Google Taps Berkshire, Confidential IPO Filings, Putin's Longevity | Jack Doohan, Shreya Murthy, Nate Cavanaugh & Justin Fox, Thomas Mueller, Edward Kim, Brynn Putnam

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ram, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. It feels so good to be back. Uh, you know who else is back? Google with a huge fundraise, an equity fundraise. Un— surprising to a lot of people. You know, raised equity in years and years and years, but they raised a cheeky $80 billion. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Alphabet's mega fundraising shows.

Let's be honest, John, the real story is that you got a haircut.

I did. I didn't just get a haircut. I got them all cut. I got them all cut. Hey, we got the team there. There we go.

That's a new—

that's a new angle. I like that. Well, Alphabet. "In AI, money talks," says The Wall Street Journal. "The ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant." So let's run through it. $80 billion stock-based fundraising should be taken as a rebuke to those salivating over the forthcoming IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. The search giant is showing its competitive advantage in an area that increasingly matters for artificial intelligence, access to money. Ben Thompson has a great breakdown too of how capital is so important in the age of AI and the war for AI. In AI, money talks. The biggest companies are paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to lure top researchers and tens of billions to build data centers while financing losses as they build their AI businesses. The money being funneled into AI is probably already making it harder for non-AI startups to raise capital, with 61% of all venture capital last year going to AI. It's really like, I was talking to somebody who was trying to—

That feels low, like based on, but there was a lot of hard tech.

Well, everything sort of gets wrapped into AI. I was talking to someone about like—

Yeah, that's why it feels low.

How to have a conversation about AI. And it was like, you can talk about sycophancy, you can talk about data centers and water and energy and like, like being an eyesore. And then you can also talk about enterprise sales and SaaS, and you can talk about consumer, and it just touches absolutely everything. And so it's almost, it feels like if you're trying to have the AI conversation, rude, rude about the Jared Isaacman in the years. We love Jared Isaacman.

I don't think that's rude.

I don't know.

Our great space leader Jared. Yeah, incredibly handsome.

People like saying that about getting a haircut. I got my ears lowered. That's another dad joke. Got my ears lowered. Anyway, yesterday Alphabet announced a massive $80 billion equity raise, says Brandon Grale in the TBP newsletter. You can go sign up, tbpn.com. The raise will be broken up into a few milestones over the course of this year. Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel at the helm. Warren Buffett obviously still at the table.

But a lot of people, a lot of people were— there was a viral post yesterday. Somebody was saying Buffett retires and they immediately invest in Google at all-time highs. Yeah. What other company did they invest in at all-time highs?

Was that Apple? Apple.

Apple. Apple. And look what they did.

They did fantastic. Yeah. I mean, for a long time, for what, 30, 40 years, Warren Buffett was known as like not a tech investor, couldn't wrap his mind around it. Valuation's always too high, business too frothy or too high growth.

Well, I think he knew vibe coding was coming. For sure. And he thought, how can I value a software company when the cost of producing software is obviously going to zero? He was saying that back in 2010.

Yeah, he wanted to get in on Genmoji a decade early. Yeah. No, obviously, like the business was printing, it fit the Warren Buffett mold. I was actually, doing this deep dive on like, where would Warren Buffett find value in the AI supply chain? I was trying to dig into, you know, if you apply that framework, because there's a lot of froth, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of high-growth opportunities, but—

Where would Berkshire trade if Warren came out of retirement and just said, I'm coming out of retirement to invest in AI bottlenecks? Not only does Berkshire re-rate, I think everything goes way higher.

I think so. I think so. Let's see. I want to see because I did look at this and I pulled—

John, they want you to crack another Diet Coke.

Another Diet Coke. Here you go. Boom.

Satisfying.

Another one. When I did this analysis, the name that popped up was—

Buffett saw GSTACK and knew that the AI revolution was real.

It is God mode after all.

It is God mode. In the memo. Well, it's like God mode.

If you are trying to get in on the action, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So my, my previous analysis identified Qualcomm has enough AI optionality for the AI investors, but enough business model durability for Buffett and evaluation that does not require heroic assumptions compared with many AI semiconductor names. Most admired but disputed. TSMC, Buffett actually bought this company, but then he sold because he was worried about geopolitical risk. And there were some other options, but he wound up going with Google, and we will break it down. So Berkshire's buying $10 billion worth of shares at a roughly 6% discount from Monday's closing price. Another $30 billion will consist of underwritten public offerings, and the last $40 billion will be staggered common stock offerings beginning in Q3 2026. And overall, the dilution is very low. All the shares Alphabet will sell are brand new, meaning the plan is slightly dilutive for existing shareholders. But at their $4 trillion market cap, where are they right now? They're way, way up. Uh, $80 billion just isn't that much dilution for the shareholders. Fortunately, a lot of opinions on the timeline about this deal this morning. Uh, I've seen a number of people— or Brandon Correll has seen a number of people theorizing that Alphabet is sucking up liquidity, AI demand from investors before they'd be able to by an Anthropic or OpenAI IPO. Richard Rehard Jark gave a few less conspiratorial explanations.

Yeah, a lot of people were saying that about SpaceX. SpaceX, yeah. But the other, the more simple answer is you should probably raise capital when it's cheap.

Yeah, and there's just a lot of demand. There's a lot of capital out there. And so there's a lot of demand for, basically all of these names when there's a new trend. And we've seen liquidity pull out of other sectors of the market. And so it has to go somewhere. Certainly makes sense that it would go into the latest and greatest technology. So Alphabet is seeing demand for Gemini go up, and so it's going to invest more in compute and scale. Ben Thompson had, per usual, a solid piece on the raise this morning. He wrote, quote, quote, the first question is why did Google issue equity instead of debt? So there's some rumors that debt might be coming. And the equity is sort of a precursor to that. But Ben Thompson writes, debt is, all things being equal, the preferred instrument for investment. The proceeds of the latter pay off better than the former, and existing equity holders reap all of the benefits. Equity, on the other hand, removes the risk of debt, but at the cost of giving up a future share of profits. That leads to why what may be the Occam's razor— Occam's 1D razor, 2D razor? No, a razor is 3-dimensional, right? So it's a 3D razor. Like 4D chess? 3D chess? 4D chess? Anyway, Google is going to start issuing a lot more debt as well, which is to say that everyone continues to underestimate the amount of demand there is for compute. Of course, that's not far off from a more bearish interpretation. Google is uncertain about the return of investment of all of that CapEx and would prefer to share the risk along with the upside. If there isn't a substantial debt issuance down the road, then this might be the right answer. Yeah, I mean, compute is remarkably expensive. We're looking at, you know, even within the COGS or the cost of inference for the labs, we're seeing, you know, dollars per task. It's a lot of money, a lot of dollars flowing into these data centers. But when you actually run the numbers on the tasks that they are completing, comp that to other sources to get something done, you're seeing positive ROI. So it's all just a productivity uplift, which is good to see. The Wall Street Journal continues and says bond investors think the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt being raised by big tech is pushing up the yield and other borrowers have to pay. And it's even affecting government bond yields. The hyperscalers of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have become major bond issuers as they ramp up spending, with Alphabet alone raising $85 billion in a series of record-breaking issues around the world in the past year, they might raise more in debt. But the stock market is the obvious place to raise capital to spend on the exciting bits of AI where the returns are unknown. Technology is rapidly developing and business models are in flux. Unlike debt, companies don't have to repay their shareholders. And if it takes longer to make money from AI or never makes money, the company can simply wait it out if it was financed by stock, though investors would be very unhappy. Alphabet is one of a tiny number of companies capable of raising so much cash without tanking its stock. What did the stock do, Jordy?

It's down a couple points today, but I don't think—

OK, not too bad.

—necessarily.

Thanks to its near monopoly in online search and credibility with Wall Street in new ventures. That's a really good point. For a long time, tech has been sort of cold on Google's side projects. But they're starting to bear so, so much fruit. You look at the progress with Waymo, and it's very clear that just one win in Waymo will be a power law. That will wash out all of the side chat apps that never went anywhere, or little software projects, and April Fool's jokes that they launched. And some of them will become really big businesses as well. They have other stuff. Calico.

They have the mosquitoes right now.

The mosquitoes are crazy. That was a weird, weird headline.

I didn't know they were in the mosquito business. I'm excited about releasing billions of genetically modified mosquitoes into the environment to try to kill all the mosquitoes.

Wait, there are mosquitoes that kill mosquitoes? That's what they do? Oh, okay. They're like infertile or something, basically.

I'm excited because there's like almost certainly could never possibly be any unexpected downside to disrupting the circle of life.

Who knows? Who knows? People have been studying this for like 20 years, so I'm optimistic.

It would be one of those things, like, yeah, one of those things would be amazing if we can just nuke all the mosquitoes off the map, but I got a feeling they're doing something important. Yeah.

Let's actually try to get to the bottom of this. Wait, should we be selling the bug repellent industry short right now? Should we be going turbo short all mosquito repellent companies? They're probably gonna go out of business if they get rid of all the mosquitoes, right? This is Finance 101 right here. Anyway, I can keep reading.

Don't give our little retail trader over there any ideas.

He's going to go short. While $80 billion is huge, it amounts to less than 2% of the market value of a company trading at $4.5 trillion. The stock was down just 2.6% in premarket trading. There seems to be an unlimited supply of willing buyers to fund AI. If it turns out there is a limit, Alphabet can only benefit by going first. 'From a societal standpoint,' says the Wall Street Journal, 'the purpose of the stock market is to funnel money from millions of savers into giant projects, just as in the 19th century railroads. For the past 25 years, that role has been less important as private capital funds grew large enough to finance companies for much longer before they needed to go public. AI's vast consumption of cash is beyond even the capability of private markets, however.' Sure, there are other reasons to list, such as allowing employees to cash out their stock options. $30 billion— you mentioned this earlier today— $30 billion of Alphabet's stock issuance is earmarked for paying tax on employee stock awards. But the ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant. As we move into a new era of capital-heavy industries, the stock market stops being merely a way for private investors to exit, but an attractive source of capital. The bear in me worries that all this equity raising is also about taking advantage of record stock prices and could be a sign that the top is near, says the Wall Street Journal. They're almost calling the top, but they're not near yet.

Yes, John, mosquitoes do have some environmental value, though most of it is not unique to mosquitoes, which is why people debate how much the world would miss them. They're a food source. For spiders? Mosquito larvae are eaten by fish, frogs, dragonflies, beetles, birds, bats, and other insects. And adult mosquitoes are eaten by birds, bats. So we already have friends in the animal kingdom that are just eating these, eating them alive. So that's good. Pollination and nutrient cycling.

You would want more birds and frogs around.

No, but the argument is that a lot of other animals contribute the same sort of general environmental value. So if you took out some of these disease spreaders—

He's a pro-mosquito. He's in the pocket of big mosquito over here. He's like, "Oh, I love, oh, I have a pet mosquito at home. I love mosquitoes. Not a dog person, I'm a mosquito guy. I like mosquitoes." This is you. You're a mosquito dude.

Yeah, wow. That's weird. I've never met anyone that's a mosquito guy. You ever get an eye like swollen shut by a mosquito? No, never.

That was me growing up. I've gotten a few like bites on my legs. You kind of X them out or try not to scratch them. They say don't scratch them 'cause that spreads the poison a little bit. But it's like a minor nuisance. But I think that they spread a lot of disease and that's the real reason. Reason why people are so aggressive about mosquito-borne illness.

Somebody should do a street interview where they go around asking people, would you want to, if you had the chance to eliminate all mosquitoes in the world with no downsides to the environment, or $100,000 and dinner with Jay-Z, what would you choose? There would be some interesting answers.

Are they releasing these in America, in California? I think so. That's crazy. A private company can just release animals? Like, could Microsoft just release like a million bears or something? Like, what's the limit of this? Can you just release like, hey, yeah, like we're releasing 25,000 bison?

That was an early idea on this show, right? It was like bear defense companies.

Yeah, domesticated bears, just, you know, wild dogs, more coyotes, more deer maybe. Pick your poison, whatever animal you want, just get it out there.

I think if we put enough Monster Energy—

I heard Truth Social's gonna release like a million bald eagles. That's their goal. That's the next thing.

Oh, that's why the company's so unprofitable.

Yeah, they've been buying bald eagles and breeding them continuously.

No, I think one of the reasons mosquitoes bite humans is there's not enough cans of like cracked open Monster Energy. Yeah. So I think if you put a bunch of Monsters out when you camp, you'd probably be safe. Okay. Mosquitoes would obviously much rather have Monster Energy than blood, right?

And does that sterilize them? I think that might do the trick.

It might do the opposite, actually. Yeah. It might make them even more powerful.

Here's an idea. Release 100,000 bulls charging through Manhattan as a sponsorship opportunity, as a marketing stunt for the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. They have the Golden Bull. There's the bull. Why not release a ton of real-life bulls? Who knows? Maybe it has a positive externality on the lifecycle of Manhattan. They wind up finding a home in Central Park, and the bulls run through Manhattan.

Do you think Meta follows suit and does an equity raise like this? Maybe. I can imagine Zuck not wanting to do this right now, given where we're trading.

Oh, yeah. The stock's down. I was high. I mean, it's not that down, but it isn't like— popping like the rest of the AI hyperscalers.

Yeah, I was comparing Meta to Tesla today according to CompaniesMarketCap, which doesn't seem to be— CompaniesMarketCap.com has one job, which is to track the market caps of companies. And I find the data to be somewhat inconsistent. Meta's sort of near all-time highs.

It's not that far off. It's certainly up from the trough of when the, when the stock was $100 in 2022.

Anyway, so yeah, I was looking at the two. Meta had $200 billion of 2025 revenue, $164 billion of gross profit, 82% gross margins growing 22% a year. Tesla had $94 billion, $17 billion of gross profit, actually shrunk 3% year over year. And Tesla is getting close to being worth the same amount of money. 1.3 trillion.

1.3 versus 1.5. I mean, if you look at the Mag Seven, if you're just doing the biggest 7 tech companies, it's like completely changed hands in terms of like Samsung, Micron. There's so many companies deeper in the supply chain that are absolutely mooning on the AI boom. Maybe we need a new term. We had FAANG for a while. Now, we have Mag Seven. It feels like we're in the dawn of a new one. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway.

Where I was going with that, I can see Zuck feeling like, I'm not being properly valued right now. Should buy the stock back, if anything. Yeah, if anything. Or issue debt to buy. They don't have a lot of—

Because they're spending a lot on CapEx. Yeah. Anyway, Matt Dratch has some takes on Google, on the raise. He says, first, I don't think this has anything to do with their view of equity value. So they don't necessarily think they're overvalued. Larry and Sergey they want to spend. Sundar and the CFO said our debt rating though, and so we are here. They don't wanna raise more debt. Of the $80 billion, $40 billion is for infrastructure, but I suspect that the equity check for a Meta-like SPV structure will be levered 5 to 6x. In other words, the spending implications are much greater than the headline. Can't believe it's only Monday. So they're gonna take $40 billion, lever that up across their infrastructure efforts, and put something closer to $200 billion to work over the next year, and that pays for their CapEx bill for probably just next year, because they'll probably be around there in the AWS tier, especially on the back of that Google Cloud growth. It's growing faster than AWS, growing faster than Azure. So lots of reasons to spend, spend, spend.

