China Blocks Manus Sale, Rick Caruso in the Ultradome, Zak Brown from McLaren Joins | Will Hurd, Anush Elangovan, Augustus Doricko

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Today is Monday, April 27th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.

The fortress of finance.

The capital of capital. Earlier show starting with guests. We have Zak Brown from McLaren Racing joining in just a few minutes.

Calling in from Europe.

We have Will Heard coming in person. Anuj from AMD is calling in at noon. Then Augustus is coming to the UltraDome at 12:20. And Rick Caruso will be in person with us as well at 1 PM. We'll take you through some quick headlines of what's going on in the news today. Of course, the Elon Musk OpenAI—

Let's take a moment for the production team.

Yes, we have a new—

Background update.

We have a new screen in the background. Much better contrast, much brighter. We're excited to explore this. The production team's stoked. Good work, guys. There's 4 key stories going on in the news today. The first is Elon Musk's $134 billion lawsuit against Sam Altman goes to court today in Oakland. Musk is alleging that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission and became a for-profit entity focused on maximizing profit for Microsoft. Jury selection is going on today. There are a number of reporters on the ground and we'll be checking in on the progress there.

Yeah, already there was some reporting that said certain people were saying it would be difficult for me to be unbiased here because of my general dislike for basically everything going on.

Okay. Yeah. The Sam and Greg were spotted on scene. Elon has not been spotted yet. There's also other Microsoft OpenAI news. They changed their partnership. OpenAI can now serve all of its products to customers across any cloud provider. Andy Jassy had some post about it saying it was a very interesting update. Obviously he's excited to vend OpenAI technology through AWS, which they also have a partnership. And so in other words, OpenAI can potentially use Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, other chips are on the table now. There's a lot more flexibility that comes from that. Over in Meta world, China has blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Manus after regulators reviewed whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules. This was something that went back and forth. Did they get enough of the company to Singapore in order to clear the hurdles that require the acquisition to go through? Then some members of the Mannes team were detained briefly in China on business. There were some issues there.

And one of the challenges is gonna be, clearly the Mannes team wanted to do this deal. They wouldn't have signed up for it. It was a great outcome for the team. They were excited to build with Meta. But one of the challenges is you have all these different team members, many of which were born and raised in China, and they still have family members and people back in China that they care a lot about. So that's going to be— I would assume that's going to be a leverage point. Yeah. From the CCP.

And the last story also from Meta is that they are planning to use solar power from space at night, beamed from space. They're partnering with Overview Energy, a different company than the other solar space.

The other— talked about space.

They've been in stealth for about 4 years. They're planning to beam up to 1 gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power production. They're also deploying 1 gigawatt of ultra-long-duration storage batteries with Noon Energy. So some exciting deals coming out of Menlo Park. Well, we will be revisiting these stories over the course of the show, but we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. Zak Brown from McLaren Racing is here with us in the TV Penultimate. Zak, good to meet you. How are you doing?

What's going on?

Yeah, I'm very good. Yourself?

We're fantastic. Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. I know it's later where you are, but we appreciate you taking the time. I would love to start—

Been looking forward to this.

Should we start at the beginning? Should we go through sort of the journey to how we got here?

Okay, so the backstory is that people in tech say they love F1, but they've really just watched maybe one, maybe two seasons of Drive to Survive. So they know you in that, assume the audience knows you in that context, but we wanted to have you on to, actually understand your history more and then talk about how F1—

The business.

The business of F1. And then also how technology is shaping it today. 'Cause obviously it's always been engineering-led, but there's some, a lot of exciting advancements. So yeah, should we start at the beginning?

Yeah, I'd love to know.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to know, like you started in karting, what was the first initial spark that got you into racing so many years ago?

Uh, 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix. I'm originally from LA, so I was 10 years old at the time, and, uh, my mom and dad, who didn't have any involvement in, in motor racing, uh, it was kind of like the circus is in town. And, uh, they took, uh, myself and my brother, and as a 10-year-old kid, when you get around a Formula One car and you hear it and you see it, uh, the size and the scale and the speed I became a, uh, a Hot Wheels kid and then, um, went to high school, uh, barely, uh, with, uh, uh, someone that was, was in racing. And so we went back to the Long Beach Grand Prix in 1987. Uh, at that point I really had the bug and met Mario Andretti, one of my, uh, heroes, and asked him, how do you get started in racing? And he said karting. And there happened to be a little ad in the race program for Jim Hall Kart Racing School. I'd been on Wheel of Fortune Teen Week at 13 years old, went and Sold a bunch of his and her watches at a pawn shop in Van Nuys, bought my first go-kart, and that's how it all got started.

That's amazing.

Amazing. Can you take me through getting— like, your first interaction with the business side of racing, just motorsports marketing? Like, what was the inciting element that got you into the business side of racing?

Well, I didn't have any family resources, or certainly not the family resources needed to go racing. My mom was, is a travel agent. And so I just kind of school the hard knocks of how's the sponsorship work? How do you raise money? You just call companies and ask them for logos on race cars. And it's much more sophisticated, certainly much more sophisticated than that today. And she got me an intro to TWA Airlines at the time and did a barter deal where they gave me some airline tickets, and then I would go to companies and say, sponsor me. And I'll give you some matching value in airline tickets. And then just totally immersed in, in kind of bartering and understanding what was TWA trying to do with their business and, and just became obsessed with my career and knowing that the only way I was going to advance my career was through getting sponsorship. So therefore, I became obsessed with understanding how companies, how I could help companies. And then once I was done with my career, recognized I wasn't as famous as a lot of the racing drivers out there, so went back to a lot of the contacts and said, forget about Zac Brown, what if I could take you to NASCAR, Formula One, IndyCar, Jeff Gordon, McLaren, etc.? And I had a lot of credibility as a racer that I understood how the sport worked. No one was advising corporations on how to get the most out of motorsports. It was more people representing racing teams, and that, uh, turned into a big business kind of by accident. It wasn't by design.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, when they think of like a partnership, they just think logo on the car, but it's a lot more than that. Like, when did you— how did you— how were you positioning partnerships to actually like to move the needle for a brand like TWA or someone else that you worked with? Like, what was the key success or like the key innovation that led for— led to maybe more confidence to deploy not just free airline tickets, but real dollars behind partnerships with motorsport?

I think it was trying to get corporations to not think about our business, i.e., motorsports, but to think about and inform us, what are you trying to do with your business? And then, you know, I helped bridge the gap between this is what you're trying to do with your business, you know, TWA or or now the world's leading companies. And then I understood how motorsports works. So I kind of played middleman, if you'd like, not just in brokering the deal, but helping race teams understand what corporations needed and helping corporations understand how motorsports worked and help them leverage it. So it was really, tell me what your business needs are. What are you trying to do? Build brands? Get new customers, retain customers, upsell customers, demonstrate technology. And every company has similarities and then every company is different. And then approach the industry based on what I knew corporations wanted. Hey, I think you make sense in NASCAR. I think you make sense in Formula One. I think you make sense with this team for those reasons and really be focused on what the corporation needs and still very much take that principle you know, very much today is, you know, what are the Googles and the Ciscos and the Dells? And we've got an unbelievable group of partners and just trying to understand their business and how we can help them move the needle.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about scaling the marketing firm? Like how small was it at the beginning? How did you think about hiring? How do you think about actually, just servicing a larger swath of the market? Did you go region by region or league by league or category by category? Like what was the philosophy around careful growth and scaling of that business?

Yeah, we've been fortunate where if you look at the brands on our car, they're like-minded brands, they're global. You know, we're great in the technology space. You know, I'm sitting in here at McLaren Technology Center.

Yeah.

You know, so, you know, Our brand is known as a premium brand, a lifestyle brand, a technology brand. We're racing around the world. So we approach companies that we feel are like-minded. We approach companies that we're already doing business in. So, you know, you take a Cisco— Cisco all throughout McLaren long before we put our partnership in place. Dell. You'll see Dell all throughout McLaren long before there was a commercial arrangement. So we're in a very fortunate position that we can do business with companies that want to do business with us and that we think we can make a difference. We don't need— we're not in a position where we need to just do business for the sake of doing business. So that's a great place to be. MasterCard being our new naming partner, which we announced last year. So we're quite Proud of our partnership ecosystem. I've very much taken the same approach back when I had an agency. So we have the largest, to my knowledge, marketing department. But size isn't all that matters. It's, it's quality. So I'd like to think we, we have the largest staff. I think we have the best staff and we're very much same principle of being focused on our partners' needs. We have partners of all shapes and sizes. We're much more concerned with the affiliation than the size and scale because that kind of takes care of itself over time. And we very much play the long game. And, and that's what our track record shows. If you look at our partner base since we kind of got started in what we're calling the Papaya era, our retention and growth speaks for itself. And that's because we're focused on what our partners need.

Yeah. How, as a leader, how do you deal with just managing the emotional roller coaster that is an F1 season or a series of seasons together? It feels like one of the most tumultuous organizations. Like there's so many organizations where they're managing to like quarterly earnings or even just how did we do this year? And you have a very different results that come in on a very much, much faster basis. And I imagine that a big win or a setback can echo through the productivity of the organization, even for people that aren't, you know, in the seat directly.

Yeah, it's all about culture. I think that's our greatest strength is our people. We've been working together a long time. We've added people. We haven't changed much, you know, since we've had our success here the last couple of years. You know, I'm looking at CEO 5 years out. I'm obsessed with our people. That's my number one job, is to have the right people in the right roles, giving them the right feedback, the right resources. My philosophy is I work for the race team. They don't work for me. So I go around every day, what do you need? How can I help? So I'm here to serve the racing team, not the other way around. It is. Difficult at times. You know, culture is tested when things aren't going well. You know, a lot of what happens, you see at the same time as, as I see it. So our report card gets marked. You know, sometimes when you have quarterly shareholder meetings, you have time to plan for the results. Here, you know, I go from having 3 or 4 strategists on pit wall to about 3 million on social media instantaneously.

Yeah.

A lot of which are, you know, are not very well informed because it's a very complicated sport. But, you know, sport is all about emotion for the fans, and that's great— cheering, booing, favorite drivers, you know, good guys, the villains. But back at the factory, in the racing team, there's no place for emotion. We're passion-led. There's a fine line between passion and emotion, and I think our job is to stay Cool, calm, and collected. Usually when we've made a mistake, it's not an individual person's failure. It's a sequence of events. So, you know, when you're emotional, you have a bad pit stop, the right rear doesn't go on well, everyone wants to, you know, your instinct, the emotional response is that right rear driver might not have stopped. Could have been a mechanical failure with the gun. Maybe a light didn't work. Maybe it was the person's fault. There's 3 people. One's taking the tire off, one's putting the tire on, on, the other's using the gun. Could be like— so you got to be very careful because, you know, it's kind of like those emails that we've all written, and over time you go, you know what, I should have put that in my draft folder and saved it and checked it in the morning. And I'm a big fan of when something happens, unless you need to correct it real time, say it's a bad pit stop, it's over. So review it Monday when the, you know, the passion, the emotion, the, you know, you can't fix it at that moment. It's done. So I'm a big fan of tackle it in the moment if you can change it in the moment. But if it's, you know, something that's happened, do a proper debrief on Monday because, you know, it's hard to take. You can say sorry, but if you overreact or you say something, it's hard to unwind an allegation, an accusation that was, you know, sorry, I was just emotional. Well, you still said it. So I think that's also part of just being calm in the heat of the moment.

Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, F1 is a sport that, or just a business where you have, you know, a chattering class. You have so many armchair critics. I wanna know about your thought process going into the first season of Drive to Survive. It felt like a risk. You're potentially shining more of a light on your operation. You're gonna get more armchair critics and yet, that choosing to actually participate in the very first season feels in retrospect like a fantastic decision for you and the organization. But how were you processing it at the time as you reflect on that decision and what has happened to the team and the— and F1 broadly on the back of Drive to Survive? How do you think about that initial season?

So I think our— you know, our initial thought was this was just going to be more shoulder programming. There's been shows done before, so I don't think any of us anticipated it having the impact on the sport that it had. Two teams didn't actually participate in year one, and they got all sorts of grief from, from their partners, their fans. Um, you know, I've always been— I'm a huge fan of racing, and I think about that 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix And I think about the impact it had on me. I think about the first racing driver I met, the first autograph I met. And so I thought, here's a wonderful opportunity to go from being a very exclusive sport to a very inclusive sport. So we were all in. And the impact it's had— when Liberty acquired, there were three main areas the sport needed to grow. Needed a younger audience, more diverse women, and it needed a younger audience. I'm sorry I mentioned that. And a U.S. And you've got to give Drive to Survive and Liberty a tremendous amount of credit and to the industry for acting differently, because I think under previous leadership, the sport was very closed book. It was kind of what's behind the curtain. And that works because that was intrigue. But, you know, we kind of opened the curtain and let you saw what the Wizard of Oz was all about. And I think You know, especially—

I think we have some technical—

sport.

Sorry, I think we just—

can you hear me okay?

Yeah, we're good.

Yeah, that's— that, that sport and entertainment aren't one and the same. Anything you buy a ticket to, whether it's a movie, sporting event, a fireworks show, that's called entertainment. I'm buying a ticket to go sit down to watch something. So I think the sport's always been fantastic But it's been a closed shop. And I think Netflix gave us the opportunity to show everyone. We only have 20 drivers, now 22. You only have 10 teams. So I became— it became very easy for the audience to get to know everyone. And it's an unbelievable sport, probably a sport that has more excitement off the track than any other sport. Right. Most sports are concentrated on the field of play, and our field of play is as much off the track track as it is on the track. So it's, it's been awesome. It's continued to grow and it's changed our sport. And it's, it's great to see how big our sport now is with a younger audience, women, North America. And we just need to keep doing the same. I don't see any headwinds in our sport other than, you know, the crazy stuff that's going on around in, in the world at the moment.

Yeah, thanks, Jordy.

Can you give us a history lesson on the major technology cycles in F1? In tech, we talk about web, mobile, cloud, AI. What are the equivalents in F1? And then bring us up to the present.

I mean, it's everything you just mentioned. We're the most technology-sophisticated sport in the world. I think it started with data and then, you know, applying that data. You know, we have— and some, some people will be impressed by this, others will go, That's nothing because I know who the audience is, you know, watching your show. But we're pulling down 1.5 terabytes of data a weekend. We run 50 million simulations. We have 300 sensors on the race car. We change about 80% of our race cars, over 50,000 parts. The amount of simulation that we run, if you take the car, at the beginning of the year and you let— that was on pole first and it was untouched by the end of the year, it would be last. So the pace of development in our sport, we live in a prototype world. As soon as that suspension is done, we're right back to the drawing board of how do we make it lighter? How do we make it stronger? How do we make it more aerodynamic? So we are constantly developing. We don't kind of do something and go, right, we're done. Let's go produce that for the next 5 years. So we live in a prototype world. Of course, AI is here in a big way. We're fortunate to have Gemini as a huge partner of ours. We learn a lot. You know, our technology partners are all integrated into our business. We have two different types of partners. We have consumer brands. There we go. I see your Coke. You got to turn it a little bit if you want to kind of get some pressure.

I'm impressed. There you go.

School.

That's how you do it.

So we have— they're not our sponsors. And what we do with our consumer brands is we want them to help us engage with our fans, grow our fan base, build our fan base. So that's what we look for from the Monsters, the MasterCards, the Googles. Then on the technology side, we look at the Googles, the Dells, the Ciscos, the Workdays to help us be a more efficient business, run HR better, run finance better, produce our race car quicker, do our financial forecasting better. So that's where partnerships have evolved to, is in the good old days it was, I need your money to go racing. Of course, this is an expensive sport. We need their investment, but we also need their technology because that's how our data is getting moved around. That's our communications are, are happening. That's how we're using AI to figure out strategy and tire strategy. And so all this new technology, we embrace it and we have the type of people at McLaren and Formula 1 in general that wanna know what technology's coming tomorrow.

Mm-hmm. How do you guys sort of develop and maintain your own sort of IP and processes as a team? One of the things that having gone to, been to a number of races, I've always found it fascinating that I could just walk into one of the garages and I see, you know, computer monitors. I'm looking around. I can, you know, so much of it is out, is out in the open. And yet you guys are trying to maintain an edge and develop constantly, kind of developing and refining your approach. How do those two things balance?

