BYOCompute, Pope Destroys False Idol, Ben Affleck's White Pill | Joe Gebbia, Molly Fowler, Tom Dotan, Pim de Witte, Greg Castle

You are watching TVPN.

Today is Friday, October 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. How many days till Christmas?

83 days.

83 days.

But you already knew that. We don't even have to tell you at this point.

The road to Christmas is going strong.

That's right.

Get ready, lock in. Also sign up for Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy as corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Oh, we're getting Christmasy up in here.

Okay.

Here we go.

Very Christmasy. It's Q4. We're in the correct season now. So we can get pretty Christmasy.

That is right.

It's pretty tricky to stay in the little red zone.

Well, enough about Christmas, John. Let's get into the news.

Let's talk about artificial intelligence.

Sounds great.

Yeah. So make it less Christmasy. It's too Christmasy. It's 83 days away.

Christmas is out.

no more than 20 days away before we get that Christmas.

I'll just leave this on.

Okay.

Oh, just one level of Christmas.

That's right.

For October 7th— October 2nd. Yeah. So there was this funny moment in a Dev Day this week where, you know, everyone's like focused on the war of like DOTS versus Muse versus Instinct. And there were a couple times where you're like, I want to talk about sign-in with ChatGPT, which is like the most boring and minute feature and very much not in the drama war for the personal agent, who's going to do your shopping, who's going to book your reservations.

I just thought it was cool for independent developers, small app builders.

It's actually probably more immediately relevant to the community that was there, like the developers, right?

Yeah. And do you remember when, like flashback to 2 years ago, people were creating these magical new product experiences with The best models at the time, but they were, in hindsight, pretty rudimentary.

Yep.

And they would build something magical, scale up really quickly, and then be like, whoa, I just got stuck with like a $30,000 API bill.

Yep.

And so this is the solve for that because it allows users to bring their own compute. Compute.

BYOC.

BYOC.

Everyone knows BYOB. Now we're in the era of BYOC. And yeah, like, you know, most companies, they could usually figure out a way to say, Hey, like this service is gonna use a ton of compute, so you gotta jump on the Pro plan immediately. You gotta set up a consumption, a credit card relationship, API credits, something like that, metered billing. But it was just an extra step, an extra point of friction of you saying like, okay, I already pay $10 a month for this thing. Now I gotta actually pay for inference. And this gives like a different offtake. So yeah, Peter Yang was feeling the same way that you were. I'm excited about DOTS, but even more excited about sign-in with ChatGPT feature. Letting users use their ChatGPT plan in your website or app makes a bunch of indie apps a lot more viable. Example, I have a live language learning app that I wasn't planning to launch to users due to API costs, but letting users sign in with ChatGPT makes this viable. Hope they roll it out to non-enterprise folks soon. Vignesh, who's actually running the project, said, I'm going to try and answer a bunch of questions. That people have raised about signing with ChatGPT in the next couple of days. Before that, I wanna let you know why they shipped it. And so you can go read that thread. But the bring your own subscription stuff, it sticks out because it feels like it's potentially like the beginning of a new economic structure. Like, is this an app store where there will be a margin that accrues to OpenAI? Or is this more just like better for discovery? Will agents like reach for these because the sign-in is available? How much more smooth will this get? But, you know, at a high level, I think you described it well. A user can sign into an app or service. The Notion example is a good one because it's very intuitive. People already pay for Notion. You can imagine all the AI features that are there. And people were probably on day one of ChatGPT launching, copying from Notion into ChatGPT, copying back into Notion, writing bindings. But if Notion wants to offer like a whole bunch of inference opportunities and agentic features inside, then they got to go to their clients and say, hey, you're paying $10, $20 a month for your seat.

I—

we also need a bunch of money for inference. This off— this offsets that. And so the way it works is a user signs into the— to an app like Notion, then authorizes the app to run the OpenAI model requests against their plan without managing an API key. On Notion, this means drawing from the ChatGPT allowance instead of Notion credits. And it makes a lot of sense for bigger companies that have inference bills, as you mentioned. And they've all had to grapple very quickly with like product tokenomics, which is just a new new economic muscle and price elasticity curve they need to ride effectively. But the big thing is that it should over time allow leaner teams to offer inference-hungry features with way less friction. So it's worth clarifying that the feature only brings OpenAI tokens along for the ride. It's not OpenAI dollars, which is, I think, a way where this could go. But the good example is, let's say you have some sort of AI book publisher where you're doing a bunch of token inference to generate the text of the book. Like you say, hey, I want to go take this, you know, general story, turn it into a book, and then print it and send me the book, right? There's 2 sort of costs there. One's inference, one is—

I'll scan it back into the computer and then I'll turn it into a playable video game.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you can't offset the cost of printing books with OpenAI tokens.

In any way.

Yes. Yes.

But you could have the user spend their OpenAI credits to run the text generation side of the business. But I do think this could go further. The example that I gave was generative video. I'd like to have like a front door to AI that can handle the full billing relationship. So if I need to generate a video, I can just add that to my tab and—

No, and you went through this with Higgsfield where you were using Codex to make videos.

Yep.

And somehow Higgsfield has like $500 of yours now and it's locked in there and it's unclear how you can get it because you ended up buying like the wrong kind of credit or something like that.

Yeah. I ended up setting up like a consumer subscription and then I also bought API credits. So I have consumer credits and API credits. And in order to use the consumer credits, I need to write a new binding in Codex to use the front end as opposed to just—

And that would be using computer use, which would cost you more.

Maybe a little bit. It's very unclear. And so all of these things are like very messy. But, um, and so yeah, I mean, between computer use, MCP APIs, like this might not even be a discussion because like you're very— like we're pretty close to the workflow happening out of the box even without direct integration. But then there's a question about will the apps push back? But there is a world where even if you're an inference provider, you're maybe fine with not owning the front door if you're generating so much more demand because you're integrated with the big platforms. And you say, yeah, I'm actually losing the customer billing relationship, but I'm going to 10x my revenue because I'm like the model or the inference provider of choice when people go and they ask for a particular— particular integration.

Yeah.

And so there's always this dance with these integrations. We were talking about it yesterday with the NeoClouds versus NVIDIA strategy where, okay, well, if NVIDIA actually does get DGX Cloud Lepton off the ground and if you're on there, you're gonna get so much more business and your utilization rate's gonna be so much higher, but you're not gonna have the leverage over the customer. It's always this like careful dance. And then ultimately if an app store does emerge, gripes over the 30% tax, like the Apple tax is the same thing. You could wind up there in the age of AI. But I think from a consumer perspective, like having a consolidated business billing relationship would be great. Even in the world where computer use can go like plop down your credit card and set up an API key, it's still nicer to have like one point of billing and then true, like the buck stops with one model. It's like, okay, you wanna do this? It's gonna be $10. Is it cool?

Yeah, it's the same reason that Some people want all the streaming services to be rebundled.

That, and also why a lot of consumers are like, yeah, it's awesome when I subscribe to something on the App Store because it's so easy to unsubscribe in the App Store. You just go to your iOS subscriptions and you say, look, I'm canceling that. And it can't be, why are you canceling it? Make sure you call us. Like all that annoying stuff that happens when you're on like some website and they're like, well, you actually have to call between, you know, 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM and we take a 2-hour lunch in there and you gotta explain yourself and listen to our pitch for why you should stick around. Apple makes it one click.

Yeah, turn down the discount to stay.

Exactly, exactly. Apple turns all that off. And so that could be this complex dynamic. App Store economics are always complex. But it might not matter because you can just go and with computer, you say, yeah, set up this API key, use this credit card. It's a little hesitant still. And I don't think it's polished among any of the models. A lot of them really hesitate. They're like, they'll even say like, don't give me your API key, please put that in your environment. Don't give me your credit card number, I don't want it, I don't want it actually accidentally leaking or anything like that. Like even if you are being bold, the models will often be really hesitant. I remember I was trying to use Computer Use to send an iMessage. I was like, go do a bunch of stuff, I'm going to leave, I don't want you to send me a push notification, just text me. I have a text message open in iMessage. The window's right there. Go in that box and tell me when you're done, and then I'll get it on my phone. It'll just come from me. And it was like— and it spent so many tokens being like, I don't want to screw this up. This is high stakes. Like, it really knew that botching an iMessage computer use thing could be like ruinous, you know? Because it winds up texting.

It would be over. It would be over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. It would be cut. And so it's interesting. The other reflection is like this whole App Store concept, this whole sign in with ChatGPT, bring your inference around, let's partner on distribution, let's integrate into the app, let's be the front door. Sam originally launched this 3 years ago at the very first Dev Day 2023. They had a product called GPTs and there was the GPT Store and Everyone was like, wow, okay, I totally see the vision. And then it was like 3 years of languishing and tussling and back and forth.

Yeah, it was maybe too early. Yeah.

And there's just been so many integrations like Walmart and Apple where people have said, okay, I want to do an integration, but it has to be really, really good and to my favor. And then it breaks down. Like the Siri integration that's going away because they're migrating to Gemini is Actually atrocious. Like, you will ask a question and it's like, yeah, of course it didn't work. You ask a question, you ask a basic question, and it will say like, oh, do you want to ask ChatGPT? And then you need to click a button. And then you click a button and it gives you an answer. And if you want to go deeper, you can say open in ChatGPT and then it opens it. But ChatGPT doesn't get all the context of whatever happened before. It just opens the app. And so it's like the worst possible, like, broken flow because, like, both companies were, like, begrudgingly working together basically and being like, look, neither of us want to work together, but the boss has signed a deal. So we got to— we got to do something here. So let's both—

got to pretend.

Let's both fight it out anyway. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I guess, like, my, you know, they're pretty enterprisey right now, like the integrations are pretty enterprisey, but I'm interested in like your thesis of will there be like a Flappy Bird moment or like a small dev team that figures out like, hey, if we can be the victor in the tool that gets pulled off the shelf when, you know, there's 1.2 billion users, probably like, you know, they'll always give that quote about like 400 million people are asking about health questions. Like, there's probably like 400 million people that are asking about, you know, I don't know, some niche thing. And if you can be the tool that funnels and you actually use it as the top of funnel, you could see someone— we could definitely wind up talking to a founder who's like, oh yeah, I actually like basically figured out how to be the tool of choice. I log in, I monetize the inference better, and I scale to $100 million ARR in like a couple months.

Yeah.

Which is interesting. At the same time, there's going to be a lot of companies like, this would be like such a solution for Instinct, right? But they would never do it because they're trying to actually go up against on the core feature.

Yeah.

And so there's this weird dynamic where, you know, Noah was on Invest Like the Best being like, I spend 75% of my time trying to secure compute. I'm burning so much money. I got to raise all this money. And like the solution's like right there. But it's like if you take that apple, like you leave the garden, you're in trouble probably. But who knows?

Anyway.

Yeah, so on the enterprise side, OpenAI announced a partnership with Base10, our friends over there.

Oh, cool.

Just a few days ago at Dev Day. That's like a really good enterprise example because you can now basically get access to open models through your overall like OpenAI like commit, which is cool. And it's native in Codex. And then the other use cases that I'm thinking about are like, you know, all those like generate headshot apps, right, that have been super popular. Those are super compute intensive. And so being able to use— basically get access to Images 2.5 is pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where like you've built an interesting funnel, you've built an interesting harness, you've built an interesting wrapper, but your compute is scaling really unfortunately. And you have the ability to like offtake there.

Yeah.

It's very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. We might have to do away with the Christmas. We'll work on that. With the Christmas, because the stinger's going under the Christmas. Wow. And he doesn't even break through the Christmas lights. You know, the 3D here.

We're working on it. We're working on it.

We're working on it.

Work in progress.

Oh, well.

Well, anything else going on? Any sort of contentious debates?

Yeah.

Sort of Santa related.

True.

Christmas related, you know? Yeah, the Pope is duking it out.

Trey's saying Coogan's War on Christmas. Yeah. What do you have against Christmas, John? We're in Q4 and you're asking, put away the decorations. It's kind of distracting. Do we really need them?

Leave it, leave it, leave it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Well, the Pope chimed in on the AI debate again. He's been posting for a while. This year has been a number of discussions. And every time he writes something, it causes a bigger discussion in Silicon Valley, of course. Pope Leo said, in this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity. Very interesting. What did PG reply? He said, since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you'll say when AIs are trained on visual experience, as well as art made by human artists, because that is presumably coming.

Well, what prompted this, John?

Walter Isaacson chimed in. Popes have been hiring good artists for a long time. Yeah, what prompted this? There's an article in the New York Times about the interactions between Anthropic and the Vatican. Danny summed it up. Anthropic, Claude has a soul. Pope Leo says, nah. Anthropic says, please say Claude has a soul. Leo says, nah, here's a book-length explanation why that's not true. Anthropic says, we're pretty sure Claude has a soul. And Pope Leo responds with, Yeah, a lot of people are duking it out here. The bombshell report in the New York Times. Christopher Hale sums it up here. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch in May because the Pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah's team then privately lobbied the Pope's advisors, quote, to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously. Pope Leo XIV held firm for months. Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under non-disclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. Okay. So, people are getting worried. They're debating, is it God or is it computer? Neil Kossler chimes in.

The Vatican will sign Oh, I guess these are various scholars. I was like, it's pretty funny to go to the Vatican and be like, hey, I gotta talk to you about something, but will you sign this NDA first?

Yeah. No, I think it was religious scholars that were visiting Anthropic HQ, and they're like, we'll give you the full tour, but you sign an NDA. I mean, also, I would be interested in like how that NDA was released, because like there's sometimes when you just go to a corporate office and like on your way in, they like, well, take a picture of Yeah. Like, here's your ID and sign this nondisclosure agreement. Like, that's like standard for like a lot of just office visits broadly, but it sounds a lot crazier when you're like, we made the Pope sign an NDA. You know, we made God sign an NDA. Neil Coastley doesn't like it. He says, I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic. Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious god while running around and claiming it will end the world.

Yeah, and to their credit, they're not claiming that it will end the world. They're saying that there is a real possibility.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Interesting that there's less of a white pill there. Like, I don't know, there's a world where you're like, yeah, we're going to build God, and, like, it's going to be amazing. P-Doom negative 1,000. Like, it's gonna be even— it's gonna be the best thing ever. There are no risks because it's God. It's, it's, it's, it's—

The creator.

Yeah, it's the creator. It's gonna love us. Like, it's gonna be so— it's gonna be amazing. It's gonna save us, you know? Uh, that would follow. But there, there is a little bit of, like, cognitive dissonance that it's like, well, what kind of God is it? Is it like a devil?

Well, and I think that—

A god that's bigger?

I think what a lot of people should be asking themselves right now is, is Claude Force conscious, right? Because, I mean, that is the intelligence powering the Salesforce sort of ecosystem in many ways. And so maybe at what point do you have to ask, is Salesforce— if Salesforce is sort of embodied by Claude, is Salesforce conscious?

Salesforce has been godlike for decades, though. People understand that it's a deity. for customer relationship management.

That's right.

