Naval's GP, Ankur Nagpal, Breaks Down The Viral “USVC” Fund | E2284

It gives the average person the ability to own a company.

Unlike AngelList SPVs, where it's only accredited investors, this can be accessed by anybody, but it has some very different nuances.

What we have is a closed-end fund that is available to anyone with as little as $500.

So people should be able to invest in these companies that are changing the economy, maybe impacting their jobs. Seems very equitable.

Like, I do think part of the negative AI sentiment is because so many people feel locked out from actually having access to any of that sort of growth. Today we can invest in any crypto coin, have a poly market bet for how long Trump shakes someone's hand. All of that is perfectly legal, but investing in a startup has this accreditation wall.

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All right everybody, welcome back to TWIST. It is Monday, it is May the 4th be with you, and the Maul series finale was today, Monday, and I watched it last night at like 11 PM. I'll talk about it in Off Duty, that's the segment at the end of the show. If you stick around to the end of the show, we talk about things that don't have to do with startups We give ourselves a little room to breathe. It could be products, it could be media, it could be lifestyle, it could be politics, it could be anything. But we leave it to the end. And boy, do we have a docket today. I want you to just go over briefly, rapid fire, Alex, what's on the docket. We have 3 amazing guests. But before we do that, I'm just going to show you my new setup. Plot Pit.

What you got?

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All right, so 3 guests across the board here. Everybody wanted us to talk about USVC.com. That's AngelList closed-end fund. We've got Ankur Nagpal on to talk about that. He's a GP over there. Then you guys got John Durbin from Shoots. Shoots is the number one TAO subnet. So we got private markets, venture capital covered. We got TAO, we got crypto plus startups and distributed computing and AI covered. And then who's the third guest today on This Week in Startups on TWIST?

Yeah, it's a really cool company called Humwork. We have the co-founder and CEO Yash on, and what Humwork does is allows an agent to raise a flag and call a human in to help it get unstuck during a longer work line. Now, we often talk about, you know, humans being helped by agents. This is agents being helped by humans. So instead of calling an agent, you're using MCP to call up an expert, get some help.

Love it.

It's a really cool idea.

I love that idea. Humans on demand. So welcome back. Well, actually, I don't know, Ankur, have you been on the program? I have not. First time.

We've talked about it, but first time.

We've talked about it, but welcome on the program. I was in another country. And I had lunch with Naval a couple of months ago. I won't say which one. He's a global traveler. And, uh, I was talking to him about what's next. I always like to ask my friend Naval from AngelList, what's next? He got me into SPVs. Uh, I got him into podcasting. We're always like, what, looking around the curves. And he said, you should do a closed-end fund. I said, what's that? I, I, is that like the sweater thing or this thing or other companies doing this? Uh, is it Cathie Wood doing it? He said, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. And sounds like an interesting thing. I have too much on my plate. I have no time to do it. But AngelList has this incredible funnel, hundreds of active syndicates with tens of thousands of members. They've been betting on things for over a decade, and now all the fruits of that labor, if I understand, drip, drip, drip, can now go into this closed-end fund. And unlike AngelList SPVs, where it's only accredited investors. This can be accessed by anybody, but it has some very different nuances. So Anchor, usvc.com is where people can get information. As low as $500 is the investment. You don't have to be accredited. So tell us what— why you guys launched this product, and then what's different about this product other than the couple of little things I said that, um, It— what's different than the classic AngelList? Here's an SPV, put in $1,000 to $100,000.

It's interesting. When I first met Naval, I've known him for a long time as well. The vision for what AngelList could become is actually quite close to what USVC is today, which is a single way for pretty much anyone who wants to get involved with the asset class of venture capital to have a high-quality product that isn't gatekept the way traditional startups are. People listening to your show know this, but sometimes it blows people's minds that today we can invest in any crypto coin. You can, you know, have a Polymarket bet for how long someone— Trump shakes someone's hand. All of that is perfectly legal. But investing in a startup has this accreditation wall. However, with USVC, what we have is a closed-end fund that is available to anyone with as little as $500. What we're trying to do is effectively build a single product to produce venture-like returns for the average investor. So if you're someone who wants to allocate 3%, 5%, 7% of your portfolio to venture and you don't know where to start, we believe USVC could be a great place.

Ankur, can you define closed-end fund for everybody? Because I know you and Jason are talking about it. I know what it means, but I'm not sure that everyone knows that term. Avart might help.

Absolutely. I'll caveat that, like, you know, even the people— like, this is all new to, to me as well. But the way USVC works is it's a closed-end fund, which means you buy it— when you buy in, there's a certain NAV or net asset value. When you buy in, you receive shares at that price, and that reflects the underlying value of the assets underneath. So the startups, the funds, whatever. Now let's imagine the startup underneath has a markup or a markdown. The asset value changes. And then when you redeem out of the fund, we have— we're going to— we aim to offer quarterly tenders that allow people to sell out of the fund. It happens at the new asset value. So it's a very interesting structure because traditional venture funds lock you up for, you know, 10 years typically. Here, this is still not, you know, it's still not a liquid product. It's still venture capital. But the aim is to give people the opportunity for liquidity every quarter up to 5% of the fund.

Yeah. And a way to think of it, Alex, is it's not an IPO, but people often refer to closed-end funds as similar because you issue a certain number of shares. That number of shares doesn't change. Then if people wanna sell their shares, then those get priced as some percentage of the NAV, right? The underlying asset value. So when we used to talk about Mr. Saylor's publicly traded Bitcoin— Bucket of Bitcoin. Yeah, Bitcoin product, you would say, hey, what's the underlying value? So here, if you had Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe in this USVC closed-end fund, people might say, hey, in the— at the end of the second quarter when the redemption happens, they might say, okay, it was $1 billion worth of share, $1 billion when we essentially IPO'd it, when we offered it. Let's take out the IPO term, which they— when we offered it to the market, it was $1 billion. Hey, the market thinks Anthropic went up, but OpenAI went down, yada yada. The market might say, okay, I'm going to buy— I'll buy it $0.90 on the dollar. So now everybody's down 10%.

right?

Uh, but only a certain amount of people sell, maybe up to 5%. Then, and you have to have demand for that. Then the next quarter, hey, Anthropic goes public, the shares are worth a lot, now it goes up. So it's, it's a nice bridge between completely being locked up except for finding a secondary sale for individual stocks. And then you get this great mutual fund, but how the GPs get paid is always very interesting. And that's where incentives matter. Okay, so you have identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Uh, not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C-Corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're gonna give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course a phone number. And that's gonna take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam, and they make it easy to cancel at any time. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C-Corp independent regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes. If you were to look at me doing SPVs, I do mine over at thesyndicate.com. There's plenty of 'em over at angellist.com. Uh, or angel.co, I think is still the domain.

angelist.com now.

Oh, angelist.com, there you go. Uh, somebody had sniped it back in the day. Uh, so angelist.com, you pay 2 and 20 typically. Uh, I'm sorry, you pay 20% carry and then you might pay some fees. The fees might wind up being, depending on the size of it, 1 or 2%. Uh, essentially $50,000 a deal, $25,000 deal, that's covered the legal and expense. Now SPVs will charge a load-in fee. Some people selling Anthropic shares want 10% on the way in, and then they have no percent carry. So they're just literally selling the shares. They sell $10 million, they want to make a million. So there's all kinds of different variations there. But in a closed-end fund, there's no concept of carry. You just get 2% a year.

We're not allowed, because we want to offer this publicly, we're not allowed to charge carry on it. So there is no carry on USVC. In some cases, when it comes to early stage investing, our personal opinion is we can't index pre-seed and seed companies like there's too many of them. So what we're going to do there is pick fund managers and in those underlying funds, the fund manager could charge carry, but there's no carry from us. And when we go direct, there's obviously no carry as well.

Got it. And you could expect to pay about 2.5%. 2% goes to the GPs in the fund. And 50 basis points goes to operations of the fund. If this were to be something in that range, something that is—

so our gross expense ratio right now is about 3.6%. And the reason it's that high is it's just a lot of like one-off type of fees that don't scale, that will scale down with assets. However, we have an expense limitation agreement for the first year to bring that down to a net expense ratio of 2.5%.

Got that.

Our total management fee is only one—

well, only.

It's 1 point, not 2%. It's 1%.

Got it.

The remaining amount is, yeah, fund operations or fees of the underlying fund. So when we're a fund of funds, the underlying fund could have management fees and that's reflected in the expense ratio.

So when you guys put this out, everyone said 1% fees, great. And then everyone got really, really annoyed that it wasn't 1%. Did you guys do a PR mistake or were people just overindexing on the first number they saw in the prospectus and not actually doing their homework? To actually read through the rest of it? Because I read through it and it was pretty clear, frankly.

Candidly, we did not expect anywhere near the reaction we got. Not because like any of it is inherently surprising, but we thought it would be a smaller deal than it was. And look, net-net, it's a good— it's good when things become a bigger deal. But it's safe to say the launch was bigger than any of our expectations in every possible way. The positive, the negative, like the PR, the messaging. A lot of lessons learned also because we are running a regulated product, right? So I can't really kind of hot respond to people being like, you're wrong, whatever. We have to have internal reviews on the communications going out and stuff. But it was a learning experience running this type of product. I think we learned a lot of stuff, but at the same time, like, this is venture capital. It is a notoriously illiquid, expensive asset class, right? You can't compare it to a Vanguard fund at 3 basis points. It's a fully, fully different thing. So we try to benchmark ourselves to how much does a traditional venture fund cost? And now we have to make this, you know, applicable, available generally. How can we do that? And we think our fee structure is pretty competitive for the nature of the asset class.