So healthy degree of paranoia, a high amount of trust with our, our team members. You know, IP is, is, is critical. Obviously, security in and of itself, because you've got a lot of bad actors around this world. So, you know, protecting— because there's two things. There's people that just want to disrupt. You know, we had an incident, 25 years ago where someone broke into our radio comms in the Australian Grand Prix. We were running first and second, and this was just someone in the grandstand broke into our radio comms, told our driver Mika Häkkinen to pit, and he did. Fortunately, we were running first and second, so we were able to reverse them. But it's right. So you have everything from bad actors in this world who would love to, you know, we can't start our race cars, not keys. You start it on a laptop. So, you know, the redundancy and the protection, cybersecurity, security, how quickly we're moving data around the world because we're very much like NASA, whether we're racing in Australia, Austin, or China. It's all coming back to Woking here, you know, not far from my office. And so protecting that with with people from, from bad actors. And then, of course, you know, we're in a very competitive sport where we're constantly analyzing the competition. Things like 3D scanners were coming into play. We do a lot of photography of each other. 3D scanners have now been banned, but that's certainly trying to understand what the competition is doing.

Just to be clear, that's, that's a team walking around and effectively scanning another car. Another team's car, vehicle, or some other equipment.

Correct. Correct. 3D scanning is now banned, but it wasn't before.

Yeah.

You'll see everything.

Do you think it still happens though? I mean, there's a lot of things that—

No, I mean, no.

You would see somebody with a scanner, right?

Yeah, you would see it. I think, you know, our job in Formula 1 is to find the loopholes, push the boundaries, but there's a difference between working the gray areas. So I'll give you an example. You're not allowed to have, uh, movable aerodynamic devices. I mean, we do now with DRS, but we weren't in the past. So these very clever engineers found materials that flex under load. Yeah, it's not a movable aerodynamic device, but it does flex. Ah, very clever. Then the FIA, our governing body, went, OK, we're going to do a pushdown test on your rear wing, put load on it. And you can only have so much flex. So then the teams went, ah, so there's a pushdown test. Now let's come up with aerodynamic where it falls back. Now there's a pull test. So the engineers are always one step ahead. And then the governing body, who do a very good job, go, mm, I don't think so. And that's the cool part of this sport, right, where when you have technology that is constantly evolving. You're always trying to figure out what's the new technology. AI is an interesting one because we have limitations on how much CFD and wind tunnel time we can use, but we don't have regulations around AI yet.

So I think, yeah, we had George, we had George Kurtz on the show on Friday and he was, he was saying, uh, he was saying that they're, they're eventually could be restrictions on like how much, how much compute you can have as a team because of what I think you're getting at right now.

Yeah, exactly right. And I think that's where the sport— it's never going to stop because technology is never going to stop. So it's about how do you get that competitive advantage? So you get to, you know, what the sport called is flexi wings. Eventually they stopped that. But because we're looking for the smallest incremental gain for as long as possible. You go until they tell you to stop, and then you go find something else until they tell you to stop. So it's a constant. As technology evolves, I think there will be regulations around AI that don't exist today that will exist in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and then there'll be another technology. And that's the beautiful thing about our sport and technology, is the ball always moving up the field. And it's about finding that competitive advantage and trying to capture it for as long as possible.

What are the norms around poaching? There's— in Silicon Valley, there's a famous email exchange between Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Or is it Adobe?

No, I think it was with Google.

Oh, Google. Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Mixing it up. But anyways, basically, like, people having a kind of a handshake agreement not to poach. but obviously drivers are kind of open season. But what about like the rest of the people on, on the team?

Yeah, it's interesting. So where a lot of sports are regulated, you know, there's trade windows and we know the— what was it? I think the Dolphins had a bit of a no-no. If I got the team wrong, I'm sorry. You know, what was it? Talking to a quarterback and they're not allowed. We don't have any of those. We have contracts, but If I want to go talk to a driver or someone wants to talk to my drivers, we have contracts, but there's no— nothing stopping them from having conversations or taking them to dinner. America tends to be a bit more of an at-will state, a country from an employment point of view, where here on the more senior side you get into 2, 3, 4-year contracts. We've got gardening leave, we have non-competes. The more senior, the more the tougher those are. But you do sign people early and play the game of— because we live in a cost cap world, we are signing people early. And then the competitive team has to go, hmm, how long do I want this person around that I know is going to competitor? When do I shut them off from IP knowledge? Then if you put them on gardening leave, you got to pay them. We're living in a cost-cap world, so that presents a challenge of I want to spend every penny on performance of my race car, whether that is on performance of my people or technology or the race car. So now I'm in a predicament of I'm now paying to park someone so they don't go to my competitor, so I'm stopping my competitor from getting smarter faster, but I'm actually really not getting great value for money, because I'm paying someone to not work. So those are the tricks of the trade. So the senior people are under contracts, and what's happening is people are getting signed earlier and earlier. So we're not— we're regulated by a contract's a contract, but there aren't rules in our sport like there are in other sports. Of trade windows and rules. And, you know, in other sports they publish, you know, the players' salaries, things of that nature. So it's a fascinating game of poker, chess, and backgammon, which again, I think is part of the draw of what fascinates people about our sport.

Last question for me. If a company came to you looking for general advice at $100 million of annualized revenue and they wanted to get into sponsoring F1, obviously you'd put together, I'm sure, a nice package for them at McLaren. But how would you think about breaking into F1 sponsorship as a kind of a midsize company today?

Yeah, I think it's all about what are you trying to do with your business? Who are the companies involved with that particular race team? Are those companies synergistic?

If they're conflicting, then obviously you Yeah, you want synergy. You think it's helpful to have kind of a shared— because when we were in Vegas last year for the race, it was so funny because we had friends' companies were basically on every team because every company needs a Neo Cloud now, or every team needs a Neo Cloud, et cetera. But you're looking for synergy across the portfolio of sponsors.

Absolutely. I call kind of Formula One. It's 24 Super Bowls from a consumer point of view, and it's 24 Davos from a business-to-business point of view. And so, you know, our ecosystem, everyone does business together. They benefit from giving each other exposure. When Cisco runs a global television campaign, all the partners benefit from that. Dell runs their campaign, you know, the Dells, the Googles, the Ciscos, the MasterCards, they're all doing business together. And there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, business to business, that people don't necessarily see. So that all comes down to, you know, the Davos side of our business. When you come to a Grand Prix, brings a tremendous amount of C-level executives and the amount of business that we've facilitated for— from dinners at Grand Prix. And we're very active in that. You know, it comes back again to knowing what our partners want. We're a technology extension, we're a brand extension, we're a sales extension, we're a culture extension. And so once we understand what our partners are trying to do, we're not thinking just about going racing. That's what our racing team's thinking about. But our commercial team's thinking about Dell has this objective. Ah, this person's there this weekend. And so there's a tremendous amount of business-to-business that's going on.

That's fantastic. Doing deals.

Oh yeah.

I think—

Doing deals.

Yeah, there's— I love that how much you've embraced the commercial side. I'm sure there's managers that just think of it as like a necessary evil. I'm going to do the bare minimum to like keep the team running, but clearly it pays dividends to really invest in the partnership side. I really appreciate the time.

Yeah, thank you so much.

We, we love it. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to chat about it.

And good luck this weekend.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Up next, we have Will Hurd returning to the show, but this time he's live in person in the TVPN UltraDome. We have Will Hurd. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Time. Um, you know, you've been on the show before. Uh, I know we have some exciting announcements today, but I was hoping we could sort of, uh, since we have 30 minutes, we have some time, I was hoping we could go back and tell a little bit more of the Will Heard story because I— it's one of my favorite stories. But, uh, does that sound good? Can we start at the beginning? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in San Antonio, Texas.

Okay. How was it?

Born and raised. I loved it. I was the baby of 3.

Okay.

Um, my So my father's Black, my mother's white. And so growing up as a biracial kid, that word biracial didn't exist when I was growing up, but love San Antonio, love San Antonio Spurs. Love everything about it.

Did you play sports in high school?

I did. I played basketball. And so, and I was on the practice squad at Texas A&M for 3 days. When I went to college, I realized I'm gonna, I'm gonna play, I'm gonna only play defense and maybe get to ride the pine later down, so then I got involved in student government.

Okay, student government, I wanna ask you, what was your perception of the US government at that time?

I didn't have one, right? Like, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't reading the Constitution when I was 9 or things like that. I played basketball, I loved, robotics. I, um, I got to intern at, um, the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, which is the largest private, um, research institution in the United States. And I worked for this woman who graduated from Stanford, and she had, uh, she was doing some cool robotics stuff. And I'm like, I want to be like her. And that's why I decided— I knew I was going to major in computer science, but I thought I was going going that route. Politics wasn't anywhere on my radar. But my freshman year in school, somebody said, hey, you should get involved in student politics and help, because you meet a lot of people that way. And I ended up, as a freshman, running this guy's campaign for student body president. He won. And so that's kind of how I got involved in student politics a little bit.

Yeah, I'm always so fascinated by your story.

Do you have any ideas about getting hacked?

What? For us, he used— I'm dating myself, right? He had the first— the guy— we built the first website ever used in student politics in 1995, right? And it was like earth-shattering. And it was like we were still using 2400 baud modems at the time. And so, yeah, so that was really— That was really the beginning of kind of digital marketing.

Have I ever told you the story about when I ran for, I didn't run for student body president, but I ran for class government. And my entire philosophy was just name recognition and like ad impressions effectively. So I just put up huge banners everywhere that said, "Vote Coogan." I made every single person in the school a t-shirt that said, "Vote Coogan." I bought these like cheap shirts and would spray paint them on. So they were really efficient to make. So everyone was very aware. They didn't know what I was running for. They didn't know what I stood for, but they knew my name. And so when they went to the ballot, okay, I guess I'm voting Coogan because I've been told vote Coogan so many times.

Name ID.

Name ID is important, right?

Name ID is the most important thing.

It's hard to break through.

So you knew that, you knew that at an early age, you know?

But I mean, the reason that I'm so fascinated by this interplay is because it feels like computer science and government have been on a collision course for years and we are, now at this moment where there are very serious discussions, but I wanna continue into actually studying computer science. Like, what was that like? Where did you think that was going? Did you think this was, was this like the birth of big tech? Were you watching that? Like, where were you? Were you just interested in the technology broadly? Like, how were you processing computer science?

[Speaker] So I was interested in technology broadly. I was interested in the problem solving. Problem solving. For me, what I always say was great about computer science is it teaches you a way of solving challenges. And regardless of being able to vibe code now and all that, that mentality is important.

First principles.

100%. And so I thought it was going to be cool to be on the cutting edge of stuff. And look, I had some pretty cool offers out of school. My first offer in the CIA was in the science and technology department. Basically the Q of the CIA, but I knew I wanted to do ops and recruit spies and steal secrets, and so I went that way instead. But it really is weird, this understanding technology enough and the implications of it and how it's adopted and some of the consequences and how you use new technology to solve old challenges is, it's funny, sitting here thinking about, going back in my life, it's like those are things that I've been focused on since I was 19.

Yeah. Take me through the decision to run for Congress.

Look, I, in addition to recruiting spies and stealing secrets, I had to brief members of Congress. You know, I lived, I was in D.C. for 2 years at what I used to call our super secret CIA training facility, they called it the farm, now it's on Google Maps. I did 2 years in India, 2 years Pakistan, 2 years doing interagency work in New York, and then a year and a half in Afghanistan, where I managed all of our undercover operations. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Yeah, I was in Afghanistan. And so my career started with the USS Cole bombing. This is when a lot of the public first became aware of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and bin Laden had been along for a long time. And then my career kind of ended right before Khost. Khost was the deadliest attack in CIA's history. A double agent got onto one of our bases and blew himself up and killed many of my colleagues at the time. So I was there in the global war on terrorism. And in addition to recruiting and doing that job, I had to brief members of Congress. And I'll be honest, I was pretty shocked by the caliber of our elected leaders. And there was this time in Afghanistan—

Shocked to the downside.

Negative, yes. I had a negative impression. I had a negative impression. And I—

I've had some interactions with members of Congress. And I've been shocked to the upside on how good of people they are, like how much they're trying, but shocked to the downside of— of just you regurgitate some basic fact and they just have a surface-level understanding. But then you dig a level deeper and you're like, is it, like, what would it actually take to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every discipline? And so there's a lot of, it's sort of Gell-Mann amnesia whenever you're talking to somebody in government. You come in, you're the expert in media, or you're the expert in technology, or you're the expert in oil and gas, and you come in and you're like, this person doesn't know anything about oil and gas. And it's like, well, they have to know 1% about everything sometimes. And so it is somewhat forgivable, but you clearly thought that it could be done better.

And let me be clear, like, there are many members of Congress that are fantastic, and I just didn't get the chance to meet them, right? And there was an experience in Afghanistan where a bomb went off in front of our compound, killed some of our local guards, took out a section of our protective wall, protective wall, and my unit was responsible for trying to figure out what happened. And basically, we conducted a bunch of operations in a short period of time, and I had a briefing with members of HPSI, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And basically, what happened in the meeting, someone asked, "What's the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?" And I'm start explaining the divide between the two. Excuse me, he asked why— the question was actually about Iran. Why was Iran not supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, where they were supporting other groups? And then I start explaining the Sunni-Shia divide, and this person raises his or her hand and says, what's the difference between a Sunni and a Shia? And I'm thinking this person is about to make a really inappropriate joke, and who am I to deny them that opportunity? And I said, I don't know, Congressman, what's the difference? And I'm getting ready to go ba dum bum pa. They didn't know that difference in Islam. And that was really the one, I think, it said for me, it's like, hey, my mom always said, you're either part of the problem, part of the solution. I decided to move back to my hometown in San Antonio and run for Congress. And I had been student body president at A&M, and I only needed like 6,000 more votes in a primary to win than what I got when I was student body president. I thought, hey, I can do this.

I can do this.

But look, to your point, right, but the amount of information that members of Congress have to deal with, like a day, like when I was in there, I would do probably 30, 35 meetings a day. And that started with—

Wait, how does that actually work? What does your calendar look like?

Look, your team is what matters. My scheduler is like the single most important person. Pre-briefs, read the briefs, have the information down, right?

—It's like a 5-minute meeting here, 30-minute meeting later, 10 minutes.

—Usually about 30, right? Usually about 20 to 30. And some of that may be speeches. Some of that, you know, all the different kinds, different physical activities that you've got to be prepared for. And one day you would start about the sheep and goat herders of America, which is a true— like, I had a lot of sheep. Goat herders in my district, to the San Antonio Chamber of Congress, to a company that's putting technology along the border, to some issue in cislunar space with overhead architecture. So you had to deal with all of it, right? And for me, what I try to do is focus on technology, because that's what I had experience in. I had helped build a cybersecurity company before I was in Congress. And so that's where I tried to focus my lane on. And it goes back to that intersection of technology and national security and to be able to help continue to make sure that America stays the greatest country on the planet. And then now in my post-career, to be able to be involved in companies that do that and with, you know, to work with friends on that intersection, right? Because the company ICON, right? I'm the president of ICON Prime. We build 3D-printed structures, right? And all those places I lived, I lived in some pretty crummy places, and people were living in shipping containers. Like, my colleagues and I were in shipping containers. We're working 18, 19-hour days, putting ourselves in harm's way, and we're going back to base basically a cot in a shipping container.

I'm sorry, that's not— what, what, what's the first thing, uh, first thing you do if you get in a shipping container? How do you make it comfy? Uh, you get a good mattress.

Good mattress. Yeah, a good mattress.

Do you try to insulate it at all?

So some of these did come with, with insulation, so you didn't have to have that. And they would have an AC unit, right? So they were, they were a little kitted out before you got in, but it's still a box, right? And and, and men and women in that are putting themselves in harm's way deserves better. And that's one of the— that's one of the things we're focusing on, on, on ICON Prime. Like, it starts with barracks. There's like the black mold, and, um, uh, there's like $19 billion worth of problems from, from, uh, weather events that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians are living in. That's unacceptable. Secretary Hegseth has said this is an erosion of our military readiness, right? And so that's, you know, to be able to use big robots to help, you know, repair military readiness as one thing, a part of what we're doing at ICON Prime is pretty exciting. Okay.

I think we have some photos of the actual structures. We're going to have the team pull them up. Walk me through the bull case for 3D printing because I've talked to some folks in construction and they've said that, well, 3D printing is great when you need something very unique, but a lot of houses are just flat walls. We're actually pretty good at just milling flat structures, laying 2x4s together. Why is 3D printing an important technology here?