Right. Bern Hobart says, looking at the current debates about Anthropic makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness and determined which substrates can and can't support it. Thought that one was more up in the air. He's joking, of course. I haven't found anything from someone at Anthropic saying models are conscious, just that they might be now or in the future. And yeah, that was something interesting in the New York Times article. Ola really goes back and forth. He's like, I don't know. And I thought that was interesting that he was not— he was advocating for— he's a we got to talk about it guy. Basically that. He was saying like, I don't know. I don't have a firm position. And through like multiple reports, it's not like he was ever Like, I'm convinced of this and I'm trying to pull people towards this discussion. He was just like, yeah, this is an interesting question. Consciousness is unintuitive. Why the heck is there such a thing as the experience of being me in the first place? What's the cutoff for which things can get it? When? Seems hard to be confident when everyone's operating on an N-of-1 view. Yeah, very odd. On the question of moral agency, we gotta go back to the pigs. We gotta go back to the pigs because the time-honored adage is never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. But if the pigs like it, do you have a moral duty to wrestle with them? I'm thinking about starting a nonprofit that would pay humans to wrestle with pigs. Yes, they're gonna get dirty, but the pig likes it and the utility that's created by the pig enjoying the wrestling would be offset by the cost of getting dirty. So it's a net— it's a utilitarian calculus really. And so I think this is— it could become like the new hot, you know, the new hot nonprofit cause. Like mosquito nets, shrimp welfare. I feel like pig wrestling—

I think it's obviously sort of—

Could be something that attracts billions of dollars of nonprofit donations potentially.

Which in many ways, if they can attract that kind of capital, would end up flowing back into the tech ecosystem, right? Because many of these foundations will—

I mean, potentially you could monetize it too. You could film it, you could turn it into a sport, you could maybe gamble on it even. We can get some prediction markets. Who's going to wrestle? How long can you wrestle with this pig before you get muddy? Potentially minutes, hours. We're going to find out. One way or another, and the pig's gonna like it. Let's see what Aiden Gomez says.

You have a brilliant mind, John.

He's building a god of his own over at Cohere. He says, it's quite disturbing that Anthropic has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them. I've been fortunate to spend time at the Vatican. Whoa, we get it, bro. And I've always asked for advice and guidance, answered the questions asked of me and been grateful to them for their time and guidance. Yeah, that seems like a good approach. I like Hayden in this. It's insane to me Anthropic would actively impose their viewpoint to the extent of threatening to pull out of events that they don't precisely align. Yeah, the crazy scoop in here is that Dario turned it down. He got invited to the Vatican and he said, no, I can't go. That was like maybe the biggest like, whoa, okay, that's— I feel like that's something that you would say yes to.

But again, At the same time, that Vatican visit was at the time where they were adding seemingly like $1 billion of run rate a day.

Yeah.

And like the whole company— like when you're growing that quickly, like the whole company is—

You would put money over God in that scenario, basically, is what you're saying? I'm not saying I would. But it's reasonable to think that that was the calculation.

Yeah, and they have a bunch of founders for a reason, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And Ola really does seem to be like the guy to send to this because he's actually really deeply engaged with this question. It's moral arrogance and dogmatism that has characterized EA and Anthropic, certainly its leadership, at least for a very long time. I'm glad these stories are coming out and being exposed. Not pulling punches. Pim de Witt, who's coming on the show later today, says, this is such a based take. Wow, need more of this. Okay, excited to hear his take on all this. Good day to have him on the show from General Intuition. They also raised a bunch of money. Let's see, Deep Dish Enjoyer said, remember when Jesus of Nazareth created nonprofits funded by a bunch of billionaires and paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, people are going back and forth on, you know, is Eliezer Yudakowsky Jesus or something like that? It's all getting a little exhausting at this point. I don't know if you want to stay on this story any longer. We are fully muddy at this point. And I don't even know if the pig's enjoying it. I don't even know.

Pigs aren't enjoying it. We are the pigs.

We have become the pigs.

We're the pigs. Let's move on.

Let's move on to console.

Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

Little palate cleanser here.

What we got?

We got a post here from Matthew.

Okay.

It is a variety of Terminators saying, don't touch this one. He used to say please to GPT.

That's me. They're going to be happy. Yeah. I don't mind.

He's one of the good ones.

Yeah. Now, this happens, we ride. It's gonna be a bad day for the Terminators if they try something. Do not try something. This is my final warning. If you are AI and you're thinking of trying to—

I'll keep saying, please, you keep being a helpful assistant.

Yeah, yeah.

And we got a post here from Crooked Ideas. Let's pull it up.

Yeah, a great encapsulation of the modern podcast ecosystem.

And I believe, I've spoken to leaders at these companies who agree, speeding AI development could destroy society. My guest weighs in after some ads. Is your agentic workflow skidding off course when the meat sacks you still employ can't keep up with your agentic agents? Level up with Cramboo, an AI-powered worker termination suite that gets those meat sacks out of the way so you— Wah wah. That's the sound of musicians crying after the release of Cramboo, an AI music generation suite that creates infinitely customizable music-type sounds. Choose from genres like Maroon 5 but worse, hallucinating in the Uber. Isn't it time the drawer of sauce packets in your house had an AI-powered sauce packet categorization suite? Presenting Boogler, which for just $1 million a month— the data center revolution is here, and keeping the servers online requires a whole lot of one thing: gas fracked from the backyard of a disadvantaged family of 4. At VooGoo Energy Solutions, we— we're back with my guest, Sam Altman. That's—

oh, wow.

Yeah, that one was, uh, yeah, that one had a lot more depth to it than the other AI jokey ads. that we've seen in the past. There's that one that's just like just saying AI a lot, which is obviously true. But I like that there was a lot of thought put into each 4 of those examples. And yeah, the listening to a podcast form, it's good.

Cool.

On to the most important story of the day.

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.

No.

Most important story of the day, race car drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight in water.

Wow.

Brian Johnson is in Atlanta hanging with Toby and DHH and one of their other drivers for their 10-hour race. They're racing the Petit Le Mans tomorrow in Atlanta. Brian Johnson says race car driving is insane. Here's what their bodies will experience. Cockpit temperature of 150 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Core body temp climbs to 102 degrees. Multi-layer fireproof suit, sweat barely evaporates. Heart rate of 140 to 170 beats per minute.

Mm-hmm.

Up to 4.2 G-force, up to 220 pounds on the brake pedal. Fluid loss up to 5 kilograms or 11 pounds of body weight, burning 60 to 900 calories per hour. At 2% dehydration, reaction times drops. They're gonna be driving in the LMP2 class. There is the GTD class, which is, you know, it's like GTD or sorry, GT3 style.

Mm-hmm.

Race cars. And then GTP, which is like the factory prototype racing. And then LMP2 is the more like pro-am, Prototype class. So, going to be a very fun day of racing tomorrow. Brian says, "I've personally experienced some of the above things: core body temp of 102 degrees Fahrenheit after 34 minutes in a 200-degree sauna, 3G force in my airplane." Didn't know he had an airplane. That's great. Non-evaporative clothing, physical exertion of stomping 200 pounds. What was What exercises do you— What are you doing, Brian? You're making me ask more questions than you're answering. Severe dehydration. So we got to ask, maybe all of these were at the same time. Maybe he was in a 200-degree sauna in his airplane while he was experiencing 3 Gs in non-evaporative clothing while stomping 200 pounds and facing severe dehydration. I like to imagine that this was all going on at once. Uh, but then he follows up and says, but never all at once inside of a race car for 2 and a half hours straight.

But a large pig is right around here.

He's struggling.

I don't like the way this sounds. Stick to wrestling, Chunks.

Um, anyways, okay, LMP2 is—

he has 603 horsepower. My car beats that. Should we, should we do— should we give him an opportunity to take the Blackwing for a spin? I like it.

What's going on here? I like it. No, the nature of being a motorsports spectator is that no matter how fast the cars seem like they're going, like, you can't possibly even imagine what the drivers are experiencing.

Yeah.

Like in other sports, you see someone running, sweating, sprinting, out of breath, all these different Sure. In a race car, you have the suit, the helmet, they're in a cockpit.

You're farther away.

Far away. And so, even though you get some— they have cameras in the cockpit.

Yep.

It's just not the same. But anyways, this race is gonna be going on for 10 hours tomorrow. I'm excited. I'm excited to watch.

Yeah. Well, speaking of Toby Loakey over at Shopify, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, More on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. How many people are actually paying for this AI thing? It's only 2% of US households pay for AI.

I guess that—

This feels low. Co-founder Nick says, we live in an X bubble. Only 2% of US households pay for AI. 25% of households pay for SiriusXM. Have you ever subscribed to SiriusXM?

I don't— I wonder how this gets counted. Because sometimes you buy a car and it comes with it, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

And then maybe it rolls over or something. But—

Well, I think they might be counting— I think it might be like sold in with the car.

Yeah.

Because that's user acquisition for SiriusXM. Yeah. No one wants SiriusXM.

Yeah.

And so they're thinking like maybe if they try it, they'll, they'll stick around. Yeah. And I'm sure to like— I've never activated the free SiriusXM.

Yeah.

And I wonder—

I'm sure when you activate it, you have to add a credit card. And so then it does roll over.

Yeah.

So maybe you need to go a little bit more like— because 55% pay for cloud storage across probably Google, Dropbox, Box, et cetera, or iCloud. And so I wonder if— does this include people who are on X premium accounts that includes Grok, right? Or like, if you have a Google account that is on a premium subscription and got you a little bit of Gemini, does that count in here? Like, there's a lot of bundling that's happening in—

SiriusXM did around $8.5 billion of revenue last year. Currently trading— their market cap is around $8.5 billion.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, the business is generally on the way out. But relatively robust in the meantime.

But yeah, I mean, if you're at— if you're doing like $20 a month and you're at 2% of households, like, that's still like a couple billion of revenue direct-to-consumer, but it feels low. It does seem like regardless, like, this is obviously directionally correct at the very least, like, household AI, paid AI subscription penetration is low. And it is a, like a vindication of like the ads model is going to be the one that wins. People will use these, you see it at the top of the store, and yet a lot of people are on free plans across the major apps, like getting the actual upgrade. The people that are upgrading are finding ways to use the apps for work.

Yeah.

I'm like, even earlier, Like, I was always expensing an AI subscription to some business because I was like, that's what I'm really using it for. There's very few people that are on a— would pay for like a personal productivity agent. And there's just so many other ways to monetize it as we've seen.

Yeah. And that's why when you look at those numbers, you have to assume that a meaningful percentage of them are showing up as consumer but are actually like SMB Like basically SMB buyers.

Agree.

Agree.

Where do you want to go next?

There's a new South Park episode that depicts a town infested with podcast-obsessed billionaires. Jason over at This Week in Startups is saying, what?

Did you watch it?

Feels like it's made for him, made for all of us. I don't even know when something goes out on TV. I don't Usually hard to find. I don't usually know how to— yeah, how to get access to it.

It's funny. Yeah. That we're learning about this from like a Forbes article.

Tyler, can you find out if it's— if it's out and if it's out, if you could watch it at like 10x speed and then kind of report back in a few minutes and give us your review?

Yeah.

Tesla stock jumps 5% on better than expected vehicle deliveries report. The delivery figure represented a 2% decline from a year earlier, but an unexpected increase from the prior period. Tesla stock was down 21% for the year as of Thursday's close, trailing all of its mega-cap tech peers.

Okay.

So, I was not surprised to see this at all.

Mm-hmm.

I think that Tesla And the reason for that is purely anecdotal, purely vibes-based analysis. I ordered a Tesla like 2 months ago and just got it this week.

Yeah.

It wasn't like it was sitting in lots. And there were so many rumors of like, oh, all the Cybertrucks are getting sold to SpaceX. It's this circular deal. There were pictures of like a lot that was filled with Teslas, like they're not moving.

And yeah, when I was— when I was ordering—

I would try and buy one and they'll be like, you have to wait 6 months.

And when I was ordering mine, yeah, I was intentionally speccing it to try to reduce the lead time. Like, I—

oh really?

There's like people online talk about like if you spec it this way or you get this, this version—

What is there to spec?

Um, Cyberbeast, or— okay, but basically there's like There's less demand. There's still a lot of demand for the like—

'Cause there's only one color, right?

Yeah.

There's no like, you can't get deviated stitching.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of like more minor things.

Do they have a tailor-made program?

They should.

They should.

They should. But here's the thing.

Okay.

I had the experience this week of Autopilot.

Yeah.

It worked perfectly for, Like 50 minutes.

Yeah.

And then I had to intervene.

Yep.

And going from the car driving itself to suddenly I have to drive my car in traffic is the most jarring, brutal experience because you realize how insane it is that we still all drive our cars. Like, once you try it, I don't think you can go back.

Yep.

Especially for— and this is— I've always loved— I've always loved driving. I've never really, like, minded commutes. They're obviously great if you can avoid them, but even going on a 20-minute drive to get an errand is generally enjoyable for me. But when it comes to the daily commute, I just don't think— like, every single day, there's some amount of people that are experiencing Autopilot for the first time.

Yes.

And it's the most viral experience because it is It's the first technology that I've tried that actually feels life-changing, especially if you're in the car for 30 minutes a day, which a lot of people are. And it's the most viral thing because it's so magical. It feels like this thing that we should have had for a long time, but it's here now and it works.

Well, it was promised a decade ago by a bunch of companies. Everyone was like, Level 5 by 2020.

Yeah. And so, it's here now and it works. And when you experience it, You tell all of your friends. And I think all these other auto manufacturers are, you know, if you rewind a year ago, everything that Elon had gone through with politics and facing competition overseas and more EVs coming online from a bunch of other manufacturers that are much better, they're much better built cars.

Yeah, like the Lucid Air.

I am like incredibly, I'm incredibly happy with my Tesla and at the same At the same time, I can look at it from like 20 feet away and point out a bunch of issues with the build.

Okay. I want to go through the good, the bad. I want to do a tier list.

Okay.

Let's start the Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck—

No, no.

Before we get to the tier list, I just wanted to finish my thought.

Please.

Every other auto manufacturer that sells cars primarily for utility is like way more in trouble than I think than I think generally people are picking up on. And the reason for that is when we have anybody that's in the automotive space on the show, we ask them, when do you think you're going to be able to get autonomous self-driving working? And they all chuckle and laugh, and you can tell it's like, could be like 7 years out.

Yep.

And they are so—

Doug Emery used the word appliance. He's like, the Model 3 is the the best appliance car. It's like— and DHH has talked about this where it's like his Model Y is like the best appliance car, but then he wants something with a gas engine, a stick shift, 3 pedals. Like he wants something that's super engaging for driving.

Yeah.

And then if he's not driving, he wants to be driven. And those are 2 separate categories now. And it's like, if you're an automaker, which one are you in?

And the thing, the thing that's having, having only experienced this for a few days. The thing that is to me, it's 10 times more magical to drive, have self-driving in your own car than a Waymo.

Yeah.

And the reason for that is like you're just— when you call a car on an app, you're used to not having to drive. You're not like gaining back time.

Totally. Yeah.

And so I think that Tesla self-driving is like more like is going to— is already more viral.

Yeah.

Because it's, you know, in the purchasing activity that virality is going to drive is going to be insane. So, all these other automakers are in big, big trouble. I think that Tesla is going to surprise everyone's focus on CyberCab, but I think the core car business is going to surprise to the upside. And I hope these other car companies are taking this as seriously as they should. Last year, or I think in Q2 of this year, actually, I talked to a guy that has a bunch of different dealerships across multiple brands. And I was like, are people coming in and saying, I want to get this car, but I really want self-driving? And he was saying, it's not really an issue yet.

No.

And I'm like, you are, I think, in for a rude awakening because I will end up telling people. And as a pretty hardcore car enthusiast, I will end up telling people I would never buy a car, a daily, a car meant for daily driving and commuting that didn't have self-driving again, period.

Yep.

I just would not do it.

Yep.