Okay, so incentive-wise, let's break down the incentive, Alex and Ankur. The incentive for a venture capitalist like myself with a fund is we want to triple the fund value. We have generous fees that should cover our day-to-day. So life is easy in terms of going to an office and having a staff, but you're not getting rich off of it and you have to pay those fees back at the end. It comes out of your carry later. So congratulations. You, you know, you had a $100 million fund. You were getting 2%. Oh, you're getting $2 million a year for 10 years. You got $20 million. Au contraire, mon frère. Now you got to pay that back. So your carry starts at $120 million. If you return $320 million, you have $200 million in gains, 20% of $200 million. And this would be a great scenario. This is the top 10% of funds, top 5% of funds. Okay, congratulations. You made $40 million over 12, 13, 14 years, which is what it takes these days. You made $2 or $3 million a year. If you were a banker on Wall Street, you would have made more money. You would have been under more stress. Maybe it wasn't as interesting. Here the incentive is, hey, there's no carry, so you're not trying to swing for the fences necessarily. You're trying to consistently grow the assets under management. So Ankur, how does that change how y'all look at the business? The incentive is to grow the fund size to get that management fee. Yeah.

I will say that yes, like growing assets is important because that's how we'll know whether we're succeeding if people believe it's a good product. But the only way people will believe it's a good product is if we generate returns, like if we become a fee stacking machine or something. I just don't believe it works with this type of product where your track record is public. And I think this is different from traditional venture funds where there's a lot of large venture funds. I don't want to name any who've, you know, kind of had these multibillion-dollar funds stacked generation after generation.

Alex will name them. Go ahead, Alex.

Andreessen Horowitz.

There you go. Those are not—

they still have better— but there's like just old school firms. I'm not going to name them, but like partners who've gotten independently incredibly wealthy delivering 2x funds for the last like 20 or 30 years. But they do that because they have institutional relationships where they kind of keep plowing it forward. We're a public fund. We're facing additional scrutiny. If we don't actually do well, if we're not somewhat performative, this whole thing doesn't really work.

So even though we performant— Ankur, not performative.

Actually, good point.

Very actually. Sorry. Correct. That's very different things.

Yeah.

Yeah. Ankur is going to break out in a show tune right now.

Hello, USBC, it's the fund for you.

No, but you're performing.

Yeah, it's very—

yeah, yeah, your performance, it matters here. And so that's what I tried to— I was actually running some cover for you guys when people were like, oh my God, we appreciate it.

Yeah.

And I was like, okay guys, everything's publicly facing. And because you can redeem, if you put $1,000 in and you redeem 5% a quarter, in 20 quarters you're out of the fund. They're out of business.

Very, very important clarification. It's not 5% of your investment. It's 5% of the entire fund. So you could redeem a lot more than 5% unless every person tried to redeem 100%. Exactly.

In which case it's done on a pro rata basis. So it's fair.

Correct. Exactly.

So worst case scenario, 20 quarters. Realistically, I'm going to guess, you know, a fraction of that, a third of that, half of that. We'll see. But, you know, if. You are trending towards, hey, you're not getting good assets in there. Hey, those assets aren't performing, uh, or you're not running it professionally, or the fees go too high. Any, any bad performance in any vector means people start redeeming. People start redeeming, then people in the press start looking at reporting and say everybody's redeeming. And we've seen that happen to hedge fund managers or private equity Private credit has kind of seen this all blew out in real time. Yeah, it's blowing up right now. So, you know, that's— I think reputation matters in our industry. Naval's got a great reputation. Everything he does, he— I, I, having known him for 20 years plus and worked with him for, for many of those years, he wants to do the right thing. And you understand reputation is— reputation is the capital. There's tons of opportunities, but you only get one reputation. And if you look at folks who've worked with the public and, you know, raised money, you wind up getting a reputation based on those returns, based on your behavior. It could be good, it could be bad, it could be good and bad. Typically it's good and bad. And how you keep plowing forward matters, I think, you know, most of all. And owning the losses is the key. You look at somebody like Bill Ackman, I think he's done a great job of when he did the Herbalife short. Was he the one who did Herbalife short, Alex?

Yes.

Yeah. Um, he was like, listen, I, I believe that that was a good short, but he— I think he— I don't know what the end outcome was. I think he got his ass handed to him. And, uh, you know, he has to go out there and own that. And then you get to own the wins. Congratulations. Uh, it seems like Anchor, it's a, a great innovative thing for specifically AngelList to do. I know Cathie Wood's doing one. A lot of people are buzzing around this. I got offered to do one with a couple of— with two different partners. I don't have the time for it. So instead, I'm looking forward to— I think we have KOM and a couple of other, um, assets on the platform. If there was an opportunity to put them in here, that means I would get liquidity for my LPs. Is that correct? It's not your imagination. Risk and regulation really are ramping up quickly. Your customers don't just want assurances from you, they expect proof of your security just to do business with you. That is why Vanta is a game changer for you and your startup, for your business. Vanta's AI-powered platform automates your entire compliance process, whether you're preparing for a SOC 2 or you're running an enterprise GRC program or you're doing an audit. Vanta is going to worry about the security so your team can focus on building a great product, moving your business forward. Some of our favorite companies like Ramp and Ryder, they're spending 82% less time on their audits right now because they work with Vanta. We've all heard the rumors about shady compliance and security companies. I don't need to get into the details. They were taking shortcuts apparently with their clients' accounts, allegedly. That's why you need a trusted partner like Vanta now more than ever. So get started today at vanta.com/twist. That's vanta.com/twist.

Even though I think with AngelList we have a very unique data advantage where we can kind of have amazing visibility into anything happening early stage. We do have the ability to also go and like, you know, pick off assets on the AngelList platform, but we're not limited to that. There's nothing in our mandate that says we have to only transact with AngelList-affiliated vehicles. And our net goal is we're trying to index venture capital as a whole, so we will back the best emerging fund managers.

How early will you go?

And, uh, so for early stage, we'd rather go with fund managers because it's just very difficult for us to underwrite again a seed company.

So how would that work? If I have my next $50 million fund, I go to you, I pitch you, you say, okay, we'll take 20% of the fund, give us a $10 million slice.

Our sweet spot where possible is find fund managers that only write seed checks. So therefore when they want to write a larger Series A or Series B or Series C at scale, we could be their capital partner where we kind of come in and write a check. Pay them potentially a small amount of carry. But that's the only way I believe you can scale judgment, which is the hardest part of, you know, running this kind of—

So if we did a deal like that for Launch Fund 5, which if— yeah, if my ballpark, I think I would be going out next year, we would do a handshake agreement. Hey, when I have pro rata, I come to you and say, would you like some of it? Or would we codify that? Because my understanding when other— I had— I have other VCs, they just want it to be like a handshake. Hey, you'll, you'll run it by us. How are you thinking about that?

This, this is about relationships with the GPs. It's more about our relationship with them. It's not going to be a hardcoded sort of thing, but like, hey, if we're valuable to you, we especially like, I mean, maybe you see this, but running a syndicate very often for a lot of people is not a lot of fun. If they can avoid that with a single check from a trusted capital partner, and if we feel good, we're not getting adverse selection, we're literally seeing the best stuff. I mean, we'd love to kind of keep that be the way we deploy in the future. The other advantage we have is at this point there's a lot of data on fund managers. We can benchmark based on track record pretty well that if we think you're more or less likely to succeed with your next fund, which does give us a bit of a data, data.

How early can you get to confidence with, say, an emerging manager that maybe, I don't know, kind of the fund one, fund two era of their life?

We can have predictive judgment with a couple of fonds, how accurate it is to realize— I mean, it makes me— makes us slightly more likely. There's still so much variance in all this data. Like, you slice and dice in a million ways, and we'll try and be quantitative. We'll try and look at, um, what percentage of top decile seed deals are you a part of? What percentage of your companies end up, you know, raising a meaningful markup? We look at all these metrics, we'll rank people, and that still gets you pretty close. It's by no means perfect at all because data is so messy with startups, right? We're not looking at like, this is not big data.

This is still small data. Well, but you know, the other thing is in a hot market, let's say we're talking peak XRP and you're doing SaaS companies, you know, everybody was, I, you know, I'm in 21 funds, 22 funds, and I put $50K, $25K, $100K into a bunch of small $10 million, $20 million funds. And I just say, hey, all I care about is deal flow. But I'll put this money in and support you. You can use my name. And they were sending me these notes like a year later. Oh my God, you know, our—

Our IRR is like 50% and DPI is zero.

Yeah, 500%, whatever. And it was like, there's like 2 or 3 markups in it. I'm like, okay, you invested out of $20 million. Now this thing's worth $300 million a year later. That doesn't make much sense. The revenue has not gone 15x. What's going on here? And I was like, if that's the case, and like literally had this discussion when one fund manager was like, we're a 7x fund. I'm like, if that's the case, liquidate everything and take the win right now. And they're like, oh no, we're going for it. I'm like, you're not going for it. You've already accomplished it.

Yes, you're done. You're done.

The logical thing to do at 7x would be sell everything and be done. And, you know, a young fund manager, certainly myself, my first fund got to that kind of level. And I look back on it, I'm like, oh, I did sell in secondary, but man, I should have sold more and I should have insisted on selling more because some cases will be the buyer on the secondary side.

