point where he owns 40% of the company, which is unheard of for for for a company of that size. Right? I mean, reason he's so rich is because he owns so much of this one company.
Speaker 4:And like, you know, I talked to some analysts for it. Oracle is basically considered by most traders like a public private company.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:You know, it's it's it's... The float is relatively small, and and Larry is totally in control, and you just sort of accept it. That's that's part of the game.
Speaker 2:That's part of the bargain. Yeah. I I think a lot of founders, don't necessarily realize, like, what a... What an effective stock buyback program over a decade can do to your ownership. We've seen this in the cloud storage market with the diverging paths of, Box and Dropbox where, you know, the...
Speaker 2:If you're buying back a lot of stock, even if you got diluted from those VC rounds, like, you could crawl your way back to twenty, thirty, 40% ownership over time. It's not going to happen in a year, but you don't need to just magically materialize, you know, $20,000,000,000 to actually go buy back It your can happen sort of slowly. I have one more question on this. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, there's a new movie coming What did you learn about the motivations there? What's going on?
Speaker 2:And do you have any predictions for what's going to happen in the movie? Because all of the all of the critics are saying like, it's the most unexpected thing ever. And I feel like the the story of Theranos has been told so many times. I can't imagine what might actually happen. So I want your take.
Speaker 4:I've kept myself spoiler free. I know there are some reviews out there that say exactly what what goes on in the movie. I So can't Yeah. Claim any knowledge I I think the variety or someone like that put out a review that really pissed people off because they walked you through the whole thing. But I mean, as far as Ellison goes, because he, you know, he's part of the story.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, he he invested there, you know, through multiple vehicles, through Taco, through other... Probably some of the octopi companies too. And you know, credit to him, he still believes in her, you know, long after she ends up getting... You know, this is in the story, but like he is, as some sources told me, smitten with her.
Speaker 4:He really thought she was the greatest and defended her to this day, said he was a she was a genius, is misunderstood and you know, part of the Alison story now is that he's also spending probably most of his investments are going into cancer research. He which you know, maybe we can talk about, but you know, the the idea of using, you know, tech dollars to fund cancer research and novel medical treatments for cancer, you could argue came from Elizabeth and like a shared interest there. Yeah. So they're deeply connected and and just one kind of funny point about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't know if you guys watched the the dropout. Now what was the name of the the Theranos series on the
Speaker 2:dropout? Yes.
Speaker 4:The dropout. Right? So Larry has a scene. I'm gonna say say for it. It's...
Speaker 4:Honestly, if the tech shows of that era, that's probably the best one. But, you know, there's a scene of Larry in the show where, you know, they're on one of... They're on a yacht and and he's telling her, can I swear on on TBPN?
Speaker 2:We don't swear actually.
Speaker 4:But... Okay. Alright. Get the get the freaking You
Speaker 2:know. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll try and thank Naughty naughty.
Speaker 4:I missed it. Missed it. Well, you guys can look up the clip but but he's in it and and and he's like, get the effing money.
Speaker 2:The money.
Speaker 4:And and that scene definitely never happened, mostly because they show him drinking, which he does not do. He's a he's a teetotaler. Teetotaler.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. Yeah. Fascinating.
Speaker 2:Do you know if he eats calamari because he loves the octopus? Does he also enjoy dining on octopus?
Speaker 7:You know, I don't... I I wish the...
Speaker 4:A better reporter would have found that out. I do know that he eats the same breakfast almost every day and probably if I worked the New York Times, would have written that that particular meal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did stay at at any of the sensei properties to try to immerse yourself in his his world?
Speaker 4:I have been so lunatic three times Okay. Now.
Speaker 1:There you Which
Speaker 4:is I feel like a lot. No. I've never stayed at the sensei properties. So I I I first started covering Larry when I was at the Wall Street Journal. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I did a story about Sensei Farms, is this hydroponic... Yeah. I I read that story. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was good.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was like this kind of... Yeah. Read... Didn't we read that on the show like Yeah. Within the first...
Speaker 5:On the show?
Speaker 1:Oh, sorry. Within the first... It was probably within the first month. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's this crazy boondoggle of, you know, he he wanted to reinvent, you know, indoor hydroponic farming and create the Tesla of agriculture and, look, it's still around. You can buy other salads in in Hawaii. But anyway, so for that I went to Lanai, went for two days and met a lot of the people there, and then I went back again for this story. I have been inside Sensei.
Speaker 4:I have walked the grounds of the wellness retreat, which has this incredible art installation, all of Larry's art. There's like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Stuff like that. I have not gotten Vanity Fair or the Wall Street Journal to ever pay for a night at the Four Seasons. I I
Speaker 2:think you need a month at the Four Seasons to get to the bottom of this thing personally....
Speaker 1:Put a note. I mean Yeah. Rogers out. But... Maybe he's out.
Speaker 1:The new CEO will will say. I think it's Yeah. Important. I will say Yeah. That the...