And I'll happily buy the weekend cars and whatever and enjoy that. But 99% of car buyers are just, they're like, I'll take one car, please. And I want it to be able to do stuff for me on the weekend and fit my weekdays. And so I'm just shocked that how seemingly how little these other manufacturers have been worrying about it because I think it's almost existential.

Yeah.

So it's been slow.

Anyways, tier list time.

Tier list reviewing the Tesla Cybertruck Cyberbeast. Let's start with the power. 850 horsepower, massive torque. How valuable is that? Where do you put that?

So I find the Cybertruck, like, self-driving, as in I am piloting it.

The opposite of self-driving.

Yeah. I find the actual driving experience horrific.

Okay.

Like, I find it, like, really unpleasant to drive. It feels very detached from Like the road, it's very jerky.

OK.

So the core driving experience when you're behind the wheel, when you're piloting it—

Actually, F tier.

F tier?

I remember my Prius days.

Yeah.

That is a good ride.

Oh, it's worse than a Prius.

Bombing around in a Prius is excellent. I put that at A tier.

OK. OK. What about the top speed, towing capacity? 130 miles an hour, capable of towing 11,000 pounds. Do you think you'll ever use that? Is that a benefit? Is that good?

I don't know if I'll use it. Having a— it's certainly not why I got it. But it's nice to have a truck bed.

But the towing capacity, where's that? C tier? It's kind of like a nice-to-have feature?

Yeah, maybe, maybe a nice, nice to have. Not even really a nice to have. It's like, okay.

Okay, so C?

C.

C tier.

Okay.

Strongly C.

Uh, what about the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes 120-volt and 240-volt bed outlets, bi-directional power sharing capabilities. You can run tools. You can power your whole house with it.

Mobile podcast studio. I think it's a nice feature. B tier.

B tier, there we go. Steer-by-wire. Steer-by-wire, very controversial. How has it actually been?

When it's self-driving, it's amazing because you can tell the whole car is designed to not— it really is. It's not just the yoke, but it's really not meant to be driven by a person. It's meant to be driven by the computer. When you drive it, it feels horrible.

But you've taken a sharp turn in a Raptor. You've taken a sharp turn manually in a Cybertruck. The feeling of steering by wire, how would you rate that?

I think it's fine. It can be done well, but I don't think it's done well in the—

So C tier?

C tier.

C tier. Okay.

C tier. But I would say, By wire with self-driving.

What about—

As S-tier. It's like incredibly smooth.

It's perfect. What about the 4-wheel steering? How has the actual turning radius—

The turning radius for a vehicle of that size is like S-tier.

S-tier?

I've never—

OK.

It's one of one.

It turns—

Having—

That's important for a big vehicle.

Yeah.

Got it.

Having previously owned a murdered-out lifted Ford Raptor, It is remarkably better. I mean, that car is like one of the most fun cars you can own.

Yeah.

And it is—

Impossible to park.

But it's tough parking.

Adaptive air suspension. It adjusts the ride height automatically, offering up to 16.5 inches of clearance. How is it actually sitting in it? Are you rumbling around, or does it feel smooth? How would you rate the ride experience, the suspension specifically?

I think the suspension is fine. Like, it's relatively smooth. You can tell they tried to spend, like, as little money on that feature as possible. But it's pretty smooth.

So they landed at—

But again, you have to remember the LA roads are— it's effectively like, you know, rock bottom.

War zone.

Yeah. So B tier.

B tier. Okay.

Okay.

What about the minimalist cabin? They're calling The cabin minimalist, Jordi. Is that a pro or a con?

I think the cabin's pretty nice. I'm going to go—

A tier?

Like, the materials are generally—

Plasticky, right?

Are C tier.

Okay, materials of the cabin, C tier.

And there's some funny features where if you don't press the, like, you press the button to open the door. And if you do the manual pull, which you need for safety reasons, it's like it literally pops up an alert. It's like, you're going to damage the windowsill, which feels like really, really funny because it's like, okay, you designed this thing where if you like— again, and the whole thing you have to look at it is like it is a computer that happens to have wheels.

Yeah.

And so there's, I'm sure, things with your computer where it's like, yeah, you could turn it off if you like unscrew it and do these things. But you should just hit the off button. Don't try to physically turn off the device.

OK. And then the last— I think we know where you're going to close out on this. But the self-driving itself, the capabilities of the self-driving system.

S tier.

S tier.

There we go. OK.

S tier.

Well, that's Jordi Hays.

Yeah, as a utility vehicle, fantastic.

As an appliance vehicle.

As an appliance.

Very, very good.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, yeah, Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well. What about Instinct? Annika Benning says, my Instinct just randomly ordered her bikinis. She says she's not ready for AGI. What happened? Is this real? She's texting her Instinct agent and says, I didn't authorize this Monday swim order. Can you please cancel? And Instinct says, you're right, and that's on me. Because the sheepish admission of messing up is just so funny to me still. A checkout click went through as pay now Wednesday evening before you'd approved anything. I'm canceling it now. It's already marked shipped. So if they can't cancel, I'll set up the return and get the store credit restored. I'll tell you what they say. Cancel. And then their policy says no cancels after placing. So it needs an urgent exception request. Email the CEO. Get ready to Email the CEO. Yeah, I think yeah, we are in the hallucination era of this.

Yeah, it's all gonna. It's all gonna get fixed.

Weird things. They're gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna mess around and stuff. But anyway, oh wait! Skydance Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery has a new name. It's just Skydance. Yeah, that's exciting. So David Ellison joined X for the first post ever.

Right?

Let's watch the video.

Let's watch the video. Let's throw it on. A movie about movies. Let's see what they got. Can you name any of these movies? What's this? Do you have any idea? Whoa, he knows!

Ball Nation!

Look at this.

I'm not gonna be able to name anything.

You don't know that one?

You don't know that one?

Oh, Ben's showing off now.

Yeah, show off, Ben. Go off.

Yeah, they don't just live on screens. Says we have big goals for Skydance. We intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and willingness to take smart risks.

Risks.

At the same time, we'll honor what makes Paramount and Warner Brothers special, giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories, and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world. Couldn't be more excited about what we're going to build together. Very exciting.

And yet connected by something deeper.

So is the actual app and platform to be called Skydance?

Yeah. Uh, well, the company I think is gonna merge into Skydance.

But I'm wondering, are they gonna— are they— is there a possibility in the future that we could get a Skydance Max?

Yeah, I was thinking they, they should at least for a couple months rename HBO Skydance and then name it back to HBO and then go back to Skydance BO and then back to HBO and then, and then HB Skydance and then back to HBO because you got to keep people guessing with that brand. It's not like everyone knows what HBO is.

Putting aside the debt load on the business, this bundle is extremely compelling.

Totally.

And I think, like, this is a— it's very disappointing for Netflix, I think, to see how all this has come together. Like, I think they can both— they obviously can both coexist and consumers will pay for both. But this combination of assets and IP is super compelling from live to news to—

Like CBS has some of the like lower-tier content that you can just throw on in the background, like the laundry television that Netflix has gotten so good at. Like CBS has that in the catalog. Like there's a bunch of great shows that people can just watch and it's just serialized stuff. So it's not like it's just Christopher Nolan Dark Knight that's on there, and that's the only crown jewel, although that is a very valuable, valuable crown jewel. They gotta bring Nolan back to Marvel, or not Marvel, DC.

DC.

DC. Because if they can reboot the DC Universe with Nolan, bring him back for Superman, put everything together, let him run free, the Dark Knight trilogy extended, that would be fantastic. Although I think he might be, might be done with with his video game era or his comic book era.

Anyway. The next post I was gonna pull up was deleted.

Yeah, yeah, drama. There's some— there's plenty of drama in the timeline. Oh, Elon's taking shots at Delta. He says, the best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight. It will have no chance of accessing the internet.

Boom!

Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Elon's also in the news 'cause he's going back and forth with Siobhan Zillis. Very dramatic, but we'll let you sort of dig into that one. We were on a United flight and they did have Starlink. I think it was the first one and pretty good, pretty good. But I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see if it actually, if it actually shifts people over. John Palmer says flying on Delta is a high-status move because it signals that you're already post-economic and don't have to work on the plane. I can see many OpenAI and Anthropic employees switching to Delta after the IPOs.

Not going off. He fired off a bunch of Delta content. This one was even better. Not a phone in sight. Just people living in the moment. That's Delta.

That's Delta. Wow, there's a lot of pressure. Didn't the Delta CEO, he put out some statements saying, oh, we don't need Starlink, it's fine. You do. You will need it. But who knows? I think it's similar to self-driving where it's like a lot of people just won't— that won't be at the top of their mind. A lot of people go to the dealership and they're just like, I want this color car or I want a car in this price range.

Or whatever.

They're like, cool. And a lot of people will be like, yeah, I want the flight that's the cheapest, or I want the flight that goes at this time. And they'll just be like, I'll buy whatever flight is there.

This one says, United is a blue-collar airline for knowledge workers who need to work on their laptops even when they're on the plane. When you retire, you can finally upgrade to the luxury airline Delta, where you can just relax without Wi-Fi or screens around.

That's very funny. Anyway, what else is going on? There's a mansion section we got to get to. Where's the mansion section today? Oh, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck put out some— there's a video of him being interviewed. We should listen to this 1-minute, 30-second video of Ben Affleck talking about AI.

In order to be a video model that's successful, you just need a huge volume of video. Initially it learns things like what is red, you know, and then it learns more and more specific information to get to the cinematic information. It's the sort of last stage. And in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I know's work, and I was uncomfortable with that. And I thought, that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer, which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be.

And so how did you create the last layer without doing all of the, you know, essentially copying of what came before it?

Because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on. So you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay, just unfreeze the weights, bro. 8,631. Now here's step 8,631. 632. So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated a bunch of social media footage or random video online and teach them to meet cinematic standards.

Oh, so it's fine to train on ours, our content, then the workflow, but not on your, your buddies? Make it make sense.

I think he's kind of saying like, no, train on everything, right?

No, no.

He's describing what's actually going on.

What you're doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating.

This is funny. Ben Affleck. All right, gather round. So you want to freeze the base weights first, learning rate 2e minus 4. He's in the thick of it. Yeah, I remember a year ago, AI lab founder was telling me like, yeah, he was like, I ran into Ben Affleck at some event and he used compute as a noun. And I was like, that's when I knew he was like dialed in.

Yeah, when he went on Joe Rogan, everyone was like, oh wow, he's a—

yeah, no, he's been deep in this. Ben Affleck reveals that seeing OpenAI models made him call Matt Damon and warn, we're finished, before realizing its researchers knew little about how movies are made. So, uh, anyway, what, what else is in the timeline? I want to find the mansion section because there were some interesting houses.

Jake Paul says Nvidia is at an all-time high figure building a robot every hour. In 5 years, a robot will fight for, for a world title, and I'll be its promoter.

Hmm.

That is where we're going.

Um, billionaire Peter Thiel is behind The $130 million purchase of Casa Encantada. The winning bidder of the Los Angeles estate was an LLC, and this is the circa 1930s Bel Air estate once prized as one of Los Angeles's grandest homes. It has a Wikipedia page, correct, Tyler?

It does. Yeah.

What stuck out on the Wikipedia page?

Why?

What does it take for a for a house to earn a Wikipedia page these days.

I mean, I think it's just like very historical.

Okay.

Yeah. Built in 1938 originally.

Does it have a golf course on it? Oh, no, that's the Bel Air Country Club. It's just next to it, but it does have a putting green. So, okay, there's some features here. Let's see. We're going to do another tier list. 8.5 acres estate. 8.5 acres. Where are you putting that?

S tier.

S tier. 7 bedrooms.

S tier.

Not too many bedrooms.

Fish and guests stink after 3 days.

So why do you need 7 bedrooms? Well, 6 kids?

No, I just think sometimes it's nice to have a number of guests at the same time.

I think this is in the— oh, I wonder if this is 7 bedrooms in the entire property. It's twice set the record for the most expensive private home sale ever. First, $12.4 million in 1980, and again in 2000. For $94 million. Not a lot of appreciation from 2000 to today. It's been 26 years, but it's only gone up by 30%. Let's see what else is going on here. Longtime home of the late financier and telecom mogul Gary Winnick and his wife. The property was subject of a contentious foreclosure battle after Gary's death. What do you think about living in a home where the previous owner was a financier and telecom mogul. Is that good energy to live in?

Yeah, mogul. Mogul's great. I mean, I obviously prefer tycoon.

Oh, sure. But I think there's a tycoon in there now. So the next owner will get to enjoy the title.

Well, that's a great provenance.

Yeah.

Mogul, tycoon, whatever.

It's on an upward trajectory of ownership.

Magnate.

Magnate could be coming next. Could be next. Gary, who founded Global Crossing, We talked about this guy, yeah. With a promise to lay undersea fiber optic cable around the world, was once said to be LA's richest man. After his death, it became clear that he was severely strapped for cash and deeply in debt. What tier is deeply in debt?

Underrated?

Overrated?

It depends on how you come out the other side. We've never been afraid of leverage here.

Well, he didn't live to feel the unfortunate—

I mean, Global Crossing went down, bankruptcy, in the dot-com era. So he went a little too hard.

But he got out, at least a little bit, it seems like, before all of that. Gary Winnick donated millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Zoo. What do you think about donating to the LA Zoo? Do you like zoos? What tier is zoo?

I gotta— I mean—

I like how you're really wrestling with it.

Well, it's tough.

Put it in a tier. Put it in a tier.

I— for— it's tough because speaking for myself, yeah, I would never— I would never choose to go to the zoo.

Okay. Okay.

But speaking on behalf of my family, I'll probably— I'm probably in zoos a few times a year.

Okay.

So I think it's an S-tier experience for the children.

Okay. But yeah, it sounds like there's some caveats there. What about a menagerie?

S-tier.

S-tier, right?

Yeah.

It's basically a private zoo.

Yeah.

And menagerie is deeply underrated. I recently discovered that there was an illegal menagerie in my town featuring zebras, hundreds of rabbits, because they just multiply and multiply and multiply. People need to consider, if you're gonna bend the rules, bend them around—

Gold says, Jordi, rent a giraffe and take it for a spin on the track. I like that. I like that. Putting zoos at racetracks. Where you could actually ride the animals around. That's S-tier.

Oh, Conrad Hilton lived in this house.

Interesting.

Okay, later owners. Design, architecture, and ground. It does have a putting green. I know you're not a big golfer, but do you like putting green as an amenity on an 8.5-acre estate? What tier would putting green go?

Why not a par 3 though?

Whole course or just one hole?

I think you can maybe do 3 holes.

Oh, okay.

3-hole par 3.

Yeah.

I mean, that could be a 40-minute experience for you and your—

That actually exists near me. There's somebody with a private par 3. And so if you look at the map, they're like, oh, I never knew there was a golf course there. It's like, yeah, there's a golf course. It's not a commercial operation.

Mm-hmm.

But S-tier.

Okay. Okay.