Like, we're not going to pay the top price, but they're there's been such little DPI in this entire industry that in some cases we're going— we have the ability rather to go to funds and be like, look, your fund may be, you know, a 5x on paper, but if any of your LPs want to cash at cash 3x today, yeah, we'll do it. And you know, those are kinds of deals where we'll take both sides. However, when we do that, I'm not likely not going to underwrite any mark that's 2021 or something and has not been written up since.

Like, it's what I like about what you're doing, Ankur, is you're anchoring reality. And that's what these— um, there are funds now that are buying slices of GP carry. I forgot what they call them. What do they call these funds that are buying everything?

I mean, we also have the ability to— we haven't transacted like that, but there's every derivative of this. You can buy out LPs, buy out parts of GP carries, you can create—

yeah, hybrid structure. Uh, what's-his-name is doing this. Yeah, no, Dave McClure is doing this. There's a name for these funds, but They buy out a 12-year-old venture fund and, uh, they—

a lot of big firms have raised multiple billions of dollars for each of their vehicles to do fund secondaries, basically.

What's the breakdown of, um, of secondaries, uh, commits to emerging managers and, and growth investing in the funds? I know those are your three pillars of where you're going to invest, but is it going to be a third, a third, a third opportunistic, or are you going to weight heavily on purpose in one direction?

Roughly a third, a third, a third is like the plan right now. We'll see how it evolves with time. Um, the critical piece for us is managing liquidity because again, we aim to provide 5% of the fund every quarter. That sneaks up. So we need to make sure we have enough in cash and public equivalents and eventually later stage stuff that could pay off sooner rather than later.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. But I'm curious about performance so far. So you've had this on the market for a little bit. Um, how has investor reaction been to it? How many people have signed up to give you money and kind of what's the average I guess LP check from the normies?

Yeah, so tons of people have signed up. I'm told by compliance to be careful about any exact numbers we state, but safe to say thousands of people have signed up, which was above and beyond all of our expectations. Um, people are excited about the early portfolio. Um, however, I'm, you know, I think there's a lot of new investments we'll be announcing soon that I'm pretty, pretty excited about. Um, but yeah, it's the early reaction. As I said, when we launched 2 weeks ago, it went crazier than any of us anticipated. And, um, it's always fun when you, you know, run into those kinds of like, hey, we didn't prepare for this, but it's going to be, it's going to be a really fun few weeks coming up as we start making more investments, announcing more investments. Our goal is to be as transparent when these things happen in a way that like most venture funds— I've invested in a ton, even the ones that make money— I don't really hear much. I'll get an update, you know, maybe once a year or something. The goal here is we want to announce companies we invest in. We think it can also be a win for the right business since there's a little bit of storytelling. It gives the average person the ability to own a company. Like, I do think part of the negative tech, negative AI sentiment is because so many people feel locked out from actually having access to any of that sort of growth.

And so the goal is Yeah. So I think it's a great point. So people should be able to invest in these companies that are changing the economy, maybe impacting their jobs. It seems very equitable. But the fund is capped at, I believe, $1 billion in its current form, which is a lot of money in the abstract. But compared to the valuation of like XAI, your number one holding as of March 31st, it's pretty de minimis. So if you want to get people access to these companies and change the conversation about AI, why, why $1 billion? Why not $10 billion? Why not $100 billion?

So, I mean, again, we are thinking about fund building and firm building in stages. Stage 1 is, you know, path to a billion. As we're approaching it, we can kind of revise our goals upwards, but it's very difficult for me to run a whatever, $20, $30, $40 million fund thinking it could also be a $10 billion fund, right? So like, you kind of think about it in phases. Phase 1 of this journey is the first billion, um, and let's try and spend the next, you know, I don't know, 1, 2, 3 years building the best billion-dollar fund we can, and then kind expand our ambition.

Big cloud providers may offer you cheap compute, but you'll end up paying the difference in engineering costs and hiring extra developers. You don't want to waste time configuring virtual networks— none of us do— or your access policies. You want your team building your product. So it's time to look at Render. Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale, and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints. You know you're gonna outgrow in 6 months, but just connect your GitHub repo to Render and you are live. Web services, cron jobs, the whole stack in one platform. It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using Render. 5 million. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup program. You'll get anywhere from $500 to $100,000 in free credits depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com/twist. No, it's perfect. I think it's, uh, this is very valuable. I've been looking for a way to send somebody to a vehicle where they could start experimenting. I get a lot of people asking me, how do I dip my toe? And I always tell them, well, if you join our syndicate and you're accredited you know, you can do as low as $5K per deal. I think that's our minimum. And then sometimes I'll let people even do like $1K, $2K, or $3K if they ask nicely and we have room, uh, in, in the cap table, in the SPV. But for, you know, normies who are non-accredited, at least for now, this is a great way to do it. And we're going to see— I had the, um, chair, the new chair of the SEC on the All In Interview Program, and he told me he's going to make this qualified investor test eventually, sophisticated investor test like they have in some other countries. So I'm sure you're following that as well.

Yep.

And, and if that happens in the next year or two, hey, that'd be great for all of us. We could have people come in and do small checks into venture funds.

Yep, it'll be awesome. I mean, my goal for this is I wish, as you're designing your portfolio— I mean, you know, I went to private banking, whatever— you're allocating your buckets if we want this to be the sort of no-brainer way, if you are like, I want to allocate 5% of my portfolio to venture, I don't want to think about it, but that's what my robo-advisor or whatever does. That's what I want to be able to enable with this type of product.

Yeah. All right, everybody, let's thank Anchor for coming on the program and we'll drop you off. Come back in a year and give us the update. We want to hear all about it and good luck and well done.

Thank you.

You know, Jason, just before we move on to our next guest, do you think that the average person is teachable about how long you can be illiquid in a venture capital context, because I've had parents that have tapped 401(k)s early for various crises. And, you know, if you have your money in this, that's not going to be an option. So I'm just—

well, how much of the 401(k) did they tap? Did they tap 100% or 10%?

I think it was something in the 25%, 30%, 40% range. It was a lot.

Perfect. So even if they did 50%, it was a true crisis. If you only put 5% of your net worth into this, then it's not an issue. So what I always tell people is low single-digit percentages of your net worth. You know, just based on my back-of-the-envelope math, if your portfolio is growing after taxes at 5%, 10%, 7%, whatever it is, you know, depending on how you structure it, whatever that number is that it grows every year, if you could afford to lose a year, because you made a speculative bet, or let's say you lost 3 of your 40 years in the market from the age of 25 to the age of 65. Let's say you had 4 years that just were zero. Yeah, but those 4 years could have been 10xers, 5xers, whatever. Maybe that's worth it if it— if they— if those 4 bets, you know, by definition were 1% each and they each could return, say, 5x, if one hits you're doing 25% better with that part of portfolio, and maybe you have some outside chance of a 10x. It really is a matter of diversification. And so I do think people understand diversification, and the people who don't are the same people who go and play at a high-stakes poker table with their entire net worth or half their entire net worth, and then they have the risk of ruin. If you are that person and you have the risk of ruin, you're a sociopath. You have a problem. You need to go to Gamblers Anonymous. You're a dipshit, you know, and— or you're, you're sick. You're a sick person and you need to take a GLP. That tightens you up.

All right, next up we have our dear friend. It's John Durbin from Shoots. He is, uh, they do titles a little differently at Shoots, Jason, so I'm not going to say co-founder and CEO or co-founder and CTO. Instead, I'm going to say John Durbin, core contributor and backend developer for Shoots. Which is on the BitTensor subnet world and aggregates GPUs for people to use for serverless instant AI compute. John, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, contributor John is what we'll call you.

Contributor John. Yes.

As I tell everybody, crypto people, AI people, they're unique. As we say in Austin, keep things weird. I'm not saying, John, you're weird, but you would agree people who are into these things, uh, maybe think differently, another way to say weird.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one way to look at it. The, um, the fact that we don't have a CEO is sort of trying to embody the fact that we're trying to be a permissionless network, right? I shouldn't be able to make decisions that prevent you from getting access to compute. That's the kind of thing, you know. So we're trying to be like— there's this concept of, of sovereign compute, right, where a country will own their own servers. They— no one else can see. They know exactly what's going on. They own it. No one can block them from accessing it. It's just their own sovereign compute. And so what we're trying to do is basically provide that in like an open, permissionless, decentralized way where I can't stop you from accessing the compute. You know, I don't think anyone should tell you how to do, you know, if you can do matrix multiplications or not. It's a, it's a fundamental right, I think, at this point that everyone should have access to AI because it's just becoming that critically important.

And this is super interesting, Alex, you know, This is scary, not to authoritarians. Authoritarian countries, they've already got it baked in that they're in charge, they control the populace. The real danger is people who pretend that they're democratic and they're running a democratic society and they want the freedom of the people, but then they slowly restrict them, they slowly choke them, whether it's through speech, whether it's through regulation. Sure. And that's what the real danger is, is the people who tell you that they believe in democracy, but then they do things like try to, um, who's the big CDN, uh, that always gets attacked for serving up Cloudflare? You know, I met the founder, Matthew Prince, of, of, uh, Cloudflare, and he's a very principled guy, but the principles can only go so far. You might remember, John, 5 or 10 years ago They were like, whoever these, you know, you know, stay-at-home parents are who write letter-writing campaigns, they were like, oh my God, they're serving up these words that I don't agree with. Okay, who actually served the words up? And they couldn't figure out who the hard drive manufacturers were or the bandwidth providers, but they figured out Cloudflare, which I guess is the bandwidth layer. And then they went after them. Not only did they go after them, they went after them so bad that then you started to have violence going towards their, their staff. And so explain the architecture of what you're building and how permissionless is built into it and how governments and, you know, the nanny state can't penetrate it, or, or how you keep it from penetrating it.