Speaker 1:I haven't been to Sensei Lanai, but I've been to the one in Palm Springs, Palm Yeah. Palm Springs. And that property is amazing because it's it's called Sensei Porcupine Creek. Okay. And it's completely, like, you...
Speaker 1:The whole... It's a wonderful place, but for me as somebody who's very commercially minded, it's hard to sort of wrestle with the thought that the the the... It must be losing so much Yeah. Just just because I think there's like 16 rooms these massive grounds Yeah. And there's a nobu and this golf course that sits empty most of the time.
Speaker 1:Sure. And and the staff's amazing. It's an amazing experience. I highly recommend it. But it is it is just wild because you're sitting there and be like, every day they're just waking up and we're losing another probably, you know, however much money.
Speaker 1:What what... The the last question I had is Yep. How... Like, talk about his relationship with risk and and willing to, like, make these sort of all in bets at different moments throughout his Yeah. Career.
Speaker 1:Like, do you think he's... Is he getting more risk on? Like, you know, with with all... Last year with all of the the sort of pushing the chips in on Mhmm. On Oracle with AI, you know, it felt significant.
Speaker 1:But at the time, you know, and and still unclear, like, whether that'll be the right decision. But I think a lot of people like to chatter and and try to evaluate the decision when they have literally, like, not even 1% of the context that he has. Yeah. And then and then with with Paramount and Warner Brothers as well, you know, I... When when somebody has like reinvented and and executed well for that many decades, like, you kinda need to default to like, hey, maybe he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, he loves big swing bets. That's that's just a a core part of his like reputation and strategy as a business person is he will do it. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 4:Oracle, like, you know, it almost goes bankrupt in the nineties because of an accounting scandal. I wouldn't necessarily call that a big swing bet, but like he lives... Exactly, Borat. Like, he lives he lives on the edge and he's totally fine to kind of go there because he has so much control. And like one of the fascinating parts of the Oracle AI story to me is that Sofrakatz, is a fascinating figure.
Speaker 4:I did not have enough time in the story to kind of dive into her, but she's in the middle of of obviously Oracle, but also his relationship with Israel. Mhmm. Super smart, conservative executive. She does not love the AI bet. She does not love infrastructure.
Speaker 4:She is, you know, a huge fan of the high margin software business. And I think it's very telling that when Oracle goes, you know, all in on AI, basically on OpenAI, like that's the client that is making that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Hold that work is the fact they're building data centers for for Sam.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, software ends up stepping down in the middle of that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And and you you've entered this new era where they are essentially a neo cloud. Yeah. And and Larry's on board with that. He's a technologist and Yeah. And this is...
Speaker 4:Look, when it when it was working, the stock, he was the richest man in the world. Yeah. You know, like it was going crazy Yeah. And then since then everyone...
Speaker 2:RPO day. I remember it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 7... You know, $317,000,000,000.
Speaker 4:Yep. You know, the next day, you know, the Wall Street Journal, former former place of work, you know, reveals that it's all OpenAI basically. And then the debt starts being a terrifying reality
Speaker 2:for
Speaker 4:people where they're like, you know, our cash flow has just turned negative. Like, this is terrifying. And so that's just built into Larry's DNA in a lot of ways. He's fine with that, not everyone is. And then...
Speaker 4:But the funny thing is with the Paramount stuff, like, know, that's all built on Oracle stock.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, his ability to finance these multibillion dollar media consolidations are at least to some degree margin loans on... Or loans on on his Oracle holdings. It's very least collateral. Like, we know that because he had to do the $40,000,000,000 backstop, you know, to make the Warner Brothers deal happen. And so it's like the guy...
Speaker 4:It's weird to think about in this context, but, the guy is living on the edge. You know? It's like you're worth $200,000,000,000, but, like, it's very risky, you know, that the banks are selling off debt, you know, for the different data centers at like 90¢ to the dollar. Like no one knows how it's gonna play out, but I think, you know, Larry at 82 years old, he he loves this shit.
Speaker 2:The full set octopus. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where else when when you've when you've owned, you know, racing teams and sailing teams and you've dogged... Yeah.
Speaker 5:Didn't get it on dogfighting.
Speaker 1:How do you get the rush without a little leverage? Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:Well, we'll dig into it next time. We'd love to have you back on the show, Tom.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This was this was great.
Speaker 2:Always a great time.
Speaker 1:And excited for for viewers to dig in and...
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Go read the full piece and subscribe to Vanity Fair. Obviously, we love them over there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And newcomer.co, my my other employer.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Was go read Eric and newcomer and all all of our stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Great joining, Tom. Have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We've been keeping him waiting no longer.
Speaker 2:We got him to win from genuine... Intuition, cofounder
Speaker 1:and CEO.
Speaker 2:Tim, how are you doing? Welcome.
Speaker 1:Man, the bet.