John, they're saying we need a L'Oréal ad read from John. OK. That new hair. Shout out. Or L'Oréal.

I like that company. They're a great, great team. Anyway, Google raising $80 billion in equity, more compute, more AI spend, full send downrange. Jack Raines says the GigaBrain move by Google sucking up some of the AI demand via equity issuance instead of debt before Anthropic and OpenAI go public. We'll see what happens. We'll see how much demand is out there. SpaceX is going out in just a couple of weeks, so we'll see how that goes. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of money. A couple of weeks, John.

Couple days.

Next week. Next week. I mean, there's a lot of liquidity across all of the retirement funds that are funneling into these things. There's a whole bunch of different things. Sergey Alexenko has the chart of Google Alphabet equity raises. This can't possibly include their venture rounds.

So SpaceX going out on a Friday. That is going to be insane.

After the market closes or something?

No, I mean, obviously, we'll list. But then immediately goes into 48 hours.

Yeah. This chart can't possibly include the venture rounds that happened pre-IPO, right? But I guess they might be so small that they don't even show up on here in 1998, because it's less than $1 billion. I mean, Google famously did not raise a lot of money. It was very profitable when they went out to go public. And Top Tick Crypto has pivoted to the memory trade and says, the memory trade can't keep going. Because the hyperscalers can't spend more than 100% of cash flow. And while Google would like a word, because they can spend more than 100% cash flow, because they can raise equity, and they can raise debt, and they can get all sorts of money from all over the place. So, what else is Berkshire doing these days? Berkshire is investing $10 billion into Google in a private placement as part of the broader $80 billion equity capital raise. Warren Buffett is here watching Greg Abel take $10 billion of money that he painstakingly made over his entire investment lifetime and put it into Google at all-time highs. I don't think this is an accurate reaction to Warren Buffett, because this play worked with Apple, and Google's in a fantastic position to continue doing this. Ben Thompson broke this whole thing down, comparing what Warren Buffett had done with See's Candy to buy a railroad, which is a fascinating example. So they bought See's— Berkshire Hathaway bought See's Candy. For $25 million when sales were $30 million, so less than a 1x revenue multiple. Pretax earnings were less than $5 million, so they paid roughly 5x pretax earnings, so EBITDA. The capital then required to conduct the business was $8 million, locked away in See's Candy. Then they had some seasonal debt, but generally the company was earning 60% pretax on invested capital. $5 million out every year, $8 million locked up. So last year— this is from 2007, the shareholder letter— last year, See's sales in 2007 or 2006 were $383 million, pretax profits were $82 million, and the capital to run the business, it was only $40 million. So they'd grown the amount of capital by 4x, 5x, but they'd grown the actual cash flow from that business significantly. $5 million to $82 million. And so Warren Buffett says, this means we have had to reinvest only $32 million since 1972. 1972 to 2007, he's reinvesting $32 million. And every year, he gets a check for $82 million. That's a fantastic cash-flowing business. What did he do with that business, which generated pretax earnings of $1.35 billion or something like that, which was sent to Berkshire? He bought a railroad. BNSF Railways— the railways require a ton of capital to operate. BNSF consumed $3.8 billion last year. They also make a lot of money. The net income was $5.5 billion on revenue of $23.4 billion. But it requires a lot of revenue, a lot of cash tied up in the business to run that. To put that in perspective, the total amount of money that Berkshire has made from See's Candy is probably less than $3 billion, so less than BNSF made last year. So which is a better business? And he goes on to talk about cloud and Google and how they have the search engine that throws off cash, and they can use that to build the railroad of the future, which is all the data centers and AI infrastructure. And so a lot to like. And it's not as much of like, oh, this is wildly outside of the wheelhouse. Berkshire's never seen a business like this. That's not true. That's— this isn't that out of characteristic. It is a wonderful business and it actually pattern matches to what Berkshire has done with Apple and also with the railroad and See's Candy before. So don't be that surprised. But what is more surprising is this story. So do you want to take us through it? But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

In the Journal today, Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive. I realize, John, there's a bunch of soundboard effects that I would only hit when we were doing ads. That's true. I miss them. Oh, it's so— feels great. Nostalgic. Back. I love it. Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive. Let's go. Under its new chief executive, Greg Abel, Berkshire raises its bet on a market recovery. By adding another housing company to its portfolio. Fantastic. Berkshire Hathaway, $6.8 billion deal to acquire— what are you laughing at?

I'm just laughing at the fact that, like, like, you know, they did two $10 billion deals and one was buying like an entire homebuilder and the other was buying like 0.01% of Google. And just the scale of these different things, like, like the— it's an extremely cool deal. We'll get into it. It's very interesting. But at the same time, it's like total peanuts compared to like the AI buildout.

Well, yeah.

It's like, what is that?

Essentially like a work harder or work smarter, not harder moment. Like we'll see which one of these ends up generating a better return.

This seems extremely important. I'm extremely excited. Yeah, yeah. Extremely important. But this is like one data center or an entire home builder that is their entire business and probably very storied, we'll get into.

Well, we don't know. He might be pivoting it into a data center. Maybe. That would be the ultimate.

Maybe. Black 2x4s, rack them, you know, Meta's using tents. Maybe the next data center looks like a house. A lot less controversial. You know, the NIMBY, if you just see a nice Craftsman home next to you, you're like, yeah, whatever, it looks nice. You know, I don't have a problem with that. You know, oh, their chimney's smoking.

That's the diesel generator. There's a data center among us.

This might be the solution. Tyler, what you got?

I was going to say, like, these two deals are still small compared to like the actual cash that they're holding.

Yeah. What do they have?

I think most recently it was $397 billion. That's so much. Even then it's like, oh, wow, you know, he's so— what, he's turbo long, say. But, you know, he's still Cash Chad right now.

Oh, hopefully inflation doesn't get him. We'll see.

Anyway, continue with an all-cash agreement Sunday for Taylor Morrison Home Corporation. The Omaha-based conglomerate is poised to become a top 5 US homebuilder, adding to its growing portfolio of housing-related companies. Berkshire's homebuilder deal is a sign that a prominent investor thinks the housing slump will eventually pass and it wants to be positioned to take advantage of any market turn. More than 75% of young renters still think they someday will own a home. That is great. Glad that— I would have thought it was less than that given, given like sentiment online. And so it's great.

There's been a bunch of— there's been a bunch of weird studies where like when you zoom out, you look at Gen Z homeownership and it's actually pretty high, but that's driven by non-coastal cities because people move to San Francisco, obviously house prices are through the roof and a lot of people are like, yeah, I want to rent and go to some local house party. Like, I want to be in the mix. And then at some point people make the decision. So it's more about like family planning. But of course there's all sorts of, you know, affordability issues.

But Chat says white pill, never doom, never doom. This investment is grounded in a long-term belief in the strength of America's housing market and its underlying fundamentals. Which we see as enduring over time. Berkshire is raising its exposure to a housing market in its fourth year of dismal sales. High mortgage rates, job market uncertainty, and the rising cost of living have kept many prospective buyers on the sidelines. Builders have been forced to offer incentives such as paying part of buyers' mortgage costs just to unload their inventory. Builder confidence is low. Single-family home starts declined 9% in April, the steepest drop since August. A third of builders said they had cut their prices last month. Moreover, many Americans now think homeownership is beyond their budget. More people are renting for longer or putting their savings into the stock market rather than investing in a home. But analysts think— analysts say the US housing shortage of more than 4 million homes means new homes need to be built. They expect more buyers will return to the market once mortgage rates, which recently hit a 9-month high, come down and trigger pent-up buyer demand. Berkshire has agreed to pay a 24% premium to Taylor Morrison's closing stock price of $58.58. That's an incredible bargain. Friday, analysts see the price as a good deal for Berkshire because the actual value of the builder's home portfolio belies its lagging stock price. That is an incredible bargain, says Tony Avila, chief executive of Builder Advisor Group. Taylor Morrison stock shot up 22%. Monday.

This is a quote by Warren Buffett. This is the first deal for Abel, Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. And Warren Buffett said, gave a quote to the Journal, he has launched, he has launched. I love it. On Monday, then they talk about the Google deal. Taylor Morrison is a safer bet in a precarious homebuilding market. The company tends to focus on the higher end of the market, which has performed better. A significant part of its business is built around buyers looking to upgrade to nicer homes rather than entry-level buyers who are struggling the most. In addition, the company is part of a smaller segment of builders that have leaned into so-called build-to-rent communities of single-family homes constructed for the sole purpose of renting. Congress recently, recently threatened build-to-rent developers with a proposal that would force them to sell their properties within 7 years of building them. But House lawmakers removed that proposal in an attempt to rescue the burgeoning sector. The Taylor Morrison deal is the latest example of consolidation in the residential construction industry. Last month, Avalon Bay Communities and Equity Residential agreed to merge in the largest multifamily combination on record years after sluggish profits. This puts pressure on others to find a dance partner, says Alan Ratner. Interesting. Well, we'll continue following up on that. Well, they own railroads and you should be on Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Uh, we have some time left before we go into—

What do you think the odds that the admin does some type of mega project around home building? Almost zero.

Like, I don't see, I don't see the government building homes. I think that the number one lever that any administration has over housing affordability is interest rates. Sure. Doing something there. FHA program. Yeah, but specifically just the Fed funds rate. Like, if you can do something to bring that down.

Yeah, I just mean we're at a time with, at least in modern history, relatively unprecedented government intervention. Involvement, yeah. Government taking a stake in Intel.

You think they might build the Cube? You know the cube?

What's a cube?

There's a cube that if you built it in Central Park, 1 mile by 1 mile by 1 mile, it would fit a billion people inside. So housing crisis solved. No windows, but if you build the cube, no more housing issues.

Wait. Not Buffett, but who's the guy that built the— James Dolan? No, the dorm at UCSB.

Oh yeah, Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger. Yeah, Munger.

He was building cubes. He was early to the cube.

Not a member of the government, not doing a mega project. I would be surprised if there's something that's first party, but Tyler has another take.

I was just gonna say the admin is not supposed to be able to like interfere with interest rates, right? Yeah, but— Fed is independent.

But there's a lot of things that you can do where—

Interest rates were declining until we got into—

Yeah, like if you strengthen the economy, pull back from, from geopolitical risks and whatnot, like, yeah, it's like the physical dominance. Yeah, this kind of— yeah, yeah, yeah. There's just— there will be things that open up the Fed to cutting rates potentially. But yeah, I don't know. It's very clearly it's not within the admin's abilities.

What—

well, let's hit up the James Walker. Okay. What's James Walker up to? He's boarding this morning's flight with an emotional support trout.

Is this AI?

Is this real? This is insane. Honestly, I don't think AI could nail this era of Instagram filter. Bringing a— is the fish alive?

This is crazy. Bringing a fish on a plane is hilarious, but that does not feel very humane. It feels like a very uncomfortable situation for a fish, but I guess if you gotta get somewhere, you gotta go in the tube.

Think about it though, John. Yeah. Think about the things this fish will have seen that many fish would never see in a lifetime. Yeah. So is it inhumane? Yeah. Or is it inhumane not to let the fish—

Yeah. If you got a trout, it's like, I think the Earth is flat. I've never seen the curvature. You're like, well, you're going into 747 and I'm showing you out the window. Your look out the window, you'll see the curvature of the Earth potentially. Or maybe it's just the windows. Maybe the windows on the plane are curving it.

This was a good post from Key. He said, this dude is effing Sherlock Holmes. Okay. Somebody says 100%. This ad is sponsored by OpenAI from the OpenAI, from the official OpenAI account. It's not even sponsored. It's just hosted. It's just—

it's not even marketing. It's just communications. This is a wild, this is a wild pose. It's so funny. Terence Tao, AI creates more room to experiment, test unexpected paths, and discover what might otherwise stay out of touch. Terence Tao, GOAT mathematician from UCLA. Very fun to see him talking about his process, where he's still seeing value, how he's using models. He talks about this a lot, a lot of times. It just allows him to flesh out his work, build a chart that he wouldn't otherwise build. Very synergistic, fully in like the centaur era. I don't know who got paid to say what, but that ad is sponsored by OpenAI. I think it's best to show real results. That's so interesting. This is so funny. Anyway, what else is going on in the timeline? Joe Weisenthal has something. The price of whey is going bananas. It's protein crisis.

This is not good. What's going on? Here's what's a little funny. Okay, break it down. We know why the price of whey is going bananas. Same story. You don't need Joe to tell us. Oh yeah. It's because Joe is going bananas on his whey consumption. Oh, you think he's responsible directly? I think he's the problem. He's like, we're all trying to figure out who did this.

He has been looking bigger. Much bigger. His traps specifically, they've been eating his head.

Yeah.

Yeah, and he has those Death Star delts on the caps. Yeah, it's true. On the shoulders. It's really crazy. And the lats, when he does the lat spread on Odd Lots, it gets aggressive. It's a little too much. So cool it with the whey, Joe. But here we have some news. In earlier May, in early May, a supplier delivered bad news to baking and beverage company Hello Amino. It had run out of whey protein. Canada-based Hello Amino uses the ingredient in all of the 30 high-protein baking mixes it sells. Founder Ali Swift found another supplier, but it means importing whey protein isolate from the US at a price that's 50% higher and due to increase again soon. The new whey protein delivered other complications. It dried out the company's baking goods due to the manufacturer's different processing methods. That's true. A lot of different ingredients will change the output. Not all whey is created equal. Our pancakes came out like sawdust, Swift said. The company plans to reformulate using different combination of proteins. Protein has really leaked into everything. I have not found— I've been surprised whenever I see the trend pieces about like, "Protein's packed with everything. Everything has protein in it." Because I feel like, I don't know, I haven't like— it hasn't snuck into that many of the things that I eat throughout the day. Like there isn't protein in my Diet Coke. I don't know what else I consume, but this whole trend of like protein-packed cereals and salads and lunches and dinners and protein-packed pastas and stuff. I never really— I just kind of stuck with the normal stuff.

Yeah, the idea that if you eat 2 to 3 solid meals a day, you have some protein, that you also need to be snacking on protein in between is just insane. It's completely unnecessary.

I don't know.