Yeah, so the main thing that we focus on these days is TEE, which is, uh, Trusted Execution Environments. And so what it is is these CPU manufacturers have on chip, these cryptography modules that can guarantee that anything that's in RAM or in the case of NVIDIA, they have confidential compute. So anything in RAM or anything on the GPUs is encrypted. So even if you're in a data center, like actually on the machine, you know, in a terminal, you can't dump the physical, you know, like whatever the contents of the memory is, you can't spy on the traffic going in and out of it. It's totally secure. And, uh, so AMD has one, it's called SNP-SEV. Um, then what we use currently is just Intel with TDX, and we also use NVIDIA CC. So what that means is basically all— yeah, all traffic to and from the GPU to RAM is all encrypted. Um, and then of course on top of that we have, you know, TLS, and then we have, um, TLS. We have—

I'm actually John, I don't know what TLS is.

Transport Layer Security. So it's basically, you know, you go to your bank, you know, HTTPS website. So the one interesting thing too is, you know, on BitTensor, we also have these quantum compute subnets and they're, you know, what are quantum computers meant to do first? Prime factorization, right? Which means breaking all encryption. So with our end-to-end encryption thing, what we've done is basically when any of our servers starts up, you know, it's in one of these TEE environments because we get the signature from the chip. You can go verify that yourself. You can get a quote, you can check the, you know, the GPU evidence. And again, you can get a signed attestation. Basically, all of our stack is open source. So again, the, the transparency there and the verification there is you can't verify anything if you don't have the source code to verify against, right? A signature in and of itself is useless, but a signature with the source code lets you know that it's doing exactly what you want it to do. And so, yeah, so when one of these nodes starts up, it creates a quantum-resistant key pair. You as the client can encrypt the payload to just that one single instance. That means even our load balancers, you know, nothing in the Chute stack when you're using this encryption can see it. Only that TEE node ever can, can read it or the response.

So if I were to explain this to my 16-year-old, very bright, you have people who contribute compute. Now they could have an AMD, Intel, ARM, NVIDIA, whatever the server is. Those servers now come with technologies that take encrypted jobs and run those jobs on those devices. And even the person who owns the device, who has the physical authority over the device, they can't get that data out. It will go back to me as the person sending the job to that machine without— I can have certainty that nobody can see it. So if I were making, let's say I was making a small language model, a VSLM, LM. We've been talking about those a lot here, and I was taking my own open source one, and I decided I'm going to put every piece of financial information from my bank in there, and I'm going to have this custom, uh, uh, small language model. I send all that, the job, to the Chutes Network. The Chutes Network lets compute take that job permissionlessly, which drives the price down because people are competing, and sends me back the answers. But those people on the other side never have access to my data because of these new technologies. AMD's is SEV-SNP, Intel's is TDX, ARM's is TrustZone and CCA, and NVIDIA's is TEE. That's what we're learning today. Yes, John?

Yep, that's exactly right. And so by having these chips that can do these signed, you know, workload attestations, That's kind of what gives us the ability to have permissionless participants, right? So anyone can at any point, any data center anywhere in the world can just start up our VM and start accepting workloads and they won't be able to do anything with it except basically turn the machine on and turn it off.

Is that enough?

They can really do for the major enterprise customers of the world that, that need to ensure that they're, you know, keeping their data as secure as possible for customers. Is this enough for them or is there still other things you need to build in to attract the major compute consumers of the world?

Yeah, so there are a few things that would sort of block some people. So for example, if you're doing, you know, if you have a wallet with $1 billion on it, a crypto wallet, for example, there are supply chain attacks that we could see, for example. And so yes, TEE will give you the RAM protection and the, and the GPU protections and all of this kind of stuff. But there's still the possibility that somewhere in the supply chain before it gets to that actual execution layer, some little library was compromised. Someone put a backdoor in somewhere. You know, there was that recent attack not too long ago with OpenSSH being compromised, right? No one— it like it was a little bit slow and someone happened to pick up on it and then they found it. But that was— that would have affected basically every Linux distribution. On planet Earth. And so that's the next phase and what we're doing. We already have reproducible VMs. You can see exactly what the expected measurements are. You can go verify the packages yourself. But there's a, there's a better way to do it, which is basically if you control the compiler, you know, the entire supply chain, like you compile all of these modules from source yourself with an assembler, you know, and a compiler that you have built, there's a way to sort of prevent the next level of attacks. Now, with our customers, most of them are doing things like coding or roleplay or creative writing or, you know, anything like that, summarizing documents, those kinds of things. And so the risk is pretty mitigated, especially since our stack is open source anyway.

Yeah.

And you can verify it yourself. So but the next level of risk, you know, doing like massive financial transactions with, with crypto wallets, like where you would have to, for example, upload the key. Um, you know, that's the kind of thing that some people just won't be comfortable with until they have everything, you know, fully vetted from, from start.

Are you shooting for those scale customers or are you more designing the company around, you know, serving inference for people that are doing role play or creative writing, as you just said?

Well, the idea is to make it so secure that it doesn't matter what the payload is. I mean, that's where we're trying to get to. So we, we don't want to know what you're doing, right? And so that's why we built this end-to-end encryption stuff. We don't care what you're doing with the compute, we just care that it's secure.

And so, right, I, I didn't mean to say like those specific things, but more that, you know, individuals with smaller compute loads versus major enterprises that might need, I don't know, a million GPUs, for example. I'm trying to figure out like where you're shooting for your, your future target customer base.

Yeah, I mean, ideally it would just be every single GPU on planet Earth is just part of Chutes, and then the whole thing is permissionless.

And yeah, I mean, what's paradoxical about this, John, is the government wants this for themselves. They want to make sure that when they're doing important compute— military, espionage, any, anything in between— uh, they want this technology. They're demanding it on their servers. They also want a backdoor put in so that they can spy on people. And so this is the business equivalent. This is the high-order compute equivalent this, you know, sector, which I think is generally goes under the, the term of art confidential computing. Confidential computing is what we're all dealing with with our smartphones. You choose Apple, you're choosing encryption. Apple didn't give the backdoor to the FBI or CIA. And the San Bernardino shooting by, you know, uh, you know, radical terrorists. Now, on the surface, you're like, well, that sucks. Like, you should give that information. You can't give that information without giving everybody to the government. So if you want to live in a spy state and you want to live in 1984 or Brave New World and have everything you do have the think police over it, now imagine that when you do a compute job, you build an LLM, you are, you know, running software that the compute level has been compromised. And by the way, it's probably been compromised for a long time. We know that they got the endpoint after 9/11 of the AT&T, uh, fiber router, I believe, and they compromised that. And so all internet traffic, the CIA, FBI was sniffing on, I think, almost all Americans' traffic. That was the allegation.

Um, yeah, and that stopped entirely. The NSA said, no, you caught us, we're never going to do that again, it's over. Yeah, no, I think it's very important to have, to have secure, secure compute, and also to have it available to everybody. But John, what I'm curious about is market demand, because I hear I have a chart right here from your site that shows your all-time kind of volume of tokens processed via Chutes. And it's not pointing the direction that I kind of expected it to, just given how much demand there is for AI compute. So what's, what's holding you guys back right now from doing more volume?

What timeframe is this? Just so I'm clear, it looks like it's 2 years worth of data.

This goes back to the launch.

Yeah. February. Oh, God.

John, you're helping me out here. What's the year here?

Yeah. So it would have started probably around January '25.

Okay.

Okay. So we're only talking about 18 months of data here. Okay.

Yeah. So there's sort of a bunch of different stories actually in this data, and we can go over it if you want. But basically, like the first peak there where it's exponential scaling and we get up to around 160 billion tokens a day. That was when we offered everything for free as we were building it to see like, what could we actually do? Like, how powerful is this Chutes network?

Got it.

And, you know, when, when things are free, people are going to just use it to this excess capacity. Right. And we, we got to the point where we didn't have enough hardware on the network to handle the traffic. And that's when we started— we didn't charge per token at that time. But what we did do is say, if you want to use the service for free, you have to have paid $5. And the purpose of that was basically to get rid of bots. Like we had a ton of bot traffic, automated traffic, you know, appeared to be spam, people blasting our servers, DDoS attacks, all this kind of stuff. So we put this payment gate in to try to reduce some of that. And then eventually over time, we started charging for everything. We phased out all free models. It took a long time because you don't want to just rug pull your customers. So we had some models that we kept running for free for a time, and then we had some models that we had sponsored by the actual lab that created the models for a time. And then, you know, so now what we're up against basically is we're trying to take it from a proof of concept that we know works because we hit that 160 billion per day scale. No problem. The network was fine. And now we're trying to make it sort of a more profitable business in the Web2 sense. Granted, it's, you know, Web3 and all of that. But the point is basically to have as much revenue going into the token as we have, you know, minor outflows. Basically, our, our owner emissions go into a smart contract and get locked up. Every dollar we receive in payment, we purchase the token and burn it. Um, yeah, so the, the colors on that chart, by the way, are just the different models. So you can see there's not a huge fluctuations in models.

So, and what are you seeing now with, you know, recently? I know, uh, we just had KIMI come out with 2.6 and Deepsea came out with 4. You are dealing with these like hacker community kind of, as we said earlier, the, the tinkerers, the strange, the weirdos, the eccentrics, the purpose driven folks, they're kind of your people. So what are they playing with? What are they most obsessed with at the moment?