Speaker 5:He's back. Doing well. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Give us the news. You raised some money. How much did you raise?
Speaker 5:You raised 220,000,000 at a 6,000,000.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Let's get the replay going. Let's get that replay going. Let's see that Gong hit. Thank you.
Speaker 1:With authority, powerful hit. So... For powerful raise. What unlock this new capital?
Speaker 5:Successfully were able to prove transfer to real world robotics from a lot of the game's data. And so I think a lot of the evidence is pointing that you can actually, in fact, just scale pixel space. Humans tele... Teleoperate robots with the exact same brain that they can play video games, and a lot of... And likewise, other way around.
Speaker 5:Right? People play video games, and then they take those skills, and they they can use the same game controller to teleoperate a robot. And I think a lot of our research, and now we've we've shown some demos as well, is indicating that this transfer works and you can scale pixel to action space on our massive data modes. And, yeah, I'm excited to show the world to models in the next few
Speaker 1:Very cool. Talk about talk about the data mode. I know we... I know we've talked about it probably a couple times now, but for anyone tuning in for the first time, talk about Yeah. How and why you guys are in a position to do this better than most.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we built the largest we built the largest video game recorder in the world, and so we get a lot of data on how people control embodiments inside video games. So when you're playing a video game, you're essentially just transferring your perception to the screen and then using the controls to control whatever character you have on the screen many times in first person view, just like when you're on a robot. And so because robots also ship with game controllers, we can map those actions, and then largely it becomes just an environment transfer problem where the pixels are different, but the inputs are the same. And so we can pre...
Speaker 5:Just like transformers or LLMs are pre trained on predicting the next text token from the Internet, we can pre train on the 3,000,000,000 videos that people capture and upload to metal every year, the game recorder Yeah. To go... So to go from frames to actions. And so LLMs go text to text. We go frames to actions, and then we can scale that into extremely general models that can control every robot that ships with the game controller, which is the majority of robots right now.
Speaker 1:Give us your overview of of various robotics categories. Where are you most excited about in the short term? Obviously, in the in in the more... Let's say in the next year, it's all about just working with these companies around like testing and proving out different use cases. But what categories are you most bullish on?
Speaker 1:Because I think for general intuition, you're... I think it's probably gonna be quite important to hit, like, some of these big inflection points when some of these use cases really start taking off in the way that we've seen other players and infrastructure providers hit, like, the inflection point with, like, personal agents, for example, or or browser automation or these other use cases?
Speaker 5:Our bet is that that inflection point actually sits largely in simulation first, and then most of companies betting on physical world robotics only are going to miss an inflection point because every robotics lab goes every robotics manufacturer, every company goes through sort of testing their robots in simulation before they transfer them over to the real world. And so this year, we've been focusing a lot on scaling with customers in simulation. Next year, a lot of it will be on transferring over to the physical world. Where we are focused specifically at the moment is quadrupeds, drones, and I like stable platforms. Right?
Speaker 5:Humanoids are are quite unstable still. Their supply chains haven't ramped quite as much, and so... But you can control them using a game controller. And so if your robot ships with a game controller and has a front facing camera, then we can likely work well together, and the models will transfer extremely well.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:God mode. In video games God mode. It gives you unlimited health. But recently, AI researchers have been talking about a different kind of God mode. Imbuing AI models with God like meaning.
Speaker 2:What is your take on the the models that you're creating? Will they be moral agents? Will they be have consciousness? How have you grappled with the question of is this god in a box or is it a machine intelligence?
Speaker 5:It's a machine intelligence. I see no reason to believe otherwise. I think our our processes in the brain, our chemical processes, there there's absolutely no reason at the moment to believe these machines are conscious. I think the entire debate is honestly somewhat silly. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I... Right? A lot more things would have to be proven to draw any equivalence there. And I also think that, for us, I think the goal is just studying these systems, understanding what they do well and not well, and and and then and then going from there. I think, you know, I try to stay away from a lot of that cultish behavior and just stay grounded.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about sentiment, AI sentiment among among gamers because anytime we've had somebody in the the gaming world, sort of legacy gaming world on the show and you bring up AI, they go, oh, you know, change the topic, you know, no one no one wants to be caught saying anything positive about it. But over the last couple weeks, I feel like people are suddenly creating a bunch of crazy experiences, even home hackers porting games from here here to there. And and and it feels like we could be at at a moment where people are like, hey, maybe this thing is actually pretty cool and a useful tool.
Speaker 2:You could be looking at the future Ben Affleck of gaming.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's right. Potentially.
Speaker 5:I thought that clip of Ben Affleck explaining freezing weights and and and it was so incredible. I I I... That made my day, honestly, seeing him explain that. I... Okay.
Speaker 5:So on gamers, why why are gamers frustrated with AI or historically have been? Because it really hadn't done much good for them. Right? It made their GPU prices go up. Sure.