Protein shake gets it done. Anyway. Well, let's check in with one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders. Yes, because they've diversified. They're an athleisure clothing line. Okay. Guaranteed Rate has rolled out RateFit, a wellness-driven lifestyle brand. They were the 7th largest mortgage lender in the country last year. Colin is baffled. I had to check if this was real. Is it? And ratefit.com. It is. You can get a— you can get pretty much all the things that you would get over at a Lululemon. Who launches this? Alo or Vorii. 20% time project or something? I bet you this was— April Fool's joke? No, I bet you this was just Shopify is just so good at sales. They were doing a little outbound campaign, and they're like, sorry, we're a mortgage lender. Really set up.

Maybe it's a rogue agent. Maybe someone just, you know, at guaranteed rate just said like, make money, make my business make money. And it was just like, I'll set up a Shopify store and contact a distributor and a manufacturer. You're now in the clothing business. Uh, how long until that happens? I don't know. Uh, any, any day now, I'm sure. I'm sure. Uh, the sooner I get a Porsche, the better for my mental health. Good luck, Mason Hughes. Uh, good luck on your on your Porsche pursuit. Maybe a very depreciated Taycan, cheaper than you think, right?

There you go.

The fact Eliezer isn't looksmaxing is the ultimate condemnation of rationalism. People have asked about this before. He should get into looksmaxing. Why not? Why not? It's a good time. Well, I had another question come up from a friend of the show about why are companies filing IPOs confidentially. It's an interesting question and I sort of pulled— tugged on the thread. Liz Hoffman was talking about this a little bit. So Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC June 1st. That was yesterday. Liz Hoffman said, reminder that the ability to confidentially file an IPO was a 2012 rule change meant to ease small companies, meaning less than $1 billion of revenue, into the markets. And it was later expanded to what we're—

Yeah, it was later meant to be like a smoke grenade.

A smoke grenade lets you talk to investors before you get out. Did we change the camera? But I, so she asked the question of like, what are we even doing here? And I was curious, like, what are we doing here? Like, why do all these companies file confidentially and then the S-1 comes out? This is what SpaceX did. It's not like Anthropics, unique in this. This is very much standard practice at this point. But how did we get here? And why? Is this good? Do I like this? I don't know. Let's find out. So first, the basics. Confidential IPO filing. It doesn't mean that you IPO in secret. It means the company submits a draft S-1 to the SEC for private staff review. SEC employees— Yeah, it's a smoke grenade. It's a smoke grenade. Yeah. Great analogy. Before releasing the prospectus on EDGAR, which then Every hedge fund can download, anyone can download, it becomes public. This lets companies run the SEC review process while keeping the sensitive financial details private. There's a few reasons why you might want to do that. Any regulatory stumbling blocks can be dealt with in advance, and so the final filing is clean and ready to go. SpaceX did the same thing, filing a draft submission confidentially before the public S-1 dropped a week or two ago. So, after the 2008 financial crisis, this is where this all starts. There's a lot of regulation that results from the fallout. Sarbanes-Oxley is the main one. And the financial markets slowly built back and started opening up as the economy rebuilt. So, post-Dodd-Frank, post-Sarbanes-Oxley, you get a lot of regulation. And then over the next few decades, certain pieces get relitigated, renegotiated., and different paths open up to slightly less regulatory burdensome pathways in the financial markets. And so, before 2012, the S-1 became public early in the process, which was great for journalists who wanted to report on IPOs. It wasn't really that beneficial to very many other people, but it raised the stakes for companies, because if anything was off, it could result in a botched IPO, which would be damaging for morale. You know, you hear that your company filed publicly and immediately something comes up and you can't fix it, so then you have to pull back and it's seen as— Weakness. —damaging. Seen as weakness. No one wants to be running a company that publicly failed to IPO. And so in 2012, the JOBS Act passed. And they created a new class of company with some relaxed filing requirements. These are called emerging growth companies. Defined by the SEC. They're called EGCs, and EGCs were defined as any company with less than $1 billion in revenue. Later, it was inflation adjusted to be $1.235 billion. But that doesn't really matter, though, because in 2017, staff at the SEC under Trump One explained— expanded the confidential filing flow to include all issuers, not just EGCs. So anyone, no matter how much your revenue was, you could go through this process. And so the JOBS Act was driven by Republicans, but broadly supported. And the 2017 change happened under Trump 1. But again, it didn't face strong opposition. So private market investors like IPOs for liquidity. VCs love to come on the show and do a victory lap when they take a company public. And it's great to return capital to LPs. And then on the other side, public market investors like access to more names. So it's sort of win-win. In 2017, this was a huge year for huge, large growth stage companies. These decacorns. You had Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Palantir. They were all well past the billion-dollar revenue threshold, but there was still a lot of uncertainty about how the market would value these companies because they had sort of new business models. There were some questions about different margin profiles, how the market would price these. There weren't direct comps to Uber and Airbnb already in the market. Are you going to just trade Airbnb like it's a hotel chain, not Really, it's asset light. So the market needs to digest that, and confidentially filing was beneficial. And it was encouraging to these companies to say, yeah, we'll go try the IPO thing because it's less burdensome.

So Stripe should file confidentially for IPO, but then never actually go.

I think that's a Collison brother nightmare. I think they wake up in cold sweats. Ah, I took the company public.

What happened? No, I know, but it would be kind of funny to like confidentially file, but then just pull it back, let it just let it just kind of sit there for another decade.

Troll, troll IPO. So the confidential filing rules were expanded again in 2025 under Trump 2 SEC staff to include other financial offerings. So new issuance of stock, other classes of securities. These things can be reviewed before going out in the market. This allows companies to test the waters on follow-on financings, spinoffs, other capital markets transactions. You can go and test the waters. So there's no question that companies are staying private longer. Everyone knows this. Private markets are incredibly deep, driven both by mega fundraisers from the largest venture capital firms, crossover investors from hedge funds coming into the market, and then also plenty of activity from the hyperscalers and strategics who can write a $10 billion check into a private company, no problem. So the end result is that the public markets have been losing companies to private markets for years. Exchanges don't want this. Public markets investors don't want this. And so there's a huge demand to make going public less painful. Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands. But it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in public markets. And so that's why why companies are allowed to file confidentially. And I don't know, after reading that, I don't really have a problem with it. But you let us know, what do you think? Should it be illegal? Should it be straight to jail if you, if you file confidentially? I don't know.

We can roll it back. A couple more notes before our first guest. Yeah. Joe Weisenthal is reporting that on the eve of the IPO, SpaceX employees are organizing. More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the IPO. Interesting. I imagine the wealth management firms are thrilled about this. They were joking, of course. One more note. Friday IPOs. Alibaba. Uber. Ooh, big ones. And Meta.

All on Friday. Very interesting. I think there's gonna be a lot of fanfare. If the images in the S1 were anything to judge, I think that like the actual coverage will be a spectacle. We will see Starbase in full force. It will be a lot of great entertainment and a pretty wild day, pretty wild day for financial history. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we can bring in Jack Dohan. He is the founder and CEO of Muse. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Jack?

Very well, thanks. How are you guys?

Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Great to have you on.

Great to meet you. Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?

Certainly. No, thanks. Thanks for having me on, boys. Myself, a bit of a whirlwind last 12 months, my whole life. Been driving towards being a Formula One driver. Yeah. So, you know, in, in that realm, let's say, and I was always in the mindset of doing one thing properly or two things averagely, right? So I always wanted to, wanted to build and wanted to do many things, but that was full focus. Ended up getting to Formula One the end of 2024 for the final round in Abu Dhabi, signed for 3 years, which was, you know, obviously a huge, huge thing for me and for a kid from Australia. And then, yes, 6 races into that season, sort of sidelined for some circumstances outside of my control, let's say. And there was a big— it was a big moment for me of realizing not that you're set, right? You're never— you're never set in stone. Nothing's ever guaranteed. But I definitely thought with security, with the 3 years and with how things work, that, that it was a little bit more stable. So it was a big reality check. I said, okay, for what I'm locking into for the next, you know, for my life and what I'm carrying, you know, the next 10, 20 years is not going to be from something that's, let's say, decided by these political circumstances. Um, so then, to be honest, I had an interest in AI since late 2020. I was teaching myself to code since 2019 on a low basis. Definitely not, uh, I'm not engineering behind the, behind Muse at all. So, um, but just done it from understanding. And then Ended up founding Muse sort of at the end of December, doing some small passive tech investments, setting up some SPVs into opportunities. But yeah, it's crazy the distribution that has been gathered now since being in this paddock and around as well.

Yeah, I want to talk about tech and business, but I have two questions about racing. First, I'd love to know a a little bit more about your early path. Did you go through the typical kart racing, Formula 3? Like walk me through the steps to actually get to F1, a little bit of the history there. And then I would love your view on like the future of the sport, where things are now, what's changed, what you've observed as you've been probably not just competing in F1, but also a fan.

Yeah, no, certainly. Started from karting, as you mentioned. Then in Australia, there's the other ceiling. I guess like any small— not small country, we're a big country, but 25 million population compared to the US. Very, very different. But you always have the goal of going to the top of what you're doing. And even from karting, the main space was Europe. So that's where the World Championships were, the European Championships were. So it's the as a kid, I always wanted to be over here. Um, ended up moving over, um, on my own when I was 13, just before I was 14 years old. Did a year of karting, um, was then picked up by the Red Bull, um, Formula 1 team.

On your own, that means like you said see ya to your parents, or what did that look like?

It was the first 7 days was with my father, and then I was on my, on my own with like people that my that was sort of connected into this, into the, in the European region.

And still, that's, that's wild. That's crazy.

It was, it was weird. I think, you know, I think when I, when I came over, I was wearing shorts and I was in Europe and the guys who were mentoring me said, I look too, you know, I look too Australian. I remember, I remember I walked in, I was a 13-year-old kid. I walked in the go-kart track and it was the first time I was in Europe and there was a Scottish guy who was mentoring me and I walked in, I high-fived a couple of kids and I sat down into my, into my awning, and he looks at me and he goes, what was that? And I said, what do you mean? And he's like, you know, you're, you're happy, you're high-fiving, what was that? I said, oh, they're just my friends. He looks at me and he goes, the only friend you need is me, there's no other friend. You know, like, you know, if you're going—

there's no friends out there on the track.

Honestly, I went— I just came from Australia where we're racing and then we come over on our scooters, we're running around, we're having fun, you know, and then, you know, racing. And obviously it's fully competitive, but it wasn't to that aspect. So it was a big wake-up and, and the realm to get there. And then climbed up, um, Formula 4, Formula 3, um, Formula 2, and then was a reserve driver in 2024. Yeah, for the Alpine team. And then mid-year, um, July, they signed for the 3 years.

That's great. Uh, where, how, how important was, uh, the sim during that time? Did it become more important, you know, throughout that early part of your racing career when you're kind of moving up the ranks? Uh, or was it important the entire time?

It's, it's important the entire time. I guess like the simulators we have are obviously at home or, or to an extent on a junior level, uh, very obviously on a low cali— on low caliber. Um, when you're a reserve driver, you're, you're doing the sim overnight on your Saturdays. So you're typically at the track on a Friday, you do the first free practice session, the free practice session 2, and then you'll fly back to the factory, do the simulator from let's say 6 PM until 3 AM. Um, so all of the things they want to try throughout Friday that they weren't able to—

yeah, interesting—

overnight because they have curfews, so they obviously can't— then the engineers can't keep working towards. So you're working overnight and then I'd get in, you know, a transfer, head straight to the airport and then head back to the track to sort of deliver this and more in a driver's perspective rather than just engineering, engineering feedback that's been delivered. So it's very rare.

So you're not flying, you're not flying commercial in that situation.

Yeah, unfortunately. Unfortunately. Yeah.

I mean, it's just crazy because it seems like a pretty tight window. You know, you're— yeah, you're going to the factory, getting on the sim, getting off, headed straight to the airport. But then I imagine you're arriving shortly before the race on Sunday, right? Yeah.

It just means not great, or let's say preferable, flight times and then options of sleep. But it's weird, like you dread it and then you get to like your 12, your midnight, your 1 AM and stuff, and then you sort of then push through your coffee's deep. You're also doing some cool things and you enjoy it, you know, definitely after a while. And it's not, you know, it doesn't become, you know, you get some bad time zones like when you're doing, you're in the UK, you're doing for Australia or you're in, well, the sim's always in the UK doing Mexico, some weird places where you're having to do some very Strange times.

Brian Johnson's nightmare. Literally, no, there's no red light therapy there.

So, I mean, throughout this whole process, you're also learning about technology, I'm sure meeting people, thinking about the company. What is your workflow like? What is your free time? Does it track with seasons? Does it track with certain days of the week? Do you have downtime where it just doesn't make sense to put any more time on the track or in the simulator. And so you do have free time. Like, what is the work-life balance like as you're sort of grinding up the ranks? I imagine it's pretty full tilt, but you obviously had a little bit of time to think about what was next. Yeah, exactly.

I like to think about it now because I went from that being, being my full, my full life, um, and you had very little time off in the sense of Every one of your spare days was a marketing day or was a media day or as a partnership day. And then if you did have then a free day, then it was more time on the sim or doing more correlation and not doing it effectively. You'll be going back to maybe a race 6 races ago and redoing things with what you have now and how that's changed. And then we had time off that was off, right? It was fully just like, you know, you were completely done. Where now I'm a reserve driver for Haas this year doing 10 races. It's, you know, what'll be, what'll be with what might happen. But I'm very limited on the control that I have on getting back into the car. Sure. So I'm not, you know, I'm not— they only have X amount of time with simulators. I'm not on the sim. I'm currently not testing. So when I'm here or if I'm off, and as I guess you are, when you're in this world, it's never fully off, right? Even if you are on the weekends or away, you're constantly still taking that 2:00 AM call. You're still, you know, working through things. There's still communication going on. So it was quite a difference. You didn't have any flat-out commitments of these partnership dates, 9 to 6 and here to there. But you're still, you know, you're constantly doing something.

Is part of what attracted you to entrepreneurship is like, I feel like the challenge in Formula 1, there's only, you know, in entrepreneurship you're getting like nos all the time and you're, you know, sometimes you get an opportunity, sometimes you don't. But in Formula 1, you're like almost entirely reliant. There's like a set number of teams on the grid. There's a lot of stuff that's out of your control. Whereas in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of stuff that's out of control. But if you get a no from one customer or one investor or a hire you wanna make, there's always like another one and you can keep working towards where I feel like— You're free every day. As an athlete, it can be very frustrating where you're like, I'm doing everything that I possibly can. Yet I'm reliant on these external parties in order to push my career forward. Does that, does that resonate at all?