Kimmich 2.6 and GLM 5.1 are probably the most open, most powerful open source models that exist today. And actually, I want to clarify, they're not open source, they're open weight, which means you can download the weights and you can run them. Now, you know, going back to this idea of like sovereign intelligence, right? We want people to be able to use it in a secure way, trustable way. Now with these labs, when they produce these models, the one thing you don't know is what training data went into them, what censorship they'll have. And so, you know, a lot of the things that people do is they probe these models to see where, where is it censored? You know, how do you jailbreak it? What can you use it for? Is it good at coding? Is it good at roleplay? You know, does it have a soul? You know, a lot of our traffic is, is people doing things like Janitor AI. We have our own character chat called Fictio AI. So it's basically interactive roleplay with characters you design. It has image generation built in, all of that kind of stuff.

But yeah, you can, you can have fun with this, John. Here is— I just decided I would test out Deepseek, chat.deepseek.com. Tell me about the country Taiwan. Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.

There is no such country, Taiwan.

The Chinese government firmly opposes any form of Taiwan independence, yada, yada, yada.

And if you ask— totally unbiased.

Well, I mean, this is the truth. Like, it's the— it's— you're going to have to unravel these things. And for folks who are wondering why I've become a bit obsessed with cryptocurrency in 2026 here and Tao specifically, well, I've been asking my friends, you know, hey, what's interesting in crypto? I've always been looking for a use case and Solana. And Tao kept coming up. Solana Tao, Solana Tao. And Tao has this subnet where it's a competition for 128 different projects. Shoots is, uh, I still believe the largest market cap of all of them. And you can buy tokens for Shoots, which then has a token that people get paid in and, and uses the network. Then there's Tao, the Bittensor overall token. And if you look at Shoots on CoinMarketCap, very new project. It's got a market cap of typically $70, $80, $90 million. If you look at the nature of this startup, if this was a startup and it's not perfectly analogous to a startup because it's, you know, not necessarily a company with shares, but the total market cap here of those tokens, if this was a Silicon Valley-based startup that was privately marketed, I would say it might be 2, 3, 4, 10 times as much value.

Yeah.

Based on the traction, right? So I do think there's value here, unrecognized value. John, is this— is Chutes part of a company? Is there a, a Delaware C-Corp that owns the IP? Explain to people how it's organized in that way.

Yeah, it's, it's very convoluted, I would say, because we're trying to make sure that we can retain that permissionless, um, you know, state. So the way Schutz works is there's a, uh, a global corp, Schutz Global Corp, that's registered in, um, in, uh, Nevis. And that company—

I'm sorry, Netis?

Nevis.

Nevis. What is Nevis?

The island of Nevis. It's, uh—

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I'm pulling it up.

Uh, okay, great. Good to know.

It's pretty small. That's not, uh—

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah.

Okay.

So total population, uh, 13,000. Definitely not an offshore place where people incorporate at all.

No, definitely not.

I kid.

But so there's, you know, and that corporation has basically contracts in place with other corporations that are around the world to do the various, you know, aspects of the system. So what I do, you know, I work on the backend, I maintain the core validator. I don't own the subnet in any way. I'm not entitled to any of the owner emissions. Nothing of that sort. I work on the backend. Another team works on, you know, the fiat payment rails, right? And they handle the Stripe stuff. We operate, you know, on like a COGS model basically, where the second you get a payment, you have to buy the token and burn it, eliminating it from supply, you know, cost of goods sold. That's it. Another corporation works on, you know, marketing and business dev and stuff like this. So every it's not like a true DAO in the sense that it's totally decentralized. But we have, you know, we have people in, in Germany, in different states in the US. We have, you know, someone in Pakistan. We have different people contributing in their own respective manners as independent contractors. And then the Schutz Global Corp itself, that entity locks the owner emissions into a smart contract to make it sort of unruggable. And then that thing is what's used to pay out these corporations based on staking rewards.

One question about the business setup here. So I know we've talked to a lot of folks in the BitTensor world, so we're pretty familiar with subnet economics as a general concept. But I'm curious, when I pay either per token or hourly pricing for access to compute via Chutes, does a portion of the money that I'm paying still flow back to the person who has the GPU in question? And if so, how does that kind of nest inside of BitTensor economics, which is more focused on a competition and validators?

Yeah, it's interesting because you could do that, right? If we took the revenue and paid the miners directly, the problem is that that would basically make us, you know, in charge of actually managing the pay. We would have all sorts of restrictions on who we can pay. How, when, you know, know your customer, know your customer refunds.

Yeah, right.

Whereas, you know, by having it actually be purely paid from chain emissions, you know, we get the DePIN SEC protections basically because the protocol is paying the participants. We are not gating it. The protocol is just, you know, you participate and then you get emissions from the protocol. You know, so if we were to start paying the miners directly, it would just be a whole different regulatory nightmare. And I think we would stop being permissionless in the way that we are today.

So then if the price of TAO— let's just say something terrible happened and it fell by 50%, that would reduce the, the US dollar equivalent of your share of emissions. Would that make it impossible to pay enough money out to the people who are competing on the GPU side, the miner side, to keep the business going. So is the longevity of Chutes somewhat dependent on the health of the price of TAO?

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the tradeoff we make, right, is the, the fluctuations in the price of TAO can be good, they can be bad. When it's good, it's nice because miners can accumulate for a while and get longer commits and drive the prices down. And, you know, there's excess compute and all of this. And then when the price goes down, Well, that's where we, you know, can make these trade-offs. One, one option is to just start eliminating models that don't contribute very much to the profit margin, basically. Um, you know, that's an option. Now, to your point though, the, the— we could see more revenue than emissions in any given day, in which case the miners are technically like losing money, basically, whereas if they had just gotten paid directly from from revenue, they'd be making more. You know, that's not the case right now. And we have like surplus going to the miners. Now we do have a bit of a worldwide GPU shortage, like it's a bit of a pandemic right now. There's almost no compute available and the prices are going up. I mean, we used to pay, you know, at one point I think the average payout for an H200 was like $0.77 an hour, which is crazy. Paying almost nothing because these DCs just had idle compute. And now if you go try to rent a server somewhere, if you don't already have a contract in place, you might be paying, you know, $3, $3.50 an hour. And so we've fortunately been able to amass a fairly sizable amount of compute and we've tried to make sure that we're only serving whatever our demand is. We're trying to meet the demand with our supply. Without having too much excess so we don't just drive the price of the token down and make all of our data centers unprofitable.

John, thanks so much for coming in. We want to keep track of this. So next time you have a big update, by all means, please reach out and we'll have you on. But definitely we'll have you on in 6 months. I want to get an update on how it's all going as a project. And what I love about this permissionless ecosystem, Alex, as we wrap here for the segment, is permissionless equals efficiency, and efficiency, uh, equals disruption. So when you start looking at an ecosystem, when you can permissionlessly join a network and you can provide a service, people then look for supply and they add supply to a marketplace. When you add supply to a marketplace, you drive down prices. When you drive down prices, you increase consumption you, you induce demand. Why? Because people look at and go, oh, I didn't realize it was that cheap, maybe I'll come up with— I have a couple of ideas. Now, if you want to make this less abstract, in the Uber ridesharing network or in Airbnb's hospitality network, when those services launched, you didn't need much permission. You did need some permission to put an extra bedroom or an ADU onto the Airbnb network, or put your Prius onto the Uber network and drive, or Lyft or Sidecar, or any of the early components. What that did was, as supply started going on, they started competing with each other. And all of a sudden, going to Tokyo or going to Paris, where you had a lot of Airbnbs, the price went from, you know, uh, $200 or $300 a night to $100 or $200 a night. And then you could see, like, this ADU was going for $75 a night, whatever it happened to be. And more demand came on and more demand came on. Why? Because the supply started to increase. People were like, I can take a vacation to Tokyo. I thought that was out of reach for me. I could go to Paris. I thought that was out of reach for me. Oh, I'm staying at a house 30 minutes outside of Paris, you know, in a flat that's not in a great neighborhood that I would never have visited, but I can in 30 minutes get to the center of Paris or Tokyo. People who couldn't afford the trip were like, that's an easy thing for me, that's an easy concession for me to make. Yes, the market didn't understand that. The market couldn't understand that, right? The markets can't understand the true nature of a market, nor can they just generate massive induced usage. And the analysts just thought, well, Uber will be as big as the number of cabs and Lincoln Town Cars, and Uber blew past that. People thought Airbnb would be as big as the number of hotels and they would be competing for those. They blew past that in Paris and Tokyo. Why did they blow past it? Because they induced the market to exist. That's what Chutes will do if they keep this project on the rails and they keep this project, you know, tight and people can trust it. And that's why I love guys like John and these principal people who join these. These are like the OG crypto people. These are the OG Compute People because they actually are in it for the right reasons. Sovereignty, freedom, individual freedom, fighting against authoritarianism, fighting against, you know, socialism and communists who want to, you know, take away people's freedoms. I applaud what you're doing, John, and I wish you great success with it.

Well, thank you. And one last point real quick. We are actually getting into— to solve that last thing where you don't know what's in the model. We are getting into the model training space as well, so stay tuned for that.

Oh, can't wait. Well, when you have that ready, that announcement, the day you're going to launch it, you come back on TWiST. All right, we'll drop John off. Great job from John.

All right, for people who are curious, it's chutes.ai, not s-h-o-o-t-s, just in case anyone goes to the wrong URL. It's chutes. Yeah.

All right, uh, I know we have a couple of things on the docket in terms of news lightning round, me and, uh, yeah. And put me on a shot clock. Is there a shot clock built into Zoom now? I was on a founder call and there's a shot clock on Zoom where we play like music from the Oscars to after they get to 2.5 minutes, it starts playing the music and then turns off their microphone. It's amazing. All right. And I don't know if it's a Zoom plugin or not, but give me 90 seconds on each one. Here we go.