Speaker 5:A lot of cap... Right? There was a bunch of games that were delayed from studios, and a lot of their investment and a lot of these large companies was going towards AI. Meanwhile, all the developers were being laid off at game studios, so it's obvious why gamers were frustrated. And I think the reason was it just hadn't done much for them.
Speaker 5:And I think now we're starting to see the early signs of that changing. So modding, obviously, becoming a ton easier. I think in our case, we'll see different types of games being possible on top of these models and different types of interaction patterns. And it just... Like, AI just hadn't done anything for them.
Speaker 5:And I think we're now turning the corner. I I do think it's starting to show, and we just need to continue creating better experiences for gamers and and bring them along in the journey as opposed to the other way around.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well said. Congratulations. An amazing progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really amazing progress.
Speaker 1:I love our our our favorite part of doing these interviews of seeing snapshots of companies as they as they make process progress between rounds.
Speaker 2:I I I have I have one more question about Yeah. You know, like the the... It's not necessarily the anthropomorphization but just this idea that like some people like just hanging out and chatting with the LLMs And you have metal and people are gaming and uploading clips. And I'm wondering if you think that there's a... That there will be a real market for a...
Speaker 2:An AI companion that you play video games with. Like you queue into Fortnite, you want your squad to be full and so you populate that with something that's roughly at the same level as you but can also chat and do callouts and has a certain flavor and and texture and humor to it. Do you think that that will be something that we'll see? Or is the structure of the video game industry such that that will just get banned?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think for sure we'll see this because when you're launching video games, your largest problem is use... Usually player liquidity Sure. Which largely drives for attention.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so I
Speaker 5:think if you're a game developer, you want these type of experiences, and I think you want your environments to be really interactive and rich. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 5:I think naturally, the economics of the industry will push towards this being a thing. I think there's a debate of... To the extent we... You should label that. Right?
Speaker 5:You should let people know that they're interacting with AI systems. But I do think it will be a thing, and I think, you know, there will be lots of good things that come from it, there will be bad things that come from it. And we just have to study those and evaluate them as they come.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it'd just be like a really fun NPC as opposed to just like the generic bot there and counterstrike.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Exactly. I think a lot of it will start... You know, the best things start out looking like a toy, and I think the same thing will be true here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Great to hang, Pim.
Speaker 2:We'll talk
Speaker 1:to soon. Bye.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Our next guest is here with us live in person in the TBPN L 3 D. We have Greg Castle from Anorak Ventures.
Speaker 2:How are doing, Greg? Welcome to the show. Should we get him to hit the gong with the American flag on? Roll the replay camera because you're here announcing a new fuzz. Is this unaware.
Speaker 2:So throw that on, take that gong, mallet and smash that gong and I wanna see the... It's the replay.
Speaker 1:Woah. Look at that replay. Wow.
Speaker 2:It's actually a gift for you guys. Oh, really?
Speaker 5:I felt like...
Speaker 2:It's crazy. We have...
Speaker 1:Maybe one in the other room but not in this room.
Speaker 2:Thank you so
Speaker 4:much. Well,
Speaker 9:I came in and I I wasn't sure what representation was gonna be and then I'm hit with that giant American flag so...
Speaker 1:Oh, No, but there
Speaker 2:is not in this room. Needs to So be right for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 9:Sure. Greg Castle, managing partner of Anarac Ventures. We are a early stage deep tech firm. Yeah. Been around since 2017.
Speaker 2:Big success. Closed
Speaker 9:just closed our third fund, which is a $35,000,000 fund.
Speaker 2:A capital allocator. Did you always know you wanted to be a capital allocator? Is that what you dreamed of being as a child?
Speaker 9:Certainly not. I think...
Speaker 2:What what did you wanna be when you grew up?
Speaker 9:I think I was always deeply interested in kind of niche subjects Sure. And different kind of subcultures whether or not it be skating or video games or comics or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 9:you know, of I think in high school always kind of jumping around from group to group and learning about what they were super excited about was kind of the way I was in high school. So definitely not... Venture
Speaker 1:capital is exactly... That.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:You're exactly right. You're kind of going into different like subcultures if you will Yeah. And really learning everything that you can about them.
Speaker 2:What was the first investment you made? Or like when were you like, okay, I'm going to start investing?
Speaker 9:The first investment I made really was in myself when I Okay. When I founded a company. It sounds kind of cheesy but like...
Speaker 2:No, it's true. It's true. Like your your your opportunity cost, you
Speaker 9:could... Exactly.
Speaker 1:So so I... I'm sorry sorry for hitting a funny sound effect but it's like it's like ask you know, if somebody's gonna start a company ask yourself, are you gonna invest Yeah. You know, some meaningful percentage of your entire life into this idea? Is it that good?
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Most important. And sometimes it can be a smaller idea and it still makes sense to do but.
Speaker 9:For sure.