Well, there's some other news here. Oil executives flocking to Venezuela set off a hunt for golf clubs. This is in Bloomberg. Dozens of executives teed up at the lush Caracas Country Club for a golf tournament on Monday, warming up for a sold-out oil and gas conference in the Venezuelan capital this week. Days earlier, the event Yeah. Organizers were in a panic. We contacted every golf club and shop to find clubs. We borrowed some sets and even bought a few to make sure we had enough. Brought a few. For ordinary Venezuelans, a rush in the city's capital's wealthy bubble to secure golf clubs is almost an absurd problem. They've faced years of economic contraction, hyperinflation, and sanctions that have impoverished the oil-rich country. The country is also recovering from twin earthquakes Yet the conference fits with President Donald Trump's promise to restore Venezuela's former glory under an umbrella of U.S. influence. Trump, a regular golfer and owner of multiple international courses, laid down his ambition of channeling $100 billion into Venezuela's oil industry revival after U.S. forces deposed former leader Nicolás Maduro in January. Some 650 foreign and local executives, government officials, and foreign diplomats are due to attend the Venezuela International Oil and Gas Summit starting Tuesday, with over 150 more on the waiting list. The stampede illustrates how Venezuela is captivating the hydrocarbons industry at a time when Middle East supplies are choked by war. So everyone's trying to bring their golf clubs on this trip. I thought there were some other— there's some other stories in here, but where should we go Next, I'll tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Sean Frank says, have you been sued in California for wiretapping just for using a Meta Pixel? Thousands of e-com brands were getting shakedown requests for nothing more than a conversion Pixel. Every settlement was $10,000 to $50,000 right out of the pocket of small businesses. He says he was sued multiple times. As of today, that won't ever happen again. I thought this was the wrong reading of the law and wanted to do something about it. My internal team worked with the eCommerce Alliance. They put time, money, and resources into changing this law. I didn't— I really didn't do much, but as a result of their hard work, no one will ever be sued for this ever again. The work of the eCommerce Alliance backed by PostScript. Oh, that's cool. I know PostScript.

Great company.

Just saved the entire e-com industry probably $30 million a year. Huge shout out to Gina from my team for getting this done. Ridge could have just kept paying it, but that's how these things win. E-com brands are too fractured. Everyone's too cheap. Everyone's being crabs in a bucket. And so, yeah, everyone just is like, ah, we got to settle this. We got something. That happens a lot. And so interesting. The other big news, Anthropic is aiming to go public ahead of Thanksgiving with an IPO roadshow as soon as the week of November 9th. Okay, so more than a full month away, but still on track for Thanksgiving.

Q4.

And yeah, it seems like they're teeing up a number of different news and models and there's the Fable 5 rumors. And so, So there's a big question about, like, what will go into hyping the IPO? Do you need to discover gold in a hidden treasure? Do you need to dive to a shipwreck, or whatever you need to do, to make a splash? Or do you just need to make one final pelican on a bike? That should be the COVID sheet of the S-1.

Yeah.

Pelican on a bike, we did it. Larry Ellison is selling his oceanfront estate in Florida. He wants $165 million for it. Tech billionaire is relisting his roughly 8.4-acre North Palm Beach property because he's adding to a different estate in Florida. It's about 14% more than his original asking price. He put it on the market in 2022, but he's listing it again at a higher price. He bought the 8.4-acre property last year. Last— no, in for $80 million in 2021. He relisted it for $145 million a year later. The move comes as Ellison has been expanding his estate in Manalapan. I think that's how you pronounce that. An affluent town just south of Palm Beach. In June, the Oracle co-founder paid about $35 million for a parcel of land next to his roughly 15-acre compound. Have you seen Ken Griffin's compound? Have you seen how many properties he's bought? It's like the entire block.

He's probably bought more since I last saw it.

The visualization is insane. He's building the biggest compound ever. And it begs the question, like, yeah, I think you do have to go golf course at that point because there's only so many features if you're getting up into like 30 acres in a residential district. Like, what are you going to do at a certain point? Like, you got a pool, you got a Full tennis court. There's some estates that will have like airstrip, 2 tennis courts and a pickleball court.

Yeah.

Well, he's actually getting some pushback on a potential helicopter pad. Yeah.

Because that's airstrip. That's why I said that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Because pushback, you go to the residents, they're like, please, we don't want helicopters.

And you're like, fine, airstrip, full plane.

I would love to understand his analysis of Like the risk-reward of helicopter flights for him. Yeah.

Seems dangerous. But I think with the right pilot, if you get somebody who's really, really elite and you have a whole team that's servicing it, making sure that it's really dialed, getting brand new one every year, like money's no expense, there's probably a way to get to 5 nines. of security, but still some risk. But there's risk in everything. And, you know, like, you know, you're not immune to risk. Seminole Landing is located next to the Seminole Golf Club. In 2020, Robert F. Smith, a billionaire private equity executive, bought a pair of houses there from energy drinks entrepreneur Russ Weiner for $48.19 million. Which energy drink did Russ Weiner Rockstar Energy. That's right. His net worth is $5.4 billion. There you go. Deals of $100 million plus homes have become almost routine in neighboring Palm Beach. However, Kenny and Kneb said they have seen $50 million plus market beginning to establish itself in North Palm Beach too. There's another company that we should dig into, Squishmallows. Have you heard of this company before? Squishmallows. It's an ultra-soft collectible plush toy created by Kelly Toy in 2017, known for their marshmallow-like texture and diverse character personalities. Have you ever heard of this brand before?

No.

Because Jonathan Kelly, whose family— his company created this ultra-soft plush toy, uh, is selling it at my mansion in Bel Air for $38 million. Uh, he bought the property as an investment. He never lived there.

He's got an infinity pool. Would you look at that?

F-tier.

Uh, um, no, I mean, you know, uh, Brian Johnson would, would be a quick pass on this house due to the proximity to that golf course.

Oh, the golf course.

Golf course.

Chemicals potentially.

Yeah, just, just, you know, the amount of, the amount of various products that it takes to maintain a golf course and the— yeah, just being that close to it can have some pretty bad health effects.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, he never lived there, so he's doing fine. The company blew up on TikTok During the pandemic, now he's betting some of that money on Los Angeles real estate. Kelly's listing his Bel Air mansion for $38 million, significantly more than the $26 million he paid in 2023. He said he bought the 2022 property at a relatively low price. I imagine interest rates were really low too. Originally had it listed for $47.5, trying to double his money almost, but has cut it back. And this was right before the LA. mansion tax passed on homes priced above $5 million. So he's hoping to reap the reward by selling now that the market has stabilized. The property was designed by architect Zoltán Pali and has some, has some interesting features. Set above the 4th green of the golf course at Bel Air Country Club, the property spans 3 levels. I know you don't like 2-level homes. Is 3 going to go in an even lower tier for you? Where are you putting 3-level houses?

I mean, I don't want to be too harsh of a critic given that this house is very well set up to take advantage of the views of the course and the city and these kind of things. So I won't criticize it in this context, but I will criticize the pool.

Okay. So the pool is F tier.

Yeah.

Being close to a golf course, being this close to a golf course, is that D tier or F tier?

F tier.

F tier. Okay.

Actually, I put the pool at D tier.

Pool's D tier.

Golf course is F tier.

Golf course is F tier because that's dangerous. What about the overall aesthetic, the architectural Style, just the vibe?

It's, it's quite a bit better than the one we were looking at yesterday that is pure raw McMansion.

Okay.

Generic.

Yep.

You know, looks like it was built in, uh, uh, without tender love and care.

Sure.

This is quite a bit more brutalist. Material selection is, is Looks a lot better.

But it's not making it to S tier?

I'm going to put it— yeah, I'm going to put it at— again, it's like, do you want to feel like you're living on, like, in a modern college campus library? You know? That's kind of the style, the sort of architecture style in some ways.

Okay.

Some people are going to be pretty fired up about.

So your final answer? The overall aesthetic, the architectural design?

I think it, again, it feels a little generic, but I'll put it in B tier.

B tier. Okay. Lightning round. You've already rated the pool. The house comes with a wine room. Where are you going on the wine room? Do we need a picture of the wine room to illustrate? I don't think we have to.

Everyone at You got to change the name from wine room to home data center.

Oh, I thought you were going to go Natural Light room. That's what I'm trying to get.

Yeah.

Just a whole room for all the different vintages of Natty Light. That's the goal. Where are you putting wine room?

Home data center, A tier.

A tier. Okay. Theater, we know you like a theater because it'll draw me over for movie nights. That's A tier?

Correct.

I got one last feature. It has a podcast studio.

F tier.

F tier? What?

Never podcast at home. Only podcast in your own version of the UltraDome.

You need to get out, stretch, spread your wings. You can't podcast at home. I hate—

I mean, there's a reason we could be—

Could be home right now.

We could be doing the show from home right now. We could. There's nothing like being in here.

I'm wondering when the podcast studio went in because he bought this house. He never lived in it. I don't think he has a podcast. Did he think, I need to add a podcast studio because that's what will add value to the property? Was he working away or did they rent it?

Well, you know that modern apartment buildings are adding this. It's a new amenity, Jon.

Oh, yeah.

They're like, well, we have a sauna, we have a pool, and we have podcast studios that you can rent. By the hour.

Yeah, I know.

And how does everyone? I already said F tier.

Yes, yes. Anyway, the price of Kelly's property could be considered an entry point for the neighborhood. Noah said the LA mansion tax did slow down the high-end market, but anything but like anything, people have gotten accustomed to it. So good luck to. whoever is picking up this Bel Air mansion. There's one more here. The Bali-inspired Florida home fetched $83 million, who is owned by billionaire Chris Rokos. I'm not sure who this is. Rokos Capital Management.

Brutal solar placement.

Oh, is that solar?

I think so.

What's going on here? What? Oh, on the roof. Yeah, interesting. It doesn't quite blend in with that type of roof, right?

Yeah.

It actually works better if you have a more boxy, modern, brutalist style. You throw a bunch of—

Flat roof.

Yeah, flat roof would definitely hide it. But even, you know, the Tesla Solar Roof, something like that, there has to be a way to integrate that more. Where are you ranking the solar panels?

Well, I think solar is fantastic.

But aesthetically?

Absolutely brutal.

So conclusion?

I'm gonna go D-tier for the placement. Well, F-tier placement, S-tier feature.

S-tier feature. You like the solar. And why is that? Is that the— you like the idea that if there's a power outage, you still have some power? Or is it just like good for the environment, nice to have cheaper electricity?

A bit of both.

A bit of both.

Bit of both.

Bit of both.

You like some solar?

Cool.

I like it.

Yeah.

And for your home data center.

But I can imagine it would be— yeah, the funny thing is if you're in Florida and there's a hurricane and your power goes out, you're probably not actually able to power your home with it because you could mess up the weather.

Yeah. But you could use it to charge up batteries and have some supply there.

I would blanket the grass with solar.

You would do solar grass. Okay.

Solar? No, just a deck of solar.

What about a solar pier? He's on the beach. You could just build a pier that goes out into the ocean.

There we go.

Free land, basically, just to build it up.

There we go. We got to— why is no one talking about Andrew McAlepp going to Paradigm?

Oh, yeah. That's a big one.

Early, early friend of the show. Andrew McAuliffe is joining Paradigm, new chapter, joining as an entrepreneur in residence.

Mm-hmm.

He's been at Varda for years now. He says, Varda was a grand adventure and a one-of-one experience I'll cherish forever. I had the rare privilege of joining the founding team and helping take a wild idea from zero to one, from a blank sheet of paper to hypersonic vehicles coming home from orbit. I'm incredibly proud of what we built together. Paradigm is giving me something incredibly cool. I'll have the freedom to search for the next important thing worth building. This might look like a radical departure, but I see it as a chance to step back, look broadly, follow my curiosity. Andrew is incredibly creative and incredibly entertaining, and he's always been working on projects.

Yeah, great hacker.

My only hope for his new role is that he doesn't find the big idea right away, because I want to ship a bunch of fun stuff in the meantime and little experiments. There's so many things that should be built that don't necessarily have an immediate commercial opportunity, and I hope that he builds some of that.

Is this at the Paradigm office? This is a beautiful office. That ceiling is amazing. Yeah, really, really cool. Yeah, yeah, exciting. I'm sure we'll get a lot of different projects out of him. Very, very good. What is going on in Cerebras land? Tae Kim is taking shots at Cerebras, says, if I was a Cerebras shareholder, I would be livid right now. Seriously, what the heck? Insiders dumping stock. CFO, COO, accounting officer, and no info about losing GPT-6.1 ultra fast. And so the big, the big sort of drama in the Cerebras world over the last couple days has been that Cerebras is maybe powering ultrafast mode for GPT-5.6 SOL, but not ultrafast or something like that. Cerebras should comment publicly, Tae Kim says, especially when insiders are dumping stock and they hyped, they hyped that they were going to win GPT-6 SOL ultrafast, but then Nvidia was commenting like, oh, we're actually the ones that got this working. We're running it on low batch size, et cetera, et cetera. Tyler, do you have any more context on what's going on with Cerebras?

There's not been a ton of details, but yeah, SemiAnalysis had a post that said like, breaking, the new ultrafast is not on Cerebras. And then NVIDIA had like a, you know, the little eyes emoji. They commented.

Seems pretty obvious that they got it done. Well, you know, game's not over. Good luck to Cerebras. I'm sure they'll rebuild and find a potential play there. The initial experience of Cerebras inference was very, very remarkable. But there are obviously a lot of tradeoffs there. And so it requires a lot of back and forth and iteration.

We got to talk about .si domains.

Okay.

Suhail says, get your .si domain people. Appreciate Rob, @rob@snagged, for helping us lock it down. And, uh, I'll start by saying Rob and the Snagged team are some of the fine— are the finest domain brokers I've ever worked with. Rob helped us get, uh, tvpn.com back in the day.

That's right, yeah.

And then I'll, I'll say next that, um, I don't think it's worth getting your .si domain at all. I think superintelligence and trying to rebrand it is corny, and you should focus whatever energy you were gonna put on getting a .si domain on just getting your .com. But I would do it.

Yeah.

I would do it with Rob. I think the whole scramble, like, already .ai domains are obviously inferior to .coms in every single use case.

Yeah.

And so, But using like the second-tier version, the .si, is even worse.

I'm hearing sort of a pitch for like a third-party candidate because, of course, Donald Trump came out and said we need to be SI, super intelligent. Then Gavin Newsom fought back and said we got to use AI. And you're saying .com. So sort of a third party, just pure commercialization.

Yeah.

What does com actually stand for? Commercial entity, right? It's great.

That's a good question.

That's not going anywhere. Yeah.

Yeah, commercial or company.

Commercial or company.

There we go. Yeah. There we go.

Yeah.

Commercial.

Yeah. Gavin Newsom, he signed the executive order declaring artificial intelligence artificial intelligence in California. You're welcome, America.

Yeah, someone already sniped .si, the tbpn.si.

Wait, really? Yeah, no way. Well, enjoy it.

We're not someone named Naiman Mark says focus on dot com, bro. Why be a king when you can be a god?

I don't get it.

No, just saying like dot com is the pinnacle.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's true. You got it. You got it.

Yeah. The main thing is anytime you're trying to use something that's not a dot com, you're going against the fact that consumers. Their entire time on the internet have been trained to understand, like very passively trained every single day, every single day, hundreds of times a day that serious businesses have used .com, real durable businesses use .com. So when you're even going through the naming process, so many found like picking a name where you're never going to be able to get the .com because some large company has it, I think is just a bad idea. And that's why I end up talking with Rob about different domains for companies in my portfolio, even oftentimes before the company is actually established.

And also, like the flip side of that, like reinforcing hundreds of times a day, like real companies have real .coms with like their real brand names, is they're also getting reinforced fairly frequently that The new TLD is sketchy. Like, I'm sure chat.ai is sketchy, and like, there's so many different like knockoffs of like whatever new TLD, whatever the hot thing is.

Positive programming constantly and negative programming.