If you go over, Salah has just volunteered to turn off your video and boot you from the call. So this will be great.

Okay, don't do that.

First off, Ryan Cohen of GameStop fame wants to buy eBay, a much larger company, at a fat premium to its latest share price. $55 billion deal, Jason. He says it's half stock, half, uh, half cash. Do you believe him? And does this make any damn sense?

Okay, play the clip. You have to see his clip. He was on CNBC today. Before I get on my 90-second shot clock, he had a back and forth with Andrew Rorschnorkin that was bizarre. Where he kept telling him to read the website. It's like, well, why are you on this? Just give me that part.

Uh, it's the first 30 seconds of this clip, so we'll just play for— until you tell me to stop.

And put it on 2x speed, always 2x speed here when we're on This Week in Startups. So just, we'll make it a little fast for everybody because, yeah.

All right, here it is, 2x speed, let's go.

Invariably the audience— and I know a lot of people are gonna ask, how does the math math for you given the price tag, $56 billion, given the market cap of GameStop, which is a fraction of that? I know you have this $20 billion, um, financial from TD. But sort of walk us through how you could get to that price and how it would work. It's on our website. It's half cash, half stock, uh, but the details are on our website. Can you help? I've read them. Can you help our audience understand them? Yeah, which part exactly? Well, I think we can start with the idea of Google stock is, call it, $11 billion. Uh, you have $9 billion, uh, on your balance sheet, arguably, if you're providing effectively all of your stock, and then the cash that gets you to $20 You have this letter from TD, that's another $20, uh, we're now at $40, uh, but we're still off by, call it, uh, $16. And the $20, as far as I understand, while it's considered highly confident letter, meaning TD saying they're highly confident, uh, that they provide the financing, it's not locked financing.

Now we'll see what happens.

Um, I understand that, I'm just trying to understand where the rest of the money would come from. Half cash, half stock. I, I, I hear you, I'm just saying that that math doesn't get you to the to the price that you're offering?

Sorry, that's a pretty straightforward question.

I don't get it. Like, where's the rest of the money coming from? Andrew laid it out very clearly.

I don't understand your question. We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done. But the full details of the offer are on our website.

All right.

I think that's illustrative of this.

Okay. So put me on my 90-second chocolate. Okay.

All right.

It's time to play your favorite new game. Arrogant, Asperger's, or alcohol, or high. I mean, I'm— all due respect to Ryan, he's on CNBC. He's the CEO of a publicly traded company. Your job is to communicate your vision, not be arrogant not have Asperger's, or fight through your Asperger's and get a coach, uh, or not be high as a kite. This was the overwhelming reaction of people. Now that's part one. He's not doing his job. Now part two is he gets some crazy kicker if he's able to do a deal. He gets this massive stock kicker, so he's trying to do any deal possible from what I'm hearing on the Reddits, etc. Now, this is GameStop, which was part of that stonks movement, WallStreetBets, all that market manipulation that occurred 4 years ago. Somehow this company was able to raise a war chest. Their business is actually working to some degree, but there's a lot of nuance here that makes no sense. If GameStop is worth $11 billion and have $9 billion in cash, you would take $9 billion out of the valuation first and then you'd be left with the enterprise value, which would be $2 billion. So Andrew Ross Sorkin is making a bit of a mistake there because it should be— the $9 billion is kind of included in the $11, so he's actually short like a massive amount. He should explain, we'll have different ways in order to fill the gap in terms of the purchase price. We're giving— our plan is to give half— this is how I would answer it. Hey, our plan is to give half equity and half stock. We have many different ways to raise capital in the future, issuing stock, extending our credit line. We're starting with, uh, you're correct, we have $11 billion valuation, we have $9 billion on our, um, on our, uh, in our bank account, our balance sheet. Thank you. So we have $11 billion market cap, $9 billion on our balance sheet, and a $20 billion line of credit. You can assume if we have those three things We'll be able to bridge the gap with the rest. Great question, Andrew. And then the conversation moves on. Instead, he chooses to be so arrogant. And I'm not making fun of people with Asperger's, but that's— people are like, is this person have Asperger's? Not even looking in the eye. Like, does he not understand he's being asked a question in good faith? In fact, he's being given a softball.

It's a layup, Jason. This is a pitch right across the plate. Tell me how you're going to do the thing you already filed an SEC document for should be the easiest frickin' thing in the world.

I just answered it. I have no— I can answer that question perfectly without any preparation. And I'm not the CEO of the company. Now, let's put this aside. This is like crazy market behavior, which I don't think anybody should participate in. I give them credit for like raising money and figuring it out or whatever, but I hate market manipulation stuff. And I just think buyer beware. If you're participating in these shenanigans, you deserve to lose it all. This is market manipulation. This is likely— GameStop has always been about market manipulation. That's what they've told us they're doing. I think it continues, or my expert view here is this feels like they're still trying to manipulate markets. I don't like it.

I don't—

not saying they're doing anything illegal, but it feels like they're manipulating markets, which means if you ask me, you are my brother, my cousin, for financial advice, and I'm not giving financial advice here, I would run for the hills and look for a company that's a stronger company. Maybe I would buy eBay stock, not GameStop. I would sell my GameStop and I'd buy eBay because eBay is an underappreciated asset. And he— I did read he had some interesting ideas there. Cut expense. Great.

Yep.

Number 2, do more live commerce, which is very popular in China, and then lean into collectibles and then have a real-world presence like the GameStop stores. That's actually a pretty great idea. I've always wondered, why doesn't eBay create retail stores, take the best of a consignment and make it an experience? Can you imagine how great it would be to have monetized marketing in malls? eBay could have a top floor of the mall, one section for eBay collectibles, one for eBay Autos, one for eBay Electronics, one for eBay Clothes and Fashion. That would be brilliant. And you could just—

returns, pick up and drop off. I mean, like, oh my gosh, look at the Whole Foods model with Amazon.

Correct. Thank you. And so that bricks to clicks would be extraordinary. Okay, let's move on. I think I went over 90 seconds. Sorry.

All right.

You're good.

All right. Next up on the news rundown, Amazon is taking on FedEx and UPS. Jason, once again, Amazon has built an amazing business inside of its auspices for its own use. In this case, it's fulfillment services. Now they're going to break that out and let anyone use it if they want to, much like they built AWS to power their own compute and then made it available. FedEx and UPS stocks are down on the news. I view this as just one more step in technology domination. But I'm curious, what do you think?

This is a genius move. They did it with AWS. If you perfect something internally and then you put the rest of the world on it, The original thesis was, oh my God, Amazon is giving away the keys to the kingdom. They're going to share their cloud computing secrets. Au contraire, mon frère. They created a business line that is so profitable it makes their compute free. Let that sink in. This is going to be so powerful. So many people are going to embrace it that it's going to build a relationship with all of those e-commerce vendors, all of those people shipping products. It deepens their relationship, just like AWS deepens their relationship with folks. And it's going to lower the cost of Amazon's, you know, one of Amazon's key, uh, expenses. Compute has been driven down by AWS, and logistics will be driven down by this. It's a brilliant move, and it's a moat in the world that we are entering. This is an increasing moat. If software is not a moat, this Infrastructure equals moat. You're seeing this also with Uber. Uber is offering their infrastructure to other people in order, uh, to build their moat. They're going to be offering all their self-driving data. They offer logistics to people. It is brilliant. And I think this means eventually Amazon buys Uber. If Amazon keeps this up, if they own the Uber network Amazon could be delivering products even faster globally. And Amazon is not in every country Uber is. I've always thought Uber would get purchased eventually by Amazon or Apple because Uber is the everything app and Apple is, you know, the most sophisticated device that brings your world to you. You can imagine you, you put either of these two companies together, this, the synergy is extraordinary. It would make Apple so valuable to be able to say, buy an iPhone and get a hotel anywhere you want. Get— which they just announced they are doing a deal with Expedia. Uber's doing a deal with Expedia. Get a ride, get food, get groceries, get convenience store. All of that is built into the iPhone, and the iPhone is constructed around this delivery promise. Apple on demand. Amazon already has it. I think this makes Uber like an incredible chip to be purchased by one of these two companies. Now that would be a mega acquisition.

Huge.

Uh, it would be huge. It would be— I don't know what the largest acquisitions have been in the history of the internet right now. Uh, but you know, we certainly have $20 billion, $50 billion ones on the regular right now. This would be $150 or $200 billion. It would have to be a $250— $250 billion or $200 billion one.

Exactly.

In order to incentivize shareholders. But I think it's a really amazing thing for Amazon to do this again. Very smart idea.

Yep, it's very smart. I absolutely love it. And if you want to learn more about Uber's, uh, other businesses, you can go to uber.com/twist to learn all about their AI services, which we have had them as a partner on the show. So a little plug for them.

That's another thing they're doing. They're taking their network of experts, of humans, and they're saying you can rent humans on the network just like we've seen with various guests we've had on here, it's a Mechanical Turk type thing. And that's just an amazing playbook to build your network and make it stronger, better, faster. The other thing I'll say is when people have to use your infrastructure, you have to have great infrastructure, right? So if your customer as the AWS group is Amazon, okay, yeah, you can, have mistakes and then you have to answer to management. If you're servicing the rest of the world, you know, then all of a sudden Target's calling you and American Airlines calling and this person's calling like, hey, why is AWS down? You got a lot more pressure on you. That's got to be even better infrastructure. So it'll make a stronger infrastructure. I see Cerebras is IPOing. You know, that is a great company. I did an interview with the CEO on the All In Interview Show when I was at Davos when I was at the World Economic Forum. And man, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money on this one.