Yeah, massively. I think even, even once you're a Formula 1 driver and you can be in a, you can be in an airtight situation, your, your seat is always for sale in essence, right? Like, uh, you know, maybe not depending, there might not be any buyers that are able to compete with the ticket size that you're sitting on. Um, but there's never any certainty, right? At the end of the day, you're an employee. You're still contracted, you can be fired. Yes, that can happen in entrepreneur stakes if you're CEO founder, depends on your structure, how you, you know, what stage things are at. But I definitely wanted to be, like I said, more in control. And I've been through, you know, although I'm young, I'm not super young anymore, but still young and been through quite a lot of, let's say, networking and navigating different realms, whether it is, you know, whether it's, you know, trying to source a client in a specific region. For instance, the old CEO of the Alpine Formula 1 team didn't really read the media and watch the news, but he just specifically had a little newspaper for his local town in Italy that he always read each morning. So I ensured that, you know, what I was doing in my testing and my work that was getting correlated was made sure that it was published in that specific newspaper. Right. And it's the same thing if you're trying to target a market in MENA or in India, the Philippines that are overlooked on the West by, let's say, Western innovation or the technology and looking at things from a different perspective. I think these are all aspects that I've learned to try to target, have a different scope on things that I wouldn't have known at all.

So tell us more about Muse and Tell me specifically why this company? What was the opportunity discovery moment?

Yeah, I think what I wanted to do was solving a little bit of the fragmentation issue for your non, let's say, high enterprise institutions that they have everything aggregated, have these things that are together in order to then implement and optimize AI. So I didn't really know where that was. It was quite horizontal of that factor, especially targeting your, like I said, your, let's say, lower served countries, whether it's South America, Brazil, India, Philippines, where things are more fragmented, Indonesia. And our first contract came actually in the food and beverage space with Oakberry, which is an açaí— açaí— Society's company. And, uh, it was an extreme, like, eye-opener of how many systems that they run on, how, you know, how they don't communicate, how things are just not, you know, tracked, obviously, over 3, 4 days. Because your input is— your, your tracking sources are 17, 18-year-old kids, whether it's Oakberry or whether it's a QSR. Your, your employees that you're managing and that you're relying on to track all this reliable data that you end up will be having automated or optimized was done by someone who doesn't really want to be there, who is checking in at the latest point and is checking out at the earliest point. And things are not being done with, let's say, top-level accuracy. So that's where we wanted to really tighten down and thought, if we're going to try to do many other things, especially in this realm, it's so important to find that trust. And so we really wanted to niche down and capture one vertical properly. And as you know, we could dive into it. You just get further and further into the rabbit hole of finding your niche, right? And getting into the area where you really want to solve. And it went from, okay, supporting on agents for your POS systems, your inventory, your waste, your, your invoicing, and then finding that none of this can be optimized until these are communicating because each QSR system is using between 16 to 80 different software systems. You know, it can be very, very large. They're all third parties. And none of them obviously are, are coerced, none of them communicates. All this data is fragmented. So no AI agent, let's say, or AI is going to be strong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. And your big institutions, your Burger King, your Restaurant Brands International, McDonald's, are very tech-forward. They have their own agents, but they're only accessing menu queries, maybe staff training. And because in order to aggregate all of that data would mean shutting some part of their system down to do it.

Is it hard to get companies to pay for this? I feel like a lot of the traction in SMB, restaurant, it's driven by the POS system, like Toast, because you just take a small cut of the credit card fee, and it's sort of like this invisible cost that then can scale really dynamically. But if you're going in and you're saying, I'm gonna sell a solution, How are you justifying actually getting someone to open up and put down a credit card or pay for a recurring service, which I imagine is the business model?

Yeah, definitely. No, it's, it's not easy on the aspect. If you think you come in and you're trying to sell something that is, oh, this is better than what you currently have, right? We're going to replace X. Yeah. You get pitched how many tech, you know, tech software has daily emails come through that what we have is better than what you have. Yeah. Use us and not them. We have a great AI agent for F&B, false, you know, for us. No one's got a good AI agent until it's operating on the data. But what we're trying to operate is it's like headless as default, right? It's an underlying layer that is almost like superglue. So in essence, AI Cloud Systems, whether you want to call it a company brain where it's unifying all their current systems into one aggregated location, which then if they're not optimizing AI, as long as we have at least 3 months of that data, up towards 3 years, then we're able to really act and create for that. Or if it's your larger companies who have already an agent with Burger King, BK Assistant or others, then you're feeding this, let's say, aggregated and orchestrated data to this agent, which before they're all individual third-party softwares and now they're in one hub which can be orchestrated. They're all communicating together and you're actually going to get that optimization. Got it. So it's much easier to sell like that than actually saying this platform is going to replace what you have, let's say.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, uh, last question, please. How's, how's the grid reacting to the Luce?

Hmm, the Luce, the Ferrari Luce, the new electric vehicle from Ferrari.

He's still locked in.

He's like, Luce, what? $40,000 US. Uh, it's a steal.

Yeah, I thought he was sort of Italian dessert for a second. Something like that.

It does sound like that.

No, I think, look, I'm with Haas and we have a relationship with— we're running Ferrari engines. So I think it's amazing. It looks terrific. It's unbelievable. It's very good.

Couldn't agree more.

Cannot bless it more. I'm sure we'll chat about that more, Jordy. But guys, I'm sure that's my time. So it's great to—

Yeah, so great to meet you. I love the energy and the focus. And let's do it again soon. Yeah, we'll talk soon.

Great to meet you, Jack. Awesome, boys.

Have a good one. Cheers. Let me tell you all about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. You heard it from Jack. I think our next guest is joining in just a minute, but in the meantime, we can talk about the AI executive order. This was signed today by the president and Dean Ball has some, some context here. He says, wow, this EO is almost exactly similar to the leaked text from the EO the president chose not to sign because it was too regulatory. The only major difference is is that the voluntary pre-deployment review process is now only 30 days rather than 90 days. That's a concession, but a very small one compared to what I would've expected based on the president's remarks about the earlier draft. So if you haven't been following along, AI companies will be able to voluntarily submit their new models to the US government for review. Now they will, the government will get back to them in 30 days as opposed to 90 days, evaluate them, make a call or give advice or give some sort of commentary. Every word that comes from the government is a potential lawsuit in the future. And so, or will show up in a potential lawsuit. And so, you can expect a lot of thought and care given to whatever the government responds to. A lot of government applications from the FDA previously, the response would be "no comment.", and no comment is tacit approval. The FDA, with some products, with a lot of nutritional supplements and food ingredients, they don't necessarily want to say, "This is FDA approved," because that's a very high bar. There's a lot of regulatory and risk and legal ramifications from approving something, but they can decline to comment. They can decline to not comment. Permit the company to move forward. And I would expect that even a small, uh, even a small result like we send them their model, they reviewed it for 30 days, and they didn't say it was bad, uh, will be a good signal for AI labs that submit through this process. So, but Dean Ball continues, he says this is a fairly major win for the safety contingent within the admin and a significant loss for the Sachs accelerationist wing and is surprising to me. I continue to think this EO is a mistake. This is clearly teeing up the infrastructure for a model licensing regime. And the fact that the administration is classifying the new details— the details of how this voluntary system will work is egregious. So everyone wants to know, what are they going to be evaluating? Are they going to be doing, you know, ArchAGI tests or some other benchmark? Humanities last exam or just red teaming it or just talking to it, who knows? It's classified, everyone is interested to know, Dean Ball is certainly interested to know, but we don't know yet, but maybe in the future. The public, he continues, "The public and the employees of the labs have a right to know how this works." It is very frustrating when you're interacting with the federal government and you don't know their rubric for grading you. That is one of the most frustrating pieces of going back back and forth with the regulatory body. It's best when there's a very clear test for the DMV. You show up, if you know the answers to the questions, you get a driver's license. If you don't, if they were like, "We test you on a mystery, Groobrick," that would be very frustrating for anyone looking for a driver's license. He continues, "Most lab staff don't have clearances, but some do. But if the literal regulatory thresholds that trigger pre-deployment review are classified, researchers then themselves won't know whether they are— what they are training is regulated by this EO, all for the benefit that is barely articulable. What exactly is the intelligence community going to do in 30 days to make the model safer? I don't know. They could— there's a lot of tests you could run in 30 days. You know, try and hack this thing, try and design a bioweapon. These are things people are worried about. In 30 days, you can certainly get these models to attempt those and see how they respect, see how they respond. So he says it's not a huge mistake, but a small, medium-sized one. But I am fairly confident this is a mistake nonetheless. Well, we will dig into it more in the future, but our next guest is here in the waiting room. We have Nate Kavanaugh from Special. He is the co-founder. Welcome to the show, both of you. Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the company.

Hey guys, good to see you. Appreciate you having us. Yeah, great to have you on. Yeah, my name is Nate Kavanaugh. Justin Fox is my co-founder on the line. We say we were excited to announce Special, which is a new holding company that we really view as an extension of the work we did at DOJ. So Justin and I worked together at the Department of Government Efficiency for the past year, but we're now building effectively DOJ but for the private sector. And so we're focused on this $10 trillion Main Street services economy, which in many ways is like the federal government. It's massive, it's inefficient, and in a lot of cases is still funded in part, at least by the government. And so we announced that today and said, I'll chat with you guys about it.

Do you have a particular industry that you want to focus on? Do you want to be general? I mean, I see this loosely in the bucket of management consulting, delayering, understanding inefficiencies. There's, there's a tried and true track record. I'm interested to hear how you're differentiating from other management consulting firms that might already be doing some of this work for large companies. But then also I'm interested to know where you're focusing, where you see the most opportunity.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the main point of differentiation is there's two components to the special business model. So Special is developing a set of AI tools that we can apply to these Main Street industries. We're starting with healthcare and more specifically a bet on the aging population demographic of the US. And so we identified that as our first vertical. We're actually incubating a new brand to become category leader and we're going out and acquiring these great independent small businesses and applying those AI tools into the businesses that then we will, we will own forever.

Yeah. And so we— Just to guess, are these like Medicare-related businesses?

Hospital or like a primary care or like an urgent care? Like what are we actually talking about in terms of healthcare?

The specific market is at-home senior care. So it would be a nurse going to a senior citizen's house to provide them with care in the home. It's the lowest cost way to provide care for senior citizens in the country. And I'm sure you guys have seen there's a lot of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. We're focused on trying to provide the nurses, the critical workers in these industries with the best AI tools so that they can provide better care for seniors.

And there's probably a lot of back office work that goes into scheduling and all of those things can be enhanced with AI tools, I imagine.

That's exactly right.

Jordy? Yeah. Why? Why a holdco? I'm curious. Oh, yeah. Like, this feels like healthcare is like, you know, —multi-billion-dollar industry. You guys, sounds like you have a playbook that you feel like can be applied across different categories. But is healthcare not big enough for you guys?

Justin, you want to take this?

Yeah, look, first of all, it's great to be with you guys today. Look, I think, you know, with Special at the top parent co and developing these AI tools, I think, you know, to limit sort of the expertise that we've learned from Doge and from prior careers to just healthcare, I think would be narrow. You know, the point of having the parent co with engineering talent is that we can deploy into multiple verticals. And so, I mean, as you can imagine, the Main Street economy is massive. And so if we're just going to address healthcare, I think that's, that's too narrow. And frankly, there's, there's so many independent business owners that we're looking to problem solve for. So Nate alluded to it, but, you know, Figure is going to be— or Figure is our newly incubated strategic brand in healthcare. And so that brand is going to inevitably be carrying the torch for these business owners through development of AI. So we're going to be working hand in hand in the weeds with these operators to develop the tools that they need to succeed.

Mm-hmm. How do you think about the size of a company that you want to acquire and fold in? Obviously, there's some organizations that have already been sort of rolled up. They're large, they're private. There's probably public companies that you could do a take private of at the biggest scale. There's also probably very small businesses with owner operators who might be getting older, looking for liquidity. Like, what is in your strike zone?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, today we announced our new financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and a lot of our Doge teammates, guys like Steve Davis, Antonio Gracias. And we, We actually in that same announcement announced our first acquisition that's under contract. It's a, it's a business that's doing, we'll say, tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. They have about 1,500 senior patients that they care for and about 200 nurses on the payroll. So it's a pretty big business based in Texas. And we have a pipeline of others that we plan to do. So I'd say it's a business where it already has some, some management sophisticated sophistication and some real scale, but is not at the scale of doing a public take private.

Yeah. Outta curiosity, how, like, is there significant, like, how significant is the back office like opex? Because I imagine like, you know, seniors want to be cared for by individuals. I imagine they don't want to just like jump on a Zoom call and get care that way. So is this a play that you think you can use AI to grow the business much faster? And you feel like there's significant sort of back office savings or like where do you think you'll get the most return?

Dustin, go ahead.

Yeah, look, I think what we're not— what we're not suggesting is that a robot is going to replace a nurse in Grandma's home. That's not at all the case here. Yeah, look, I think, you know, when we think about the delivery of service, you know, if that takes up about 50% of the cost to pay your nurses, there's something like 40% of the remaining dollars are getting spent on a lot of administrative tasks that can be solved with AI. And so our view, you know, the way that we think about it at Figure is let's make the jobs of our back office team members easier. And instead of what maybe a traditional PE or strategic would do, which is pocket those savings and market a huge margin accretion, let's share those savings with our workers. So one of the things that's unique about this space is there's a massive shortage of nurses and caregivers. And so to the extent that you can be in a market and be able to pay your team the most, everybody will flood into your business. And so then you can provide care for the millions of Americans who sometimes don't have access to it. So that's the underlying thesis. I think it's share the pie, grow the pie with everybody. It'll help you grow and deliver better service.

And Jordan, to your point, this is the playbook that we plan to replicate across not just healthcare, but markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a lot of the learnings we had from Doge can then get applied back into the private sector.

Yeah, more leverage on the key workers that are doing the most important tasks, the things that are actually aligned with the mission, and more efficient back offices.

Uh, sense you guys sticking with a 5-day work week? It's been a hot debate. I got a feeling you guys might be putting in a few more hours.

I don't think we're as, uh, We're somewhere between 5 days and corgi, I think is a— That feels healthy.

That feels sustainable.

Just a third of tattoos, I suppose. Never go full tattoo. Exactly. Exactly. Congratulations and thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for coming on, guys. Congrats on the raise and I'm sure you'll be back on with more news soon.

Have a great rest of your day. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks. Good to see you. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have Tom Mueller from Impulse. Space. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Two job titles, three job titles. We're very excited to have Tom Mueller back on the show. Uh, he's been on before, but great to see you. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Great to see you guys.

First question: Ferrari Luce reactions.

What you got? What I got?

What do I have? Ferrari Luce reactions. Ferrari Luce, the electric Ferrari. Oh, it's coming out $640,000. Do you think it's underpriced, overpriced? What do you think?

Overpriced for that styling.

It is an odd positioning. But it got everyone talking. I think the F40 is going to hold value. I don't think it's going to be an F40 disruptor. Not many people trading those in. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Ferrari. We're here to talk about Impulse Space. Can you reset the table for us, reintroduce the company, give us the news, tell us what's happening? And then I have a million questions about the space economy broadly, but let's kick it off with that. Ampulse Space.