Well, first off, and you're seeing this is one of our robots building, you know, we can build bunkers, that was a bunker I think you were seeing there, the first part was some barracks. Whether you want a box or a Fibonacci spiral, the cost is exactly the same. So flexibility. And then here's what happens, when you curve, if I took a piece of paper, you can't stand it up, it'll fall down. But if you curve it, it's a little bit sturdy. That's why that internal structure is there. And so that's why you can start doing unique things with internal structure. And we have gotten the price down. So the construction has been the same since the Middle Ages. Yeah. And we have gotten our price down to below the national average of putting up walls. Walls are the most expensive part of construction. That's what Jason Ballard, our CEO, and our founders— the unique insight was, if you're going to disrupt construction, what is What is the thing that can do, have the biggest impact? And they discovered it was the wall system. And so now the fact that like we can make wall systems below the national average. So why do you want just a box? Now here's the other thing. Guess what happens with concrete? Termites don't eat it. Sure. You can't burn it. Sure. It can stand up against a flood. Yeah. Right, and so these are some of the challenges that you don't have in traditional construction. Now, the US military has also done some unique things with our walls to test their strength. Really? And that there's an added benefit for that when you're trying to help project force in difficult places. So that's the use case of why 3D printing. Now, construction technology companies companies have been around and many have failed. Sure. There was a company that was 3D printing. They put out, they sent out about 110 robots, but they only built like 100 structures. Wow. You know, at ICON, we have built over 250 individual structures. And so, and the reason we're unique is that we've done the entire vertical integration. Facetive. It's the design. Designing structures takes time and there's different elements of of design. Then you have the— then you have the, the construction piece. We also deal with the regulatory effort. So the fact that we've done all of this vertical integration is what has made us successful. And we have— well, this is not novel technology. This isn't science projects. This is real technology, real robots, real AI-enabled software, real material science. Like, our— the most PhDs we have is in the material science Science area. And so this is what makes us unique. And now we've started the technology business. We're gonna be selling robots to people. So it's an exciting place to be. Oh, and by the way, if we're gonna be an interplanetary exploring civilization, we're gonna have to be able to build in other places, and we're gonna be building the first structure on on the Moon using some of the tactics, techniques, and procedures we've learned down here on Earth in order to do that. So it's exciting. Yeah.

This actually feels like you could probably mix cement from dirt on the Moon like fairly easily and use the actual materials on the Moon.

Fairly easily. Well, it's easier than wood.

Sure. Like easier than getting wood up there.

Here are the 3 insights in how you're gonna be able to be an interplanetary exploration creating a civilization, you gotta use the resources there. In situ resource utilization, right? That's one. You gotta have some robots to do it. And then those robots have to be generalist, not specific. And the moon has some unique challenges. But right now, look, we're excited.

Just a couple of unique challenges.

Just a few, just a few. But look, we're super excited 'Cause again, when I was in Congress, I knew about this barracks problem. I was on the Appropriations Subcommittee that dealt with this issue. And the fact that now we're solving this, and we are right now printing 10 barracks in 6 months in Fort Bliss. This is, the Army came to us and said, "Hey, can you do it in a year?" When we were doing the negotiation, they came down, "Can you do it in 6 months?" To have one of the largest military construction projects to be done in 6 months is absolutely unheard of. And these are places that give our warfighter the dignity that they deserve. And because of this work, we got another project in Louisiana at Fort Polk. And this is our newest one. It was a $201 million contract to— There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go.

I want to talk about the aesthetics of 3D-printed housing and materials. We saw a Starbucks that was 3D-printed and it had sort of the signature ripples of the concrete. People, the Starbucks community was up in arms about it. They don't think it looks good. I think that for military applications, people will probably take whatever's safe and comfortable, but—

Yeah, you just want something that's highly, highly functional.

Yeah, but do you think that— Not issue-prone. Do you think that people will, like the taste will evolve and people will start to see see 3D-printed structures as a sign that it's more sustainable and it will actually just be normalized and people will be cool with that, or will we be like plastering over this to create a flat wall?

Look, I think people will, and this will evolve. And I live in a 3D-printed home now, right? We live, when I'm in Austin, we call it House Zero. This was the first home that we built to show that this is great living. And my wife and daughter love it. My daughter's 13 years old. That's awesome. And she loves the Ripples and Friends. When they come over, they love— now the Starbucks, I don't know who built it. It wasn't us. Right? So just like with anything, quality is different everywhere you go. Sure, sure. And so we've done a 100-home neighborhood in North Austin with Lennar. The folks that are there love it. Love, love living there. We have a community in south, south of Austin called Wimberley. We're looking to build in Miami as well. So we've done the whole range from helping the chronically homeless in Austin to high-end luxury in Miami to folks in the military and barracks in El Paso. And then these astronauts on the moon, right? We've done the whole bit. And again, this is the thing about 3D printing is that the walls are probably the thing that creates the most, makes something a home. And when you have the waves and the unique structures, it makes it, you have a different experience. And I've seen it in my personal life and the folks that are living in the 240 homes that we've already built are loving it as well too.

Yeah, it's a great part of the sales pitch. They're like, well, how is it to live in? You're like, come over for a barbecue. 100%.

Look, when y'all come to Austin, I got a place. We're coming. I got a house.

Y'all can attest to it. Yeah. The company is sort of like a dual-use technology now, working with the government, but also building homes. How do you see that evolving? I have to imagine that the commercial real estate market is massive compared to the United States military barracks market. Same with the residential market. Is the Army project, or is the Department of War project more about proving the technology, scaling the technology, or do you see yourself as evolving into primarily a prime? Where does the business go? This seems like a fork in the road. Sure.

So the business is really 3 parts, right? It's my part, the being a government contractor. We are. We've done already $360 million of work. We have more coming. My goal is to build 900 barracks in the next 5 years. And so the immediate— we're doing that. We're doing it because the customer needs work, right? And this project we're doing in Fort Bliss and the demonstration in Louisiana, this is real, right? Like this is, and we're moving at a scale people don't have. We also are gonna help deliver force projection in hard places. How do you build in situ in difficult places, whether it's the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific or somewhere else, right? How do you do that? So delivering force projection, and then we've talked about space. Now, we just started a technology business where we're gonna be selling the robots to others, and yes, that, right now, if we sold 2,500 robots, and to give some context to that number, John Deere, of their big tractor sells about 66,000 a year, right? So we're talking about 2,500. That would make the Icon Builders Guild the largest home builder in America.

Because they could build so many.

They could build so many with those robots. And when you look at the market share, it rounds down to zero, the global market share. That's how much opportunity there is in this space. And so, yes, the technology business is going to grow in an opportunity, but we are going to have a core government because that's our responsibility, we believe. And then our third part is we have what we call it design-build. This is our general contractor in-house. This is how we've proven all the steps you need to do. How do you have the ecosystem and the tools necessary in order to build. We've proven that with all these structures. We're going to continue to prove that with the government business. And that's what's going to inform when we have the ICON Builders Guild start printing with our robots. That makes sense.

What do you think the future of prefab is in this case?

Look, there's a $2 million— it's not $2 million, excuse me— $2 million home deficit. —just in the United States every single year. So, you know, there's gonna be tools for everything, right? I think there's a place for it. I believe, and we believe, that 3D printing is the way to go because not only of the quality to withstand rains and fires and bugs, but it's the ability to deliver something that's beautiful as well, too.

Yeah, on the national level, Was there ever any proposal around home building or solving that home deficit that perked your interest but maybe didn't get across the finish line? It feels like a lot of the housing crisis is driven by specific markets going through bull cycles or permitting or timelines. And then of course, there's the materials and all sorts of different technologies that can happen. But I haven't, I've heard the price of housing elevate to a national conversation, but I haven't heard of someone put down a plan that actually gets traction.

Look, so affordability is probably the number one issue across the United States of America right now. And so I agree with you, but this is a problem that has, It's an issue that has multiple problems. Now, I can make an argument that because of poor design over many years, that is what's caused all this overregulation because people weren't doing the things in order to take care of their communities, right? We just went through this process of getting into the UFC, not mixed martial arts, but the Uniform Facilities Code. This is what the government uses in order to build. It was a process and we went through it and now we're in. And we're going to be able to start doing more. And so the difficulty of doing this community by community is why some people want to see that change. But I think it starts with do innovative things. We use robots to change the walls. That's just the beginning of this process. It's labor. It's time. All of these things has what impacted the issue of housing. And for us, the key insight was, how do you stop— how do you do something different and change something that's been going on since the Middle Ages and do it faster and better and smarter and cheaper? Middle Ages? That's crazy. It is, right? OK, look, let's be honest. You're right. If you had a house that was 100 years old, it would probably be a little more stable than one that was built 5, 10 years ago. And this is one industry that has an— that hasn't been changed. And that's what we're— that's what we're trying to do.

Cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to get that update. We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the waiting room already. Let me put my headphones back on. We have Anoush from AMD. He is the vice president of AI software, and we'll bring him in to the TVP and Ultra Dome in just a minute. Here he is.

How are you doing?

How are you guys doing?

We're doing great.

Happy Monday. Thank you so much for taking the time. Since it is the first time on the show, I would love for you to give a little bit of an introduction on yourself and how you fit into the AMD organization.

Yeah, I joined AMD about 2.5 years ago. I came in through an acquisition called Nod.ai, and we'd been building ML compilers for 5, 6 years, the precursor to AI. And I was at Google prior to that building Chromebooks, Chrome OS. And, and now I lead AMD's software strategy, software execution, and trying to make sure AMD has a, you know, a pervasive AI software story as much as a pervasive AI hardware story.

Got it. I'm sure the question that everyone is asking you is around around how AI is, you know, speeding up the actual deployment of AI models onto other silicon stacks, other chipsets, AMD specifically. How is it going? What is real? How much acceleration are you feeling? Obviously we've seen incredible performance from AMD Semi Analysis Inference Max, which I think has been renamed, but Inference X. Inference X, that's right. And so, and so like it is clear that AMD can, can provide incredible inference for AI models. And I think there is an expectation that the AI models themselves will allow for more powerful models to be deployed on AMD more effectively. But what are you What are you seeing? What are your sort of timelines for more fluidity between the silicon stacks that are out there?

Yeah, very good question. So until about December, I was, you know, I saw it like a linear progression, right? Like I'd been here for 2 years at AMD and it was like hard work, grind, grind, grind. And then suddenly it was like, oh wow, software is just tokens and time. So, you know, since January, it's just like, supercharged our ability to execute. Even performance things that we were, you know, traditionally took a little bit longer to kind of get for, you know, when we launched the MI355, it would take us a little bit to like get, understand workloads that are not in the well-lit path and go after the performance. Now all of it, like, you know, we have to be everywhere at the same time and be performant And AI helps us do that, right? So we have like automated performance loops that just run with, you know, as soon as the customer tries the model, we start an agent that's just like nonstop optimizing the customer's model. Right. And then that allows us to not just make the performance aspect, but also the breadth of coverage to make the out-of-box experience delightful and magical. And that we are seeing it in our customer feedback and what we hear on social media. I track that very religiously just to make sure that the experience is good and it's been good so far.

Yeah, I think I've seen you do the Lil Yachty walkout once or twice, taking a victory lap courtesy of some AI company and Semianalysis, of course. Walk me through the key, like, levers of AI-enhancing productivity on AMD, because I feel like there is potentially a world of secret tricks to model performance that are maybe not in the pre-training data and are locked in the heads of very talented folks that work at AMD and often are deployed with a company to actually get the last 1% out of whatever production run is going on. But then there's the other side, which is this feels like a perfectly verifiable reward. You can run this loop, you can sort of brute force it. And if you're deploying a large-scale model and there's a lot of money on the line, you can potentially put a ton of compute behind it. And so even if the training data isn't, 100% there, you'll get there through reinforcement learning. But what are you seeing as moving the needle? What else? What's the next thing that needs to happen? Are we just purely scaling compute here and everything is like one click on AMD and everything's great? I don't even know what the benchmark is, but the hypothetical full performance is real. Yes.

Yes. So very good question. I'll just take a step back and say, AMD has had this ethos of open source, which really plays to our advantage. Every Frontier model that I use has already seen every bit of AMD source code. Sure. And I can even like, it'll rewrite my spec for me because it already is in the pre-training data, right? So which you cannot get from closed ecosystems, right? Because you are constrained by like what is out there. Like we publish our ISA specs. In fact, I built a virtual GPU simulator just based off of our public specs. And now I'm running it on the GPU. So I can run like cross-generational GPU simulations on an existing hardware. So to your point on pre-training data, we have that advantage. And we'd run a Dev Day contest where we generated more tokens on AMD like Triton kernels and HIP kernels. Than that existed on the internet at the time. So GPU mode had set this up. Wow. And so now that's all part of pre-training data, right? So which again, it's a superpower because now you're open source and you're identically, um, you know, accelerating this, uh, process. And then the second part is, you know, that's already the foundation is solid, uh, and now agent loops just, you know, they're working non-stop, right? Um, so We know our rooflines. And so these agents just continue and execute towards those rooflines. And so it makes us achieve that. So from where I see it, right, I think AI is just, you know, it's become like this great equalizer. I thought abstractions alone will be the great equalizer for GPU programming, like, you know, Triton and higher level Pythonic ones. But now it's like that plus agentic AI. You know, I have agent loops that are running nonstop, you know, every night that are looking at bugs, PRs, and they're just automatically fixing them. Of course, we have humans in the loop where needed, but if your harness gets really robust, it's good to be in autopilot. So I'm very confident in like the enablement that, you know, Edge SDK has given AMD as a whole and how we can execute and kind of skate to where the fuck is going, not all the journey of where it went to now.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. In the theme of skating where the puck is going, you know, I'm loosely familiar with this, you know, the paths around CUDA and some of the trends that we're seeing there. What is going on in the CPU world? It feels like we're incredibly CPU-bound from a physical number of chips perspective, but What are you hearing from developers and engineers on what needs to happen to unlock all of the capacity and use the CPUs more efficiently? Is there a need for more software there? Is this just purely just make as many chips as we can, like the job's finished, or what are people asking you? Yeah, that's a very good question.

Software, the job is never finished. It's just you're going you're going higher and higher in terms of orchestrating and enabling the last mile, right? Like you always want to try and see how much more efficient you can make a system. And like we started the thing, right, the discussion, AMD, even on our laptops, right, like the Strix Halo laptop, it's got a CPU, GPU, and NPU. And now with AgentiKI, we are actually able to like provide a very clean heterogeneous runtime and then a compiler so that now you can actually bounce between these based on the usage. So if it's tool calling and it's like, you know, it's compute, uh, it does— it's not GPU bound and you can use it on the CPU, we can shift to the CPU. But then the interfaces, we want to make it seamless. Yeah. So that it's elastic between where you want to run this. I have a, uh, Strix Halo here on my desk that's running like a local voice model that does my transcription. It's a hacked-up version of Codex that can actually do real-time voice transcription. That's cool. I have a small keyboard that just has next session, previous session, and this is push-to-talk.

That's awesome.

This one here is extra high or high or the model selector, and then you can just speak to it. So in that case, it's running all of the voice on the NPU, right? So it's able to do like real-time voice translation, and then it does GPU and then CPU, and then where required, it pumps it to, you know, the thinking models are up on the cloud. So it gets, yeah, it gets a combination of all of this.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. The flip side of that incredibly cool 4-key keyboard is it's over for you if you, if your entire job is based on the traditional QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure that there's a, I'm curious about like AMD seems like a fantastic place to work in an AI takeoff in a crazy AI future world. What are you seeing on the people that are joining AMD right now that are set up for success? What does it take to get a job at AMD? Where are the new high leverage positions within the organization where you see, okay, this person is on a fantastic career track inside of AMD?

Well, it's a very, very good question. So what I do like about AMD is that, you know, I think it comes from a humble place of being through 55 years of a journey, right? But then deeply ambitious and then, you know, at the right place at the right time, you know, have been executing on hardware for so long and now the software piece is accelerating it. So the way I tell my teams is that we're a startup. We're a 55-year-old startup. And even in the AI group, it's like 2,000 people. I encourage everyone to work like you're a startup, do the right thing. I have an all-hands with with everyone who has a manager, because in the future it's going to be manager of people and agents, right? Like you're just going to accelerate that capability and your breadth of what you do is going to increase. So I think the workplace and the culture is like, hey, let's go do it. Be humble, ambitious, go, go do it. And then the acceleration is just something that I look for people to look at it as it doesn't replace first principles thinking, but it can do a lot of your work, right? And so my coding interview is like, show me your plan, your skills, and solve this problem while we're sitting at it, right? Like, you know, like the first 10 minutes of what you do with Cloud Code or Codex, I know exactly your thought process in terms of like how you're going to approach it and what your harness is going to look like. So yeah, I'm super excited about the overall team, how we're adopting agent-to-CAR, but also the folks that are joining us that have deep experience in the fields and now just supercharging it.