Speaker 1:But it's worth thinking about it that way.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And also, you know, I think that there's a lot of different things that you can do just under your own passion, but then there there's a different stage when you actually have to go out to people and ask for money, including your friends and family, which is what, you know, which was kind of I consider my first investment was some of my own capital, some of my parents' capital, and going into a very unrelated field in retail. So in 2014... Oh, sorry, 2014. 2004 Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I moved over to The UK and started up a retail chain that was kind of similar to Sweetgreen. Sure. And I ran that for six years over We in had about six locations.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 9:But then in terms of my first real investment where I wasn't operating, it was in Oculus. Wow. That was really... Yeah. That was the first track.
Speaker 9:So I figured from, you know, I figured that this is this is easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was...
Speaker 9:This is what I'm gonna do from...
Speaker 2:Did see the Kickstarter online or...
Speaker 9:No. So in 2010 when I moved back to The States, I moved back to work for a friend who I went to college with, whose name was Brendan Erieb. And he had a company which was a software company, which was selling software into game developers. And I was always, you know, he is an amazing salesperson and communicator, and I was always really interested in what he was building. So when the opportunity came around to come and join him at a company that he had dropped out in 2000...
Speaker 9:1999 actually, when he dropped out of school to go and do that full time, I was kind of on my own path but was always very interested in what he was building. And so I came back to join him, worked with him, worked with Mike Antinoff, worked with Nate Mitchell. And then a few years later that... Well, that company was acquired by Autodesk and then a few years later we had heard about a kid who was working on a VR headset and that kid was Palmer.
Speaker 2:And that was Palmer Lucky. Yeah. Wow. That's wild. What...
Speaker 2:Yeah. What a good good start to a venture career. Working with Palmer Lucky is gonna go on and do so many different companies. While we're on the topic of VR, what... How how successful do you think the meta VR glasses will be?
Speaker 2:And one way to sort of quantify it is when when VR is having a moment, I feel like when Christmas comes, the the v... The app is at the top of the app store. So like the the Quest or the Oculus app would be at the top of the top of the App Store. Like, it it doesn't come out until next spring. I think they're gonna launch it maybe April or May.
Speaker 2:But it feels to me like they got a lot of the pieces right. How are you feeling about 2027 as a year for VR growth as someone who's been involved in the industry for a long time?
Speaker 9:It's taken a long while. A lot longer than I think we had all hoped. It's interesting to think back of when I first made that investment. That kind of was... That kick started my career in venture.
Speaker 9:So that was at a time after they were growing like wildfire where everybody in the valley was kind of convinced that people were going to be wearing headsets walking down the street. Yeah. Right? And so it's kind of part of my origin story where I was able to kind of go out and speak on the topic with knowledge and with the relationship to the team. And there was a whole bunch of people who wanted me to...
Speaker 9:Who kind of were thinking that I was going to start a VR fund. And there were a bunch of comp... There were a bunch of firms actually that started
Speaker 2:Yeah. That
Speaker 9:were just VR focused. Yeah. I always was kind of felt as though it was going to take a lot longer.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:And so it has. I think that, you know, you have this kind of situation where the hype has not... The hype has set expectations that have been very difficult to follow and so therefore you have this kind of disappointment that everybody feels about kind of how everything's transpired.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I don't see there being a massive inflection point.
Speaker 2:There
Speaker 9:have been several points in the past where something has come out, be it, you know, the Quest one
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:Be it Gear VR. Like, there have been a bunch of different points along the way where people have been like, this is it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:Like Apple, this is it. Yep. This is when it's all gonna change. Yep. And it just hasn't happened like that.
Speaker 9:I think Even with question takes
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even with Zuck's Meta Connect presentation, it didn't come across like he was presenting... It it came across as like this incredible technical milestone and like a big step up. Right? But if you compare it to like foundation models.
Speaker 1:Like it was a big leap but it's not like it actually is a drop in coworker for you. So and and even some of his language in the presentation was like, it's a glimpse of the future.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's like, well, that like, you don't get a crazy inflection point through glimpses of the future.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like another it's another milestone....
Speaker 2:A CEO to stand up on stage and say, with this product, you are staring into the future with your eyes wide. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised they don't have... They should make I expect...
Speaker 2:You wanna go to Clockwork
Speaker 1:Orange on the future? That's what your goal is? Talk about the the fun strategy. I... A fund this size, I feel like you can probably confidently go to LPs based on the track record and say like, there's a good shot I can four or five x a fund like this.
Speaker 1:Has maintaining that been super important to you? Because given the track record, I imagine you could scale up.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And then how are you how are you... Like, what what is... What's what's the strategy at the early stage in terms of things like ownership? Are you flexible, inflexible? Just because current market conditions are are absolutely wild and they don't necessarily favor smaller funds in in some ways.
Speaker 9:Yep. Yep. Yeah. It has been very much deliberate keeping the funds small. You know, I started I started angel investing, so after the Oculus investment, after that came to fruition, I essentially quit my day job and and really wanted to answer three questions like one, what does it mean to be a responsible fiduciary of capital?