I started this company 5 years ago. It's space mobility. Overnight success. Which basically means that we take over where launch leaves off. So we move things around in space. So starting at LEO, we move things up to to geo, like 20— up to 22,000 miles up. We can, you know, take things to the, to the moon. We can greatly increase the amount of payloads you can take to Mars. We have our MIRA spacecraft. 3 of those are flying right now, and a bunch are in build. Yeah, those things, uh, do precision maneuvering in orbit. They can host payloads, they can deploy payloads, they can do rendezvous. We are hope— hopefully we'll get on-ramped onto the the new lunar cargo program and do some 1-ton class lunar landers. It's a lot happening right now.

I can imagine. So there's been so much excitement about LEO, Starlink, Planet Labs. You put a camera up there, you put a Wi-Fi router up there, basically, not to simplify it too much, but even Varda manufacturing in LEO. Like, so much of the attention's been on LEO that I think a lot of people have sort of lost the reference classes for what happens in higher orbits. Can you give us some examples of what's interesting at higher orbits, whether that's Middle Earth orbit, I think, is that what it's called? MEO? Yeah, MEO. Middle Earth is just hilarious 'cause it's a Lord of the Rings reference, but MEO, GEO, I understand. Geostationary orbits are sometimes useful, but give us the 101 on why someone would be unsatisfied with just YOLOing endless satellites into LEO in perpetuity.

Well, the nice thing about GEO, you know, is where really commsat started, is that you can cover the whole Earth with just 3 satellites. Oh, that's right. And of course, GEO, geosynchronous means, or geostationary means that it's a 24-hour orbit. So you're You're always looking at the same point in the sky. Super important, still an important orbit. It's kind of been overshadowed by all of the LEO launches, but there's still, you know, a dozen launches or more that go to that orbit. It's becoming more important of an orbit for the Space Force. There's a lot happening up there that I don't even know about. I don't have the need to know, but there's a lot going on up there. And, you know, but our adversaries, China and Russia, are maneuvering around our satellites up there. So we need to, we need to go to have mobility to go up there and defend and find out what's going on and be able to protect our assets.

So we have the capability to get to GEO. Obviously there are satellites currently in GEO. You mentioned there's maybe a dozen launches, that sounded annual. Manual, like maybe something like that going up there. So we have the capability, like the rockets exist, but it's uneconomical. And so the value prop of Impulse, just to say it back to you, is get on a rocket that's going to LEO, but end up in GEO and you don't need to pull all of those resources. And so you're sort of unlocking GEO based on all of the LEO capability that we have in space. Satellites. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. So what we're talking about here is our Helios product, which is what we call a rocket on a rocket. We add basically a third stage to a Falcon 9. It's got 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, very high performance, uh, pump-fed staged combustion engine, and it can get you from LEO to GEO in a day. So it basically helps Falcon 9 do what Falcon Heavy does, for tens of millions of dollars less. Or for an example of a, you know, commercial guys usually don't fly on Heavy, they'll fly Falcon 9 and then they'll spend months using electric propulsion to get to where they want to get.

We'll get you there. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that was an option. That's so interesting. I'll have to research more of that. I'm fascinated by that. But talk to me about how Starship changes things for you. Is that an accelerant for you. I mean, you're raising a $500 million Series D. I can imagine, and you worked at SpaceX obviously for a very long time. I imagine that that's not a nail in the coffin. That's not a threat, but I imagine it's a benefit. But how is it a benefit? Because the intuitive, you know, the layperson might think bigger rocket, that'll get me to GEO easily. Why do I need Impulse now? So talk to me about how Starship fits into the future of the space economy.

Starship is the, you know, is going to be the, the ultimate, uh, LEO, um, you know, cargo ship workload.

Yeah, cargo ship.

Yeah, because it, it, you know, it, it doesn't need to refuel. Yeah, um, get to LEO, it can get to LEO and be fully reusable, come back and fuel and go again. Yeah, so it's going to greatly reduce the cost, uh, per kilogram or per ton to get um, to get cargo to, to orbit. And that's, that's why I started the company, basically, because I worked on Starship. Yeah, you know, last 6 years I was there, realizing that now we have such an efficient way— like I mentioned at the beginning, launch is solved. Now we need to figure out how to move all that cargo around once it's up in orbit. Of course, Starship can refuel and go to these high-energy orbits, but I think it's going to be more efficient. And if you need Starship there, that's what you need do, like if you're taking cargo to the moon or humans to the moon or to Mars, that's the right thing. But if— I don't know that it's the right thing if you don't actually need the Starship up there. Because if you think about it, Starship's 120 tons of stainless steel you got to bring up there, and then you got to bring it back to get it back. So it comes— uh, we'll see how that— how the economics work out.

Okay, how did, uh, how did, uh, the space sort of like How did the founder startup community react to Blue Origin? Obviously, you know, massive setback and disappointing, hopefully for all humanity.

I don't think anybody was cheering that on. I mean, it's obviously bad for industry. Launch is, you know, is still constrained even though SpaceX is flying so often. There's just so many payloads that need to go that we need all of them to be successful. And I think it's been mentioned many times, SpaceX is not gonna lower their price until they have a true competitor. And we need true competitors to come online. It's happening, but these setbacks delay it.

Yeah, what have you heard around how big of a setback it actually is? Is this setting the program back?

Actually, Dave Lamp, the CEO, just, I think last night, tweeted that they think they can, it's not as bad as it initially looked, and they think they can fly again this year, which is great.

It's great news. Yeah, I was looking at the aerial photography of the launch pad and the headline was billion-dollar launch pad, the only one they have, completely destroyed. But some of the buildings looked pretty usable. I was optimistic. So I'm glad to hear that Dave Limp is sharing some optimism there as well. I would love for you to sort of walk me through some of the trade-offs and economic considerations about getting to to the moon because we just saw with the Artemis launch that single rocket seemed to be able to just fly right up there, come back. And then when I see the Starship plan, I'm like, it's a as big or bigger rocket. It should just be able to go straight there. But then when I see the actual plans, it's like 7 different refueling stages and it seems much more complicated. And it seems like you have the ability to potentially get to the moon with certain plans. And so it feels like there's an ensemble approach, there's different trade-offs. Like, what is the logic as we try and get to the Moon more regularly? How will this actually play out?

Yeah, I think, you know, there's, there's two ways to do it. You, you use a large, um, partially reusable, where you throw— you basically throw away those upper stages and, and, and take a lander to the Moon. That's kind of the Blue Origin, uh, approach. Or there's the fully reusable with, with multiple refueling to get there and back, which is the SpaceX approach. But what we do with Helios is sort of the former. We're adding this, this expendable third stage, and now we can, we can 10x the amount of payload on a Falcon 9 to the Moon. So imagine that lever, like you basically, um, for the same cost of the launch vehicle plus a little bit more for the Helios, you're getting 10 times the amount cargo. And we've looked at missions to Mars where we get 5 times the payload to Mars just by adding a Helios. So it's a huge leverage. It's going to be a really compelling product when it starts flying. It's already selling really well. I think once it starts flying, we won't be able to make them fast enough.

So you have the money raised. What are you actually working on in terms of creating reliable manufacturing manufacturing, your supply chain? Because I imagine that it's not enough to build one prototype, a few prototypes, something hand-built. That might be something you're experimenting with in the early stages, but the name of the game is industrial capacity here. What do the next few years look like in terms of scale?

Yeah, ramping up production. We're hiring more people and we're, and we're hiring a lot of people in the production area, you know, manufacturing engineers, technicians, All kinds of people now, where earlier, you know, earlier in the company's history, we were mostly hiring, you know, a lot of development engineers. So now we're really getting into production on our products. And we just moved into, or starting to move into, a much larger facility here. So filling that out with, you know, production capability. And we're always, the same thing that we did at SpaceX, we're constantly, bringing more things in-house, like getting— becoming even more vertically integrated. Okay. Vertical integration takes a lot of capital, which is why we've raised a lot. But once you vertically integrated, you have a huge advantage. We see that— we see this with SpaceX, able to execute very quickly, very efficiently, at low cost. Basically, you can control cost, schedule, and quality if you're vertically integrated.

And take me through the shape of that vertical integration. Are you buying like tube bending machines, CNC machines, 3D printers? Like what is the shape of the vertical integration? Are you building like specific machinery that will just make one product over and over and over again?

I mean, that's the tooling part of it, but certainly, you know, milling machines, lathes, 3D printers, and, building out test capability.

So like raw materials in and you get the finished product eventually. Yeah.

You know, you bring in raw material and spacecraft come out the other end of the factory.

I love it. What do you think the impact of the SpaceX IPO will be on, you know, the space economy broadly? You know, talking about, you know, maybe people that have been there for a decade, maybe ready to do something new. How do you think it'll impact the industry?

Well, certainly, you know, the space economy has been accelerating, you know, since the time that, you know, I've started this company a lot. And I think that's just really the general effect of SpaceX and other startups to have on the industry. And now with the announcement, it's just supercharged the space industry, which is great. And I love what Elon's talking about, you know, building, you know, basically he's talking about building megastructures now in space, you know, millions of, of AI servers in space. And he's already talking about using the resources of the moon in order to build when, you know, when they max out what they can launch. And this is the theme of my company, is like, this is something I've talked about a lot, is you need to use the resources of the moon to build these megastructures in space because it's going to be destructive to the Earth to, to launch it from Earth or grab it from Earth or Or in the case of compute power, the amount of compute power we're going to need in the next 30 years, as it's growing at 15% annually, is just crushing. So moving that to space is the obvious thing in the long term. I'm glad to see it's happening sooner.

Seems like you're excited about both the moon and Mars. Yeah. Elon was like a Mars maxi for a long time. He's interested in the Moon. It's been exciting. I'm obviously excited about both, but what is different about these two missions? Obviously the Moon's closer, but what's uniquely unlocked by the Moon? Why is the Moon important? Why do you see Mars as important as well? Obviously you should never stop. I hope you wind up going to Alpha Centauri soon. Every year. But let's just narrow in on Moon and Mars. Moon, Mars, what are the unique opportunities? What are the risks? What are the trade-offs?

Yeah, I've always been more of a Moon person myself. I think the Moon is more important in the near term. It's easier to have a permanent base there. And I think everything we need to build in space is on the Moon. The metals, you know, water, you know, oxygen. So everything we need to be self-sufficient. Of building megastructures in space is there. And I would also add near-Earth objects. Some of them are easier to get to than the Moon. Mars is super important.

What's a near-Earth object that's closer? There's secret planets or asteroids out there you know about and I don't?

It's a near-Earth asteroid. Okay. Near-Earth asteroid. Yeah. The thing about the Moon is it still has a gravity well. You know, we talk kilometers per second. Yeah. Earth has a gravity well of like 9 kilometers per second, and the Moon has a gravity well like 2.4. Okay. But it still has— you still— that's a lot of propulsion to, to, to brake down on the Moon at 2.4 and then come back. You're talking 5 kilometers per second total. That's a lot of delta-v.

And you got to bring that with you.

Yeah, you got to bring the propellant to do that. Yeah. That's why the Moon is, is still pretty tough, whereas a small asteroid is is, you know, it's just meters per second, maybe, or centimeters per second because the gravity is so low. So you don't have to use all that propellant in order to get there and back. So it's a big—

And those meteors, I'm not trying to quiz you on something that you might not have dug into, but I'm fascinated. Are these like meteors that are just passing by and the whole point is that they pass by regularly enough that we could go up and back, or are there actual meteors that are like orbiting the Earth right now that I don't know about?

There are. I mean, there are. I think there's one right now, right? These things get temporarily captured in orbit, and then they eventually are unstable and they get thrown out, like the Moon will throw them out or something. Yeah, but there's, you know, there's a lot— most of them are, you know, further than the Moon. Yeah, but once you escape Earth's gravity, it just takes time to get there. But you don't have a gravity well once you get there to get the material to come back. But the Moon is easier in just that you have surface gravity and a nice surface you can land on and build on. So I think the Moon is super important also.

Yeah. Sorry, Drew, do you have something or? Not right now. I can keep going. I'm interested in both the footprint of the company You mentioned you're expanding. I know the original headquarters was in El Segundo, correct?

Yeah, I still have that little building over in El Segundo. Okay. We started in a little 7,000 square foot building.

Yeah. But I imagine you've outgrown. So what is the footprint of the company? What's the workforce like today? Where do you see that going? What are you hiring for? This feels like a great company to join if you're uncertain about how AI will change the world. The world. Well, we're going to be shooting rockets for 30 years, as you said. We have a lot of work to do. So this feels like a fantastic opportunity for folks.

Yeah. Yeah. So like I mentioned, we started in a 7,000-square-foot garage, people call it over there. We've, we maxed that out, and then we moved into the, um, our facility. We had an interim that's about 60,000 square feet, and we just acquired another 240,000 square feet, uh, on the same block at the other end of the block that we're just starting to build out. We've got 500 employees right now. We just, we just passed 500 a few weeks ago, and we've got 200 open job reqs.

So we're hiring. That is, that is fantastic. Take me through the shape of the— there we go— hiring 200 people, that's serious. Take me through the shape of the, of the, of those those job racks? Are you hiring software engineers? Are you using AI everywhere? Are you hiring everything?

Like I mentioned earlier, we're hiring a lot in the production area. Okay. Um, we're, you know, we're, we're hiring, uh, software, uh, people, uh, just— I mean, we're a spacecraft company. Um, we, we do, you know, we have to do comms, we have to, you know, we have radios, we have antennas, we have reaction wheels, all kinds of stuff, lots of avionics. Lots of propulsion, lots of structures, lots of software to control it. There's, you know, no such thing as being a tech company without software to operate your hardware. So all of the above. Guidance, navigation, and control. Orbital mechanics are— I'm a rocket scientist, I don't understand most orbital mechanics. That's really tough stuff. Super smart guys that figure out how to navigate in space.

All of the above. That's great. Awesome.

We have a gong, we'd love to hit it in your honor.

Tell us about the fundraise. You raised $500 million from 137 Ventures.

There we go.

We love Christian from 137. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a fantastic rest of your week. Yeah, great stuff, Thomas. We'll catch up with you soon.

Congrats on the progress.

Thank you, guys. Goodbye. Bye. Thank you so much. OpenAI announced that they're breaking ground Stargate Michigan, a 1-gigawatt data center utilizing closed-loop cooling, and they're getting out ahead of the water, the water FUD. They say it uses water at the rate of a typical office building, creates thousands of union jobs.

Not an office building that I'm in.

No, I know you're drinking a lot of water.

You're not drinking tap water.

You're bringing in the glass bottled water, potentially.

Aurora's— Aurora water. Aurora's, you know, getting, uh— Yeah, thousands of gallons a day.

AI pivot for Aurora, filtering the water that goes into the data center.