Yeah. What is AMD's equivalent of the forward deployed engineer? Like at any given point, how many engineers do you guys have like on the ground at different data centers or even within the offices of Labs or other companies? Yeah, that's a very good question.

We didn't get very creative. We called it forward deployed engineering. Uh, we—

I think it's a very appropriate name.

So we started that about 2 years ago. And well, I guess now we should have an FDA also, Power Deployed Agents. So FDE and FDA. But it's multiple hundreds of people that are just— the way they're focused on the customer. The way I phrase FDE is that SE or software developers are the forward pass and FDs are the backward pass. So the forward pass like executes to a PRD and the FDs execute from a customer backwards. And that's your entire model of operation. And both of, you know, you have to be a software engineer to start, but you just come at the same code base from, you know, whether you're forward pass or backward pass.

Yeah, makes sense.

How has— I wanted to ask about the story of George Hotz and how he sort of raised alarm bells. But it felt like, you know, you said AMD is a startup. And I did not think that AMD— I didn't think of AMD as a startup 3 years ago. But when I saw that interaction and the back and forth there and the change that actually happened, that felt like, okay, This company is in founder mode. This company is in startup mode. How has the flywheel of feedback from the open source, the individual, the, the random Twitter poster actually become actionable? Because I think there's a lot of companies that will see something being said but not necessarily take action. Like, how culturally has AMD changed to actually move the needle when something like that happens? Yeah, it's a very good question.

First, mad respects to George Hodgson and the skills that, you know, he has, right? Like, I wrote a ROCm port on macOS just based off of, like, you know, TinyGrad's, you know, what he's done, right? So now I have macOS ROCm running with an eGPU, and that's, you know, that's the power of open, right? Like, we can see And now, you know, the industry moves forward. On the flywheel, I personally monitor all of X as much as I can, like all the keywords, AMD software sucks or something like that. So if someone—

If somebody posts, you're going to take it personally. It's going to ruin your afternoon. It's okay.

It's okay. I take that as one of my jobs to do. So I personally respond, and whether it's George Hotz or whether it's anyone else, I may not know who that is, but usually my response is, if there's a specific issue with the GitHub, I will go personally track it down and make sure it's fixed. If it's an opinion, it's hard to fight opinions because it's an opinion, and sometimes opinions are like lagging indicators, and that's fine. We'll earn their trust and we will take step by step to get there. But the problems that exist, we want to double down and go actually fix. We started this about a year ago where people were like, "Oh, you removed support on this card or that card, or you don't support Windows well." A year ago, I took a poll and we sorted all the systems that we needed to support. And now at least as a community supported version, all of those hardware for Windows and Linux and now macOS too is all being like enabled so that customers or developers can use AMD and be delighted by it.

Last question, is AMD a car?

Is AMD a car? Yes. Uh, is this a car? Okay, let me see. Um, well, tell me more about the car.

It's a Formula 1 car. It might be a car.

It's a Formula 1 car. There we go. That's the correct answer. That's the correct answer. It's a good car, sir.

It is a good car. It is a Formula 1 car. And the race we run, you know, sometimes we are a little 2 inches behind and 1 inch ahead. Yeah, but we're ready for the race. I love it.

It's been fantastic following the race. It's been fantastic following your progress.

One thing I know for certain, you did not wake up a loser.

That's for sure. That's 100% true. Obviously, it comes across very clearly. Thank you. It's— thank you so much for taking the time. The news today is that Annual Developer Day, San Francisco, April 30th. Go check it out. And thank you so much for taking the time to come join us. Nailed it. I need it. Other way, other way.

Okay, thank you. Great to hang.

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have Augustus from Rainmaker, who's the CEO and founder. He's a Thiel Fellow and he's in the TBPn UltraDome live with us in studio in in Hollywood. Welcome to the show. You're looking fantastic. Oh, thank you.

And not as good as Jordy in the Rainmaker green suit.

Yeah, you did that just for me.

Yeah, of course. Everything fits. Give us the update. How's life? How are things going?

Uh, blessed. Better than ever. Uh, Rainmaker is the first company in human history to unambiguously, repeatedly modify the weather, improve it. Okay. Yeah, this past year—

break it down. When did this happen?

Where? So, you know, I've known you guys for a while. Um, it's pretty tough to be the mulleted kid running around saying that you're gonna modify the weather for a few years without being able to prove it. The mullet looks less mullety.

It's a little just out of— You're growing out the front, so now it's party in the front, party in the back.

Party everywhere.

I would say either party or just disheveled all around. Disheveled. Yeah, yeah. But across our operations in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and the Middle East, we've been able to run these operations and in areas with otherwise no precipitation whatsoever, see snow happen exclusively downwind where our measured and modeled aerosols are going. And so for anybody that's not familiar with cloud seeding, it's this technology that's been around for 80 years. General Electric invented it in 1946.

I would actually be shocked if there's someone in tech that is not familiar with cloud seeding, just because you've been around the circuit for the last few years. A couple times. But give it to us again, in case anybody's been living under a data stream.

We'll start with what a cloud is.

Yeah, yeah. Scientists don't actually know, that's a separate question. By the way, speaking of people not—

This goes deeper than I thought.

People that might not have heard of cloud seeding before, I was talking to some big fancy show producers, and we were like, hey, do you want this story? And they were like, well, maybe if you go on TBPn first, then we would take it. And so there's some other hits this week, and it's all credited to you. But the long story short is, there's lots of clouds that have small drops of liquid water in them, too small to naturally fall, If you can find those clouds, release the right material into them, those drops will freeze onto your dust and become big enough to fall. Problem is, if you blast a cloud and then it snows, who's to say whether you actually made it snow? Attribution. Attribution. Oh, he's reading the investor updates. Yeah, yeah.

It's just like brand marketing.

Yeah, but now the most normie-interpretable attribution we have is downwind of where we're seeding. Sometimes you can see the water in the cloud in the entire portion that we seeded freeze and then fall out. And in an otherwise overcast day, this hole will open up in the sky and you can see the blue sky and sun and snow falling downwind, and otherwise it's totally overcast. So using data from our own proprietary radar, from the National Weather Service radar, even NASA satellites, we're able to show exactly how much of the precipitation is manmade, and then tell our customers, be they governments, hydroelectric utilities, insurers, ski resorts now, actually.

Yeah, I can imagine ski resorts being early adopters.

Yeah, yeah.

Although, isn't it very narrow? It's such a small target. When I think about like rainfall on a cornfield, that seems like sort of spray and pray and you're good. But if you want that double black diamond to be hit perfectly, that feels like precision. Are we there yet on the technology?

Well, really what the ski resorts want is the off-pied to get snow, right? What's that? Like, oh dude, you gotta— Off-piste? Yeah, yeah, off-piste, off-piste, all right, off-piste. Yeah, yeah, like backcountry for randoms. Yeah, 'cause your snowblowers, the conventional stuff, they can get the actual trails, but if you wanna do the backcountry, cloud seeding is best for that. And so historically, cloud seeding's been no more precise than a few hundred square miles at a time. You're flying these planes at hundreds of miles an hour, the entire watershed will get water. We've gotten it down to, because of the wind sensing that we're doing, the modeling that we're doing, we're like an AI company now, sorry to say it. Yay! We've gotten it precise enough to land on about 8,000 acres at a time, and doing all of like our snow zone research, that's what we're calling the area that we're hitting, we can probably get it down from 8,000 to a little bit smaller, maybe 1,000 acres at a time, which is easy for any mid to ultra-large resort in the US.

Yeah, makes sense. Where has demand been? You mentioned a few different geolocations, you mentioned a few different industries. Do you think that you will be narrowing down at some point? Like finding a beachhead, finding a product-market fit, and it's like—

Yeah, he's narrowed down already. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know there's a broad vision, but every company goes through a narrowing and a focusing point, and then a broadening diversification. Do you see yourself going more narrow for a little bit and just being like the dominant main player in, you know, the Pacific Northwest in ski, and then going other things, or do you wanna keep running multiple places? Is there a benefit to that?

It's a super salient question, right? Because if you look at, say, Reflect Orbital, right, the guys that are offering sunlight on demand, infinite potential applications for that. Rain or snow on demand, a bunch of different demos could use that. For us, it's two things exclusively. It is municipal and state water agencies. So say like the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the California Department of Natural Resources, water for them. Mm-hmm. That's straightforward. We're very legible to them. They understand the value of snowpack and how that relates to their water table. So that's one, and then just ski resorts. So all these other markets, although eventually we'll play in them, I think insurance is really interesting for like crop insurance. I think that hyper— How does that work? So right now there's insurance against crop failure due to drought. Sure. Sure. So if you have like a parametric insurance play where you can structurally reduce the risk of drought killing your crops, then you can price— Buy more water down. Exactly. Makes sense. Although that'll all be interesting, it's really going to be Alpine, Rocky Mountain, Sierra ski resorts, and then just the governments that I mentioned before.

Makes sense. What kind of advancements have you made on the hardware side, the actual drones? Like you guys are flying drones. In probably more extreme conditions than, like, I would guess any other company or organization on the planet. Is that accurate?

There's some pretty cool defense companies that are building crazier drones than ours, but we have the only rotor-wing vehicle that can fly in severe icing in all of NATO. Rotor-wing vehicle.

Is that like quadcopter? So quadcopter. Quadcopter, rather than fixed-wing.

Sure. Yeah. And so the advancements have been, candidly, last year our drones were basically like bottle rockets. They'd go up, the icing was really severe. We had not perfected the system required to sustain flight through severe icing. But now in atmospheric—

Bottle rockets as in they would go up, they would deliver a payload, and then they would just kind of fall.

I was kind of making a joke about them exploding. Yeah, yeah, okay. So all of the development that's been done in the last year is about reliability and precision. Yeah. These vehicles—

'Cause you don't want to lose a drone every time. No. It doesn't work.

Exactly. Yeah. And so we're flying 3 to 4 miles above ground level. That's being done pretty consistently up to 60, 70 mile an hour winds in these atmospheric rivers. That's the big development there. And then also, Another big thing is the aerosol sizing. So this was part of the big breakthrough that happened in January. We realized we needed significantly smaller, so like nanometer scale, and then significantly more concentration of these particles to deliver the effect that we were intending. Before that, we were releasing like micron-sized particles, but now, because we're releasing more and smaller particles, we're able to more reliably see our effect. Wild.

How has the response been to just the vanilla pushback of like dangerous chemical goes in the cloud? Like this, this, like the actual silver, is it still silver iodide? Silver iodide. Is silver iodide something you can't just chug in a glass of water, right? Did you see a Daxton video? I did, yes. I want you to unpack that. That did not look very good. Like what's going on there?

Yeah, so shout out to Daxton from Soon.

Great filmmaker. Yep, spectacular. Potential investigative journalist going on.

What's going on here? So silver iodide is still what we're using. Yeah. In this upcoming winter, we're going to have scaled operations with our alternative seeding agent. It's this bio— naturally occurring protein from American soil. Yeah. So on brand for you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We think that— you know how you're trying to make this look good?

It's like a naturally occurring white monster.

Exactly, so we're gonna mix the protein into whey and then I'm gonna drink that and it's gonna play.

But no, I mean, putting salt in the atmosphere doesn't, it seems like that could be, if it's a natural substance, if it is something that you could drink, that would be, that would kind of close the loop. But are you thinking about moving away from silver iodide entirely and moving over to this new seeding agent?

So silver iodide, because it's safe, because it's proven, because this problem is already inordinately complex, we'll continue to use in most of our commercial ops for the next 2 years. The reception is generally, like, there's 2 things happening at once. There's more awareness of cloud seeding. Like, in the last 3 years, there's 400 times more searches of cloud seeding than there were before.

We're all wondering who is responsible for that.

Yeah, why? And then also on the, like, public sentiment side, as long as you can disambiguate like the sort of Bill Gates dimming the sun type stuff from cloud seeding, which is localized precipitation enhancement, people are pretty receptive. And silver iodide, if you back out the math for people, they're willing to talk 90% of the time, 10% less tractable, but we're always gonna be open and transparent with them. Long-term though, my primary interest in alternative seeding agents, it's not just because I wanna get away from like the PR of using silver iodide, it's that these proteins are about 1,000 times more effective at nucleating ice, and the Chinese have that one primary advantage over our weather mod program. So they're doing very advanced material science for different graphene particles that much, much more effectively manipulate the weather conditions. But that seems more problematic.

Graphene? From an environmental perspective, like if it falls on my corn, I eat it, I don't necessarily want graphene in my digestive tract. Something like that. That makes sense. But maybe in certain applications you don't care about the chemicals in the water. I don't know. I mean, if you're skiing, you're not necessarily eating the snow, so there's potential for— I eat the snow. Lots of people eat the snow, so maybe that's not the best example. But there must be some sort of— there's probably some applications where, you know, you're not net polluting the environment potentially.

Yeah, and I think there's also always the like dilution is the solution angle. Sure. You say, okay, if you put down 50% more water, then it's still an inconsequential amount of material in the soil. That's their angle right now.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Jordy, you have something else?

What's the team like today? And where are you guys like, where all over the map are you?

Yeah, so we, We were— I don't know what we were last we spoke, but this time last year, we were about 30 people. We're a little bit over 130 now. Wow.

Yeah. That's huge. How is that divided up?

So there's about a third, 40 or so, in Los Angeles at any given time. There's about 60 in Salt Lake. Sure. Shout out Utah. Shout out Governor Cox. Shout out LDS Church. Love them all. But then we have a smaller operational site in Pendleton, Oregon. —an operation in the Middle East, which we still cannot talk about the location of, and then our D.C. team, and shortly, actually, in Alaskan as well.

Oh, Alaska. Are you still going to local court hearings constantly? I feel like you were on a run there. Also, there was a potential of, like, is this going to get completely banned in certain states or at the federal level? What's the status of the government government pushback? I know the government's doing a lot of different stuff, but—

[Speaker] Yeah, at the state level, of the 31 bans that were proposed, only 2 went through in the last session. [Speaker] Florida? [Speaker] Florida, and then Louisiana. [Speaker] Okay. [Speaker] Unsurprisingly, the discourse in everywhere east of the Mississippi, where they don't need the water as badly, is more liable to chemtrail conspiracy discourse. West of the Mississippi, people need the water and are willing to hear you out and disambiguate. Sure, sure, sure. I think that in terms of federal involvement and potentially preemption, President Trump brought up the necessity of saving the Great Salt Lake, right? We have operations for the Bear River, which is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake right now. And if we were to scale up our operations about 10 times, we could radically accelerate the timeline to reversing the aridification of of in refilling the lake. And so we might get to see some participation at the federal level in cloud seeding because it's the only way to produce net new water for the lake. And that's an interesting project, not just because the lake is a piece of national American heritage, not just because it's something that all of the ski industry is dependent on in Utah, because that lake effect snow is what gives you the champagne powder. It's not just important because, 'cause if the lake aridifies, you end up with toxic arsenic getting kicked up, like in the Salton Sea. But also, it's the training wheels for what an interstate weather modification project would look like for the Colorado River, right? The Bear River, which flows through, or the watershed which flows through Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, that is sort of the precedent setting that we're looking for for the Colorado, which is down to about 8.1 million acre-feet through Lees Ferry every year. That's the place where they measure flow of the river, so they figure out allocations. That's about half of where the water was measured to be or suspected to be when we made the Colorado River Compact. Rainmaker's goal, to call a shot publicly, is to get the Colorado River back to its 1920 supply levels by 2031. That will mean, about 8 million more acre-feet of water down. And a lot of that'll come from cloud seeding, and some of it will come from other technologies that we're looking at right now. Wow.

How do you structure your customer contracts? Like, how does that work, right? I'm assuming you have these different types, different types of groups that you're working with, but what does a typical contract look like? I'm assuming it's like annual contract, you're trying to deliver a certain amount of effect in that period, but walk us through it.