Speaker 9:What does this whole VC thing mean? Two, am I any good at this? Yeah. Or was Oculus just a fluke? And three, do I want to do this?
Speaker 9:Do I want to devote the rest of my life to it? And the answer over those couple of years of deploying my own capital and doing a few SPVs was yes, yes, and yes. And over that time, I kind of developed a network and reputation as somebody who can be flexible with checks and can be really helpful and doesn't have sharp elbows and kind of can like fit into rounds. Yeah. And that worked out for me.
Speaker 9:That worked out very well with fund one. That worked, you know, that's working out very well with fund two and now hopefully it'll work out with fund three. I am very much of the opinion that every size of fund requires a very different skill set and a very different strategy. And what I proved out and what I'm good at is deploying smaller amounts of capital. Sure.
Speaker 9:And that's what I want to keep on doing. And I think that, you know, I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of chase AUM and chase those management fees. It helps if you've done decently well in the past and you have like a nest egg and you don't need to stack fees on fees on fees and bigger funds and bigger funds. Yeah. And it just feels like I'm much more aligned with my LP base.
Speaker 2:Does this fund size lead you to a different LP mix or is it the same thing where like you're still going to a sovereign wealth fund but just asking for a smaller slice or endowments? Like how do you think about LP relationships and structuring?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I kind of graduated. I was just looking at my LP list over the... Over time and it was like fund one was like 60 LPs, fund two was like 50 and now I'm at like 22. Sure.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And and that's been a purposeful move.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And and, you know, frankly it's pretty...
Speaker 1:Basing to one yourself. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 9:that would be the dream. Right? Like the hunter Satya model Yeah. Is is I think where every VC ultimately wants to be. Although to be honest with you like I'm...
Speaker 9:I've got great relationships with my LPs and I love working with them and they also have appetite for later stage rounds. But anyway, to answer your question I would say I started out high net worth individuals, offices. Now it's a lot more family offices and fund of funds.
Speaker 2:Fund of funds, But but yeah, but you don't need to do the road show with like huge endowments and sovereign wealth funds
Speaker 9:No.
Speaker 2:Trips to The Middle East.
Speaker 9:I'm too small for that. And also, you know, I would say, you know, I started out very much as a deep tech fund where it's just like I saw what happened at Oculus and I saw how amazing it was to bring a completely new technology to market and I was just sold. I was like, this is what I wanted. I don't want to be investing in ad optimization. I don't want be...
Speaker 9:I want to be investing in people who are really fucking moving the needle.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then I had the opportunity because of a relationship with Palmer and Trey to invest in Anduril. Yep. And I always pronounce it slightly differently, Anduril. Sure. That kind of ignited a sense of patriotism in me that I didn't really knew I had.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:And since then, we've been doing a lot more in aerospace and defense, a lot more in kind of American dynamism. Yeah. And so therefore, from a LP perspective, having LPs who are based here in The US is of great importance to me. Yes. I've got we actually brought on our first LP from Luxembourg, this fun.
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 9:Shout out to Mangrove, very excited to have them on board. But for the most part, like the trips to The Middle East, the trips to these places, like I don't need to do them and I don't necessarily want that capital involved How
Speaker 1:excited are you for... To be post SpaceX IPO based in LA, Southern California in general? Because it feels like we're probably gonna get hundreds of companies in the fullness of time that that spin out and and these super talented teams where they've worked together at SpaceX, experienced some, you know, hairy problem and then they want to go solve it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. I originally moved to to LA more for my wife than for me. You know, I was in the Bay Area before this and I was kind of reluctant to move down here. And we did this two weeks before COVID and it's worked out really well especially with the areas that we invest I think that the talent just keeps on increasing, the talent pool just keeps on increasing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because Long LA completely flopped except that El Segundo and SpaceX happened.
Speaker 9:Absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Like I said, like we we won but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like... Not the way that we...
Speaker 1:Not the way not the way that we were hoping. It was like thinking like consumer
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this... It was like it was like there will be like a sales force of LA and like many more of those. There's been a few but yeah. It never it never developed into like the New York City style market.
Speaker 9:Yep. Yep. Yeah. And you know, think one of the reasons why I always love being an SF was the fact that everybody comes there to raise capital regardless of where you're building. So my job in many ways is kind of a biz dev job and like just being boots on the ground there.
Speaker 9:And now it feels like there's also a lot of capital in LA. There are a lot of the VCs from SF who are coming to LA on a regular basis. So there's a lot more capital available I would say down here.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the market structure concentration of winners in various emerging new technologies? Like with with Oculus, if you went and did like five other VR headset companies, you probably would have had a pretty bad run. With Andoril if you did, like, five other defense tech companies. Like, at least right now, like, they're all pretty marked up. So it seems like there's, more of an oligopoly there.