Make sure it's only filtered. Only.

I'm sure that there's a water filter. I'm sure that there is a water filtering system in these, in these data centers.

In other OpenAI news, there's now Sites in Codex. You can turn work ideas, plans into interactive websites or apps your team can explore, use, and share. This is very cool. This is what you asked for.

Yes, the first one was my sort of like benchmark, my hello world test. Like, can I go on my phone into, uh, into any of these AI apps and have it generate me a link to a website that I can share with a friend? Because I can generate a big deep dive text thread and I can share that link with someone. They can go in the app and see what I've been texting back and forth. That's It's very useful. You can generate an image and then you can save that to your camera roll, send that around. It's very portable. And when I demoed Meta AI, the latest launch, one of the suggested prompts is like, "Vibe code a video game." And it actually does a really, really great job building a little miniature video game and it gives you a link, but the link is like trapped within the Meta AI. And I'm like, "Oh, we're so close." It's such a minor thing to have an actual link actual hosting service there, but I think that that's exciting for virality and something else.

There's going to be a bull market for simulators.

Yes, because you'll be able to— I mean, there are a lot of people who, you know, they— as much as they want the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro with the lid cranked open at all times, they want to, you know, vibe code something or build something on their phone and then send that to a friend. And if they build something interactive, they want that to be shareable. Role. And this is, uh, yeah, exciting, exciting development.

Um, uh, speaking of Meta, they had—

what else is going on?

I think a pretty insane— oh yeah, is this real?

I, I saw this and I was like, this cannot possibly be real, but it is.

I've seen a number of people that I know that have one-word usernames that got them—

they got hacked. Okay, so basically this is from 404 Media. Hackers simply asked Meta AI to give them access to high-profile Instagram accounts. It worked. I'm sure they're rolling it back. I'm sure they're on top of this. But the exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI. I guess the, I guess the, uh, the AI was able to deliver, uh, you know, um, uh, account recovery information to anyone who asked, and it wasn't segmented. It didn't do the proper validation. Hackers say that they use Meta AI chatbot, uh, to break into a host of high-profile Instagram accounts.

Here's a video of how it worked. Okay, pull it up.

Play that video and, uh, we will see from how they're—

404.

The Obama White House account got hit. Oh no. Um, uh, people were saying, I've been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts using the easiest possible method.

They're just asking Meta's AI chatbot for access access to the accounts. Here's how it worked.

Basically, they started— music in the background—

as AI chatbot and said, hey, I want access to a specific account, please send a reset code to the hacker's email address. AI chatbot said, it's not our soundboard.

In the last 24 hours, we've seen some really high-profile accounts targeted this way.

We saw Barack Obama's White House account get stolen.

We saw a Space Force account get So they were only targeting high-profile Instagram accounts. Did they go after yours, Jordy?

No, I'm not in that league.

Oh, they came out of mine crazy. They were trying to steal my— Oh, it was insane. I was just getting bombarded because they were like, we got to get this guy's Instagram account.

They were probably going for your dog's Instagram account. Maybe.

I think he still has more followers than me. Rest in peace, Gustavo. One of the best to ever do it. Anyway. You know who won't be passing away anytime soon? Vladimir Putin, because he is on a $26 billion quest for longevity. Brian Johnson's chiming in. It's so— You can't go to a rich person's yacht or fly a private plane or live in a mansion.

I think that Russia has invested more in Putin's longevity than AI, or close to it. That's true. I was trying to figure out how many GPUs they had inside of Russia.

Well, all the best AI people like left via Yandex and are now running in Neo Clouds and yeah, and also ClickHouse. Anyway, from mini pigs to organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia's president has turned anti-aging research into a Kremlin priority. And remember, he was caught on that hot mic with Xi Jinping saying that humans could achieve immortality by placing their organs. Some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats. In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia's flagship scientific projects. Uh, like other Silicon Valley billionaires, Putin has been long fascinated with anti-aging research, but in Russia, Putin's quest to stave off decline is now a state priority. Last month, Russia's government announced that scientists are developing a gene therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging, uh, as part of the $26 billion Longevity Initiative. The drug represents one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging. Another auspicious avenue: creating human organs in a lab for transplantation. Sounds, uh, normal. Very normal thing to do. One of the lifespan-extending initiatives. Pretty sure, wasn't Tyler trying to— He's been doing that. He's been doing that.

We always say, hey, knock it off, Tyler.

Knock it off. Breeding the human organs. All these efforts are part of a national longevity initiative he unveiled in 2024, which promises to save 175,000 lives by the end of the decade. That's great. Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key areas, bioprinting, or 3D printing living tissue, tissue and xenotransplantation, or growing human organs inside mini pigs. What if the next, what if the next, you know, longevity hack comes from the mosquito? And we kill them all. And it's like, oh, all you needed to do was get a blood transfusion from a mosquito.

It's the next HeLa monster.

Yeah, the next GLP-1 potentially. You gotta be careful about these knock-on effects. Who knows?

Well, I think the conspiracy theorists would would say that some humans already discovered the mosquito's one simple trick. Yeah, what's that?

Drinking blood. Oh yeah, weird. Russian scientists are working with government agencies to claim, they claim that they have bioprinted human cartilage tissue. That seems doable maybe. And a mouse thyroid gland with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. They're trying to grow organs inside pigs In the Russian Federation, work is underway on a whole range of scientific programs in this field. These projects are supported by the state, and many scientific and research institutions are taking part in them. Uh, it's difficult to discuss immortality, but the ability to repair man will undoubtedly increase, they told the Russian media. Unlike similar research funded by American tech elites, the work promoted by Putin's circle has produced little peer reviewed research in major international journals. He's keeping it to himself. He's gonna live forever and not tell us how he did it. We'll see. Anyway, he's doing a cold plunge too. So he's doing some of the, some of the old stuff, some of the new stuff. The average male life expectancy in Russia is about 68 years, roughly, compared to 76 in the United States. So lots of room to catch up. 80 or over Western Europe. The, the Europeans are living to 80 these days, but in Russia, just 67, 68 years. So, uh, lots of room to improve health over in Russia. We'll see, we'll see what happens. Maybe they've discovered the next GLP-1. It feels like it is— they are behind the ball on AI, and it feels like they, uh, would be potentially enhanced by having AI tools to help them alongside this. I have been— I feel like, uh, AI 2027, China wakes up this year. When is Russia waking up?

I had Codex do some quick research. Yeah, yeah, uh, no, no evidence of any, uh, anything like, you know, Blackwell-level chip, which makes sense. I don't think— and NVIDIA has plenty of demand. It wouldn't be selling them over there. They do have, uh, likely small numbers to low hundreds of H2 200s, uh, potentially hundreds to low thousands of H100s, and then they have, uh, some A100s. But again, uh, and then, and then certainly could have, um, some within the military that they're not talking about. But, um, but yeah, not, uh, they're trying to get up to 10 supercomputers by 2030 is their stated ambition, each with 10,000. That just sounds like not a lot. I think you're gonna— They're calling everyone else's bluff.

You absolutely must not dunk on any Russian oligarchs if they talk about their underfunded AI projects.

I will not, I will not.

You must abstain 'Cause you can have some fun witty banter with the President of France, with the President of France, but I do not want you to draw the ire of the Kremlin at any point.

No, I think it's great. I respect their supercomputers. I respect their supercomputers.

I respect them. They're doing great. Seems like it's on track. Good job, everyone over there. You're doing great. Really, really good. AGI, definitely on the same timeline as every other country. We have to pull up this, video. We have our next guest in the waiting room. But first, we have to play this video from Jensen Huang because the gamers are rising up and NVIDIA is delivering an AI chip for laptops, for PCs, supercomputers at home, AI agents at home. It's in Section K. He was on stage and he had a very funny quote. I want you to listen to this, Jordy. The new 007 game. I'm looking forward to playing it. I look a little bit like him.

Look at this. I look a little bit like it. They're gonna blow out, they're gonna blow out. It's gonna be a blowout.

That's funny, is that he's playing like, he's like, this, this laptop has 4s on it, the racing game. This, this laptop has double the new 007 game out. I look like him. It's like, I guess he's wearing a leather jacket or something, but that's just so funny to be like, I'm—

he's having a great quarter.

It's amazing. It's such a great bit. And then he, and then he shows some other racks, but There's a lot of good stuff from NVIDIA. Why NVIDIA inside can work in the PC market. The world's only $5 trillion company can sell the concept that AI computing won't be confined to data centers. So he's already getting ahead of the future of on-premise AI compute, local AI inference happening in your house. You get a DGX, you get a big powered piece and it runs your lights, it runs your smart home, it runs whatever you want locally and actually can inference a near-frontier model in the future. So exciting to see. I like it. I like the idea of having powerful AI that's not in the cloud, that's local. I think that that's fun. I've always been a fan of the tiny box and this is in that vein.

So yeah, and actually I bought the property right next to your home. Yeah. And I'm putting a data center, a little data center in there.

Perfect. As long as I can throw an Ethernet cable over there. Well, we have Edward Kim from Gusto. He's the co-founder and head of technology. Welcome to the show, Edward. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on.

Great to have you on and great to meet you. I think—

Yeah, nice to meet you. I think I'm the third and final co-founder. Third and final co-founder.

That's what I was going to say.

So there must be one more you guys have hidden. Yeah, one up your sleeve.

No, just us three.

No, just you three? Okay. Well, anyway, take us through the launch today. Tell us what's happening in Gusto world.

Yeah, so today I'm really excited. I think it's the most important moment for us as a company since the launch of the company almost 14, 15 years ago. Wow. And we're launching today Gusto Co-Founder. Gusto Co-Founder is really the first agent that can automate most of what a small business does in their back office. You guys were just talking about personal computers, and I have a Mac Mini where I set up OpenClaw took me 8 hours to set up. Yeah. Pain in the ass. Yep. And as soon as I got through the entire setup, I didn't really know what to do with it, right? I still kind of like use it as a glorified search engine.

There's people in the back. Sorry, someone on your team was—

Background, yeah, in the office. We're in the office here in Dogpatch. People are still using it still as a glorified search engine. Yeah. That's kind of the problem that we set out to solve with Gusto Co-Founder. Yeah. Instead of starting from the technology and then giving people a blank canvas on something to do with it, what Gusto Co-Founder does is we start with all of the problems that we're already helping our customers with— payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling, time— and then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it. So at the center of Gusto co-founder is a concept called automations. And essentially you tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, all these things that we're already doing for you. And Gusto co-founder will basically run your business process for you. You communicate with it through SMS and Slack, so you don't really even interface with it through a, through a website. And then of course, we'll connect to all of your systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. So Notion, QuickBooks, Google Workspace, you have a lot of information and data that sits outside of Gusto as well. What Gusto co-founder does is it brings it all together into one place where it can automate your, your, your business processes.

Why, why SMS and Slack? Why not like a chat in your face and a Gusto app directly? Like what, what does that allow you?

Because I think it just I mean, I'll tell you, it just mimics exact— I mean, I remember even with how Gusto, how easy to use Gusto was in 2018 when I had my first business, I was still relieved when we hired somebody whose job was just to kind of like handle everything on the payroll side. And if I needed something done, I would just text them or I would Slack them and say, hey, hey, can you do this thing? Hey, we're onboarding this person, or this contractor, we need to make sure they get paid by this day, or whatever it was. And so I just think actually making it feel like a teammate is getting you much closer to the experience of— people are not waking up every morning, entrepreneurs are not waking up saying, I want to spend a bunch of time in my payroll platform today, right? You want it to be so seamless that it's just, it's just happening.

Yeah, that's exactly right. We want it to feel like your teammate. It should be someone that, you know, you feel comfortable texting, having run processes for you. So you could have it actually text you when it's run your payroll. It'll tell you the, like, total amount, and all you have to do is say, "I approve it." It'll actually run your payroll. So you never even have to, like, log into Gusto to run your payroll ever again. If you want to do more one-off things, like, "Hey, pay this contractor $500," You could just text it as well. One of the things I really loved about Open Claw is just, it just blew my mind. It was such a simple concept that seemed so obvious, the ability to text with it through Telegram. And that's kind of, I wanted to bring that magical experience into Gusta Co-Founder. It just really changes the game and it's hard to understate how important that is.

Yeah, so is the product development for this sort of like indigenous in the sense that you're, you're your experience are informing the product decisions, or is it you're noticing customers, like you're noticing an uptake, or I don't even know if you can detect if your customers are interfacing with Gusto's core endpoints or UI with OpenClaw. Are you able to see some sort of data to show that there's demand for this, or is it just like—

Absolutely.

You've experienced it and you're launching this?

Yeah, I mean, if you just observe some of our customers, like, I'll give one example. There was a massage spa in New York, and what they do every week to run payroll is they typically have work tracked in some other system. In this case, it was Mindbody, right? A lot of like spa, yoga studios, Pilates, they track work of their workers in Mindbody. Then every week what they'll do is they'll export data from there. They'll put it into Google Spreadsheets. They'll run some crazy calculation in there. They'll say, if you worked this many, if you did this many massages, then you'll get paid this much. If you upsold CBD oil or a hot stone massage, you get $15 for each one of those. That goes in as a bonus and commission. And then here's how we do tips. We'll split it across all of our therapists. They do all that calculation, and then and only then, they go into Gusto, put in all that information to run payroll. That part we see, obviously, right? And so if you only look at that part, we're like, great, we did a great job. It takes like seconds to run payroll. But if you look at the entire process that they're running, there's this whole, what I call the work before the work that happens. And you really only like understand that when you observe a customer like end to end, not just using your systems, but all the systems that they're using to run their business. And that's why kind of having these connectors and Gusto co-founder was so important to us. We recognize that these businesses are not doing everything within Gusto, at least not yet. And they have multiple systems that they're connecting. And these entrepreneurs are really creative in stringing them together, but that's still a lot of work at the end of the day. And they can just really kind of have those business processes just tell Gusto co-founder once that like, hey, go export it from this system, do these calculations on it, then put it into Gusto, run payroll, and then text me the final amount so that I can approve it before you actually run payroll. That's cool.

Last question for me. I'm very interested in how, like, I don't know, like a company of Gusto's scale thinks about launching new products within Gusto. Because you sort of— there are a lot of people that are just like, "Oh, Gusto works perfectly. I'm not going to think about it." And you have to market this new feature, this new product to your existing customers. Obviously, it's a draw for new customers, because new capability, better product. But also just, you have to tell people, obviously, you can email them. But I'm interested to know, because every payroll admin probably has a phone number already, authenticated for two-factor? Is there some sort of internal go-to-market strategy that's more mature than just throw it in the newsletter, tell everyone that this thing exists? How are you thinking about actually onboarding, measuring churn, making sure there's satisfaction for sort of a new product within the Gusto ecosystem?