So there's two modes depending on the customer. With B2B, it is value-based pricing. We've recently hired on some guys from Palantir. They've been instrumental in us figuring out how to set up those structures. It is some program stand-up fee, fee and availability and like operations, maintenance, repair fee, and then being paid based on the inches of snow that we produce, the gallons of water that flow into the system of interest. People value the water from cloud seeding very differently, and so we structure that outcomes-based pricing differently depending on the customer segment and what they actually want. [Speaker:JOHN_COOGAN] Yeah. [Speaker:JAKE_BURGHART] Then on the B2B side, I'd prefer to do that sort of outcomes-based pricing, but you wouldn't be surprised to find out that governments have a harder time paying for outcomes than they do for infrastructure services. And so that has looked like firm fixed fee for the most part. So all of our operations priced into the initial contract standup. Give me an update on the gundo. Um, dude—

Feels like a bunch of companies have grown a ton, potentially outgrowing the gundo. Are there more? What's net inflow like, you know, what's going on? Well, I think the first— it's also just less noisy now. I feel like the meme, like, if you kind of—

because they all locked in—

wins and then locked in, right?

Yeah, yeah. There was a pretty deliberate discussion that happened in the group chat after your piece came out, and we were like, radio silence, like, we all have to shut up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the most important thing is that, uh, it didn't blow up in like a fiery disaster. Um, which it totally could have. But if you look at us, if you look at Valor, if you look at Niros, a lot of these companies are like at scale and operating in size now. Valor—

and the older guard's doing well too. Radiant and Impulse and Varda, that crew, they're like the— I feel like they're like the— the unks. Yeah, they're the unks. They're like the juniors. You guys are like the sophomores now, and the seniors The SpaceXes and the Lockheeds. Mattel. Mattel. Barbie's there, of course.

Classic Gundam company. Yeah, so I think that our original Gundam bro cohort having matured, that's something that's pretty cool, but yeah, every single one of these companies now has operations, manufacturing namely, outside of Gundam. R&D will stay in and around Gundo Torrance, the Greater Gundo area.

Um, the Greater Gundo area, including Bel Air and Malibu. I consider these Greater Gundos.

I think actually Greater Gundo extends all the way down to Costa Mesa.

Costa Mesa. To include Android.

Yeah, there's a prolific defense company in Gundo. Greater Gundo.

Throw San Diego in, why not? Yeah. Las Vegas, that's Greater Gundo.

No, we don't claim Vegas actually, but, um, Right up until San Mateo.

You get NVIDIA, maybe, but not Facebook. You stop at the chips.

Yeah. And the inflow has been pretty consistent, largely through Discipulus. Yeah, that's right. Jacob.

Yeah, Jacob's been crushing it. Last week, right? Yeah.

Yeah. That was really cool to see.

Give me a rundown.

How'd it go? Well, I'm personally investing in some of the companies from Discipulus. Populous. I think there's a few worth checking out. One, just at the top of my mind, is Western Chemical. Jared West. He is the guy— I don't know if you saw the movie.

Jared West of Western Chemical.

Powerful. That's so good. Yeah.

So he's doing water processing, taking wastewater, and then putting duckweed into it, harvesting and cleaning the water, and then taking the hydrocarbon carbons out of the duckweed thereafter. Interesting. Yeah, so that's one of the first processes that he's scaling up production of.

Okay. Yeah. What were the other trends? I mean, it feels like one interesting trait of the gundo companies was that they were maybe more like pointed to specific solutions. There was already— there were already like a big energy energy company generally, or like big oil, or like, you know, a big defense tech company. But then you'd get somebody like Neros and Soren who were like laser-focused on this one application and still breaking through. And like, it's not like you were framed as like, just like, oh, like dealing with water broadly. You weren't the water company. You were like cloud seeding specifically. And it was this sort of off-the-beat technology. And I feel like that's part Part of what made the Gundow experiment so interesting was that it felt like a science fair in some ways. And there were a lot of people that were like, they weren't biting off more than they could chew, but they were taking on really ambitious projects that if they scaled, they'd work. But is that culture alive and well? And are there, like the Discipulus thing, are those companies coming to the Gundow? Are there new freshmen joining every year, basically?

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I feel bad because the original cohort—

Feel bad for the hazing rituals?

No, in 2023, I assure you I'd have instituted something like that. But yeah, 2026 Augustus, not so. He's grown up.

Grown up.

Yeah, nobody even lives in the office anymore. Wow. I know. Fell off. There's no squat rack in the office. Brutal. It's brutal. But— Gone corporate. Yeah, it's over.

He's big cloud seeding now. Big cloud.

But what's interesting about this most recent cohort is it's largely chemical manufacturing. Interesting. Yeah, so I think that if we pumped out more defense slop or energy slop, that space is pretty—

Well, it's hard. Yeah, Anduril has a bet in almost every category, and a lot of funding, and a lot of talent. And so there's a big question about, should you try and compete with Anduril or just go work at Anduril, right? You can certainly fulfill a mission if you want to work on some particular solution in defense by just going over to Anduril.

It's not some abstract company. Do you have any younger competitors, as in startups? Or is your competition somebody deciding just not to do it? Is it newer, hotter?

Cloud seeding company with a longer mullet is just not getting a guy.

Because I know you guys acquired a company at one point, right? Yeah. That was doing something in the space broadly, but has anybody been crazy enough to try to fast follow you?

So we did acquire one of the legacy cloud seeding companies that was using planes and ground generators, and we're going to continue rolling those up just because it's very simple to inject our tech produce significantly more water, improve our yields, and then upsell accordingly. No, I don't know of anybody that's started a company that's competing with RainMaker. And I think that they'd probably get bodied instantaneously if they were to do so.

It would be a nightmare. No, I'm sure there will come a point where people will be like, wow, he figured it out. Basically, like once you hit a certain scale, then they'll be like, "Oh, that seems like a good idea," but it'll be too late. You'll already be getting dragged in front of Congress for monopolizing cloud seeding.

Yeah, I think that I'm supposed to be magnanimous publicly about that sort of thing, but I— Do you have to be magnanimous publicly about energy drinks?

About energy drinks? Oh, we going back to— 'Cause the first time we recorded anything together. We did a tier list. I want you just a quick tier list of rank all of these, please. Can you rank every, can you rank every, uh, you got the Alani Nu up there. This is, this is the biggest tier. Are you an Alani Nu guy? For, uh, for these are, these are unranked. This is the beginning of a tier list where you have to sort these from absolute heaven, S tier, A wonderful and amazing, B pretty damn good, C It's fine. D gets the job done. F, why are you drinking this? Then instant kidney failure is the lowest possible tier. And then of course you can put things in never tried. There are a lot in here. I didn't even realize some of these existed. Full Throttle, that's pretty cool. Full Throttle's in there. We got a lot. Anything standing out? Anything make it in the Augustus rotation or the Rainmaker fridge more frequently than previous?

I think the— I think the biggest one is not actually listed here. Oh, deep cut. There's like a— I think it's called like Red Tiger. It's this Red Tiger Jordanian energy drink.

Instant kidney failure ingredients.

And so I would actually disagree with the premise and say instant kidney failure, if it gives you the optimal nootropic effect, is probably what we're optimizing for.

We never got you to rank Diet Coke. Are you pro Diet Coke or are you a hater?

Um, stand on Diet Coke. You know, I think unfortunately Diet Coke is SF-coded. Oh, however, however, I'll offer, I'll offer my olive branch to SF. Yes, say, um, we did the meme, we dogged on you guys for making nonsense for long enough. We can be friends.

Yeah, now they're, they're shipping, I don't know, semiconductors and hardware. There's a lot of companies up there. Uh, Ulysses, I don't know if you're buddies with Bill. Yeah, right. Yeah, and he's building real stuff up there.

Will, David, and Poseidon.

Yeah, there's a ton of also just like, I feel like—

Both Ulysses and Poseidon. Yeah.

That's hilarious. There's also just a boom of like consumer hardware, industrial robotics. Ford's pretty cool. There's a lot of stuff. And I feel like even if it's like a consumer robot that does your laundry or something, like that's a little bit more, I don't know, just like a more optimistic future than just more ad tech. And I think it sort of checks the box. It's close to checking the box of the Gundo criticism, which was fair.

What is the TBPN like public policy on prediction markets, by the way? Public policy?

Or the open statement? We don't engage in them. We don't trade on them. They're sometimes useful to pull up like the Elon, Sam Altman lawsuits going on right now. I think it's sitting at exactly 50%. So bad example because it tells you nothing. But in terms of like the midterms flipping, I find that really useful. But I generally hear your criticism about like, we don't need more sports betting. So we've had Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points on. I think you agree with him. And I think we're like in loose agreement with that. Okay. That the sports betting is like zero-sum, negative-sum. Did you hear about the, what was it?

Was it the SF guy that, not San Francisco, but Special Forces guy that bet on the Maduro extraction? Yes, that feels—

Bet on himself. Yeah, he's betting on himself, but obviously a violation of the job, I imagine, so not good.

I mean, it's crazy because it puts you and your team in insane harm's way because you have to imagine like Maduro and his government have access to the data source too.

Oh yeah, that's a, I hadn't even thought about that.

That's crazy. —easy. And so you're basically telling the enemy indirectly, like, when you are going to—

Yeah, because they can see a spike in the chart.

Yeah, it's a signal. And so, yeah, the more I sat with that, I was like— Trump's reaction when somebody mentioned it to him was he was like comparing it to like betting on yourself in baseball.

That's a joke. That's not the real thing.

Yeah, but this was like putting— I think that guy should probably go to prison for like 20 years or something. Rough.

But not based in SF. I think both companies are in New York. True.

So, sticking with the finance press. We haven't yet made money off of snow prediction markets. Oh, you saw about the hair dryer, right?

So, there was a Paris weather market, and this guy gets caught on video pulling a hair dryer up to the meter.

I mean, the other thing that was sort of irksome was we got to a point where there were prediction markets around what people would say during their TVPN appearance. Oh. And so that creates this weird thing with the chat where the chat will chime in and be like— Ask him about Bitcoin. Ask him about Bitcoin. And sometimes that's like a reasonable thing. Like, maybe we do want to know, is there a crypto integration to this thing? Or they might want to ask you about, oh, ask him about Abu Dhabi specifically, or ask him about Spain specifically.

Is there anybody's bag we can grab right now?

Yeah, exactly. And so it creates this weird dynamic where it sort of like degrades the quality of the questions that are getting asked in the chat, which is annoying because the chat is very useful for us to bring an extra character in. And then we had a very weird interaction where at one point we had a prediction markets scrolling across the bottom. And a guest, actually Sam Altman, was looking at them 'cause he could see them. And one of them was like, Sam Altman declares AGI. And he's like running this weird thing. Like, this is weird. Like people are gambling on what, if I say this word right now, this triggers this thing. And it's just like distracting. And so there's been like a back and forth there, but still some cool intelligence and some cool like meta-analysis for like understanding what, is going on and just synthesizing a bunch of polling data, that's still pretty interesting to me.

Yeah, no, I think they should be illegal.

Even the political ones, like who's gonna win the next presidential election?

So, well, yes, but I heard one person say you could self-fund a campaign. You ever read this article where it was like— Yeah, bet on yourself. Yeah, exactly. All that to say though, Gundo still, all the changes it's gone through, corporatization, not sleeping in the office anymore, everybody does hate the get-rich-quick, cash-out slop stuff. And if only for the sake of some moral fortitude and the mitigation of the degrading mental quality of everybody across the country, and also the middle and lower classes just being utterly bodied by people that are doing de facto insider trading on these things, like, yeah, they should probably be illegal.

Yeah, that was Saagar's point about just gambling broadly, that like the inaccessibility of like Las Vegas is like a feature, not a bug, and should not be worked out. And you should need to like explain to your friends and family like why you're going to Las Vegas. And then like maybe you're only there for a weekend, you come back and you're like, not just like stepping away from the gambling, but also probably hung out over and being like, I don't need to do that for a couple years, as opposed to like push notification, it's available now. Yeah, yeah, very tricky, very tricky. But stay safe out there.

Uh, I don't know. Any, any more shots you want to call for this year?

Um, for this upcoming year, um, I think ASI, yes or no? ASI? Are you, are you AGI-pilled?

Um, I would have said 2 months ago, no, absolutely not. But some of our smartest philosophy graduates, like super, super AI-native young kids, rebuilt some of the most sophisticated weather models in the world with LLMs this year. So yeah, I would say actually you have to AGI-harden your company. And so we're doing all of this. That feels like AGI.

AI-pilled, not AI-god-pilled. Yeah, yes, yes. Not, not, not. But also you— Like useful tool-pilled. Yeah. Not slop, oh, it's a bubble, it's nothing, it's not even useful.

Like it is useful. No, super useful. I think the weird take though is like most of the economy's faked already. So everybody's jobs getting automated is like ostensibly no big deal.

You've seen those Instagram reels, right? It's like AI's gonna take my job, What job? And it's like a guy skateboarding or something.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Too many examples. So yeah, I think it'll probably revolutionize a bunch of stuff now. I think on the water thing, I brought this up before. The water critique of data centers, yes, sure, will talk my own book all the time, but they don't actually use that much water.

No, I think all of Google use 50 golf courses worth or something like that. Crazy.

Yeah, 50 golf courses just around Southern California.

Controls like 20% of compute or something like that, maybe more. Yeah. It's like absolutely insane. It's not a water issue, it is a power issue. Are you bullish on desalination?

Yeah, yeah, I think desal is gonna be pretty instrumental.

I mean, is there a bit of you where you're looking at what Isaiah's doing and you're like, mega project, desal, like this feels like you could crush that. I don't know, like it's a different shape of company. Like what you're doing right now is maybe more innovative than just being like, there's a desalination plant that works here, I'm gonna build another one, copy paste. But what's really involved in that is like what Isaiah is doing, which is like marshaling the capital, marshaling the political will, getting stakeholders aligned. Like it's this very soft, messy thing.

All things that you're quite good at.

You're good at this. And I feel like, I feel like if, you know, it's like, yeah, right down from your office.

Uh, yeah, well, it's off, right? The, the desal plant— well, are you thinking Carlsbad down in San Diego?

I thought there was one like in El Segundo.

Is that not right? There's the water treatment plant. Hyperion. Yeah, Hyperion. Um, they do a ton of recycling. Okay. No, I think a shot that I will call is by Q1 of next year, uh, Rainmaker is gonna be doing some desal —let's go. And yeah, a lot of that is marshaling political will and stakeholder engagement. It's also, you gotta take the perspective of modular manufacturing of units, right? Like that's what Valor's big thing is for nuclear.

We talked to somebody who was doing a desal at the scale of like a cooler. So, you know, you're going camping, you can fill it up with just swamp water and you can get clean water, battery-powered. It's a smaller unit. You know, but you can kind of scale up.

Yeah, sorry, I'm laughing to myself. I realize I haven't told any of my investors yet.

Don't worry, it's not like it's live. We'll review this before we post it.

No, no, no. But, uh, yes, stay tuned for DeSal. I think the DeSal, um, really the roadmap is really good at snow time, uh, precipitation enhancement, um, then come Next year we're gonna be doing operational summertime, like warm cloud precipitation enhancement alongside hail suppression. That's the same period when an arm of the company will start doing this desal work. And then thereafter, the third thing that you have to do is automated tractor tilling of biochar or hydrogels into soil because we make a ton of water right now via cloud seeding. But if you do that in say Moab, in Southern Utah, your effective precipitation is about 10%. Most of it evaporates away before it actually percolates into aquifers or runs off into streams. If you start to till the soil with these absorptive materials that increase the amount of organic matter there, you can change the trophic potential of the soil such that it's not just sand anymore, but grasses can start to live there, biota can start to survive in the soil, and then you retain more water. Year over year because of that. That's more of like a 2028 arm that we're gonna stand up. But snowpack now, rain and hail next year, desal towards the end of that, and then automated tractor tilling thereafter. Very cool.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show.

Fantastic to get the update.

Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you soon. We have our next guest, Rick Caruso, joining.

Get the boots up on the table for the—

Nice. What you got?

Look at these. American Conservation Coalition. There we go.

Looking sharp. Well, we have about 40 minutes until Rick Caruso joins us live in the TVP and UltraDome. We will go through some news since we really haven't been through the timeline. Uh, we got to start with these Diet Coke videos because I fell down a rabbit hole of Diet Coke Instagram reels.

I'm surprised you weren't in this.