So much money. So the company is looking at $115 to $125 per share when it goes out on a non-diluted basis. Jason, about $27 billion. If you take in every single warrant and RSU and option, it's about $36 billion. We don't have Q1 data yet in the newest SEC filing, so we're still waiting for that. I'll just say that if you are someone who has money in benchmark funds, congratulations, you're about to make a lot of money. Indeed, I think Crunchbase has dozens of different investors that have bet on Cerebras. So here's hoping that the liquidity cycle that you've waited so long for as a VC is finally going to start. I know it's one IPO, but we could be optimistic, right?

I mean, it's one of many, and M&A is back on the menu.

I think it's— no IPOs this year though, Jason. Like, I mean, I know we're going to get OpenAI and Anthropic in December, but like, it's been pretty light. It's pretty light.

I think that's because we had a flurry last year, right? And, uh, it'll just keep happening. Um, and M&A is happening again. I think the interesting one is the Spirit Airlines, um, which JetBlue wanted to buy Spirit Airlines. Elizabeth Warren, you know, Lena Khan, all these folks, they blocked it. Why did they block it? Oh, well, because it's going to be less choice and we want You know, we want there to be more options for people flying from Boise, Idaho to Fort Lauderdale, etc. And of course, Spirit Airlines goes under. Now, you are a politician, you're a government bureaucrat, and you think you understand the free markets better than the free markets operate. You're wrong. The best thing that could have happened would be for a mismanaged company like Spirit which was underwater, which didn't have good management, which didn't have a great or didn't have a sustainable product to go to a company like JetBlue, or for JetBlue, which bought Virgin, which was another company that was not sustainable. It's totally fine for there to be consolidation. When you have consolidation, what happens is, um, you will wind up opening up opportunities for other people to come into the market. Where you want to look for places to intervene is in the allocation of gates at airports, which are limited and therefore a hot commodity, essentially. Right now, what they should do is, if they really want to, uh, intervene, they should say, hey, tell us about how you're going to give out the next 20 gates at Atlanta. At Phoenix, at Austin, at Dallas, Fort Worth. Show us the plan, and we want to make sure that that auction is done properly and that it's open to everybody. And then the second thing is stop bailing these companies out. Every time these companies have a problem, they get bailed out. If they get bailed out, then it leads to managers who are incompetent. The airline companies have managers who expect a bailout. At this point. They expect a bailout.

I agree with that. It's ridiculous. But I— every— everyone's a capitalist when someone else is getting a bailout, and no one is a capitalist when they need one. So I feel like maybe what we should say more generally is we will take away some of the caps on M&A, but in return, there's no safety net. Go play with fire.

But also, if you never should have been a safety net, where did the safety net come from? And now what happens is all these people lose their jobs. And this is why blocking M&A by default and not thinking it through, um, it screws with market dynamics. The market dynamic is the company should either go out of business and get bought out of bankruptcy, or right before that happens and they're out of money and they're on death's door, somebody should be able to swoop in and buy it for pennies on the dollar, get a great deal, and do a turnaround. Virgin America was a fantastic airline It was bought by JetBlue.

Mm-hmm.

Great. And now here we are. But if you're finding people doing price gouging or, uh, product dumping, which in this case would be dumping low-price flights in order to kill a competitor, okay, those are things the FTC, uh, and, uh, the FCC, you know, they have all kinds of jurisdiction in there to give speeding tickets, to take actions against behaviors. M&A is not the behavior to worry about unless you had one person with majority market share, which is 80%, 90%. That's not the case here. And now here we go. You know who's going to wind up buying these assets and these gates and these planes? It's just going to be United, American, you know, Southwest. They're just going to wind up buying the planes. They're going to wind up buying the gates. They're going to wind up doing it anyway. And you're just going to have that get consolidated to the top. You have to look for ways, if you want to get into regulation, to allow more entrance, not, you know, uh, stop more entrance. And with these stupid bailouts—

well, we should also like just build a lot more gates. Like, I think it's ridiculous that companies are so precious about gates. There's, there's a story recently about one particular European airline flying thousands of flights empty because they wanted to hold on to their gates. Well, that's a ridiculous setup. Why do we have it work like that? I mean, there has to be a better way to handle airports to allow for more flexibility, well, and to unlock more efficiency and deregulate the small airports where private jets come in and out of.

And an innovative disruptive company like JetSuite figures out how to do charters there where you can buy seats. Yeah, why don't we let more JetSuites occur? Well, the big airlines are trying to block those companies at every step. Let me tell you something, you take JetSuite X for, you know, 1.5 times the price of Southwest or United, you're never going back. JetSuite X is the model. Uh, Surf Air was the model. Providing more small planes that can service smaller hubs and take the pressure off the big airports is the model. You used to be able to land at very small airports with these Pilatus PC-12s, PC-24s. The JetSuite planes That's where innovation can happen. Let more of that and then let more VTOLs, and that would take the pressure off of the big airports, and then it would increase safety as well because the smaller airports could have infrastructure put into them. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Uh, let's go off duty.

All right, Jason, we have one off duty today. You teased it at the top of the show. I have the video pulled up here, but before I play even a little bit of it Tell me more about the Maul Show. Okay. To someone who is not currently in the Star Wars world.

Okay, very straightforward. You remember from The Clone Wars and The Phantom Menace, Darth Sidious had a Sith apprentice, right? There's always two. It's the Rule of Two. You have Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker, or you have Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan, then Obi-Wan and Anakin, who becomes Darth Vader. Spoiler alert. There's always this rule of two, a master and an apprentice.

Sure.

The original apprentice of Darth Sidious, the Emperor, uh, Palpatine, was Darth Maul. Darth Maul was trained and tortured from a young being, and they explain all of this through flashbacks in this incredibly incredible artwork series. You can play it in the background here, the, the clip, uh, it's 10 episodes, it just ended. They did a very unique, uh, animation style where they did, um, like oil paints on top of the cells in order to make this very beautiful— it looks like a painting. Now this is a low-res here, but when you're looking at Darth Maul's face or these Jedi fighting Darth Vader or the background, it looks more like a painting than an oil painting than it does animation. Yeah, absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Darth Vader at the peak powers after Revenge of the Sith, before Star Wars. That's where it takes place in the canon. Episodes 1, 2, and 3 are the prequels. 4, 5, and 6 are the originals. A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi. This is between those two. Darth Maul is out there as basically trying to stop the Empire. The remaining Jedi who are in hiding are also trying to stop the Jedi, so they are strange bedfellows. Darth Maul and his group of, um, rebels are kind of in this movie teaming up lightly with the Jedi who are in hiding. This was a perfect balance between, you know, being kid fare, family fare, and adult fare, and servicing the Gen Xers and servicing my 10-year-olds. Absolutely perfect and gorgeous. But it also takes on a new nuance. There's like the, the dark side and the light side, and then there's this chaotic side in the middle that just wants revenge because Darth Maul was essentially exploited by— exploited and then kicked out of the dark side. And then the Jedi are also kicked out and they're villainized as they were double-crossing the Republic, and they've been purged, and the public believes the Jedi were the enemy. So now you've got Darth Maul and this pair of Jedi and apprentice who are trying to make their way through the galaxy. A+, right up there, right behind, uh, something like Andor. It just adds a lot to the canon. And, you know, I'm not an animation guy by default, but these Star Wars stories are really great. And I'll just add to this, there's a Star Wars Tales Untold— I'll have the team pull it up right now. One of the things that's happening is because of the models, there, there's a an AI model from Japan— I'm sorry, from China.

Okay.

That makes videos. I forgot the name of it. Somebody will tell me in a minute.

SeeDance.

SeeDance, correct. And SeeDance, you can't get access to in the United States unless you're using Higgsfield and you pay for it. Uh, SeeDance follows no IP. So if you want to make Jedi and you want to make stories, these, these Star Wars tales, uh, untold tales or whatever it is, Just looking at this and watching Darth Vader choke out somebody, you know, if you were just going by on a TV set with your remote control, or you saw Anakin Skywalker here, Darth Vader, you know, with his body deformed and trying to recover from his burns, you'd be like, wow, this looks real. All of the stories, and there's, you know, people, uh, in the Empire, um, it starts to cross the uncanny valley. And I think we've basically filled in— if there's an uncanny valley here, you can look it up— I think we've filled in 80%, 90% of the uncanny valley. You know, even myself as a real Star Wars aficionado my whole life, I'm starting to watch these and, you know, I can tell it's AI, but I can also tell that I like it. And this would be better than anything. This would be better than anything as, you know, a child of the '80s I would get.

Oh, for sure.

You know, and so as an '80s, '90s, you know, young adult and child, this stuff is looking incredible. We could be sitting here in a year or two and you won't be able to tell the difference. You could also feed in that Darth Maul into— I'm sure you could take Darth Maul, feed it into Sea Dance, feed in the 10 episodes and say, make me this style. And I just want to make each episode instead of 20 minutes, 24 minutes, whatever it is. They're very short episodes for kids. Make them, you know, 40 minutes and add a little more story to them, I think you could actually start to make things that were great. I think that's what people are gonna start doing with shows like The Sopranos, shows like The Wire, shows that people miss, right? So if you miss Breaking Bad—

Yes, shows people want more of, that they feel like their characters are their friends that are gone. Yeah, no, I think that's dead on.