Yeah, I mean, it's really just talking to your customers all the time, I think. Really understanding what their needs are, there's always going to be more problems that we can solve for them. Yeah. And then when we solve those problems, you know, we're pretty good at tracking either through, you know, customers we've talked to or through our data, like, how do we reach out to those folks that would specifically benefit from what we just built? Sure. That way we're not, you know, kind of spamming every single one of our 500,000+ employers on Gusto. For every little thing that we launch. We want to kind of just kind of communicate to them only the most relevant things. And so with Gusto co-founder, we've reached out to 500 customers to give early access to this starting today. Got it. And they're naturally a little bit more on the tech-forward ones are the ones that we've talked to that, you know, are already using AI to automate parts of their business, but can do a lot more. Yeah. Cost.

How much does it cost you? How much does it cost the customer? Is inference a problem? Are you able to use a series of models? How are you thinking about— is it like—

Yeah, I think you gotta worry about people being like, hey, I'm trying to ship this new feature. You think you can—

Hey, Gusto co-founder, can you actually just do product development for me too?

And it's like, no problem, boss. I mean, I think the philosophy we took with Gusto co-founder is we wanted to unconstrain it as much as possible because I really want to just learn to see how people use it. Right? If you have it say, hey, text me the weather every morning, especially if it's going to rain today because my business is a tour business. Yeah, that might actually be relevant.

Even though that sounds like a wild, like just random OpenClaw task, like that actually does make sense in that business context. Yeah.

And then, and then look at my customer list and send them an email saying to bring an umbrella for today's tour.

To build those automations.

You can do that on Gusto Co-Founder. And we had some conversations. Do we really want to let people do this? And I think our bias has always been, why not, right? That's the problem of why people aren't getting the most out of AI is because I think a lot of folks are putting unnecessary constraints on those systems. And obviously, like, at some point there's certain things that we won't want Gusto co-founder to do. We're not going to have it, like, you know, serve as your cloud code or anything like that. Sure, sure. But I think for now we're more in a learning mode. We want to kind of see how people use it. We want to encourage people to get as creative as possible with it.

Okay, Jordy, you think what I'm thinking? Automatic swear jar. Anytime you swear, it docks your Gusto payroll automatically. I like it. Agentically.

You can do that. Probably. Probably. I like that you guys didn't just pick some quirky, like, human-like name. Oh yeah.

It is just like a, just like a very—

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how we think about it. It should be really Literally the person that you are on a texting basis, you feel comfortable reaching out to, day or night, to take care of something to help you with running your business.

That's great. Would you one day allow it to make calls on behalf of customers? Like, let's say there's some, you know, you have a— I-9 verification. I was thinking more like, you know, let's say you have an employee employee in another state, and like, you know, the tax board there, or some type of employment agency, like— Call them and explain this to them? Yeah, I feel like every startup founder is used to getting like some type of letter in the mail from some random state that you pay to call.

And you have to call.

And you have to call. I feel like there's probably some stuff there down the line.

Yeah, I mean, I don't see why not. We don't do that today, but— You can certainly tell it to email on your behalf, right? And so if we're willing to do email, then why not calls? That'd be amazing.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

Have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you, Albert. Congratulations on the launch. Congrats to the team.

Thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Okay, section out. We gotta pull up the Ferrari Lucec. I think this is the third mention of the Ferrari Lucec of the show.

This show.

But people have been talking about different specs, and this Instagram account showed the Ferrari Luce 1.9 JTD base spec, and I think it looks fantastic. What do you think? Scroll through some of these. So this is when you get it with a 1.9-liter turbo diesel. It's like a base model Civic. Spec'd like this, It looks fantastic. Just, just minimal, minimal. Scroll through all of them. Here we go. Look at that. Yeah, the, the, the central console delete and then the stick shift there.

Just— I actually love the way this looks.

I do. This looks like a 1995 Honda Civic.

I think this looks— okay, the rear end looks a little bit rough, but just ultra, ultra discounted.

Uh, let's compare it to The Spectre.

Okay, from Rolls-Royce. Yeah, uh, coming out, starting price around half a mil. Okay, 307-mile range, 20% cheaper than a Luce. Uh, 0 to 60, 4.1 seconds. Good. Very slow, very big, very heavy, but that's 6,600 pounds.

It's the same as a Cybertruck, same Cybertruck.

That is wild. Uh, but it looks incredible.

Okay, well, would you get one of these, one Rolls-Royce Spectre Series 2, or 10 Model S Plaid used? Model S Plaid goes 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. You can get 10 of them, so you can just be launching them off some cliff, dive out, get in the next one, because you got 10 of these things. 0 to 60 in 2 seconds.

It's a tough call. It's a tough call when you put it like that.

50K, At the, the, the used Tesla Model Plaid is hard to beat. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, the alternative with the Lucha, you get 15 Tesla Model S Plaid or one Lucha.

You and the crew, just 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. The drag racing would be very, very good. You have your whole, whole bachelor party doing drag races. What do you think of the GMC Hummer X SUV pickup truck concept?

I thought this would be good. For you.

I like this. And you know where they launched it? The Pasadena Design Studio. Can you believe that? No way.

They brought it to my hometown. No way. It's a sign, John.

It's a sign. I think it looks good. The, the, the truck also looks good. Um, I— it's interesting because it looks— it still looks huge, but, uh, in a world of, uh, 20, uh, 1,250-horsepower Corvettes, ultra-luxury Cadillacs, the GMC Hummer SUV and pickup trucks are no longer the most outrageous new cars in the General Motors family. That does not mean they've been forgotten, though. GM is celebrating the opening of a new design studio in Pasadena, California. Let's go. By reimagining its enormous electric SUV with a pair of outdoorsy concepts, one size smaller than we've seen recently. I think— I think it looks cool. Looks very like ready to crawl over some rocks. I think it's a fun, fun time. Anyway, let's tell you about—

Let's have Whistlin Diesel put it to the test because he tried to test the Cybertruck and I think it stopped. It basically bricked before he could really make a video.

100%. We got to see the— what does he call it? Durability test. Whistlin Diesel durability test. Let's see it. Let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of their IT, HR, and finance support. About giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And our next guest is in the waiting room. Sanjuktra Murphy from Pardifull.

Welcome back. How you doing? Hey guys, it's great to see you. How's it going?

Great to see you too. Thanks for helping.

You were, what were you dressed as last time? Was it Halloween?

Yeah. The Wicked Witch of the West.

That was a wild appearance. That was really, really fun.

You guys said you weren't gonna do it. You said you weren't going to dress up this time. Yeah, but I still am kind of disappointed.

I'm disappointed in myself.

Yeah, uh, well, I'm not disappointed. What's the progress in Partiful's world?

Tell us. Yeah, and, uh, you guys gonna finally make some money?

What's going on? Oh yeah, yeah, I know we literally promised to the world an ironbound agreement that Partiful would never make money with a very literal tweet that was clearly meant entirely seriously and could not possibly be a joke. Um, and here we are violating our promises to the community. It's kind of a sad day.

Wow. No, I think it's a great day. It's a great—

I think it's a great day. We love monetization here.

We love monetization. You love money? Uh, me too. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted hyper-targeted ads based on Partiful. Yeah, right, in the app. Like, you know, I want it to feel like Partiful is listening to me. Yeah. But I don't think that's what you're going to do.

It should let you stand up a B2B MLM on demand. So this person was at this party with this potential customer, enlist that person to sell them Ramp, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, buy some Tupperware.

Yeah, yeah, Tupperware, Partiful for enterprise SaaS.

That is what— that would have been a good play. It's like, hey. Yeah, we said we weren't going to make money. Turns out we are. Partiful Tupperware parties. Host a party. Host a party in your area.

Should be good. But actually, take us through the real monetization plans because we've riffed enough and I want to hear the real story.

So, yeah, I mean, today Partiful launches ticketing. It's available on app, on web. You can now buy and sell tickets directly on Partiful.

Fantastic.

So it's not just us making money, it's hosts making money too, and that's the most important thing.

Very, very cool.

Who— I want to know, yeah, is it like walk, crawl, run? Like, do you imagine that you're going to bring in like a new, like, like, you know, a, like a, you know, uh, like a band that's performing at a concert, and that's going to be a new user that, that has been on the fence and not jumped in, or do you think that there will be a sort of more gradual evolution from people that are throwing events on Partiful, it's an easy add-on, so the next one in their series of events they will just have paid ticketing for because they already have a lot of traction and they're a power user?

Yeah, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. So the impetus for building it was something that had been building for quite a while. Which is that people were already trying to host paid events on Parkable. Yeah. You know, supper clubs, run clubs, you know, community events, concerts, album release parties, fundraisers. And because we didn't have ticketing, it was not a great user experience. Like, hosts were linking out to other platforms. Guests weren't sure, like, does my RSVP count or does my ticket count? Hosts were cross-referencing It's like, so that wasn't really upholding our standard of what we want Partiful to be and what Partiful is known for, which is having a super seamless experience no matter what kind of event you're hosting. And so first and foremost, we saw this as a feature gap. And it was always a question of, well, when do we close this feature gap? And I think the tipping point for us was starting last year, we launched our Explore feed, which is a tab on the app that you can go to and you can browse events that are happening around you. They're highly curated. You can see what your Partiful mutuals are going to, and increasingly people are using that as a place to discover things to do. And so with the launch of Explore, we started to see a proliferation of these events that really needed ticketing because they're marketed to the public, because They're often higher production value. Like, it takes real money to put on a lot of great events. And that funding for hosts has to come from somewhere. And it typically comes from selling tickets. And so all of that really culminated where we were like, first and foremost, we want to create a much better experience for the hosts on Partiful today and the guests on Partiful today to do what they're already doing, but in a seamless way. And then two, we absolutely know that there are types of events that you we can't have on Partiful because we don't have ticketing. And so we're hoping with this that we can grow and actually get even more of those events onto Partiful that weren't on the platform previously.

Yeah, I can imagine like a lot of even emerging artists that aren't on like some insane, you know, tour, you know, etc., etc. Like the, the experience of like an artist being able to like send an easy text blast and feel like they're communicating and then have like social features built in. I feel like that'll be a much, much cooler experience. What trends are you seeing on Partiful? Like, I would— I feel like you guys should— should maybe you do and I haven't seen them, but like, I want to know, like, have run clubs peaked? Have people stopped running from whatever they're running from?

Like what, what, what's kind of maybe more relevant to the lookalike meetup ecosystem? Have we reached peak lookalike meetup or are we continuing to boom?

Well, it's funny you mention that because on our very serious Twitter that should be taken literally at all times, we did tweet like, I think a year ago that lookalike contests are dead and that future lookalike contests will be banned. On the platform. And actually, a news publication picked it up and said Partiful has canceled lookalike events, but they're still happening. And, and, and, and, you know, honestly, in 2026, many of them are still great. Like, there was a big heated rivalry lookalike contest that was still happening. There was a JFK Jr. lookalike contest. And so I, I think I've come around, and I can never say no to a good lookalike contest. There's also these just like mass meetups in Central Park, and, you know, Dolores park to do whatever. And so I, I think that's the trend that we're seeing is the rise of these viral events of someone, you know, taking a funny meme and actually bringing it to life in the real world. And it's so much better when that happens. Like, people yearn to touch grass. Mm-hmm. And they yearn for these types of events that feel like easy, low-key, and something that where they can participate in a collective cultural moment. And say that they were there. Like, I don't— I think anyone who wants to—

Yeah, it has a crazy feedback loop too, because the meetup itself produces so much viral content that then feeds the meme, because it's like, well, that person doesn't look exactly like so-and-so, you know? Sometimes, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Yeah, public events are social. Another reason ticketing's on Pardonful now.

So, uh, Have you discovered any lessons from particularly seamless payment processing? I feel like so much of the beauty of Partiful is how the text message integration, the seamlessness, and I feel like there's demand for Apple Pay or Venmo. There's a whole bunch of different ways you could solve that. Maybe you just do the hard work to get everyone to put their credit card information in, then it's all saved nicely, but what was What were the trade-offs? What was the best practice that you wound up landing on?

Yeah. So first and foremost, it was like, this should feel ridiculously easy because RSVPing on Pardonable is really easy. It shouldn't feel quite as easy as RSVPing because you do have to pay money. But if you go through the flow, it still feels buttery smooth. You tap buy tickets, you add the number of tickets you want. If you have a promo code, you use that. We have an event for Tech Week tomorrow where tickets are $10,000. But if you have the secret promo code—

How much is it?

We have the secret promo code. It's $20,000.

Oh. The secret promo code. It's $9,999.

Very fun. How are you feeling? What's your motivation at this point? What's your ambition? I feel like, you know, I imagine you guys have had a bunch of acquisition interests this entire time to date while you're not making any money, and, you know, somebody makes an offer, and you're looking at it, and you're like, "Wow, this is, you know, a big number." I feel like the hardest time to turn down an acquisition is when you're not making money. Once you're making money, and you're growing, and things like that, I think it can, there's more of like a line of sight to, hey, this is like a really big real business, but how did you process like building a company for this long that's so in the public eye, that's so popular and not making money and stay focused on the long term?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a bad day for everyone who wanted to acquire us when we weren't making money.

Yeah, exactly. For sure. Brutal. They hate— they, they— all the acquirers probably love that. Oh yeah, Partiful is cute. Like, they're not really monetizing yet, so they'll, they'll take our offer eventually. Nightmare. Nightmare for them. Yeah, they're, they're down bad today.

But, but I think this is like, this is exactly the next step we wanted to take for our long-term ambitions. Like, we intend for Partiful to be a massive company. And we've already proven in so many ways that we're there from like a growth perspective and we're continuing to grow. But this just felt like such a natural addition to our ecosystem where it's a win-win. We're closing a feature gap. We're making an experience buttery smooth, which is what we always want to do for everything we're building. We're solving a problem for hosts. We're solving a problem for guests. And yes, this feature happens to be one where we can make money. It's not the only feature that we'll ever build to make money. There's a lot more to come, but it is the right next step in our journey. And I think what's cool is that it's coming at a time where there's this real cultural moment around gathering in the real world for these fundamentally social experiences. And that's where Partiful plays really well. One thing that's pretty different about us is we're not a ticketing company. Where social is an afterthought or nonexistent. We're a social product that now has a ticketing component on top of it. And so what does that get us? Like you mentioned concerts earlier, Jordy, like Weezer, for example, threw a ton of pop-ups on Partiful that were just free events that they were doing for their community as part of their tour. And before, Partiful didn't have ticketing. And so like all Weezer could do with Partiful was host their, their free events. But I think they're one of so many like artists, cultural institutions, performers, creatives who are really harnessing Partiful to connect with their community and create social experiences with their community. And so that's the ball that our eyes are on is how do we supercharge this thing that we're seeing in the culture and what are the features we can build to help accelerate and expand that and make that accessible to more people.