Yeah, it took him a long time to figure out that I drink 3 Diet Cokes a day and I love Diet Coke, but these, these videos have brought me a lot of joy. So we can play one. There's been a new study about Diet Coke versus Coke Zero, and we can pull it up in just a minute. We can also flow to something else, whatever we want. The world is our oyster today in the TBN UltraDome. Rick Caruso will be joining at 1:30 to talk LA fires retrospective, state of the LA real estate market, his management style, risk preferences, deal philosophy. We'll go through it all. Fung shui. At 1:30. I want a feng shui deep dive for sure. We're gonna get that out of him.

Anyways, let's play this video. They just came out with this new study that compared people that drink Diet Coke versus people that drink Coke Zero.

And what it actually found was that people that drink Coke Zero are idiots, and then people that drink Diet Coke are actually sigma chads that are way better than everyone else.

Thank you, thank you, we needed that. Wait, play the restock video. There's a restock video that is— it claims to be $4,000 of Diet Coke stored all over this person's massive house.

I think it's about $200.

Let's count it up, let's count it up, let's pull up the restock video and you tell me, is this $4,000 worth of Diet Coke? Okay, that's maybe $20 of Diet Coke. This is maybe $10 of Diet Coke. Here's another 10. We're what, under $100 still of Diet Coke, I would imagine.

I'm just so curious, when do they opt for the plastic bottle versus the can?

It is odd. Some people have preferences. I saw again on Instagram in my Diet Coke video, deep dive. Someone who insists that the 16-ounce aluminum can of Diet Coke tastes better than the 12-ounce aluminum can. That's the level of Diet Coke aficionado.

Also check out the organizational inefficiency.

Yeah, what's going on here? In this fridge. What's going on here? She's not—

Just putting up in the front. Yeah, yeah.

Frauding. Frauding. Yeah, because you could stack the Diet Coke much deeper, but once you're that far in the reel, Instagram is just the Diet Coke app for you now. Yes, well, I'm getting, I'm so deep that I'm getting Diet Coke vibe reels. Let's pull this one up because this one is electric. This is like peak content. Play this, play the next one. Is this it? Yeah. Is this it? No. No, there's so many, so many Diet Coke videos. It says, it's a, must be heaven. Says thank on the thumbnail. There we go. This one.

Add in the accident because this must be heaven. I gotta testify.

Come up in the spot. This is like— John just— the fact that somebody took so long to edit this together is, uh, that looks like something you could one-shot. Not— and I mean, it's like in CapCut and you'd need to like choose the words and place them and add the features. Like, you should be able to puppeteer that with an agent, but I don't know of any agents that are really there on the video editing front. Certainly like the next chip to fall, the next opportunity.

Anyways. Rise says, "A Chad might mog, but when the jester performs, even the king sits to listen." True. And this is incredibly true. We have a friend of the show that is 100% a jester. —And the closest thing we have to kings in this industry will pick up his call and listen to whatever he has to say, even if he's jester maxing. That's true. Every time. Based16t, gotta be honest, bro. Oh, deleted. I think you got deleted.

But said, gotta be honest, bro, I have no idea what a semiconductor is. Do you know why they call them semiconductors?

That made me laugh so hard.

Deleted. Do you know why they call them semiconductors?

Semi— I do not.

So full-on conductors like copper, electricity flows through it constantly. A semiconductor is like geranium or silicon. The current can be turned on and off, so it's semiconductive. And that started the computing boom because you can effectively store ones and zeros in it. A little more complicated than that, but that's like the very high-level version for why they are semiconductors. That's not why they call it Semi Analysis. It's because Dylan just says he doesn't want to do full-on analysis. He only wants to do semi-analysis. I think his analysis is totally full-on analysis, but he decided to go with semi-analysis. Anyway, imagine genuinely believing that the entire human race was going to be wiped out in the next year, and then you just kind of aimlessly argue about it on Twitter. That is a weird, weird phenomenon that's going on. Oh, Phil is looking looking for a large gong in the Bay Area. If you are in possession of a gong that is over 30 inches, give him a call.

He's in the market. Is that even a large— is a 30-inch gong a large gong though?

How big is our gong? I think it's 42. 42. We're, we're around there. We're around there. Anyway, do you know where we got this gong?

GongsUnlimited.com.

GongsUnlimited.com. Phil, you have your answer. Okay, but here's I could have replied to this on X, but I chose to save it to Monday. Okay, here's the thing. And tell it to you in person.

Yeah. Gong, why is, why did we get the biggest gong?

Why did we?

Like, why is there a limit on gong size?

I have said, we've seen bigger gongs online. It should, yeah, should you not be able to. They do exist, but they get very expensive. Sort of an exponential relationship between gong size and price. Unfortunately, which is rough out there if you're in the gong market.

Okay, we have to talk about this study that went viral over the weekend. Yeah, it is, uh, placebo sleep affects cognitive functioning. And the takeaway is that literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology. Sleep badly, convince yourself you're well Suggested: stressful day, convince yourself it's fuel. Failed: convince yourself it's useful data. Uh, so in this study, it says the placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment but rather to an individual's mindset. This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In two studies examining whether perceived sleep quality affects cognitive functioning, 164 participants reported their previous night's sleep quality. They were then randomly assigned one of two sleep quality conditions or two control conditions. Those in the above average sleep quality condition were informed that they had spent 28% of their total sleep time in REM, whereas those in the below average sleep quality condition were informed that they had only spent 16.2% of their time in REM sleep. Assigned sleep Sleep quality but not self-reported sleep quality significantly predicted participants' scores on the paced auditory serial addition test and controlled oral word association task. Assigned sleep quality did not predict participants' scores on the digit span test, as expected, nor did it predict scores on the symbol-digit modalities test, when it was unexpected. The control conditions show that the findings were not due to demand characteristics. Characteristics from the experimental protocol. Those findings supported the hypothesis that mindset can influence cognitive states in both positive and negative directions, suggesting a means of controlling one's health and cognition. Takeaway: golden retriever mode, golden retriever mindset.

They made a movie about the golden retriever mindset years ago. I know you haven't seen it. Have you seen it? It's called Yes Man. I was thinking Air Bud. Air Bud is a great answer to that. No, that's about a literal golden retriever. Yes Man with Jim Carrey is effectively about the golden retriever mindset. Basically, he's a bank loan officer. He's become withdrawn. He's going through a divorce. He's having an increasingly negative look outlook on life. He then goes to this seminar with an inspirational guru who has him enter a covenant with the universe and say yes to everything asked of him. And so he just has to say yes to everything, and hijinks ensue, but he has a fantastic time. And it's a very, like, interesting, like, silver lining story. Bradley Cooper's in it, Zooey Deschanel, and Jim Carrey star. Highly recommend I recommend it if you're looking for a good uplifting movie this week.

Should we talk more about Meta's space solar project? Absolutely, what's going on there? So they announced this morning two new partnerships to bring innovative energy generation and storage to our data centers. We mentioned this earlier. Space Solar partnering with Overview Energy to beam up to 1 gigawatt of space solar power from Earth orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power. Production. What is the company? I think they're in El Segundo.

Reflex Orblin. Reflex Orblin. We talked about that. I think Sean Maguire did the deal.

Yep. And so, yeah, I was not familiar with Overview Energy. And then they're also doing—

And also, who is it? Co-founder of Robinhood, Baju? Is that it? What's his name?

Yeah, but I thought that was more of a compute play.

He has done more compute, but at least at one point, a piece of the business was collect energy on solar panels in space and beam it down via laser. And so that was, all of these projects are incredibly difficult to math out and require a lot of different things to go well. They're very exciting, but, This company, we've clearly been working for a long time, but if it's working for them and it winds up working for Meta, you can imagine that there are going to be lots and lots of buyers because energy, of course, is in short supply. The mirror in space is such an interesting solution to what I'd heard before, which was collected on a solar panel and then beam it down on a laser. A mirror is such a simple solution to that. So we'll have to see. It feels like step one is just getting more solar panels down on the ground. You know, you see these data center projects and a lot of natural gas turbines, not a lot of nuclear.

Well, the question is like, if you have this capability, this ability to bring basically 24/7 sun, can you bring a lot more solar projects online because the economics economics just make more sense because you can power things like data centers, especially if you have batteries. The batteries that they are doing in tandem with this apparently have 100 hours of capacity. So presumably even if you had, you know, a few days of cloudy weather, you could still keep energy coming through the system.

[Speaker:JOHN COOGAN] Yeah, yeah, it feels tough because data center wants to run 24/7, needs to run 24/7. The math on depreciation and the cost of the chips completely changes if you have intermittent electricity. And in some cases, if you lose power, you can actually damage the data center. And so there's a whole bunch of other things that you need to work through. Did you see this post from Benjamin Todd? This was a very interesting post. We found this a little bit. You were the first person that kind of brought this up that I'm aware of. So the question is, you know, size impact on jobs, on jobs and employment broadly. And I had brought up the— I'd looked at overall employment in India, overall employment in the Philippines, and how it was tracking this year, because of course, there's a lot of outsourcing. There's a lot of lower-skilled, white-collar style work, call centers, BPOs, outsourced processing centers small atomic tasks that get done abroad. I expected that if there was going to be an uptick in unemployment, it would show up in potentially India and the Philippines first. Of course, we heard that somewhat hilarious quote that 90% of the Philippines economy is call centers. Of course, it's not, it's closer to 5%. 5% or something like that, maybe 6%. But everyone sort of agrees, at least on the surface level, that it's, as Benjamin Todd put it, it's hard to think of a more AI-exposed job than Filipino call centers. But oddly, in 2025, employment was up 4%. And so of course, people will say, well, maybe it's earlier, the technology's getting better, you know, all these different things. There has been a process of automation around call centers. I mean, I was trying to get on the phone with the company just earlier. I had to go through a whole phone tree. It was even hard to find the phone number. There's a whole bunch of steps that companies take to try and reduce the amount of call center operators that are in the flow. And so this was not necessarily a new trend. There was some other commentary about this. About this that I saw that I don't know if I can find it now. There was a quote, US call center worker employment is in decline, but that started before ChatGPT and is probably mainly about outsourcing. So the outsourcing boom, you would think it would've started with like the dawn of the internet. I would've expected the trend to start in 2005, you know, like— Internationalization, globalization was well underway. In fact, US call center business support services, all employees for the United States, the peak happened in 2016 and then declined sort of during COVID and then has been declining ever since, probably as things move offshore. So there is a world where, you know, these technologies, they take time to diffuse. AI might play the similar role in the sense that like there is some sort of onboarding cost to moving from a US-based to a Filipino call center. That's taken a decade to actually decline by, you know, not even half. It went from 900,000 people to 650,000 people over the past decade. Certainly not good if you're in that industry. In America. But interesting, interesting nonetheless. Also, Poland is having a breakout year. Income in Poland is on track to overtake income in the United Kingdom. This is based on a forecast for advanced economies. UK is growing now slower than Poland. So, everyone who's a fan of Poland will be excited to hear the news that Poland Really is going through a fast takeoff over there in Poland. They are doing some great stuff. Anyway, Poland was once a communist third world country. Now it's overtaking Britain. This is in the Telegraph. European superpower is luring a record number of UK immigrants with its restored economy and robust patriotism. Interesting. 3 months ago, the British businessman Johnny Mercer advertised a marketing role in his construction firm, PoleStrawd. Based in Poland. Not long ago, people weren't interested in moving here. As he sits down with a trendy French bistro this time, however, Mercer was inundated with Britons eager to work in Poland. 35 applicants for the job were British and happy to relocate permanently, including one without any British links who got the job. People are excited. Noam Brown shared some interesting details about on the different constraints on AI progress. He says, "Noam Brown suggesting that model weights become relatively less important as inference becomes more important, which means securing weights still matters, but securing inference capacity becomes a strategic advantage." This is from a slide for a talk he gave, which is very, very interesting just from an AI safety perspective. The idea of, of sneaking the weights out on a hard drive that you've smuggled in your suitcase, and that being equivalent to a suitcase bomb is, or a— Or refined uranium. Yeah, yeah, it's not quite the same. Maybe the chips are the refined uranium more than the actual weights, and the weights are merely one piece of the puzzle.

Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I think like recently the past few months we've seen this big fuss over like distillation. Yeah. But like, you know, maybe there's an angle where like distillation actually gets less important because, you know, even if the Chinese can distill our models, they actually can't serve them. Yeah.

So it's like, you know, is that even important? Yeah, yeah.

And even if the models are exactly the same, if I'm able to put 10 agents securing my bank account against your 1 agent trying to break into it, I will have 10 times the amount of solutions. And so I should win that battle almost all the time. And you, you, it does, it does seem like we're shifting towards this, uh, the, the incredible value of inference and capacity, which of course makes the whole data center slowdown ban so much more complicated because, uh, once you get into like the geopolitical considerations, uh, and, uh, and what, what happens when large inference clusters start coming online elsewhere. And you go back to the Dwarkesh, the Dwarkesh, what was it, probability density curve where he says like, if AGI comes soon, America wins. If it comes over long-term, China wins because he's worried about China ramping up their capacity over time. But they're behind currently.

Semaphore posted an article, said meet the man who's outsourcing almost everything in his life to his AI assistant. It listens to every conversation, reads every message, emails, and schedules meetings for him, all while pretending to be him. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me. And Taylor says, I think this will be normal in 5 years. She has an excerpt here. So he's made a small fortune selling multiple companies to Apple. Multiple companies to Apple. That's always— I love stories like that. Another one. Who recently launched a voice recognition startup called Olive, said his personal AI has all but taken over his life. Now when he wakes up most mornings, he consults the agenda his AI assistant has crafted for him and then spends his days following its directions. The AI has permission to email people on his behalf and sometimes sets up in-person meetings with people he has never met. It listens to conversations he has with his 3 kids and then suggests parenting advice, which he says has improved his relationship with them. It's a portrait of an emerging class of token maxers, power users who are plunging tens of thousands of dollars into MacGyver-level AI assistance, not by waiting for the next big model release, but by orchestrating today's models in loops with more computing power, more passes, and more automated checking, and a massive dose of risk tolerance. The idea is to give the system an unlimited amount of tokens and access to every conceivable data source conceivable piece of relevant data. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me.

So some of this is extremely weird. Some of this is maybe very normal. I'm trying to think of like how many of my interactions in my daily life are like mediated by technology already. Like my alarm clock comes from my phone. It decides when I wake up more than anything else. In fact, I have the Eight Sleep decide like the optimal time that I wake up within a few minutes, right? Because it's like an adaptive alarm. And then I get in the car, I select Maps, it sort of tells me what streets to go on. I'm merely like the embodiment of the AI to get where I need to go. And then I have a calendar that tells me what I'm doing when. There are some, there's some level of like intermediation, But I don't know. There's still incredible value in touching grass. And I think that the—

We will see a bull market.

I just think we're going to be in this barbell world for so— potentially forever, where you have Larry Ellison is buying Oracle data centers and going super long on AGI, and also, CBS and Foghorn Leghorn, and you gotta own Bugs Bunny, and you gotta own Superman and Batman, right? And then on the flip side, you have Josh Kushner, investor in OpenAI, a ton of different artificial intelligence companies. And then on the other side, SF Giants. And it's like, are these diametrically opposed or are they actually both true visionaries visions of the future of the world. It seems like something that is going to continue. We should go back to Mannes. Do you want to read through the Financial Times with Tyler? And I'm going to take a quick break. Let's do it. Can we do a queue up with Tyler in place of me? And you can read through the Financial Times and sort of some of the reactions because—

Yeah, so regulators reviewed the deal, reviewed whether deal violated Beijing's investment rules. China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of AI app Manus as Washington and Beijing vie for dominance over the emerging technology. The decision marks an extraordinary late-stage intervention by Beijing involving two non-Chinese companies. Meta had already begun to integrate software from Manus, which was founded in China but relocated to Singapore last year. It was unclear how the acquisition could be unwound at such a late stage. A person briefed on Beijing's decision said the announcement could be intended primarily as a warning for similar deals in the future. The person said the gesture was pretty harsh and it carries a strong intention to stop follow-on deals like Manus. In reality, it's hard to unwind a done deal. Uh, Manus has been, uh, live, I believe, in the Facebook Ads Manager. Uh, it Obviously been heavily branded as a Meta Platforms company for some time now. The Meta team has been investing in scaling it. And so, yeah, very much feels like a done— it had been a done deal. I don't think there's been any reporting on it, but I would assume that the full cap table had been paid out in large part. Already. So it's very unclear how you undo something like this. I'm not— it's not super surprising given that we obviously forced the sale of TikTok. And this feels like somewhat of a response. Yeah, it is interesting. Like, you know, is this the moment when like China wakes up?

Right.