And so I'm sure the .si world is gonna have so much spam on there that, yeah, there might be a couple companies that lean in and build real companies. And like, there are plenty of companies that we've talked to that do have the .ai domain. And they are real companies. Doesn't Anthropic have like Claude.ai or something like that? Like, I feel like there's been a few that—

Yeah, but they don't—

They don't embrace it. I think they reroute to the .com, honestly.

Yeah, they—

But like—

Oh, they don't reroute, yeah.

There are some .ai companies that have broken through, but still, it's a lot of slop. And then SI is gonna go through the same thing when you could just get a nice, nice .com. Anyway, huge jobs missed. It says zero hedge September nonfarm payrolls came in at 29,000 expected 90,000 last revised lower to 133K. There's a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the economy that rates are surging. So the market is up because this maybe will lead to like a rate cut potentially. But from Bloomberg, they have ten reasons why rates are surging. Here are the top ten reasons why. Interest rates are surging. Resilient economic growth. The US and the world, really US global growth supports inflation and reduces demand for bonds. There's other things you can buy. Higher commodity prices. Oil, gas, diesel, food prices are adding to inflation pressure that's driving up rates. Interest rate hikes. Central bankers are actually just raising rates directly, signaling further increases to combat inflation. Hyperscaler borrowing. We've talked about this one a bunch. AI infrastructure spending is driving a surge in corporate bond issuance, increasing consumption for investor cash. And we will get back to that in a minute because we have Joe Gebbia with us.

No, we have Molly.

Oh, we have Molly.

Okay. We probably have a couple more minutes. Okay. We're rescheduling Joe.

We got it.

There were some technical difficulties, but we'll get him back on.

Yes.

As soon as possible.

Okay.

Let's talk about what Dr. Dad is saying.

Please.

With horsepower comes horse responsibility. I couldn't agree more. We obviously have this horse here as a constant reminder that with great horsepower comes great horse responsibility.

Indeed. Indeed. Let me tell you about 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.

Our friend Ara Karazian.

Yeah.

Saying AI spending falls. Yeah. The latest Ramp AI Index.

He's striking fear.

Price cuts at Frontier in addition to cheaper and more efficient models at standard and light levels are pushing down the cost of using AI. Open source models remain less than 5% of business spend.

Mm-hmm.

This decline in spend is driven almost exclusively by competition between OpenAI and Anthropic. Very, very dramatic headline. And Buco Capital comes in and says AI spend falls for the 12th time in my chart that keeps going up and to the right is more accurate, but a less interesting title. And of course, yeah, looking at Ara's chart, it's been going up and down quite a lot, but the trend is clear.

Okay. We have been switching up our schedule, but we have Joe Gebbia with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and UltraDome and hear about everything. From his perspective.

What's going on?

At the National Design Studio. Joe, thank you so much for joining the show. How are you today?

Gentlemen, it's great to see you. Been looking forward to this for a long time now.

Yeah, yeah, great to have you. Caught us on the one day where neither of us is wearing a suit. Yes, so very—

yeah, you guys are bringing style to Silicon Valley. That's one of the many things I appreciate about the show.

Yes, and you're bringing design to Washington. Can you, uh, get us up to speed on your role, how you actually interface with digital services, what your day-to-day looks like, what your team looks like. Just sort of set the table for us.

Yes. Well, it was about 18 months ago I joined Doge with a specific mission to fix a very outdated part of the government, which was how government employees retire. Yeah, it was, you know, paper-based. It was really hard to use. So in about 6 months, I recruited a couple of ex-Airbnb engineers, a couple of great designers, We took the whole process online. It was a huge win for the admin. Went from 6 months to about 6 seconds to retire. And it spawned a bigger idea, which is, what if we did this government-wide? What if we could go across every agency, working with every cabinet member to actually reform the digital experience for the entire nation?

Yeah. So, what I'm interested in is like there's the National Design Studio, and I think there are people still that think design is just like what color the button looks. And design is so much more than that. Like, you are designing the system. I imagine that a lot of the design work that you're doing is actually interfacing with a ton of different stakeholders, understanding why a system was built. There's the Chesterton Fence analogies. Like, what does it actually take to move a project through the National Design Studio to fruition? I imagine it's not just, you know, a new front end.

It's far more than that. You're right. The big idea was, well, you have— there's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. Some you're familiar with, maybe the IRS every April 15th and some long-tail websites that are more information-based. And there was a realization a couple of months back, earlier this year, that there's no way— I mean, you spend your whole lifetime trying to go website by website to upgrade and improve to modern standards. Yeah. And it became sort of apparent and obvious at a certain point, well, what if we just used modern tools that are emerging in real time vis-à-vis AI and gave people a place where instead of 29,000, what if there was just one?

Yeah.

What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it, meaning that I could go search which Medicare plan is right for me, or write for my grandmother or grandfather. And then right on the same site, I'd be able to enroll. And there's something very interesting here. So, we built America.gov to do exactly that.

Yeah.

And the site is a place to get information and also, it's coming soon, action it. So, the interesting thing is that because we're in the government, our LLM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the internet.

Sure.

So information, that means it's accurate and it's up to date. It also means that coming from in the government, we can integrate into agencies.

Yeah.

Meaning that with the enrollment for Medicare, we can actually connect into the Medicare database because we're inside the government and help somebody actually effectuate that change, make that decision right in one place and not have to go back into the maze of the Medicare website.

Yeah.

Talk more.

You—

America.gov launched right as there's so much excitement on the West coast around personal agents and really all over the world as people have gone from just like getting information or everyday people are going from getting information from LLMs to actually getting information and then being able to take action. I imagine you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the project. You didn't need new agents to get released, but how good can this get? Like, because I can imagine a one homepage for interacting with your government where again, you can and learn about the services that the government provides and laws and everything like that, and then be able to actually immediately take action and, let's say, spawn an agent that goes and deals with another agency, and your agent is dealing with their agent, and then it brings you in the loop when you need— when it needs your input and things like that. I can imagine, like, the perfect version of that product. But any— you're dealing with the actual realities of what it's going to actually take to roll that out. And given how hard it's been to get agents right in the enterprise and personal agents that are still very error-prone, I can only imagine that it's going to be just as hard or harder for your team to do.

Yeah, look, I'm sure that day will come and it's probably closer than we all think. For now, though, we don't even have to go that far. Because we're positioned inside, a lot of these agencies have APIs that we can connect to that, you know, outside third parties are never going to have access to. So we have this advantage right now where we can just connect directly to those. And if they don't exist, we now have an executive order to help create APIs that we need in order to do things like that improve the experience for everyday Americans. You just moved, you have to change your address with the post office. You'll be able to do that. On America.gov, no stress. You want to learn about and actually enroll in an armed service? You can do that on America.gov in a couple clicks. You lost your Social Security card and need to replace it? You want to know a fun fact? We looked at the flow of the replacement of a Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper.

Wow.

And that's, by the way, with no errors. That's if you get it right the first time.

Yeah.

And so what you'll see in american.gov in the months to come, when you're logged in, it literally takes one click and it ships your Social Security card. So there's more than a 10x improvement that's unfolding right now across the nation. I don't know if you can hear it. Marine One's taking off behind the White House here.

Very cool.

Yeah.

It's not coming through. Your team has set up a good system. I wish we could hear it.

Can you talk— oh, can you talk us through the— can you hear us okay?

You see the helicopter there?

Oh, yeah, there it is.

Wow.

There you go. Oh, it's about to land.

So crazy.

There you go.

Wow, would you look at that?

Landing right back.

Pretty good for an AI background. Isn't it?

It's this White House background option. It seems really paint on though.

Yeah. There's the humorous sort of fake quote, we don't do things because they're easy. We do them because we thought they would be easy. You don't strike me as somebody that would be super naive. I assumed you I can imagine that this work would be incredibly difficult, not because designing the front end would be difficult, but this sort of complex coordination. But when it comes to just making everyday interactions with the federal government easier, have some elements been relatively straightforward, or has it all been— a slog that, that, that makes, you know, starting a YC startup feel easy.

There are elements of YC here. There's a lot of elements of Airbnb. You know, some would say the hardest marketplace to start is one where strangers are going to rent out their homes to other strangers. So, you know, that was definitely a lot of lessons there of— and a lot of enjoyment of taking on a really hard problem like that. Like, how do you create trust between people who've never met? And take that to scale. So, you know, it took us about 10 years, but we pulled it off. And, but it's a, it's, it's a huge problem here. There's, it's the government's the largest employer. It's 2.3 million employees. It's got systems that go back to the 1970s. They still are actual mainframes running important systems in our government, our nation today. But it's 2026, guys. What are we doing? It's the United States of America. We lead in everything else. We lead culturally, economically, technologically. Let's also be a leader in the citizen experience. It doesn't have to be the way it is. It can be better. Right? Like, let's plant a flag and say enough is enough.

Yeah.

Like, I'm embarrassed, actually, you know, as a tech guy, as Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

As a designer, in fact. The way our nation had shown up digitally is no one admires it, and they should.

Yeah, that's true.

So, that's why I'm here.

How do you think about the differences between your work at Airbnb to now your work in the government, specifically around how you measure success? I mean, it sounds like you do think in KPIs. maybe it's not specific click-through rates, the more minutiae of when you have designed Airbnb from scratch. It was a greenfield project, so you're not starting with a mainframe, but you still understand that just going from 86 clicks down to just a few is going to be a huge improvement. How much of what you're doing is driven by the traditional software metrics versus more intuitive, sort of higher level of abstraction metrics, just like this is a mess and we should just reduce complexity. And the KPI looks a little bit different than what you were doing before.

I'll tell you, the first difference that came to mind is when you're starting your own company, you're a founder. You know, Airbnb was— that was Brian, Nate, and I's universe.

Yeah, right.

Like we called all the shots.

Yeah.

Here it's It's the president's universe. You know, it's different. So you're working in a very different context where you don't— you know, the authority that you have as founders is different, obviously.

Yeah.

That was the first big change. Second is I'd say the way that we're measuring on America.gov ultimately will be about hours saved.

Yeah.

It's not about the number of websites produced or information on the site. It certainly comes down to hours saved. There's a stat published from the government that Americans spend 10 billion hours every year trying to get things done in the government. That's an absurd amount of time.

That's a lot of time.

And the level of inefficiency that creates that is— it's over. Like, we're ending it. The whole point of America.gov is to end that. And if we 10x the improvement of getting stuff done, getting to the information you need or getting the action done, the enrollment, the application, et cetera. That's billions of hours that go back into people's lives and maybe also back into the GDP.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for everything you're doing, and thanks for coming on and breaking it down for us.

Last question.

Please.

Do you think in another life the president would've been a product guy, or is he more of like a visionary? Like, but, you know, does he have opinions on like button colors and things like that, or is he more higher level, like, Just, just get it done, Joe. I trust you.

Well, thankfully, guys, we have a president who cares about this stuff. Yeah, he's a hospitality guy, remember?

Oh, true.

So he, he cares about the experience that our country has when it comes to these things. Sure. And so you think of America.gov as, as a concierge to the government. He loves that. He's a builder. He's a fixer.

Sure.

And, you know, the credit goes to him for supporting this effort.

Yeah.

Final, final question. And I know, I know we're over, but What can we do about state governments? Do you think there's learnings that can be passed down to them? Is there shared infrastructure that could be basically owned and operated by the state, but effectively code that can be passed to them? Is it possible to open source this stuff for the states so that— because I think like— I mean, there's— If they're spending 10 billion hours with the federal government, they're spending probably an equal amount of time Locally, you have to imagine there's states that have already reached out about that.

Sure.

There's other countries that have already reached out about this just in the last three days, saying you know how do we bring this to our country? I won't say their names yet, but multiple countries have reached out asking how do we bring this here. So states have already reached out other nations. I think if we can do this right, when we do this right, which is phase one access to information. Phase two is actioning that information in the next couple months. We'll have set a new standard for the citizen experience to inspire states and other countries alike.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Great to catch up. Thanks for the work.

To come and chat with us. Have a great rest of your Friday.

Have a great weekend.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We're running about 10 minutes behind, but we are going to stay back on track. Molly Fowler from the Dorm Room Fund, the founding partner. Molly, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Sorry, we're running late.

Hey, guys.

All good.

That was actually really interesting to listen to. I used to work in government, so, and, uh, we, for the City of LA, we did an overhaul of the 311 website. And so to have somebody like Joe, who's like a product guy doing this, is ridiculous.

So cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very exciting to see it roll out. Um, anyway, uh, first time on the show. Give us an introduction. Yeah.

Explain. Yeah.

Thank you for having me. So excited to chat because so many, so many friends of the show that are like, got their— that we know have got their start with Dorm Room Fund. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it just seems to have these amazing like ripple effects.

Totally.

And yeah, very, very excited to get the update.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. And I know you guys are big fans of Ben Horowitz and his magical anti-AI tool. So a recent Dorm Room Funder we're very proud of and I know you guys are homies of Will Manitas, who I promised to encourage you guys to know that he's closer to 22 than he is to 40. So, important details.

Yeah, very contrarian.

But I like all different viewpoints. That's great.

Yeah, that's one data point.

It's a bold stance. You don't hear many people coming down on that side of the argument, but we encourage free and open debate here.

Yeah, there you go.

I have your opinion and I respect it.

There, there may have— may or may not have been some, um, purchasing of some booze by some older folks for, for Will before perhaps he could do that legally.

So yeah, well, when you have a fake ID that says you're 10 years younger, like, it doesn't work there at a liquor store. So that's a very, very low—

this, this minute of TVPN is the lowest TAM. I think it'd be very entertaining for, for like, for like 10 people.

Well, let's spice it up with a gong smash. You raised some money. How big is the?

Yes, sir. Yeah, so we just raised fifty million bucks. We're really excited.

Thank you, sir. Let's get the replay going. That can we replay?

That was a great hit.

Gong smash. How was that, man? There we go. Thank you.

With authority.

There we go.

Okay, so reintroduce anybody that doesn't. doesn't know what you guys do, he's got to be living under a data center somewhere. But introduce the fund and the platform and the strategy and then, yeah, maybe talk about—

Yeah, no doubt. So, so Dorm Room Fund was founded in 2012 as part of First Round Capital. I cannot take credit for this genius idea. It was, it was actually Josh Kopelman, founder of First Round. But long story short is, is that when you think about places where unfair advantage accrues to builders and to tech founders, it's pretty hard to compete with universities, right? I mean, if you think about it, they're kind of like the OG ultimate hacker house.

Yeah.

And so, the question arose in 2012 to Josh, which was like, how can we, you know, the cloud compute is new, we know it's going to get way easier to start companies, you can spin up an instance on, you know, AWS in your underpants instead of buying like, you know, Yeah. Rack space. And so, he was like, how do we find out who's great on campus and find them early ahead of sort of going to the classic, like, you know, accelerators or pitch competitions or that sort of thing? And so, had the insight that students themselves, you know, these incredibly connected, super smart humans are going to know who's legit and who's kind of dinking around before they go back to their consulting job when they finish business school. And, and so that's how we got started. And the whole idea was, you know, scout, scout, scouting was new still. It was really something that, that seasoned founders were doing. And so the idea was, let's give these new folks some capital and some training and some guidance on what good looks like and see if they can spot the best stuff first, because they've got all this social capital and knowledge about who's good and who isn't. And so that's, that's how we got started. And started in Philly, grew to 4 cities across the US inside of First Round Capital. We had 3 funds with First Round. And then come 2021, we realized that there was this huge opportunity for us because the model was working. We were backing incredible founders before all the big boys. And we had this opportunity to, you know, increase the amount of capital we could give our founders to give them more help. And at a time when, you know, things were getting a bit more sophisticated on campus. So we spun out of First Round Capital, raised our own fund in 2021 with First Round as LPs, and have had a huge run since then. We were lucky enough to not only continue to invest in founders that are building on university campuses, so we're talking about college, MBA, PhD, but also the alumni of the dorm room fund. community. Because as you guys can imagine, those, you know, 12, 15 students that are on the team for 2 years while they're in school, when they go out to build or invest, they become absolute superstars. And so that's been a source of a lot of really amazing opportunities for us as a community.