Speaker 2:Some of that's, like, literally a direct order from the government being, like, we won't let a monopoly exist in this category. Whereas, you know, Mark Zuckerberg runs a monopoly and he's like, we're happy to be the only player in this space if we can be. But with some of the newer frontier technologies, how do you think about winner take all dynamics? How... And and then also just like what other frontier technologies are exciting to you?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Humanoid robots, industrial stuff, more farther out on the defense side. There's so much space. There's so many different areas. How are you spending your time?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's interesting. I think I was of the mindset that Andoril will be the Andoril of x and they will just kind of dominate and I think over time...
Speaker 1:Horrible mistake. No. No. I'm just I'm just saying that I've I've done the exact same thing where it's like, yeah, obviously.
Speaker 9:They're just gonna do it.
Speaker 1:They're gonna do this. Yeah. They have all the relationships. They have the capital. They have the talent.
Speaker 1:But but...
Speaker 2:Also you get you get further out and people will be like, we're the we're the under roll of ovens. We we we make a stove.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's like...
Speaker 1:At some point it gets too niche.
Speaker 2:It's like, no. I don't think under roll is gonna do the stove.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're winning the... You need to win the whole market and then you need to underwrite the team on like doing a bunch of different product extensions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're still going to be like competing.
Speaker 7:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think the, you know, the government has made pretty clear their desire to diversify and I think rightfully so, and I'm very glad that they are doing so. I think that generally when everybody's looking in one place, I'm trying to look someplace else. I think that partially that's just the job of a VC, but also just like given my fund dynamics and the smaller size of the fund Sure. When everybody is piling into one area, prices get driven up Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, rounds get kind of insane. And while, you know, I loosely kind of have ownership targets, I still will kind of... I'm basically looking at can I kind of 100 x my money? Yeah. And I feel like that is more difficult in defense these days.
Speaker 9:Sure. And so do I think that there are room for other big players in defense? Absolutely. Is that where I am necessarily putting my money at the moment? Not particularly.
Speaker 9:Like, I think we... I am actually a lot more interested in some really freaking boring areas Sure. In chemical production, in steel production. You know, know you've had Yeah. Zane on the show beforehand.
Speaker 9:Investors in Knox Metals.
Speaker 2:Love Knox Metals. They're ripping, right?
Speaker 9:Doing phenomenally well. You know, rare earths, magnets, all the boring stuff that's kind of up supply chain Yeah. That we will need in order to achieve our mission as a nation Yeah. Is all stuff that I think is is super interesting. We invested in Atlas.
Speaker 9:Sure. I think you guys had them on the Yeah. Show as well recently. Yeah. So...
Speaker 2:Have you been surprised that the big defense primes haven't been more acquisitive even on a relative market cap weighted basis?
Speaker 4:I have.
Speaker 2:Because in AI, like, you're seeing these trillion dollar companies take down $10,000,000,000 acquisitions. Yeah. And it's like, wow, that's $10,000,000,000. That's a huge return for the VCs. But it's like, okay, there's...
Speaker 2:They're throwing around 1% of their market cap. Yeah. You could look at Oculus as a similar thing where Zuck is sort of throwing around
Speaker 1:like 1% of their market cap.
Speaker 2:But Lockheed doesn't seem like they're doing that.
Speaker 1:Founder led companies tend to be like... More acquisitive? Earlier companies tend to be way more acquisitive. Sure. Andriel's been very
Speaker 2:I mean, that that was not true for Elon for a long time until...
Speaker 1:But but even looking at like in the early twenty tens, like the the acqui hires where the like people made money Yeah. Were like much more common. It was Sure. Sure. Twitter's buying.
Speaker 1:I think didn't Twitter buy like 50 companies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's like classic like founder led company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I guess that... Does that explain it or do you think something else going on with the market structure in defense tech? Why the primes haven't been more acquisitive?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I completely agree with what you're saying. Like I I am it shocked as well.
Speaker 1:79 Yeah. Companies.
Speaker 9:I am shocked as well. Autodesk is another one who has acquired a ton of companies. There are some companies that...
Speaker 2:You'd think they'd want to give Adam Porter Price a harder time instead of being letting him be the only bettor on these things. Instead they're like, if Adam's not buying we're not either.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I, you know, I wish I had a better answer. I have to think at some point that there's gonna be enough pressure from the board of some of these larger primes that it's just kind of... I mean, there's lots of different reasons why this could be happening. They could be waiting for a dip.
Speaker 9:There's inevitably gonna be a pullback. Yep. There are inevitably going to be issues, you know, hopefully during peacetime at some point in the near future where these companies just can't raise Yep. And and kind of Lockheed can go and sweep them up. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I don't know what it is, but...
Speaker 1:I think they need to be flipped by Andrew all first to actually wake up, like Yep. From a valuation standpoint. Like, that actually is gonna be very, like... That's actually gonna just be the moment where the boards are gonna look around and be like, why is this company that has much lower revenue scale than us? And it's like, because the market believes that this company will generate way more value Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In the future than us even though Yep. Their scale still...