People, you know, they're super like AGI-pilled. They're like, okay, at some point China is going to like wake up. Up. Like, this, this seems like directionally towards that. But it is interesting because, like, I don't know, like, like, you have this and then you have, you know, China approving the sale of Nvidia chips there. So it's like, okay, how much do they really want to, you know, disentangle from the US regarding AI? It's interesting. Yeah, AI 2027 had China wakes up in mid-2026.

Yeah, it feels like, I don't know, Manus is, I mean, it's not like a cash flow acquisition. Like it's not a highly profitable thing that you're trading on earnings. It's a team.

And it's a wrapper.

And it's a technology, but the technology is somewhat commoditized. There's been code leaks from Clocktoad.

It's a super talented product team with a demonstrated track record of like getting real paying users, right? And so the question was always, you know, how much does Zuck care about, you know, keeping this as a standalone product, an AI assistant for business that—

Why even buy the whole company then? Why not do one of those zombie acquisitions where you get the talent and then you get a license and then there's a ghost ship and you leave the ghost ship alone?

Because that's gotta be harder to approve, or harder to block. I'm assuming that that's kind of what happens. I don't know. I mean—

It seems like it's too late. They already bought the company, right? Like, they already did the proper acquisition, like, as you said, paid out the cap table. I don't know. I don't know the exact terms of the deal. But it probably would have been easier to do something like what Groq and NVIDIA did, or like the Windsurf Google thing, where you're bringing people over with this with this, like, contract, and then, like, yes, China blocks it, but it's like, what are they even blocking? It's just people getting a new job and a licensing deal that the money flows through, and then maybe they try and claw that back. I don't know. It is a tricky, tricky situation.

Yeah, I'm not familiar with an acquisition that actually closed in venture that was then later fully unwound. I don't know.

I don't know. Dillion's taking a victory lap. He said, wow, so weird that they can do this since it's not a Chinese company, according to Gurley. There's always been back and forth about whether or not China would have any power over the Manus team. And it seems like they have some sort of power. Chris McGuire is writing about this. He's on the Council of Foreign Relations. Says after China's cancellation of Meta's purchase of Manus, Why would any founder start an AI company in China if they had a choice? I mean, well, you could make money and cash flow in China. Like, you don't necessarily need to sell to an American hyperscaler to have a wonderful life as a founder of an AI company in China. But he makes the argument, in China, you have access to less compute, less capital, and salaries are lower than in the West. And if you are so successful that a non-Chinese Chinese firm tries to acquire you for billions of dollars, the Chinese government will lure you back to Beijing, ban you from leaving the country, and take your profits by canceling the acquisition. Manus did everything right. They even moved their entire business to Singapore to comply with US outbound investment restrictions. Their only mistake was that they originally founded the company in China. It's not even clear what this means for China to force Meta to unwind the transaction. Is it going to force Manus researchers to return to China and place exit bans on them too? Is it going to force Manus' founders and shareholders to pay back $2 billion to Meta? This is what happens when you regulate by fiat rather than by rule of law. Ultimately, this is a much larger defeat for the Chinese ecosystem than for the United States. Interesting. Meta will be fine without Manus, but Chinese nationals looking to AI to found AI companies will increasingly start them overseas. Hmm. It's interesting. The message from the Chinese government here is that every AI company founded in China will forever remain subject to the Chinese government regulatory pressure and manipulation regardless of its legal status. So he goes on, but you can read that there. What's Bill Bishop up to these days? He says, he's quoting from the Financial Times. Did we already read this? A person familiar with the matter said Beijing had told the two companies that the deal must be unwound completely, including returning funds, re-registering the company's ownership, and halting Meta's use of the Meta, of the Manus algorithm. The person said that if the parties failed to fully undo the acquisition, Beijing could impose penalties on Meta, limit its China-related business, and possibly pursue criminal charges for individuals involved.

That is a wild— Yeah, China does have a good amount of leverage given that like tens of billions of Meta ad spend originates from Chinese companies. And so they could put pressure on Chinese companies to pull back spend, which would, would hurt Meta. So yeah, very, very unclear how this will all sort itself out. But yeah, unfortunate, unfortunate for everyone involved.

Yeah. What else is going on the timeline today? I mean, Bessen says game's out, game over. If US doesn't win AI over China in the Wall Street Journal. As I said, winning this race is a national imperative and they will throw everything at it riding the wave. Lots of people chiming in on that. Ethan Mollick says, we really need a better word for the good kind of AI psychosis. The one where someone goes into a fugue state with the latest model and returns 40 days later from the mountaintop with something new. Yeah, AI mania instead of AI psychosis. There aren't enough examples of that. I guess Open Claw would be a good example of AI mania where he was deep in, in vibe coding and vibe coded a product that wound up going mega viral, making money and satisfying a lot of people. Like you can just debate whether or not Open Claw is like a game changer, overhyped, or will be copied. All that stuff, but like people definitely enjoyed using it and people still enjoy using it, and that's probably the good outcome. But yeah, I don't know. There aren't— there are simply too many examples of people saying, "I stayed up all night. I vibe-coded for, you know, 10 million lines of code," and then you ask them what they shipped and they just don't have anything really tangible to show for it. But hopefully this all changes soon. Forge frenzy. I like this. There was something else from Taylor Lorenz. She did an analysis of how much AI content is distributed across each category on Substack. So pulled in— did she like vibe code this?

Let's run this article through Pangram. Yeah.

It's, uh, dude, Did somebody do that already? That is a funny joke. Extracted from the link truncated. Fully human written, says Pangram Labs. So she says, I use Pangram Labs, the AI detection tool, to analyze thousands of posts from the top Substack newsletters across every category to find out. Here's what I discovered. And the main screenshot is that near pure AI is overrepresented overrepresented in technology, philosophy, and health content, and underrepresented in fiction, music, and food and drink content. Also US politics. I would've expected a lot more political slop. I am also, I mean, I'm not surprised that fiction is not being slopped because like when you try and get an LLM to write something fictional, it seems to fall down more there than code or math or research or anything else. Like when you're thinking about technology or even health, if you're just trying to summarize like, here's all the literature, I did a deep research report, even if you're transparent with your audience and you just say, hey, like here's my take, but then here's a deep research report on, you know, pulling together all the different resources. AI seems very, very good at that. So I would expect that representation. Fiction has been stuck for a little bit. I'm not exactly sure when we'll see a breakthrough there, but there isn't really a great benchmark for it. It's somewhat like comedy. You know it when you see it. It's hard to determine. It's hard to RL against. It's oddly stickier when people thought it was the first thing to go, when the computers learned to write. It's turning into like the last thing to go, which is just a very odd outcome. Anyway, we have our next guest joining us. The TVP and Ultram. Rick Caruso is here, and he will join in just a few minutes. Um, and we are ready for him whenever he is ready. Um, let's see what else.

Porsche sold off their stake in Bugatti. Oh yes, uh, upon completion, uh, to, uh, Hoff Capital, right? Uh, oh yes, capital. I think it's Hoff Capital. Uh, they had invested acquired Rimac in 2022. They said, drawn to what Matej had built from a garage in Croatia into one of the most technically ambitious companies in the automotive industry, home to record-setting hypercars, a tier 1 supplier of batteries trusted by leading global automakers, and since 2021, the iconic Bugatti brand. And so we are looking to get some of the relevant parties on the show. I'm very excited about, but excited to see what the Bugatti Rimac does as an independent brand.

Very cool. Pull up this post from Michael Chang. It's showing sort of a glimpse of like the future of generative UI. So the prompt here, hey ChatGPT, what's the weather like today? Might have been a little bit more complicated than that, but using the new Images 2.0, it is rendering sort of a video game game style map. I don't even know. This feels like the type of map that you'd see at the front of like the Lord of the Rings book or like a Game of Thrones book. But it's giving you the actual information, like accurately telling you for each neighborhood what the weather is like. Of course, you didn't need that much information because every single town is 56 degrees, maybe 57, maybe 55. There's very slight, there's very, very slight state differences. But it is, it is an interesting world where you're getting closer and closer to this generative on-the-fly UI. Ben Thompson wrote a big bull case for the Meta augmented reality headsets, not just Orion, but also the Meta Ray-Ban displays today, talking about as AI models get better, on-the-fly UI generation with less Chrome, which is like, like the top bar and the bottom bar and less permanent UI functionality, is what actually feels magical. Like when you go to, you know, look at something and you get something that perfectly sums up exactly what you're looking for on the fly. And previously, was it possible to build something like this? Absolutely. You— but you would have to hang out in Blender and create the 3D map and render and then build some webpage that would go and pull in the data from APIs and place it on the—

Ryan says one tower Golden Gate is a crime. No, there's still hallucination.

There is. I found a benchmark that ImageGen 2 fails at. If you want to take a look at an anagram and you want to show how that anagram maps to a different word and you want lines and string between the letters. So they're— what's the— quick brown fox jumps over the— no, that's a— I don't know. You know an anagram where you take one word and rearrange the letters and it becomes another word? Like drawing the lines between the two words that map up, it's bad at that. It's still bad at that. Even on Pro. So more work to be done. Job's not finished. But we have our next guest, Rick Caruso, live with with us in the TDP and UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Rick. Please take a seat. And I just want to say thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. And, uh, speak with us. How is your 2026 going so far?

It's going well, thank you for asking. Yeah, yeah, very good. Family's good. Yes, business is good. So I have no complaints.

What, what is on the top of your mind for this year, next year? What are your biggest goals?

Are you talking about from a business standpoint?

I'm talking about from an everything standpoint. From an everything standpoint. Zoom out and I want to know— 360. 360? What does a great next year look like for you?

A great next year starts out with a lot of happiness and health with the family. That's number one. First and foremost. That's all I care about. Always. Yeah. And we just became grandparents, so that's— Congratulations. I know. That's really great. It's really a great thing. That's amazing. Oh, the place goes wild. The place does go wild. The place goes wild. We called over Luca, Luca Caruso. Luca. Yeah, Luca, good Italian name. I love it. And on the business front, we are pushing really hard and growing. We've got 2 projects already under construction, one in Calabasas. We're expanding the Commons at Calabasas, residential tower and more retail. And we bought, I can't say where yet because we haven't completely announced it yet, but we bought a golf course and a club. And that's under construction, and we're expanding our club business.

And we're going to start—

Generally in California. Generally in California, LA. Yeah. But I just spent a lot of time, as maybe you see on my social media, I was in Nashville. We were in Austin. We were down in Florida this last week and making a big push to be developing outside the state.

What does pushing look like for you in the real estate context? Does it mean going broader on the fundraising side, on the prospecting side, evaluating more properties, hiring more staff to evaluate more potential projects? [Speaker:JOHN_COOGAN] Yeah, good questions.

So we're a little bit unique. Everything that we do, we've done on our own balance sheet. So we're not out raising funds. And we've continued to grow on our own balance sheet. So when we're looking at pushing, there's really multiple levels because we're fully integrated as a company. Yeah. So we not only design and build our projects in-house, and we bring in outside contractors and outside architects, but we oversee it all in-house. We operate all of our properties in-house. And so we are just like a dog on a bone in terms of pushing our operating profits, generating more cash flow, and at the same time elevating the guest experience, which at at all costs can never be sacrificed. And then at the same time, we're putting new projects in the pipeline. And we're very disciplined about how we do that, what our returns look like. So, that's the big push. And we want properties that are irreplaceable, that are in high barriers of entry. And we want properties in cities and states that actually respect and want our investment. And we think our investment is safe. It's our own capital, my own capital. We're very careful about how we invest it, but we can make decisions very quickly because we don't have a lot of committees to go through.

Have you ever had doubts about that model? We don't see a lot of venture capital firms in the tech industry that— we see some very high GP commits. We don't see very many firms that have no outside LPs at all. Jane Street in high frequency is notorious for are also not having LPs. Have you ever considered it? Or has it been the model works, don't break it?

I feel like it ultimately, the client, the customer wins, because if you're spending your own money on something, like the experience has to be fantastic.

Yeah, well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's right. There's a couple of things there. So when I started the company about 40 years ago, I would have never been able to raise money and do what I wanted to do. It just wasn't an option. Well, if I would have— even more recently, if I would have said to you or anybody else, I'm going to go build a hotel up in Montecito on the beach, and it's going to be a 5-star hotel, but I got one small problem here, we got a train that runs through the property. You been up to Miramar?

I was there. I stayed there this weekend. OK. I'm going up there. I go there. I go there all the time. You'll laugh at this. I'm in Malibu. But when my wife and I want to get away, it was our wedding anniversary. We love going to the Rosewood.

I love it.

Which is so funny because I'm literally living on the beach in Malibu. And I'm like, I need to get away for a weekend.

I need to relax. And go straight to the beach.

It's pretty good.

You're in rare air there. No, but the funny thing is— It's funny because my mom's side of the family is from Orange County. So I have like a love for the Surf Liner, right? Okay, yeah. That runs through Orange County too. So when I'm at the Rosewood, it feels like I'm at home.

Yeah. And I would tell you that before the hotel was built, just describing that, rightfully so, you'd say you're crazy. You just can't put a 5-star hotel with a train running through the property 6, 7 times a day. The question is, can you take pieces of real estate and do something really special? We have a rule in the company also that every piece of real estate's got some kind of issue. You can either isolate that issue, or you could celebrate that issue. I can't isolate a train, so I better figure out how to celebrate the train and make the train an amenity to the property. I say that just— I could have never fundraised around the Miramar, right? Now, maybe now I could. And we're actually looking at a model that would allow— because we get a lot of requests from firms to joint venture with us and whatnot. So, we're starting to look at that model. And I think maybe we could do that now, because even if I said to somebody, okay, I'm going to go build the Grove, I'm going to turn my back on the street, I'm going to create my own street, and then we're going to have this trolley going up and down. And actually the trolley goes nowhere, but it's going to be really cool, they would have said, no, the trolley's gone. We're not paying for the trolley. If you didn't have the trolley at the Grove, the Grove would be the Grove.

Guys obsessed with trains.

I love it. I know. I know. No, no, it's not. I'm sending it to my child. Make them stop.

I know, a lot of guys are.

Okay, speaking of your childhood, speaking of starting out in a point where no one would finance these projects, did you have a mentor or did you have sort of a historical historical legend that you look to the way a value investor might look to a Warren Buffett, or a technologist might look to Steve Jobs? Did you have someone that you were identifying with or learning from in the early days?

I had my dad. Yeah. My dad was my best friend and certainly a mentor. He started his own business. He was an entrepreneur. Yeah. And he was a great advisor. He was the one that literally drove to my house. We spoke every night after work. We never We never worked together. But after I announced that I was buying the Miramar, he literally drove to my house that night saying, you've lost your mind now.

Which I actually respect very much. What was the state of Miramar when you bought it?

Was it— It was— there was a lot of the old buildings were still there, pretty decrepit. But it wasn't an operating property? No, it was not an operating property. It stopped operating for about 15 years.

Wow, so it was just falling apart. Falling apart.

We were the third buyers into it. And I bought it from Ty Warner, who tried to get it developed and couldn't. And then Ty bought it from— I'm blanking on the name that has Studio 54.

Ty Warner of Meat Babies fame?

Yeah. Wow. And who had Studio 54 in New York?

I know I'm dating you. I'm familiar with Studio 54.

He bought it before Ty, and they couldn't get it developed. So we were the third group into it from the original family. But listen, I think curiosity is one of the most important things in business. And so I study a lot of people. I study a lot of companies. I've done it my whole career. I think meeting people in your industry or outside of your industry is really critically important. And I cold call people. And I'll say, do you mind having a cup of coffee? I have zero agenda. I just want to understand how how you think, what you do, how you became successful. I learned a lot from that. I think it's a constant learning arc that I'm involved in.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] If you don't need to worry about or deal with wrangling outside investors for a new project, who are the stakeholders that you're trying to build a constituency with to make sure that a project goes flawlessly or has the best possible outcome? There's retail shops, there's employees, there's the local community. How do you think about them and making sure that everyone is aligned throughout the process?

Well, first and foremost, it's the guest experience. So we have a guest experience and then we have a customer experience. The guest experience is you guys coming by with your families. Sure. Shopping, staying with us, whatever. The customer experience is our customers, Nordstrom, Allo, Apple, whoever we're doing business with. We have to be really great landlords and deliver great value to them. And we want to make sure we're taking care of their customers really well. And then we think about our employees. We want to have an environment where people are excited to work. We work hard. There's a lot of intensity at our office because we tend to be perfectionists and we're trying to constantly reinvent the curve on these properties. And so I want to take care of my Employees, I have an incredible team of people. And then, you know, it's my family, because I want this company to be dynastic. I want it to live long after I live and hand it down to the family. So I think about all of those people, but every day that all of us wake up, we are literally thinking about the guest experience and how we continue to elevate that and make it something really special.