What are you— what are— do you have any data on like entry prices? Because it feels like you might be the, the, the, well, you're kind of like the final early-stage fund that can actually reliably get in sub-$10 million potentially, because you're not— even there's got to be founders today on college campuses that are compelling enough that they could go raise a full seed round if they're—

No, if you're in college and you do $50K on $500K, you can build a business for a full year. That's a lot of money.

Yeah. And so, you guys, I'm sure, are trying to actively avoid not being predatory. And that's the job of the individual investors. But if somebody's going to give good pricing to somebody, it would be one of their peers that then opens up this network that you guys have.

Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of things are happening. One is that every time there's one of these big technology changes, like we're seeing, obviously, today, in the last couple of years, it really has the effect of leveling the playing field for first-time builders, right? So, and the other thing that it does is that it drops the price of how much it costs to really start a software business. And so, you know, we're in this really interesting era where, you know, Jordi, you're right, there's a ton more capital on campus than used to be. You know, when we started doing this back in the old days, everybody thought we were insane. Now everybody's like, oh shit, I have you know, get my own campus program going. And so, great founders can raise really quickly. I think what is, what is different about today's market, and I think puts Dorm Room Fund in a really strong position, is that founders are increasingly dilution sensitive, right? And so, there are a lot of these legacy solutions that look like 7%, 10%, 12% dilution with the first big check. And I think founders are quickly realizing that you know, to John's point, you can build really fast, really cheap. And so, the place where DRF is sliding in is being this sort of almost like the replacement for an F&F round, like a friends and family.

Yeah.

And recognizing that, like, not everybody has a bunch of, like, rich aunties and uncles who can back them up, right? And so, Dorm Room Fund can be that first infusion of capital to get them just to the point where they get that magic moment of, like, sparkles of product-market fit. And then, we can help them go out with our giant community and help them raise an even more kick-ass institutional round.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember back when I was in college, like the concept of a, of a friends and family round was so absurd to me because I was like, friends and family that are going to like individually invest like the same amount of money as a car.

You know? Yeah.

Like a new— it's like, hey, instead of buying a new car, why don't you invest Take a wild swing at my idea. Yeah, no way. Yeah, and I think that's such an unlock too. It's also— yeah, there's a lot of reasons that it can make more sense to do that. As much as you want to give the people in your world access to what you're working on, sometimes it's better to just work with something more institutional.

Well, and I think there's also plenty of space for— I mean, there's There's been a lot of examples where Dorm Room Fund's been the first institutional check for a founder, right? And we might catalyze around where they bring in a few friends and family alongside us, right? So I don't think it's an either or, but I think what it is, is recognizing that like, you don't necessarily have to go to the traditional accelerator programs or something like that as you're just getting started, and that there's a more capital efficient way to do it, I think, in the early days.

What is— last question for now— what does the $50 million mean? How do you think about allocating it across different students, not on the investment team, but then also founders, things like that?

Yeah, definitely. So, our check size is usually sub-million for the first time around. We're probably going to end up investing in, I'd guess, probably like 75 or 80 companies over the next, you know, in this sort of 3-year period. And the way we think about spreading that around is, one, the student opportunities that are sourced to us, right? So we have regional teams all across the US. They, they cover all the top entrepreneurial ecosystems. And so each, each of those 4 teams will be deploying capital over the next 2 years. We've already been in, we've already been deploying out of Fund 2 since about July of last year. We also then have the bucket of Dorm Room Fund alumni, right? So if you've been part of the DRF crew, like, like Ben Horowitz, like some others, no matter when you build, you're eligible for a Dorm Room Fund check. And those have been superstar hitters for us. So that's how we got into, you know, we're lucky enough to get into Cursor.

Yeah.

We got into Dandy really early.

Because Tony and—

thank you, Tony and Mike were both on the team when they were in undergrad. And so, you know, that's a really big win for us. And then, you know, we're lucky to have been able to get some really fantastic institutional partners with us in terms of LPs. And so now we're in a really great position to not just help our founders with that first amount of capital, but actually be along for the ride a little bit longer.

Also amazing. Thank you so much. Such a great product and platform and great to finally meet.

Thanks, guys.

Great to see you.

Cheers, Molly.

Goodbye.

Have a great weekend.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

Just do it.

I'm Tom Dotan. The cat is in the bag and the bag is in the river. We got the former host of Dead Cat. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Tom?

I love the reference. I'm glad that you're still keeping the memory of Dead Cat alive.

It was such a fantastic show. You guys got to bring it back. I mean, I know it's like—

thank you. To me, that, that was like, like, there's not a lot of hardcore podcasting that goes on. Like, when I was watching Matthew Bellini on The Town with Ari Emanuel, and I was like, this is hardcore podcasting.

Yep.

This is people like kind of arguing and bickering, saying what they actually think. And I have some good memories of Dead Cat in like 2021, that era where people would actually say what they really thought. And these days—

Yeah, no, I'm trying to think if am I the Ari or am I the Bellini in that situation with Eric there? I don't know.

Well, it's just more like you're listening to that and you're like, wow, this actually feels like you're just listening into a conversation over lunch.

Yeah, it was inside baseball.

Yeah, yeah.

The Bellini-Emmanuel thing doesn't doesn't match, because like, I think— I feel like all the Dead Cat hosts were like on the same lens, like they were all like real journalists in tech. Uh, but the fact that it was called Dead Cat and it's like this obscure reference that you have to explain to like everyone who joins is, uh—

Yeah, it was like, everybody has Dead Cat Bounce. They would think it was a reference to that, which is a good one, but that wasn't it. But you know, Eric and, and Katie Benner and I were all like the first journalists at The Information. So Jessica hires us like right when the place launches. And so, there's a brief period of time where we are all crunched into this very small office space where Amir Efrati, also early player, would burn his toast every day and we would kind of deal with the toxic fumes of that. So, from that environment birthed a podcast that you guys remember.

I do. Yeah, it's great. So, yeah, this Ellison profile, it could be turned into a serialized podcast. It's obviously a profile available at Vanity Fair. But what got you interested?

With AI, it could be turned into a playable browser-based game.

Yes, perhaps.

But I don't know what that even means.

What got you interested in Ellison? Because we read an older Vanity Fair profile about Ellison that was fascinating, where it shows that he's like dogfighting with David Ellison when David's like younger and they're like literally flying planes at each other. Fascinating character, obviously at the center of the AI buildout, but not at the White House dinner. A little bit more behind the scenes. Why'd you settle on him for the profile?

Yeah, that profile that you read, the Vanity Fair one, was that— do you remember, was that the '97 one that Brian Burrow wrote?

Yep.

So very good. The Gates legend.

Insane.

Yeah. Yeah.

I talked to Brian actually while I was doing the story because I kind of wanted his blessing. And this is a side point. Yeah. He told me, I have no memory of doing that story. I have no— it is lost in time to him. But it was an amazing piece. I recommend everyone go out and read it because Brian got access. You know, like he was sitting next to Larry at the Bulls game and watching him with his then-wife. And fascinating, Steve Jobs is in it. It's a great piece. But look, for me, it was like, why not? You know, like someone had to do it. The guy is everywhere. He's been around for generations, for decades. I mean, really of that first vintage of Silicon Valley titans and the last guy who's in the game. You know, Steve Jobs has passed. Bill Gates is kind of sort of in it, but he's also more of like a grandfather-like figure and, you know, also kind of tainted because of the Epstein stuff. And, and Larry is sort of the last one. He still really runs Oracle. And they're in the midst of, like you said, so many things between AI and the crazy bet that they're making to build data centers. They own 15% of TikTok. And how that came to pass was an incredible journey. And then everything that he's doing with David, you know, just today they finalized, you know, the acquisition of Warner Brothers and Skydance is now like, I don't have this in front of me, but I assume the largest studio in Hollywood. And Larry is, you know, he and David have 77% voting control over this thing.

Yeah.

And so, you know, the guy's like in the last chapter of his life or the latest chapter of his life and more active and more present than ever. And the funny thing is he's also not available. He's not present. He's not someone that you see at the White House or in the office. And so, you know, all of that is just like, as a reporter, you're like, what's going on?

Yeah, that seems like a shift because obviously he participated in the last Vanity Fair profile, but in the '90s. And he was— I think he went on Oprah or something. There's a vignette about that where like his person— like people were so obsessed with him, like would-be suitors effectively would call Oracle headquarters and try and ask him out on a date, which is wild.

Yeah, one anecdote.

And now he's like, nonsense.

I remember the day very, very early in building the show where he followed TVPN in like Q— like within a quarter of starting. And to me, that was wild too, because as somebody who appears to be like outside playing outside of the matrix of the tech, you know, he's very— like you're saying, he's in the industry, but he's not like doing the comms tours and doing media and all these things, like able to be like a very much a live player, but behind the scenes. It was notable. I was like, he's on X, you know?

And you guys tweet that out? You know, he's not on X anymore.

I think he closed that account.

So I don't—

the whole, like, big tech monitor tweet, like the automated account, like posted it basically.

Yeah.

And so, like, okay, you see it there.

Fascinating.

What was interesting is like for the last year I've been mapping the Ellison strategy as like more of a barbell strategy. Like you're building the data factory, the data centers, the chips, the, the potentially like the AI slop. But then you're also building Hollywood and TikTok and like legacy IP. And we see this with a number of investors where, you know, Josh Kushner is an investor in OpenAI, but also buying a sports team. Right. And these, these two things are like at the opposite ends of the continuum for like high-tech, low-tech. You center on a different analogy, not a barbell, but 10 to Can you tell me about that? And like, what, like, what, what actually does that mean? And then he's into this metaphor himself, right?

Right, right. I mean, that was kind of, you know, it is sort of a well-known trope of, of what it means to have power everywhere as you have your tentacles. It's just a saying. But with Larry, I mean, he, he's been taking that seriously for as long as he's been in business.

Yeah.

Um, you know, as I list out in the story, he's got multiple holding companies that are Octopus themes. So between, you know, Octopus Corp, there's Cephalopod Corp, there's Tentacle Corp, there's Taco Ventures, and taco is the Japanese word for octopus. And as I also wrote in the story, when he first moves out to California, you know, right after he drops out of college and he's sitting with his buddy and they're looking out over the city and talking about the buildings that they're going to own, he has a vision of a company called Universal Octopus Corp or something like that. Universal anyway. So, so this idea of having, you know, your, your, your arms over multiple parts of the world in an industry is very much appeals to him.

Yeah.

And, um, you know, that is very instructive to his ambition. Like, he's someone who never stops. Like, Oracle is one of the great stories of tech, right? It's, it's this company that gets in at the ground level of Silicon Valley with Steve Jobs and all these guys, and he has this very focused image of, of the database. and the relational database. And it's not sexy in the way that Apple was consumer and stylish and Bill Gates, this idea of workplace software. Oracle is really the mechanics, the plumbing, but it's a great business. And it's still around to this day. And it's like people are still using the Oracle database and he's still running it.

And he maintained his ownership in Oracle so remarkably when there are other companies that I put in same category where there were multiple founders, things got split up, maybe the company got taken private, went public again, and like the founder winds up with like a couple percent. Larry was really able to continue reinvesting, buying stock at key moments, like maintaining that economic pool. So then when the AI moment comes and, and it booms, like he's still in the, the, that really tight club of like truly richest And not only does he maintain control, he grows control. Yes.

Like, its stock was basically flat. It went sideways for decades as the database would spin off cash, but they weren't really growing it in anything else. And during this period, he accumulates more and more control to a point where he owns 40% of the company, which is unheard of for a company of that size, right? I mean, the reason he's so rich is because he owns so much of this one company. And like, you know, I talked to some analysts for it. Oracle is basically considered by most traders like a public-private company.

Sure.

You know, it's true that the float is relatively small and Larry is totally in control and you just sort of accept it. That's, that's part of the game. That's part of the bargain.

Yeah. I think a lot of founders don't necessarily realize like what a, what an effective stock buyback program over a decade can do to your ownership. We've seen it in the cloud story. storage market with the diverging paths of like Box and Dropbox where, you know, if you're buying back a lot of stock, even if you got diluted from those VC rounds, like you could crawl your way back to 20%, 30%, 40% ownership over time. It's not going to happen in a year, but you don't need to just magically materialize, you know, $20 billion to actually go buy back your company.

Right.

It can happen sort of slowly. I have one more question on this. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos. There's a new movie coming out. What did you learn about the motivations there? What's going on? And do you have any predictions for what's going to happen in the movie? Because all of the, all of the critics are saying like it's the most unexpected thing ever. And I feel like the story of Theranos has been told so many times, I can't imagine what might actually happen. So I want your take.

I've kept myself spoiler-free. I know there are some reviews out there that say exactly what goes on in the movie, so I can't claim any knowledge there. Yeah, I think Variety or someone like that put out a review that really pissed people off because they walked you through the whole thing. But I mean, as far as Ellison goes, because he, you know, he's part of the story.

Yeah.

Um, you know, he, he invests in Theranos through multiple vehicles, through TACO, through other— probably some of the Octopi companies too. Um, and, you know, credit to him, he still believes in her, you know, long after she ends up getting— you know, this is in the story, but like, he is as some sources told me, smitten with her. He really thought she was the greatest and defended her to this day, said she was a genius, is misunderstood. And, you know, part of the Ellison story now is that he's also spending probably most of his investments are going into cancer research.

Oh.

Which, you know, maybe we can talk about. But, you know, the idea of using tech dollars to fund cancer research and novel medical treatments for cancer, you could argue came from Elizabeth and like a shared interest there.

Yeah.

So they're deeply connected. And just one kind of funny point about it. Yeah, I don't know if you guys watched The Dropout. Now, what was the name of the Theranos series on Hulu?

The Dropout. Yes.

The Dropout, right? So Larry has a scene. I mean, I say, honestly, of the tech shows of that era, that's probably the best one. But there's a scene of Larry in the show where they're on a yacht and he's telling her— can I swear on TVPN?

We don't swear, actually.

Okay, all right. Get the get the freaking money.

Yeah, I'll I'll try and thank you. Nothing nothing.

I missed it. I missed it. Well, you guys can look up the clip, but but he's in it and and he's like get the effing money. Money. And um and that scene definitely never happened, mostly because they show him drinking, which he does not do. He's a he's a teetotaler. Teetotaler. So yeah yeah.

Fascinating.

You know he eats calamari because he loves the octopus. Does he also enjoy Do you know what he eats for dining on auction?

You know, I don't. I wish that a better reporter would have found that out. I do know that he eats the same breakfast almost every day. And probably if I worked at the New York Times, I would have written that particular meal.

Did you stay at any of the Sensei properties to try to immerse yourself in his world?

I have been to Lanai 3 times now, which is, I feel like, a lot. I've never stayed at the Sensei properties. So I first started covering Larry when I was at the Wall Street Journal. I did a story about Sensei Farms, which is this hydroponic—

Yeah, I read that. Yeah, that was good.

Thank you. Yeah, it was like this kind of—

Didn't we read that on the show? Like within the first—

On the show?