Do you expect there to be an entire class of Partiful entrepreneurs, basically small business owners where the vast majority of their revenue or almost all their revenue is flowing through Partiful? Does it feel like there's like a line of sight to that?

I think that's going to be a huge and very important subset of our ticketed hosts. But I also think it's equally important for us to be serving the more casual host who needs ticketing for their event for whatever reason, whether that's a frat, whether that's someone putting together like a party bus for their birthday, whether it's like just someone who wants to charge $10 to make sure that people don't flake from their event. Like, there's so many ways that you can use ticketing to get what you need out of your event. And there's so many people where they have a day job job, but building community is their passion project. We hear from so many people like that. And so I really see ticketing as something that very much unlocks what they're able to do as much as it is something for the person where their lifeblood and their business and their, you know, what they're building for themselves and their lives financially is powered by Partiful. What's a country that uses Partiful a lot that people wouldn't expect? Oh, Italy has a very strong—

I would expect that. I would expect that. I have a bunch of Italian friends. They like to get together and do things. Yeah.

Yeah. The Italians love party fall. I mean, the UK is really big, but like, so it depends on how you feel about the UK. I've been to some phenomenal parties in London, so it doesn't surprise me. But some people are We're like, what? No, I would say like the most unexpected thing is the random— most of our users are in the US, like the random contingents of people that I didn't expect. Like my mom's friend texted her that Partiful has gone viral in a South Florida over-55 senior living community. And I love that.

That's amazing. Partiful retirement. What a wonderful way.— to retire. What's the work culture like at Partiful these days? You guys, like, work more on the weekend than, like, a normal company because there's a lot of action? Yeah, there's actually stuff going on. Or is the product robust enough that you guys can, you know, take a couple days off?

Well, it's always— the product's really robust, but it is always stressful to be on call on the weekend because, like, if something breaks, that is when it's going to be like a bad time for everyone. So I would say like the culture is work hard, party hard, which probably doesn't surprise anyone. Like we can't be 996 because in order for us to do our jobs right, everyone on the team physically needs time to party. Like it doesn't work without that. But yeah, I would say events that are otherwise totally fun and stress-free free for other people, like Halloween. Like, that's my— I'm in the situation room. It's your Super Bowl. All Halloween or New Year's. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not partying. But yeah, we— the party product research is a very important part of our culture.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming. Very cool. Congratulations on the progress.

I'm glad. It was great to see you guys. Yeah, great launch. Excited to attend my first ticketed Partiful event, whenever that is.

Fantastic. $10,000 tomorrow.

Pay me. There we go. Awesome. We'll see you later. Great to see you.

Bye, Axios. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out, figma.com. And our next guest is returning to the show, one of my favorites, probably the— my number one favorite new consumer electronic device product of the last— I don't know how many years. We have Brynn Putnam from Board. She's the founder and CEO. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

How are you doing?

What's going on? Thanks so much for having me back, guys.

Last time you were on, we both laughed. We both ordered on the show.

Yeah, very easy checkout. Thanks, Shopify. Yeah, thanks. And, and they arrived. And we have been entertained for hours and really, really enjoyed the product. But tell us how things are going on your side.

It's been a crazy 6 months. It's been so fun just seeing Board actually out in the wild and seeing people using it and loving it. I think it's really just sort of exceeded our expectations. We have, you know, thousands of households using the product and loving it, people are actually starting to create their own games for board, which has been the most surprising but exciting development for us.

Yeah, so you three presented us as Mark Andreessen and Ilya Sutskever dressed up on Halloween. It's very funny because it's like a very meta— it's a character of a character. But what, like, what does that actually represent?

There they are in real life, smaller than they looked on the photo. In the photo, they loom large.

They loom large. But why would a customer Why would a customer want to print something? Walk me through the thesis. Like, how is this actually playing out?

Yeah, so today people are, you know, using their favorite AI coding tools to build using our SDK, which really surprised us that your sort of average family was sitting down around this new shared surface trying to create their own experiences. And so we've decided to really lean into that and are creating a product we call Board Studio. That really makes it just easier for your average person to start to build. So they'll sit and just prompt, and the Board Studio will create the experience for them, including their very own custom miniatures. So very excited to see what people are creating, everything from educational apps to things for healthcare settings, or bars or restaurants. It's really been a diverse range of interactive experiences.

Yeah, what's the secret to making a, you know, basically I'll call it like a vibe-coded game studio. I imagine you want, you don't want to change, is like reskinning the best way to think about this? Because coming up with like original game mechanics and rules and all these things feels like much, much, much more challenging for the average person than just deciding like, I'm going to make this character look like this and I want to change the setting and choices like that.

Yeah, so I think it's important for us to really create like a batteries-included environment. So to give people good project templates, good asset libraries, an easy way to, you know, connect directly to their board so they can kind of automatically build, deploy, and play games. And start to test and to help kind of steer people towards experiences where they really can go from prompt to prototype in an hour. So that's not going to be creating highly complex games with where the technology is today. But it's, it's quite impressive how quickly, you know, people are able to create things that are fun just using sort of a set of prepackaged assets and templates.

Very good. Walk me through where the board SDK ends and the Vibe coding begins. It feels like there's an SDK that's open source hosted on GitHub or your website, something like that. I download that and then I can kind of use the Vibe coding tool of my choice. I could use Codex, Cloud Code, whatever I want to sort of build. But then am I testing the game in a browser? Is it going, am I deploying to the board? Is there the idea of like test flight or then at some point does it get released to an app store that you review? Because I imagine there's all sorts of, you know, privacy and security, you know, goals that you have in mind as the company.

Yeah, so for Q4, you'll be building on a computer and then directly deploying on your board for use with your own family. I think our learning has been the act of creating a game on board is actually one of the most fun games on board. So I think for many people, the experience is just going to be vibing things that they love and that their kids love that they want to play in their own homes. And then from there, if they want to share with the broader community, we have a review process. So you submit your game to us. We have content standards and controls, and then we'll release those games in our board store. So the first of the community games goes live next month. And that was something that a member of the community created using the arcade pieces from our Arcade Suite. And it's a reimagined game of pinball that we're super excited about. And that will go live in July. And it just went through our review process to ensure that it was fun and accessible for the community.

Yeah. I have a game idea. What is it? Monopoly-style game where you develop data centers.

Yeah. Love it. Yeah, I was thinking—

Tyler? Tyler? We'll get Tyler on the team to build this. Discounted Cash Flow Simulator.

It just runs a full spreadsheet, sort of like how Ramp Labs came out with their ramp sheets. You know, you just get the kids started early.

These will be the least popular games on your community forum, but potentially the most popular in this—

My children will be required to play them 8 hours a day. Probably 996, really, to make sure that they understand the discounted cash flow.

How did you feel? Your intuition was around this launch, you know, versus, um, Mirror. Uh, I feel like the hardest thing with hardware is you spend like, you know, 1, 2 years, sometimes more time developing something, and then you just have no idea. You, you have an intuition around how people will react to it. Did you have more confidence going into Board than the last go-around? Uh, and, And, you know, did— obviously the launch has been great, but did it kind of meet your expectations? And how are you kind of adapting your thinking going forward?

I think it surprised me, honestly. You know, I think we thought that we would be talking to kind of early adopter gadget geeks, maybe some hobbyists who wanted to build, you know, interactive D&D campaigns on board early days. And the audience has been much broader than expected. You know, we have grandma and grandpa who are buying it for when the grandkids come over, along with, you know, teachers and doctors and restaurant owners. So the breadth of the audience, I think, has really surprised us. And it's great, but it's definitely been a challenge the team now has to meet because we have to create games quickly that can satisfy not just deep, passionate gamers, but people who for whom this is like really their only gaming experience. It's bringing sort of new people to the table. And so it's been really fun, but the mission of making playing together more accessible and creating together more accessible is all that more important given the breadth of the audience. Yeah.

How are you thinking about intellectual property in the modern era? Because I can tell my son a bedtime story where Spider-Man meets Superman, which belong to different, different studios. Never the two shall meet on the silver screen. But in the imagination of a 5-year-old, anything is possible, including cross IP infringement. And some of the AI models will sort of play friendly with you if you ask, you know, ChatGPT, hey, tell me a story or flesh this story out where Spider-Man's interacting with Superman. Some of the companies have licensing agreements, and they make royalty payments and all sorts of things. But there's some sort of interaction there where I can draw Spider-Man, and I think that's legal. I think I can just draw an image of Spider-Man and give that to my kid. But if I take a picture of that, upload that to Board, I imagine at some point you'd be partnering with companies. But is there some sort of terms of use that you have to think through? Or guardrails that you put on? Because some of the magic of creation is drawing Mickey Mouse for the first time. But if you're monetizing that and selling that, that's a whole different equation. So how do you think about playing that side? Because I imagine there'll be huge demand for intellectual property-based games, but you need to be careful that you don't run into any trouble with the big studios.

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to get to a point where it's just one big universe where everyone is playing together in the board sandbox, but we're obviously not there. So I think today, we are making every effort to respect the IP holders and also respect the sort of safety and privacy concerns of our community. These are families that are using the device. And I have a 3-year-old, and I want to make sure that when the 3-year-old sits down to make pieces, that nothing comes out that wouldn't be upsetting or surprising to us. But those are definitely active conversations that we have had since day one with IP holders about how we can move to a future universe where creation isn't really limited, that people can bring Spider-Man and Miss Piggy together into an incredible new world.

Yeah. When I think of D&D campaigns, I— I start to think about almost like Internet connectivity within the game. I imagine that most of the games are self-contained. It feels like there is a— there's an internal state of, you know, is the cartoon character clean? You have to wash him off. If you save the game, you come back, still dirty. But how are you thinking about making the games— are you thinking about expanding to something that is more cloud interactive multiplayer at some point? Is any of that on the horizon? Is that interesting? Is there demand for that even?

Yeah, that's definitely a polarizing topic within our audience. Sure. Some people would love to be able to start a game on their board and then have grandma play on her board in a different state, which we don't do today because the other half of our audience also feels very strongly that board feels safe because it is a closed community. Um, so our tabletop product is the first product that will be networked. You will be able to link to your Foundry VTT account and play your campaigns with people elsewhere. But we felt like that was a specific segment of the community that was— that understood the connectivity. And so otherwise, we are keeping it sort of limited to, to your board. Um, that may, that may evolve over time, but for now, I think Those are guardrails that are important to keep it really feeling full family for everyone.

Wait, so sorry, take me through the product catalog. It sounds like there's, are there multiple products at this point or is it all just one? The one that I have, like the big board. I just think of it as the board. The board. But is there a different SKU at this point or is there one coming?

So we launched with a Founder's Edition, which had 13 games included, which is the version that you guys have. And then we unbundled in March. And so we started selling 5 of the games à la carte, which was really exciting for us. We saw over 60% attach rate on games with most people buying 4 out of the 5 games we had available. So that sort of gave us the confidence that more games were needed in the community. So starting in June, we'll launch another 10 games between now and holiday. And the board tabletop product is sort of the most unusual of those in that it's specifically for the tabletop community that's currently using VTTs. Otherwise, they're all sort of full family games. Got it. Awesome.

Warhammer is coming. I'm excited. Yeah, exactly. Talk about the round.

Yeah, I want to hit the gong.

How much did you raise? Already, we raised $20 million.

Good morning. I know I could hear you because I had an idea. But who, who led the round?

Mike Mignano. There we go. Square.

Yeah. Yeah, we love Mike. We love Mike. I love— I don't know, everything Union Square is doing. This company, everything about this is just delightful and amazing and obviously a good business as well. So it's a royal flush of good news. Yeah.

Great update.

Thank you so much for taking taking the time to come chat with us.

Have a great rest of the day. Thank you guys so much. Great to see you.

Cheers. Bye-bye. Uh, we gotta go back to Instagram because, uh, in the, uh, in the era of AI slob videos, the Renauld Encore was doing it better than anybody years and years ago. We got to pull up this video. I want your reaction because this seems like peak cinema I want your analysis. Break it down. With independent suspension for amazing handling. Okay. Reasonable car, right? Wait until you see the advertisement. Cheap car. You can get 100 of those for the price of a Ferrari Luce. 100 Renault Encore. Anyway, it's gonna restart and you're gonna be amazed. Watch this. If you are what you drive, imagine yourself as a Renault Encore. Expressively sporty and outlook stylishly European. We don't know how to make vibe reels like this anymore. Leading car maker. Show me the founder transforming into the B2B SaaS that they are launching. Electronic fuel injection. Put away the cinematic softbox. Take away the soft shallow depth of field. Show me the founder transforming into the product. I can see myself in a Renault. The one. Such a good ad. The one to watch a great ad, right? Such a good ad. Actually a great ad. Someone just copy this. You know what else is a good ad? Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

Mike Isaac said, get ready to get even more annoyed by your cheapest friends because the Germinator is sharing that Apple readies iOS 27 service that will let users split bills for dinners, events by taking a photo of a receipt and assigning items to friends. This is annoying super intelligence, uh, that I won't be using. Uh, this will be part of Apple Wallet and Cash. Yeah, taking on Venmo and Splitwise.

You gotta do the credit card roulette.

I love that game.

Or the inverse credit card roulette where one person— you take out one credit card, they don't pay, so they get the free free dinner, and everyone else splits the bill. And everyone else pays like 10% more, but someone else got like a free dinner, so they get a great, you know, experience. And everyone got great company. Yeah. But no, every dinner should be a ruthless game-theoretic Nash equilibrium of everyone trying to drink exactly the same amount or buy the most expensive steak to one-up each other so that you don't get taken to the cleaners with an even split. You wanna get your money's worth. So if you see someone ordering the porterhouse, you say, "I'll have 2 porterhouses. Give me 2 porterhouses. We're splitting this evenly, right? Oh, you got 3 glasses of wine?" Let's do another round. I'll take 10. But triple me up. And I am having dessert.

I'm having dessert. Yeah, I'm a big dessert guy. I'm a big dessert guy, actually.

I'll be taking it to go.

That's the best dessert.

Order lunch for tomorrow too. And I'd like a third porterhouse. For lunch. For lunch. I'm coming tomorrow, let's split the bill evenly. Don't pull out your Apple intelligence on me.

Don't do that.

What's the crime? Having a porterhouse? Having two porterhouses? Having three porterhouses? Three, four, five? You're gonna divide that up with Apple intelligence? Oh, you don't want— Take one out of your receipt?

You don't want one of your good friends to hit their macros today? Yeah, what are you trying to do here? There's a whey protein shortage. What's going on? There's a whey protein shortage and you're saying I shouldn't order, my second and third porterhouse.

What is going on?

When you know if I go to the store right now, whey is going to be priced to the—

Let me have a porterhouse.

Let me have three. That's a good place to end it, folks.

Thank you for tuning in. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let me tell you about Ramp one more time. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more.