On that guest experience, I heard a conspiracy theory. Oh, okay. That I want you to address. Can't wait to hear it. I heard a conspiracy theory that the guest experience is so, so important that 90% of the people that you see at the Grove are paid actors. Yeah. Everyone you're sitting next to on the train, the person that's looking at the fountain excited, not just, not the people in the Apple Store, not the people serving you food, but the people walking around. And on certain days I might be the only real normal guest. Is there anything to that? Could be.

Could be, I don't know. Could be. I'd hate to have that payroll.

That does sound like 9,000 extra employees.

18 million people coming through the Grove.

That's a hell of a payroll. 18 million people coming through, wow.

Okay, wrote, your dad thinks you're crazy when you buy Miramar. At what point does he call you and say, I think you might be onto something?

Well, you know, Pop was— the greatest gift that he gave me was permission not to go into his company. He was in the car business, and I know he wanted me to be in the car business with him in the worst way. But I think that's one of the greatest gifts your parents can give you, is to say, "All right, go do what you want to do," you know, that you're good at and passionate about. He never lived long enough. He died when he was in his 90s. He never lived long enough long enough to see the completed product. But I know that Pop would be very proud of it. You know, he didn't understand the Grove at first. It's like, what are you doing? And, you know, why are you doing it that way? But he was always super supportive. But I think the conversations we had every night, it was not only a father and a son, it was a father and a son who were both in business. And him challenging me was like really important because I didn't grow up in the real estate business. I had no background in the real estate business. So it's not like I came out of this industry or from an industry and I knew what all the rules were. I actually believe very strongly that one of the reasons we've been successful is I didn't know the rules. And so I didn't know I was breaking a lot of rules. I didn't know I had to build a property with a roof and no sunlight and no windows. And no landscaping and make you feel like you're walking through a prison.

That is the default.

Right, if I would've grown up in the mall industry, that's what I would've built. Yep, totally. So, but it was great having him challenge me with many, many people challenging me along the way, including communities that we serve. That goes to the other priority of people we're thinking about. We're very, very protective and supportive of the communities we're in, whether it's Montecito or LA or Calabasas. And it's— they're good people.

Have any data center developers called you and said, how do you do it? Like, what's your playbook? Because data centers are ugly. They don't employ a lot of people. They're probably a harder sell than a lot of the developments that you've done. But you certainly have faced a lot of opposition over time, but got people around and got them aligned and ultimately created spaces that I think make the, whatever area they're in, better. Thank you.

Well, a data center doesn't need to worry about any of that. I mean, they need to get their permits and I know there's a lot of push against data centers now. Yeah. But they don't have a guest experience to worry about other than they're doing what they're intended to do. So no, they've never reached out to me.

But don't you think— Maybe they should. Maybe they should because if they were less isolated saws, they might face less pushback. They could. That's true.

There's nothing— listen, I'm a big believer it's always good to make things really, really nice and attractive. And we spend a lot of time and a lot of money making things nice and attractive. And it always has worked to our benefit.

Is feng shui a valuable practice?

100%. Everything is feng shui'd. Explain that.

How did you get into feng shui?

We got into it because I started studying it a little bit. And in fact, In fact, when you take a look at the Grove, our advisor in feng shui, Catherine, does every one of our properties. She reviews all of our plans before a property is built. She is on the property before we open, blessing it and all the things that need to be done. And it's respectful of a culture that we care about as a guest, but it also makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. So the way the railroad at the Grove goes and how it moves and turns was very important not to intersect or get too close to the fountain, because that's bad feng shui. It would be cutting off a lifeline. The number that's on the trolley was feng shui. Now, it ends up being— which most people don't know— it ends up being my birthday. There's all these things in all of our properties. So the number for the trolley is 1-7-7. '75-9, being January 7th, '59, which I wanted to use, but we had to make sure it was properly feng shui'd.

Interesting. Yeah. Oh, it's always feng shui'd. Did you have any projects early on that didn't work that you now attribute to poor feng shui? I don't think he can talk about it, but I know that he passed on something. But yeah, 'cause I think everyone, whether or not they've even read about feng shui, believe in it, all these things, everyone has been in a space and being like, there's nothing objectively wrong with this apartment or store or hotel, but it just, it's just bad. Doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right. And I've had, you know, a home where I never use like 1 or 2 rooms. And for some reason—

You gotta feng shui your current office. Your back is to the door. That's a crime.

Yeah, that's not good. Oh, that's true. No, seriously. There's countermeasures. You can use countermeasures.

Yeah. It's interesting.

I think that feng shui is important, along with a million other things are important. We are so focused on making that guest feel comfortable in the space. And that's why we go around the country and we go around the world actually studying spaces. We'll look at retail centers, we'll look at malls, we'll look at We'll look at ones that work and we'll look at ones that don't work. But mostly, what we're doing is we're studying streets. When you go to the Grove, or you go to the Americana, whatever, the height of that curb, the slope in that street, how the railroad is sitting there, the fact that there's gutters, and there's drains, and there's all these things, they're there because your eye picks it up. If we would have built the Grove as a flat plaza— without curbs and gutters, you wouldn't read it in your mind as a street. So the rhythm of the trees, the rhythm of the streetlights, we study all of that stuff. And we actually had a landscape architect on the Grove that threatened to quit because he wasn't going to design curbs and gutters. He said, "People are going to trip." I said, "People don't trip walking around the cities. Why are they going to trip here?" And then he finally came around. But we studied, uh, The Grove is patterned very much in scale down in Charleston. We studied Charleston in terms of building depths and whatnot. But all of that's really important.

How did you experience the dot-com era? Were there people telling you that retail was going to be over? Sure. It was all just, you may as well shut down now. The internet is going to be everything. Right. We have a lot of people in our, you know, in the technology industry that are building products that are either, you know, that benefit from AI or are threatened by AI or totally unknown yet. And so a lot of people are going through an existential crisis. How did you, did you ever doubt? Did you ever believe in the more out-there internet pitches that you were getting, or were you always confident? I was always confident.

I tell you why. And maybe it's 'cause I'm naive. I'm not trying to be arrogant about it either. No, no, but it's a good philosophy.

But here's why.

If you looked at it through my lens, why did I go in the retail business? I was never in the development business. So why did I go in the retail business? Well, I went in the retail business because I love people and I loved real estate. So where am I going to do something where I could marry people and real estate? And I started in— the warehouse business. That was just hugely boring to me because I could care less at the end of the day about dock-high loading and clear spans. There were no people there. It was just a bunch of trucks. I got into retail because as a young kid visiting family in Italy, I was always taken by the piazzas. At the end of the afternoon, the sun's going down a little bit, the people are coming out, the kids are running around, somebody's having a glass of wine, there's a little music in the back. Very, very— my family came from a very poor, very modest town. Didn't matter. There was this joy of life. I wanted to duplicate that. That to me is my psychic income, is this—

You're like, the internet's not going to do this thing.

It can't copy it. And from the beginning of time, what have we done as humans? Human beings. We've gathered. We went around a fire, right? We protected each other. Yeah. Right? We're just— human beings are that way. So the last thing I would say is there's always been multiple ways to buy a product. There was the Sears catalog long before there was the internet, right? Yeah. And so nobody buys just with one channel. And the best retailers, I want them to have a really a robust online operation, because that means they're a better retailer. So it doesn't scare me at all. And our business has grown. Our CAGR is 18%. So I'm not too worried about—

what was that noise?

That's an air horn for 18% CAGR. Was that a good thing? That's a fantastic thing. What's been your thought process? You have such an incredible presence in California, such an incredible track record. You've made so many of our communities like better spaces. I feel, I didn't live in the Palisades, but I would go to the Palisades, your property there at least once or probably twice a week on average. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Just passing through. And when after the fires, it felt like some part of our community was just gone. And what has been your— I imagine people from all over the US have tried to entice you to bring this kind of scale to their states. What has been— when have you indulged in those conversations? You mentioned earlier in the conversation exploring more opportunities outside of the state, what has been the thought process? Was there early loyalty to California? It seems like it was your— I'm a big believer.

It's a great question. I'm a big believer that if you want to create generational wealth in real estate, it gets done because you know the area incredibly well. You're local. And when you take a look, and I'll give you an example, if you look at the Palisades, so many people said the Palisades is never going to work. There's not enough people there. People would even say they don't go out at night. It's a bedroom community. Just not the case. There was nothing to go out to, right? And the case study for the Palisades, because I live in Brentwood Park, and if you live on that side of the 405, you cannot literally travel travel east after about 3 o'clock. It is bumper to bumper to get over the 405. So you have this enormous population that's Balkanized that can travel west easily to dinner and the movies and shopping, including the other side of the 405, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, that can travel. So to me, it was understanding that dynamic of how the mobility of people.

It's like the feng shui of the city.

Well, feng shui, but also just the actuality of the mobility of how people moved. Yeah. So I've, I've always wanted to stay local because that local knowledge is critically important. And if you look at the most successful businesses in real estate in any category, it's usually local families.

And you get that from a feel, not from data, I assume.

You get it You don't get it from a field. You get it from learned information. Or living it.

Yeah. You're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you know. You don't need to poll it.

I drove my kids to school every morning. And I know at 8 o'clock in the morning, you can barely go. And if you want to go pick them up at 3, you need an hour to get to the 405. So that, I think, is super important. What we would do is if we go outside the state— and we're going to go outside the state for a number of reasons. We would just make sure that we have a lot of really local talent surrounding us to backfill that kind of knowledge that we're going to need.

Why are you going out of the state then?

What are the reasons? Well, California and Los Angeles are very difficult to invest in anymore, especially LA City. We have not built anything new in LA City since the Palisades, very intentionally, because it's too overregulated, too expensive, too unpredictable. And frankly, we spend an enormous amount of money on our properties on security, because the city has struggled with having enough police. And we're very adamant on having a very safe, secure environment on our properties. So I want to move our capital. I hate leaving LA, but I want our capital to go into places that I know is going to grow and be safe. Now, I don't have to leave California to do that. That's why we're investing in Calabasas. It's a great community. We'd love to do more in Glendale, incredibly good community, safe schools, clean streets, safe streets. Those are the kind of things we're looking for. But there's also great growth happening in like Nashville.

I was blown away by Nashville. How many years? Do you feel like you kind of raised your hand with the local government and said, hey, these things aren't working, we need to make changes? Because this wasn't something that overnight you were like, oh, this city doesn't feel safe anymore. I'm going to move out of state, or I'm going to move out of— I'm going to move up to a different county.

You know, listen, a lot of years, and I worked for 3 mayors. I had the benefit of working for Tom Bradley when I I was in my 20s as a commissioner. I worked for Dick Riordan as a commissioner. I worked for Jim Hahn as the head of the police commission. So I understand the city. So I worked for the city for 17 years while I was growing my business. So I understand it well. I understand what was working, and I understand what's failing. And so much of what we're doing now is just failing because we have leaders that frankly aren't qualified and they're incompetent. And they're not bad people, they just don't know what they're doing. And if you look at other cities, it blows my mind on how well they're doing. There's no reason that LA shouldn't be doing well. It's only not doing well because our leadership isn't making smart, aren't making smart decisions. And we're paying the price for it. [Speaker] Hmm.

Jordy, follow up there?

Are you going to run for president?

It says here you're here to announce your—

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

How about that for breaking news? What other— what other— what, um, uh, but I don't want to be—

you know, let me add before I interrupt you, I, I'm a very optimistic person and I love this city. Yeah. And I believe in the city. We're not moving out of the city, we're not doing anything like that. And I think this city LA will get back to where it should be in terms of being the most productive city in the country. It just has to. And it will eventually with the right leadership.

I was optimistic during your campaign. Well, I tried.

I've heard a lot of negative takes on LA and things that are going right. And I just keep coming back to like, the waves crash on time and the sun shines. On time, and so Los Angeles will be great for a very long time, and the rest of the things are solvable.

Well, yeah, I think because of the natural environment, it sort of enables some poor government governance. You get a lot of shots on goal. There's always a new people coming through.

You do get more shots on goal. But you do have a net decrease of population.

That's what's going on right now, unfortunately.

Just like, you know, I remind people If we operated the Grove, and it was dirty, there were encampments, it felt unsafe, people vote very quickly with their feet. No different in cities. There is a tipping point that people are going to say, you know what, I know the weather's great, I know the views are great, blah, blah, blah, but my quality of life now, or the quality of life for my children have gotten to a point that but it's not worth it anymore. And we should never get to that edge.

We both, you know, continue to make this decision. We work here in Hollywood, but our families are not in the city. We both moved out of the city. And I would love to buy a home in the city someday, but there's a bunch of things that would have to change. What cities and states do you think have the best sort of business environment right now? What's appealing? Because I'm sure there's places that would love to have your business and would offer a number of incentives to try to bring you out there. But then I'm sure there's places that are just already great and you want to set up shop.

Well, we've spent time— like I said, we spent time last week in Nashville. I was very impressed. I met with the mayor of Nashville, very impressed with him. There's a lot going on there, and businesses moving there, but the streets are clean. The environment was great, and people are happy. You can feel the energy along the streets. So, it was terrific. Austin was the same way. We're focused on Austin. Last week, or— yeah, it was last week. We've been moving around a lot. We just covered a big chunk of the state of Florida, from Palm Beach to Coconut Grove. A lot of interesting opportunities. Coconut Grove is a very cool city. Down there. We're looking at a lot of places, but I would also say in California, like our property in Montecito, I think that region of Santa Barbara is managed very well. We're doing another project up there. We're expanding the retail up at the hotel. We're starting that at the end of this year. We're investing a lot of money in workforce housing for our own employees actually on the property. Our employees can live there. And Calabasas is a good example. We're putting in another $130 million. That was a property that I built 30 years ago. It's effectively that downtown, but it's an incredibly well-run city. Good schools, good neighborhoods, and it's safe and clean. And same with Glendale. I mean, Glendale is a phenomenal city, and we want to invest more in Glendale. So you don't have to go far. Culver City's done— a hell of a job. I mean, look at what's boomed in Culver City with the offices that have gone there.

Yeah, I was shocked at the office lease prices in Culver. Well, look at Century City.

It's part of LA. Yeah. But it's the part of LA, because it's sort of this contained bubble that's clean, safe. There's a lot of emphasis by the ownership there versus downtown. Basically the same office product. And the office product downtown, because of the homeless problem and the crime, you have a 40% vacancy rate. You go to Century City, you have the highest rent probably in the United States outside of New York City. So that just tells you what people are looking for.

What do you think it takes to make it in real estate in 2026 if you're an up-and-comer?

I think the opportunities are huge. You know, you mentioned AI. I would tell you, I think anybody coming into whatever industry today, coming out of college, the opportunities are now endless because the world is on a pivot. And it's going to be a little bit inefficient. And inefficiencies are the greatest opportunities. And because there's so much uncertainty how AI is going to impact different industries, that's the best time to be leaning into it. And then finding out how, if you want to be in real estate, how AI is going to create a better guest experience, how it's going to create lower costs of building, how it's going to create lower costs of operating, designing. I mean, we do things now in our company through AI I would have never thought we could do a year or 2 years ago. One of my biggest frustrations is I'm constantly pushing the team. What more can we do in AI? Are we adopting everything we should be adopting? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, I think it's just jumping in. Jump in, get in it, take any job you can, is what I tell people coming out of college. Work really hard. Don't necessarily do what you're just passionate about. That's great. Do what you think you're really good at. And if you're really good at something and it marries up with passion, then that's unstoppable. And then you just keep going.

We'll close with a challenge for everyone listening. Use AI to feng shui your home office, wherever you work. There you go. Take a picture of it, upload it to ChatGPT, tell it, "Redesign this for proper feng shui." That is a great application, John. I think it'll work. I think we're close.

Close. That's brilliant.

AI might be able to reposition your desk, follow the room. You're the cutting edge next generation, the way you married those two. I actually got into feng shui like 2 or 3 years ago, redid my whole office. It was so much more relaxing. I'm a true, true believer.

But you married one of the oldest cultural science with the cutting edge science.

It's very cool. Yeah, it can take time to get up to speed. You should have a horn. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will wrap up here. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpm.com. It's an honor. And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.