Oh, sorry. Within the first— it was probably within the first month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's this crazy boondoggle of, you know, he wanted to reinvent, you know, indoor hydroponic farming and create the Tesla of agriculture. Look, it's still around. You can buy their salads in Hawaii. But anyway, so for that, I went to Lanai, went for 2 days and met a lot of the people there. And then I went back again for this story. I have been inside Sensei. I have walked the grounds of the wellness retreat, which has this incredible art installation, all of Larry's art. There's like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm.

I have not gotten Vanity Fair or the Wall Street Journal to ever pay for a night at the Four Seasons.

I think I need a month at the Four Seasons to get to the bottom of this thing personally.

We'll put a note. I mean, yeah, Rogers out, but maybe the new CEO will say I think it's important. I will say that I haven't been to the Sensei Lanai, but I've been to the one in Palm Springs. Palm Springs. And that property is amazing because it's called Sensei Porcupine Creek.

OK.

And it's completely like you— the whole— it's a wonderful place. But for me, as somebody who's very commercially minded, it's hard to sort of wrestle with the thought that it must be losing so much money just because I think there's like 16 rooms, but it's these massive grounds. And there's a Nobu and this golf course that sits empty most of the time. And the staff's amazing. It's an amazing experience. I highly recommend it. But it is just wild because you're sitting there and be like, every day, they're just like waking up and we're losing another probably however much money. The last question I had is—

Yeah.

Talk about his relationship with risk and willing to make these sort of all-in bets at different moments throughout his career? Like, do you think he's— is he getting more risk on, like, you know, with all last year, with all of the sort of pushing the chips in on Oracle with AI, you know, felt significant. But at the time, you know, and still unclear, like whether that'll be the right decision. But I think a lot of people like to chatter and try to evaluate the decision when they have literally like not even 1% of the context that he has.

Yeah.

And then with Paramount and Warner Brothers as well, you know, when somebody has like reinvented and executed well for that many decades, like you kind of need to default to like, hey, maybe he knows what he's doing.

Yeah, I mean, he loves big swing bets. That's, that's just a core part of his reputation and strategy as a business person is he will do it. And yeah, exactly. Oracle, like, you know, it almost goes bankrupt in the '90s because of an accounting scandal. I wouldn't necessarily call that a big swing bet, but like, he lives— exactly, Borat. Like, he lives, he lives on the edge and He's totally fine to kind of go there because he has so much control. And like, one of the fascinating parts of the Oracle AI story to me is that Safra Catz, who is a fascinating figure— I did not have enough time in the story to kind of dive into her, but she's in the middle of obviously Oracle, but also his relationship with Israel. Super smart, conservative executive. She does not love the AI bet. She does not love infrastructure. She is a huge fan of the high-margin software business.

Mm-hmm.

And I think it's very telling that when Oracle goes all in on AI, basically on OpenAI, that's the client that is making that whole bet work, is the fact they're building data centers for Sam. Safra ends up stepping down in the middle of that. And you've entered this new era where they are essentially a neo-cloud. And Larry's on board with that. He's a technologist. And this is— look, when it was working, the stock, he was the richest man in the world.

Yeah.

You know, like it was going crazy. Crazy.

RPO day.

I remember it.

Yeah, exactly. $317 billion. You know, the next day, you know, The Wall Street Journal, former, former place of work, you know, reveals that it's all OpenAI basically. And then the debt starts being a terrifying reality for people where they're like, you know, our cash flow has just turned negative. Like, this is terrifying. And so that's just built into Larry's DNA in a lot of ways. He's fine with that. Not everyone is. And then But the funny thing is, with the Paramount stuff, like, you know, that's all built on Oracle stock. You know, his ability to finance these multibillion-dollar media consolidations are, at least to some degree, margin loans on— or loans on his Oracle holdings, at the very least collateral. Like, we know that because he had to do a $40 billion backstop, you know, to make the Warner Brothers deal happen. And so it's like the guy— it's weird to think about in this context, but like the guy is living on the edge. You know, it's like you're worth $200 billion, but like, It's very risky, you know, that the banks are selling off debt, you know, for the different data centers at like 90 cents to the dollar. Um, like, no one knows how it's going to play out, but I think, you know, Larry at 82 years old, he, he loves this shit.

The full set octopus, let's go.

Yeah, where else? When you've, when you've owned, you know, racing teams and sailing teams and you've dog— yeah, we didn't get on dogfighting. How do you get the rush without a little leverage. Yeah.

You know, well, we'll dig into it next time. We'd love to have you back on the show.

Yeah, this was, this was great.

Always a great time.

And excited for, for the viewers to dig in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go read the full piece. Subscribe to Vanity Fair. Obviously we love them over there.

Yeah.

And newcomer.co, my other employer.

That's right.

Go, go, go, go read Eric and Newcomer and all of our stuff.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much.

Great joining.

Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We've been keeping him waiting no longer. We got Pim de Wit from Genuine General Intuition, co-founder.

And there he is.

Pim, how you doing?

Welcome, man.

The man.

He's back.

Thanks, guys.

Give us the news. You raised some money. How much did you raise?

We raised $220 million at a $6 billion valuation.

Fantastic. Let's get the replay going. Let's get that replay going. Let's see that gong hit.

Thank you.

Congratulations.

With authority. Powerful hit, John, for a powerful raise. Uh, what unlocked this new capital?

Um, we successfully were able to prove, uh, transfer to real-world robotics from a lot of the games data. And so I think a lot of the evidence is pointing that you can actually in fact just scale pixel space. Humans teleoperate robots with the exact same brain that they can play video games. And likewise, the other way around. People play video games, and then they take those skills, and they can use the same game controller to teleoperate a robot. And I think a lot of our research— and now we've shown some demos as well— is indicating that this transfer works, and you can scale pixel-to-action space on our massive data modes. Yeah, I'm excited to show the world the models in the next few months.

Very cool. Talk about the data mode. I know we've talked about it probably a couple times now, but for anyone tuning in for the first time, talk about how and why you guys are in a position to do this better than most.

Yeah, so we built the largest video game recorder in the world, and so we get a lot of data on how people control embodiments inside video games. So when you're playing a video game, you're essentially just transferring your perception to the screen and then using the controls to control whatever character you have on the screen, many times in first-person view, just like when you're on a robot. And so because robots also ship with game controllers, we can map those actions. And then largely it becomes just an environment transfer problem where the pixels are different but the inputs are the same. And so we can pre— just like transformers or LLMs are pre-trained on predicting the next text token from the internet. We can pre-train on the 3 billion videos that people capture and upload to Metal every year, the game recorder, to go from frames to actions. And so LLMs go text to text. We go frames to actions. And then we can scale that into extremely general models that can control every robot that ships with a game controller, which is the majority of robots right now.

Give us your overview of Of various robotics categories, where are you most excited about in the short term? Obviously, in the more, let's say in the next year, it's all about just working with these companies around testing and proving out different use cases. But what categories are you most bullish on? Because I think for general intuition, I think it's probably gonna be quite important to hit some of these big inflection points when some of these use cases really start taking off in the way that we've seen other players and infrastructure providers hit, like the inflection point with personal agents, for example, or browser automation or these other use cases?

Our bet is that that inflection point actually sits largely in simulation first, and that most of the companies betting on physical world robotics only are going to miss that inflection point because every robotics lab goes— every robotics manufacturer, every company goes through testing their robots in simulation before they try transfer them over to the real world. And so this year we've been focusing a lot on scaling with customers in simulation. Next year, a lot of it will be on transferring over to the physical world. Where we are focused specifically at the moment is quadrotors, drones. And I like stable platforms, right? Humanoids are quite unstable still. Their supply chains haven't ramped quite as much. And so, but you can control them using a game controller. And so if your robot ships with a game controller and has a front-facing camera, then we can likely work well together and the models will transfer extremely well.

Very cool.

God mode. In video games, it gives you unlimited health. But recently, AI researchers have been talking about a different kind of God mode, imbuing AI models with God-like meaning. What is your take on the models that you're creating? Will they be more Will they be moral agents? Will they have consciousness? How have you grappled with the question of, is this God in a box or is it a machine intelligence?

It's a machine intelligence. I see no reason to believe otherwise. I think our processes in the brain are chemical processes. There's absolutely no reason at the moment to believe these machines are conscious. I think the entire debate is honestly somewhat silly. A lot more things would have to be proven to draw any equivalence there. And I also think that for us, I think the goal is just studying these systems, understanding what they do well and not well, and then going from there. I think I try to stay away from a lot of that cultish behavior and just stay grounded.

Yeah.

Talk about sentiment, AI sentiment among gamers. Because anytime we've had somebody in the gaming world, sort of legacy gaming world on the show and you bring up AI, they go, well, you know, change the topic. You know, no one wants to be caught saying anything positive about it. But over the last couple of weeks, I feel like people are suddenly creating a bunch of crazy experiences, even home hackers porting games from here here to there. And it feels like we could be at a moment where people are like, hey, maybe this thing's actually pretty cool and a useful tool.

Could be looking at the future Ben Affleck of gaming.

Oh, that's right.

Potentially.

I thought that clip of Ben Affleck explaining freezing weights was so incredible. That made my day, honestly, seeing him explain that. Okay, so on gamers, why are gamers frustrated with AI or historically have been? Because it really hadn't done much good for them, right? It made their GPU prices go up. A lot of Right? There was a bunch of games that were delayed from studios, and a lot of their investment in a lot of these large companies was going towards AI. Meanwhile, all the developers were being laid off at game studios. So it's obvious why gamers were frustrated. And I think the reason was it just hadn't done much for them. And I think now we're starting to see the early signs of that changing. So modding obviously becoming a ton easier. I think in our case, we'll see different types of games being possible on top of these models and different types of interaction patterns. And it just like AI just hadn't done anything for them. And I think we're now turning the corner. I do think it's starting to show. And we just need to continue creating better experiences for gamers and bringing them along in the journey as opposed to the other way around.

Very cool.

Awesome. Well said.

Congratulations.

And amazing progress.

Yeah, really amazing progress.

I love our favorite It's a favorite part of doing these interviews, of seeing snapshots of companies as they make progress between rounds.

Yeah, I have one more question about, you know, like, it's not necessarily the anthropomorphization, but just this idea that, like, some people like just hanging out and chatting with the LLMs. And you have Metal, and people are gaming and uploading clips. And I'm wondering if you think that there will be a real I think that's a really interesting question. I think that's a really interesting question. Do you think that there's a real market for an AI companion that you play video games with? Like, you queue into Fortnite, you want your squad to be full, and so you populate that with something that's roughly at the same level as you but can also chat and do callouts and has a certain flavor and texture and humor to it. Do you think that that will be something that we'll see, or is the structure of the video game industry such that that's Or will it just get banned?

Yeah, I think for sure we'll see this because when you're launching video games, your largest problem is usually player liquidity.

Sure.

Which largely drives retention.

Yeah.

And so I think if you're a game developer, you want these type of experiences.

Yeah.

And I think you want your environments to be really interactive and rich.

Yeah.

And so I think naturally the economics of the industry will push towards this being a thing. I think there's a debate of to the extent that you should label that, right? You should let people know that they're interacting with AI systems.

Yeah, right.

But I do think it will be a thing, and I think you know there will be lots of good things that come from it, and there will be bad things that come from it. And we just have to study those and evaluate them as they come.

Yeah, but it'd just be like a really fun NPC as opposed to just like the generic bot there in Counter-Strike.

Exactly, exactly. I think a lot of it will start. You know, the best things start out looking like a toy, and I think the same thing will be true here.

Yeah. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to hang, Pim. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats to the team.

Bye.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

Goodbye. Our next guest is here with us live in person in the TDP in Ultradome. We have Greg Castle from Anorak Ventures. How you doing, Greg? Welcome to the show. Should we get him to hit the gong with the American flag on? Roll the replay camera because you're here announcing a new fund. So throw that on, take that gong, mallet, and smash that gong, and I want to see the replay. Boom!

Look at that replay.

Wow.

It's actually a gift for you guys.

Oh, really? I felt like I was coming into your house.

I almost feel like we don't—

It's crazy.

Yeah, we have maybe one in the other room, but not in this room.

Thank you so much.

Well, I came in and I wasn't sure what the representation was going to be, and then I'm hit with that giant American flag. Oh, yeah.

No, but there is.

Not in this room.

It's not in this room. It needs to be right here. So for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself and the company.

Sure. Greg Castle, managing partner of Anorak Ventures. We are an early-stage deep tech firm. Been around since 2017.

Just closed— It's a great success.

Just closed our 3rd fund, which is a $35 million fund.

A capital allocator. Did you always know you wanted to be a capital allocator? Is that what you dreamed of being as a child?

Certainly not. I think—

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I think I was always deeply interested in kind of niche subjects and different kind of subcultures, whether or not it be skating, or video games, or comics, or whatever it is. Tinkerer stuff. OK. And I think in high school, always Kind of jumping around from group to group and learning about what they were super excited about was kind of the way I was in high school. So definitely not the problem.

That's actually a perfect analogy.

Well, venture capital is exactly like high school.

It's exactly that, yeah.

You're exactly right. You're kind of going into different subcultures, if you will, and really learning everything that you can about them.

What was the first investment you made? Or when were you like, OK, I'm going to start investing?

The first investment I made really was in myself when I founded a company.

Oh, no.

It sounds kind of cheesy, but like—

No, it's true. It's true. Like, your opportunity cost, you could be earning a salary.

Exactly.

So, I lost my—

I'm sorry for hitting a funny sound effect, but it's true. It's like, somebody's going to start a company, ask yourself, are you going to invest some meaningful percentage of your entire life into this idea? Is it that good?

Yeah.

Most important.

And sometimes it can be a smaller idea, and it still makes sense to do.

For sure.

But it's worth thinking about it that way.

Yeah. And also, I think that there's a lot of different things that you can do just under your own passion. But then there's a different stage when you actually have to go out to people and ask for money, including your friends and family, which is what which was kind of, I consider, my first investment, was some of my own capital, some of my parents' capital, and going into a very unrelated field in retail. So, in 2014— sorry, 2014— 2004, I moved over to the UK and started up a retail chain that was kind of similar to Sweetgreen.

Sure.

And I ran that for 6 years over in London. We had about 6 locations.

That's cool.

But then, in terms of my first real investment where I wasn't operating, it was in Oculus. Yeah, wow.

Really?

Yeah, that was the first check.

Crazy.

So I figured from— I figured this is easy. This is what I'm going to do from now on.

Did you see the Kickstarter online, or—

No. So in 2010, when I moved back to the States, I moved back to work for a friend who I went to college with, whose name was Brendan Iribe. And he had a company. which was a software company, which was selling software to game developers. And I was always— you know, he is an amazing salesperson and communicator. And I was always really interested in what he was building.

Mm-hmm.

So when the opportunity came around to come and join him at a company that he had dropped out in 2000, 1999, actually, when he dropped out of school to go and do that full-time. I was kind of on my own path, but was always very interested in what he was building. And so I came back to join him, worked with him, worked with Mike Antonov, worked with Nate Mitchell. And then a few years later, that— well, that company was acquired by Autodesk. And then a few years later, we had heard about a kid who was working on a VR headset. And that kid was Palmer.

And that was Palmer Luckey. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, what a good start to a venture career, working with Palmer Luckey, who's going to go on and do so many different companies. While we're on the topic of VR, how successful do you think the Meta VR glasses will be? And one way to sort of quantify it is when VR is having a moment, I feel like when Christmas comes, the app is at the top of the App Store. So like the Quest or the Oculus app would be at the top of the App Store. Like it doesn't come out until next spring. I think they're gonna launch it maybe April or May, but it feels to me like they got a lot of the pieces right. How are you feeling about 2027 as a year for VR growth as someone who's been involved in the industry for a long time?