I think you can do a lot of it. You could take an entire season of The Sopranos and just say, make it twice as long, tell, you know, 3 more stories, you know, have 3 more threads into The Sopranos for this season.

There's so much in the, the canons for these major shows like Warhammer 40K and Star Wars in the written word. Like, there's so many novels that are part of those universes. But it's cool to see for people who also like to be more visual that they can have the same experience. I think it's great.

This is what people are actually doing. It's interesting you bring that up. A lot of these Star Wars Tales of the Untold that we're showing here, um, they came from the comic books and from the novels. So people are going to the comic books and the novels and just saying, here's the source material. And I guess they put that source material in, they say, just animate these stills. So you could take any comic book. So if you loved Teen Titans and you wanted to make a frame by frame, you could just take the Teen Titans. I wonder why nobody's done this. If somebody wants to do this, um, and come on the show and just show how they built it, I'd love to have somebody come on. I'm not going to give you a bounty because I don't want to get in trouble with IP. I was going to say But I would love to get a how-to series. Just take, um, here's a, here's a deep pull: Dazzler. Dazzler is this crazy comic book character that came out in the '80s, one of the X-Men mutants. If somebody does this, um, because everybody was fascinated by Dazzler in the '80s, kind of a cult character that appears for like 5 seconds in one of the X-Men movies, you can pull up the COVID of the first Dazzler. She can turn sound into light. So she's— there she is, that's Dazzler. But just pull up the COVID of the Dazzler cartoon. So anyway, she's on roller skates. It was like a very of-the-'70s moment where they made a character based on like the vibes. And if you pull up the covers, yeah, Dazzler episode, you'll get a real flavor for it. So somebody take the first episode of Dazzler, feed it into SeeDance, and come on the program and show us how you did it and make it into a couple of minutes of dazzle. So there she is. I think that's episode 1, and she's there with Scarlet Witch, Beast, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. Gambit was also very popular. I think Gambit would be cooler. And just use Sea Dance and then show it to us and how you built it. All right, everybody, we have a bounty for annotated.com. I bought the domain name annotated.com. I wanted to do a clipping service for like Delicious back in the day. Shout out Josh. Um, and I want somebody to build it. You can win $5,000 if you build it. I get to own the— I own the IP. You write the code. I give you $5,000. We're going to do this over a month. I think we have a couple of dates on the website. Just go to annotated.com and we'll put you to this, uh, lovable website we made. It's basically a sidebar Chrome extension. We made some images of it, but You, you pick how you want to build it. Alex, imagine you're a fact-checker, uh, or you feel like you want to fact-check a TechCrunch story, right? Or you want to add your feelings to it. You go to the TechCrunch story where you were editor-at-large or editor-in-chief, whatever you were, managing editor. Somebody highlights it, highlights a section, and then writes a commentary on it, and then it makes a landing page from that. Would that be fair use in your mind?

I think it's absolutely fair use. It also drives attention back to the original article. But I think the point that it creates a landing page is what I like, because what I don't want is to see if I'm just going to a website to see all the, the people's scribblings. But I would love to have a way to say, show me the top 5 citations or notes from other people, a bit like in a Medium story in a sense.

Correct. So now you got it. The, uh, the, the address is the URL. So once you have that URL from that, uh, TechCrunch story about I don't know, the launch of Uber, and it's an old story and people want to put comments on it. So let's say I take it, I'm like, I highlight a paragraph about the Open Angel Forum where they raised money, and I say, here's some commentary about that and here's a picture from it. Then you, Travis, highlights a part of it, different part, and he says, oh yeah, and that this was actually— here's the backstory to that. So two different paragraphs, but as you're pointing out, you could say this URL has 7 annotations, and then you put the 7 together in a very long page. You click on any one of them, it opens that page. All of them link back. Nobody can take the whole thing, so there's no stealing. It's just— and it's fair use because it's commentary on the original piece. And I want to be able to do it for an audio, so you can take a clip from this podcast. We'll limit the clips to like maybe 90 seconds or 60 seconds, and we're going to downgrade them to like postage-size video. So and link directly back. If you click on that video, you click on that story, you go right back and it says, this is from this story, this is from this video.

Yep.

It just has so many uses. And so the only thing we're gonna do as part of this is we own, or, uh, we own a license to all the comments, just like Reddit owns, you know, a license to all of the comments pasted on its website. And then that's the business model eventually is all that commentary can power a large language model.

One other thing you could do with this idea, Jason, is let people who are the original, like, people behind the article, behind the story, behind the poem, whatever it is, comment. So here's an example that I really love.

Yes.

This is Eminem's song Criminal over on Genius, which gets lyrics and puts them online.

Yes.

And he says, and you can't stop me from dropping each March because his plan at the time was to release an album every year. But then, as he says here, I became a drug addict. But if without that context, I would've thought, well, like dropping every March like a syllabus or like, I wouldn't know. Yeah. But you can just hear directly from the people and I think it's very powerful and also very, uh, democratic.

Interestingly, when the Genius guys came, uh, to one of my conferences and, uh, I had them on the podcast back in the day, I talked to them offline. I was like, hey, you know, I own annotated.com. Do you guys wanna do a DLO? And they're like, no, we like Genius branding better. So I was gonna sell them the domain. I had bought, I, I think I bought the domain for 30K. 20 years ago, and I offered it to them, and I was like, hey guys, uh, give me, you know, uh, $500K in equity and I'll give up the domain.

Okay, last thing for me, and then I know we gotta go, but like, do you remember the Genius guys? They were nuts. They were bonkers.

One of them was nuts. They all had like a shtick. They wore like deep sunglasses. Somebody pulled up the, uh, clip of this Genius.com co-founders. One of them who passed away from, I believe, a brain tumor I was told, or he actually confessed, that he was suffering from mental illness and that was explaining his— yeah, magabad, I think, magabad if I'm pronouncing it correctly. But yeah, there they are, look at that, with me. Look at the Observer. There's me and then a picture of the guy. I don't know what that Observer story is, but I know I got into him. Look, there's a young J. Cal at the DLD conference. If you click on the story that that's from, Uber investor Rapchis Korvin have the greatest Twitter rivalry.

Um, you had beef with the Genius Boys? I didn't know that.

Uh, Mogadabim, um, was saying crazy stuff to me and I was like, hey dude, are you mentally ill? I mean, this is my younger years. This is in 2015. What did I say? Let's scroll down here.

Um, uh, now, now we're just aping in the new MTS.

I don't even remember this one. Uh, check your privilege. Oh yeah, look at this. Well, no, scroll down a little bit. I don't have that tweet anymore. I got rid of all my old tweets back in the day, but he was coming at me something hard. Uh, no one physically threatened anyone. Whatever, you're still the biggest douche alive. I mean, he was crazy, um, and he would start fights with everybody.

I, I wasn't trying to say that people should be a little bit unstable. I was trying to say that like they were fun, like Snapchat-era spectacles. Vending machines, fun. Do you remember Meerkat, which was that like go live immediately thing from your phone?

Yes, Meerkat. Yes.

Fun. We need to have more fun. Everything's so fricking serious. I think SaaS literally just drained the joy out of technology.

Yes, I agree.

And if we are going to be in the era of SeeDance and generative AI, we should be having a blast. So someone make me happy.

Now, wait, you didn't put anything on Off Duty. Alex, the idea of Off Duty is you bring something. Is there something? Amazing, like a gadget, a piece of food, a trend, a dress that you love. What, what are you into?

I am currently obsessed, uh, really hook, line, sinker, got me by the collar with a game called Captain of Industry. Now if you are a person who plays video games, you've heard of factory automation games. The, the, the OG here, the Dream Theater of this genre if you will, is Factorio, which I have over 1,000 hours then. Um, and I'd done my 100x and 1,000x science run. So don't, don't come at me with Factorio knowledge. Captain of Industry is different, Jason. It's a little bit less scientific, a little bit more you're on an island, turn it into an enormous factory. And I have just a little clip here I thought I'd share, but I will say, if you really want to get worse at your job and ruin your sleep, go ahead and start playing Captain of Industry because this game will eat you.

It has— this is a Windows game that I'm playing here.

Probably plays on anything.

I just pulled up this video. What is this I'm looking at? Is this like a technology tree or something? That is a technology tree.

Yeah. Um, it is, it is shockingly complex because you can change the entire terrain. You have to deal with dumping, so you build piers and there's shipping and there's a global economy and trains and trucks.

And is it multiplayer too, or no?

I don't have any friends, so I don't know, but, uh, you can find that out. Um, but this has kept me sane during the very small child, uh, hours, if that makes sense, Jason. So huge shout out to the guys behind, uh, Captain of Industry. I love your game. You're the best.

Is this like a big title game or an indie?

Pretty, pretty darn indie. I think it's like $20 or $30. Um, there's still— it's still in early access. It's made by a small team and it's just—

why don't we have them on the pod? Have them on the pod.

I will, I will bring them on the pod.

It is not multiplayer. Yeah, I would love to have like, um, you know, some of those small game folks and understand how that startup part of the startup ecosystem works.

Um, okay, I have a couple of ideas for companies we can bring on. We'll get that done.

No, this one specifically, the one you're playing. Oh no, we're gonna have them on first, but I have them on first.

Indie studios.

Yeah, indie studios. I like the idea of just understanding how that works because you now you have all these people who are willing to pay in advance for the game and Patreon, and I don't know how they do it, but I think they do raise funding early and they have enough support because the gaming community is used to paying a little bit.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Anyways, uh, we're back on Wednesday, noon Texas time, 1 PM Eastern. We'll see y'all then.

Go Knicks!