Speaker 2:Lucky could approach it from a different perspective. The Primes could do some sort of like PE roll up joint venture maybe like bending knives. Roll up all the the the deadweight venture failures in defense tech and, you know, try and put them together or something. Raise prices. You never know.
Speaker 1:Bending swords.
Speaker 2:Bending swords would be good too. That one works. I like that.
Speaker 9:I agree though. I mean, I do think... Does it need to materialize in the form of an Andoril IPO or something like that? That would certainly be one way to do it. I can't imagine that the board isn't looking at the ceronics, the Andorils Sure.
Speaker 9:Etcetera, and and being like, this is okay. Yeah. So, they're also just big freaking companies, right? That are Yep. That are, you know, have lots of bureaucracy and Yeah.
Speaker 9:Lot and and kind of move slow. Mean...
Speaker 1:The dysfunction that that I've heard through hard tech founders in my portfolio around the way these companies operate is like actually insane. Like, they'll they'll be sitting there like... And like the company is basically like looking at a pile of money, like an existing contract. And then years will pass, and no one just goes and picks up... You know, they're just, like, looking at it.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you starting to look at BYO? It feels like there's a moment where tech is crossing over. Like, it was a crazy idea to do anything industrial or defense or building physical stuff. Like, tech used to mean software, then Oculus was like, okay.
Speaker 2:We can build a consumer hardware product. Mhmm. Then Andrew approved, like, no. You can build an industrial scale hardware product. And it feels like even though obviously there's a very mature biotech investment industry, it feels like those two worlds are like starting to blur.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It is also a very nuanced area, and an area where there are investors who are better suited to really attack it than me. Yeah. And so I... We kind of more stay in our lane.
Speaker 9:It is definitely an area that I have been thinking about more and that I've trying to that I've been trying to get smarter in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's also the interesting bridge where some companies are doing like the bio defense. It's more Sure. Of like a defense contractor, like
Speaker 9:an as well. Totally. Things like SoluGen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So... That are that are definitely interesting. That would be much more something that would be up our alley Yeah. At Anorac than something that is kind of purely a biotech play. I mean, latest...
Speaker 9:We're we're just about to close in our investment in a in a kinetics company. So, you know, I think I think that things that, you know, I kind of am at this... I feel very good about making investments that have the potential for a big impact on on the future. Mhmm. And defending freedom and democracy is something that I think is of critical importance.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And, you know, so I do... You know, I said beforehand we're doing less and less in defense. We are to a degree, but we're also looking at, you know, kind of the second order... Like a NOx Metals? Yes.
Speaker 9:Companies like NOx Metals, companies like this explosives company that I think are going to be necessary in order for us to kind of, again, achieve our goals as a nation.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Jordy? Last question from my side. As a small firm, how impactful has AI been on your ability to get up to speed on some of these? Because I'm sure you're getting pitches all the time where you're like, I literally have never thought about this part of the economy.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:you get into it and you realize, oh, that you... Let's say you get a deck and it's somewhat compelling but you know nothing. Is it is it had a meaningful impact? Obviously, you still need to talk to experts and and diligence it. But do you feel like you can like start to build conviction on an idea faster because of being able ask a million questions and and and sort of sort information through these tools.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's definitely changed the paradigm. You guys had Lo on yesterday, right? And he was talking about this as well, and I completely agree. It is...
Speaker 9:It's like having kind of a desk of analysts at your disposal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So we are leveraging it. We need to be leveraging it more. You know, to be honest, I mean, you know, I have myself and I have a partner who's based up in SF. So we're basically a two man team with a with a... With an assistant who helps us out.
Speaker 9:I think that we... You know, this to me, this kind of fund three kind of feels like the transition from us going from... Or me going as kind of... Me going from a fund manager to a firm manager. And so Sure.
Speaker 9:Really kind of building up the infrastructure to be able to scale, really being able to build something that lives beyond me is something that we're really really focused on now. And certainly AI will be a massive will be a massive part of that.
Speaker 2:Night vision goggles.
Speaker 1:It just sounds like you're getting powered up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like it. I like it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Dude, it's I can't wait to talk to all the founders. You back. Yeah. I love that you're sticking to your strategy and can't wait to come on in ten years and just walk us through all the fun performance one by one. But I think it's crazy numbers.
Speaker 9:I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I love what
Speaker 9:you guys do. It's so cool to be on here and to be in this Yeah. Amazing place.
Speaker 2:It's a great time.
Speaker 1:Close it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see you at 11AM Pacific on Monday. Have a great weekend. Have the best weekend ever. Of your life.
Speaker 2:Just do life.
Speaker 1:It's possible. Lot of
Speaker 2:people Leave us a podcast Spotify. Sign up for news later at tbpn.com, and we will see you on Monday. Boeing Flashback. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:We love you.