It's taken a long while, a lot longer than I think we had all hoped. It's interesting to think back of when I first made that investment. That kind of was— that kickstarted my career in venture. So that was at a time after they were growing like wildfire, where everybody in the Valley was kind of convinced that people were going to be wearing headsets walking down the street.

Right?

And so it's kind of part of my origin story, where I was able to kind of go out and speak on the topic with knowledge and with the relationship to the team. And there was a whole bunch of people who wanted me to— who kind of were thinking that I was going to start a VR fund. And there were a bunch of firms, actually, that started that were just VR-focused.

Yeah.

I always kind of felt as though it was going to take a lot longer.

Sure.

And so it has. I think that you have this kind of situation where the hype has not— the hype has set expectations that have been very difficult to follow. And so therefore, you have this kind of disappointment that everybody feels about kind of how everything's transpired. I don't see there being a massive inflection point. There have been several points in the past where something has come out, be it, you know, the Quest 1, be it Gear VR. Like, there have been a bunch of different points along the way where people have been like, this is it. Like, Apple, this is it. This is when it's all going to change. And it just hasn't happened like that.

And I think— Yeah, even with Zuck's Meta Connect presentation, it didn't come across like he was presenting, it came across as like this incredible technical milestone and like a big step up, right? But if you compare it to like foundation models, like it was a big leap, but it's not like it actually is a drop-in coworker for you. So, and even some of his language in the presentation was like, it's a glimpse of the future.

Oh yeah.

And it's like, well, that like you don't get a, crazy inflection point through glimpses of the future. It's like another milestone.

You want a CEO to stand up on stage and say, with this product, you are staring into the future with your eyes wide like that.

Yeah, I'm surprised they don't have— they should make that.

Eye expanders from Clockwork Orange. You want to go Clockwork Orange on the future?

That's what your goal is? Talk about the fund strategy. A fund this size, I feel like you can probably confidently go to LPs based on the track record and say, there's a good shot I can 4x or 5x a fund like this. Has maintaining that been super important to you? Because given the track record, I imagine you could scale up.

Mm-hmm.

And then how are you— what's the strategy at the early stage in terms of things like ownership? Are you flexible, inflexible? Just because current market conditions are absolutely wild, and they don't necessarily favor smaller funds in some ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has been very much deliberate keeping the funds small. I started angel investing, so after the Oculus investment, After that came to fruition, I essentially quit my day job and really wanted to answer 3 questions. Like, one, what does it mean to be a responsible fiduciary of capital? What does this whole VC thing mean? 2, am I any good at this?

Yeah.

Or was Oculus just a fluke? And 3, do I want to do this? Do I want to devote the rest of my life to it? And the answer over those couple of years of deploying my own capital and doing a few SPVs was yes, yes, and yes. And over that time, I kind of developed a network and a reputation as somebody who can be flexible with checks and can be really helpful and doesn't have sharp elbows and kind of can fit into rounds.

Yeah.

And that worked out for me. That worked out very well with Fund 1. That's working out very well with Fund 2, and now hopefully, it'll work out with Fund 3. I am very much of the opinion that I think that every size of fund requires a very different skill set and a very different strategy. And what I proved out and what I'm good at is deploying smaller amounts of capital.

Sure.

And that's what I want to keep on doing. And I think that— I mean, I think it's very easy to chase AUM and chase those management fees. It helps if you've done decently well in the past. and you have like a nest egg and you don't need to stack fees on fees on fees and bigger funds and bigger funds. And it just feels like I'm much more aligned with my LP base.

Does this fund size lead you to a different LP mix, or is it the same thing where like you're still going to a sovereign wealth fund but just asking for a smaller slice or endowments? Like, how do you think about LP relationships and structuring?

Yeah. I've graduated. I was just looking at my LP list over time, and it was like Fund 1 was like 60 LPs, Fund 2 was like 50, and now I'm at like 22.

Sure. Yeah.

And that's been a purposeful move.

Yeah.

Yeah, and frankly, it's pretty—

Pacing to 1 yourself.

Yeah. Oh, guys.

I mean, that would be the dream, right? Like the Hunter Satya model. is, I think, where every VC ultimately wants to be. Although, to be honest with you, like, I've got great relationships with my LPs, and I love working with them, and they also have appetite for later-stage rounds.

So—

but anyway, to answer your question, I would say I started out high-net-worth individuals, some family offices. Now it's a lot more family offices and fund of funds.

Fund of funds. OK. But yeah, but you don't need to do the roadshow with, like, huge endowments.

No, I'm—

—trips to the Middle East.

I'm too small for that. And also, you know, I would say, you know, I started out very much as a deep tech fund, where it's just like, I saw what happened at Oculus, and I saw how amazing it was to bring a completely new technology to market, and I was just sold. I was like, this is what I want to do. I don't want to be investing in ad ops. I don't want to be— I want to be investing in people who are really fucking moving the needle. And then I had the opportunity, because of a relationship with Palmer and Trey, to invest in Anduril. And I always pronounce it slightly differently— Anduril. And that kind of ignited a sense of patriotism in me that I didn't really know I had.

Sure.

And since then, we've been doing a lot more in aerospace and defense, a lot more in kind of American dynamism. And so therefore, from an LP perspective, having LPs who are based here in the US is of great importance to me.

Yes.

I've got— we actually brought on our first LP from Luxembourg this fund.

Oh, cool.

Shout out to Mangrove. Very excited to have them on board. But for the most part, like the trips to the Middle East, the trips to these places, like I don't need to do them. And I don't necessarily want that capital involved anyhow.

How excited are you to be post-SpaceX IPO based in LA, Southern California in general? Because it feels like we're probably gonna get hundreds of companies in the fullness of time that spin out and these super talented teams where they've worked together at SpaceX, experienced some hairy problem, and then they want to go solve it.

Yeah. Yeah. I originally moved to LA more for my wife than for me. I was in the Bay Area before this, and I was kind of reluctant to move down here. And we did this 2 weeks before COVID and it's worked out really well, especially with the areas that we invest in. I think that the talent just keeps on increasing. The talent pool just keeps on increasing.

Yeah, because Long LA completely flopped, except that El Segundo and SpaceX happened.

Absolutely right.

No, like I said, like, we won, but— Yeah.

Like, not the way that we—

Not the way that we were hoping. It was like thinking like consumer and this—

B2B SaaS. It was like there will be like a sales Salesforce of LA, and like many more of those. And there's been a few, but yeah, it never developed into like the New York City-style market.

Yep, yep. Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why I always loved being in SF was the fact that everybody comes there to raise capital, regardless of where you're building. So my job, in many ways, is kind of a biz dev job, and like just being boots on the ground there. And now, it feels like there's also a lot of capital in LA. There are a lot of the VCs from SF who are coming to LA on a regular basis. So there's a lot more capital available, I would say, down here.

How are you thinking about the market structure concentration of winners in various emerging new technologies? Like, with Oculus, if you went and And did like 5 other VR headset companies, you probably would have had a pretty bad run with Anduril if you did like 5 other defense tech companies. At least right now, they're all pretty marked up. So, it seems like there's more of an oligopoly there. Some of that's literally a direct order from the government being like, we won't let a monopoly exist in this category.

Mm-hmm.

Whereas, Mark Zuckerberg runs a monopoly and he's like, we're happy to be the only player in this space. If we We can be. But with some of the newer frontier technologies, how do you think about winner-take-all dynamics? How— and then also just like what other frontier technologies are exciting to you? Humanoid robots, industrial stuff, more farther out on the defence side. There's so much space. There's so many different areas. How are you spending your time?

Yeah. It's interesting. I think I was of the mindset that, and Earl will be the Enderal of X, and they will just kind of dominate. And I think over time—

Horrible mistake. I'm just saying, I've done the exact same thing where it's like, yeah, obviously—

They're just gonna do it.

They're gonna do this. Yeah, have all the relationships, they have the capital, they have the talent. But—

Also, you get further out and people will be like, we're the Enderal of ovens, we make a stove. Yeah.

And it's At some point, it gets too niche.

It's like, I don't think Anduril is going to do the stove.

You need to win the whole market, and then you need to underwrite the team on doing a bunch of different product extensions, and they're still going to be competing.

Yeah, I think the government has made pretty clear their desire to diversify, and I think rightfully so, and I'm very glad that they are doing so. I think that generally, when everybody's looking in one place, I'm trying to look someplace else. I think that partially that's just the job of a VC, but also, just given my fund dynamics and the smaller size of the fund—

Sure.

When everybody is piling into one area, prices get driven up.

Yeah.

Rounds get kind of insane. And while I loosely kind of have ownership targets, I still will kind of— I'm basically looking at, can I kind of 100x my money? And I feel like that is more difficult in defense these days. And so, do I think that there are room for other big players in defense? Absolutely. Is that where I am necessarily putting my money at the moment? Not particularly. I think I am actually a lot more interested in some really fricking boring areas, in chemical production, in steel production. I know you've had Zane on the show beforehand. We're investors in NOX Metals.

Love NOX Metals.

They're ripping, right?

They're doing phenomenally well. Rare earths, magnets, all the boring stuff that's kind of up supply chain that we will need in order to achieve our mission as a nation. Yeah, is all stuff that I think is, is super interesting. We invested in Atlas. I think you guys had them on the show as well recently.

So have you been surprised that the big defense primes haven't been more acquisitive, even on a relative market cap weighted basis? Because in AI, like you're seeing these trillion dollar companies take down $10 billion acquisitions and it's like, wow, that's $10 billion. That's a huge return for the VCs. But it's like, okay, there's They're throwing around 1% of their market cap. You could look at Oculus as a similar thing where Zuck is sort of throwing around like 1% of that market cap, but Lockheed doesn't seem like they're doing that.

Founder-led companies tend to be like—

More acquisitive?

Earlier companies tend to be way more acquisitive.

Sure.

Anduril's been very—

I mean, that was not true for Elon for a long time until Cursor.

But even looking at like in the early 2010s, '10s, like the acquihires where people made money were much more common. It was Twitter's buying. I think, didn't Twitter buy like 50 companies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's like classic founder-led company.

Yeah. And I guess that— does that explain it, or do you think there's something else going on with the market structure in defense tech, why the primes haven't been more acquisitive?

I completely agree with what you're saying. I am shocked, as well.

Porterhouse bought 79 companies.

I am shocked, as well. Autodesk is another one who has acquired a ton of companies. There are some companies that—

You'd think they'd want to give Adam Porter Price a harder time instead of letting him be the only bidder on these things. But instead, they're like, OK, if Adam's not buying, we're not either.

Yeah. I wish I had a better answer. I have to think at some point that there's going to be enough pressure from the board of some of these larger primes that it's just kind of— I mean, there's lots of different reasons why this could be happening. They could be waiting for a dip. There's inevitably going to be a pullback.

Yeah, totally.

There are inevitably going to be issues, hopefully during peacetime at some point in the near future, where these companies just can't raise and Lockheed can just go and sweep them up. I don't know what it is.

But I think they need to be flipped by Anduril first to actually wake up, like, from a valuation standpoint. Like, that actually is going to be a very— like, that's actually going to just be the moment where the boards are going to look around and be like, why is this company that has much lower revenue scale than us? And it's like, because the market believes that this company will generate way more value in the future than us, even though their scale is still—

Lockheed could approach it From a different perspective, the primes could do some sort of PE roll-up joint venture, maybe like bending knives, roll up all the deadweight venture failures in defense tech and try and put them together or something, raise prices. You never know.

Bending swords.

Bending swords would be good too. That one works. I like that.

I agree though. I mean, I do think, does it need to materialize in the form of an Anduril IPO or something like that, that would certainly be one way to do it. I can't imagine that the board isn't looking at the Sironics, the Andurils, et cetera, and being like, this is OK. So, they're also just big freaking companies, right? That are— have lots of bureaucracy and kind of move slow. I mean—

The dysfunction that I've heard through hard tech founders in my portfolio around the way these companies operate is actually insane. They'll be sitting there, and the company is basically looking at a pile of money, like an existing contract, and then years will pass, and no one just goes and picks up— they're just looking at it.

Yeah. Are you starting to look at bio? It feels like there's a moment where tech is crossing over. It was a crazy idea to do anything industrial or defense or building physical stuff. Tech used to mean software, then Oculus was like, okay, we can build a consumer hardware product. Then Anduril proved like, no, you can build an industrial-scale hardware product. And it feels like even though obviously there's a very mature biotech investment industry, it feels like those 2 worlds are starting to blur.

Yeah. It is also a very nuanced area, and an area where there are investors who are better suited to really attack it than me. And so we kind of more stay in our lane. It is definitely an area that I have been thinking about more, and that I've been trying to get smarter in. Yeah.

There's also the interesting bridge where some companies are doing the bio- Defense. It's more like a defense contractor, like an—

And biomanufacturing as well.

Totally.

Companies like Solugen. Yeah, yeah, Solugen. That are definitely interesting. That would be much more something that would be up our alley at Anorak than something that is kind of purely a biotech play. I mean, our latest— we're just about to close in our investment in a kinetics company. So I I think that things that— I kind of am at this— I feel very good about making investments that have the potential for a big impact on the future. And defending freedom and democracy is something that I think is of critical importance.

Yeah.

And so, I do. I do, you know, I said beforehand we're doing less and less in defense. We are to a degree, but we're also looking at, you know, kind of the second order—

Like Knox Metals.

Yes. Companies like Knox Metals, companies like this explosives company that I think are going to be necessary in order for us to kind of, again, achieve our goals as a nation.

Very cool. Jordi?

Last question from my side. As a small firm, In that form, how impactful has AI been on your ability to get up to speed on some of these? Because I'm sure you're getting pitches all the time where you're like, I literally have never thought about this part of the economy. And then you get into it and you realize, oh, that you— let's say you get a deck and it's somewhat compelling, but you know nothing. Has it had a meaningful impact? Obviously, you still need to talk to experts and diligence it, but do you feel like you can start to build conviction on an idea faster? of just being able to ask a million questions and sort of sort information through these tools?

Yeah, it's definitely changed the paradigm. You guys had Lo on yesterday, right? And he was talking about this as well. And I completely agree. It's like having kind of a desk of analysts at your disposal. So, we are leveraging it. We need to be leveraging it more. To be honest, I mean, I have myself, and I have a partner who's based up in SF. So we're basically a 2-man team with an assistant who helps us out. I think that we— this, to me, this kind of Fund 3 kind of feels like the transition from us going from— or me going as kind of— me going from a fund manager to a firm manager.

Sure.

And so, really kind of building up the infrastructure to be able to scale, really being able to build something that lives beyond me is something that we're really focused on now. And certainly, AI will be a massive part of that.

Maybe vision goggles.

It just sounds like you're getting powered up.

Yeah, I like it. I like it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dude, it's awesome. I can't wait to talk to all the founders, you back. Yeah, I love that you're sticking to your strategy and can't wait to come on in 10 years and just walk us through all the fund performance one by one, putting crazy numbers.

I really appreciate it.

I love what you guys do. It's so cool to be on here and to be in this amazing place.

It's a great time.

Close it out.

Yeah, we'll see you at 11 AM Pacific on Monday. Have a great weekend. Have the best weekend ever of your life. Of your life. It's possible. A lot of people go into the weekend and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you on Monday.

Rolling flashback.

Goodbye. We love you.