TBPN Live - 4 Tech Arguments (Number 3 Will Shock You), Mansion Section, John Arnold Joins | Viswa Colluru, Jake Adler, Adam Korsunsky

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

(00:54) - 4 Tech Arguments (Number 3 Will Shock You) (24:09) - Has The AI Slop Gone Too Far? (38:53) - Is AI Driving Interest Rates Higher? (50:26) - WSJ Mansion Section (56:00) - John Arnold discusses his career from natural gas trading at Enron to founding his own hedge fund and becoming co-founder and co-chair of Arnold Ventures. He shares insights on risk management, gambling-like financial products, AI infrastructure, energy markets, nuclear power, and the growing disconnect between private and public market valuations. (01:44:12) - Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Invetta, discusses the company’s $311 million fundraising round and its AI-powered technology for identifying biological molecules and their functions. He outlines Invetta’s focus on developing medicines for widespread unmet needs—including asthma, eczema, and long-term weight management—and explains the practical limitations and safety considerations of AI-designed drugs. (01:54:17) - Jake Adler discusses Pilgrim’s $25 million funding round and its mission to become America’s first biological prime contractor. He describes Argus, a portable “Shazam for the air” system designed to autonomously detect, identify, and characterize airborne biological threats in locations such as airports. (02:02:22) - Adam Korsunsky discusses founding Freebean, an advertising company that distributes free, branded coffee as a tangible, targeted, and trackable marketing medium. He explains the company’s rapid growth, conference and campus distribution strategy, and launch of a New York City storefront billed as the world’s first free coffee shop. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching. Today's Friday, September 25th, 2026. We are live in the TV fan Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about. am. com.

Time is money. Save both. These to use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Be the king in the castle, with ramp. We got some debates on the time.

We got some debates on the time. line I identified four debates for you you you don't want to call them debates though you want to call them arguments fight I thought arguments okay we're throwing down we're throwing down wouldn't wouldn't someone rather listen to an argument argument okay yeah I don't know I don't want it to be I don't want it to be a health a healthy mature conversation I want okay I want to be reaching over a debate yeah first one Microsoft are is Microsoft about to have their muse They've launched co-pilot. Now they're launching a new product today.

Is it going to be a breakout success? Is it going to compete directly with Meta and Muse? Or will it be a different thing entirely because it lives in the enterprise? It lives in the Microsoft ecosystem. Let's go to Take Kim. He says shots fired. Pump, bum, pump. Microsoft will go after Meta's muse.

From Alex Heath's interview of Satina Della, he's doing the rounds. He talked to Deirdrabosa, talk to Alex Heath over on Sources. dot news still cooking quote from Sautanadella or from Alex Heath he wants to bring autopilets AI chief of staff to your personal life to

it's not staying in an Excel it's not staying in an outlook it's going to be cooking dinner big move going from a co-pilot to autopilot autopilot yeah it says a lot about about their intentions with the product yeah yeah it is actually sort of the like

you know is this AGI is this not AGI? Like if you're in the co-pilot mode, you're sort of signaling we're not really in the AGI era. Autopilot feels more like, although it's a term, it's a vague definition,

it is significant in the brand term. So it's a hardened version of open claw. The agent gets its own computer, workspace, and memory to work continuously. There was a very funny post from somebody in Meadow who was like, A lot of these agents, like the value prop is that it has its own computer, it has its own virtual machine with some real hardware behind it, so you can have a file system as I think 8 gigs of storage.

So you can say, oh, I need you to download some images and files, like keep them in your cloud so you can access them at all times. It can obviously build a database, save records, your contact information, your calendar, it can mirror that. So it doesn't need to be pinging every service all the time, doing everything in the context window. in the Ben Thompson Parlayans, it can write things down. This is very good. This is what everyone was doing with OpenClawn on their Mac minis. This is what people are doing with Codex, Cododod on their computers. And Codex, of course, has, like, cloud threads that do something similar.

The funny thing is that it's a real computer. This is a real computer. And they're literally using a virtual machine, which is still a real computer. Like, you have access to hardware, but it is a virtual machine. Like, when you're not using it, it goes dark, and someone else uses it. And I think there's still some confusion because people were like, this isn't a computer at all. And it is. Well, yeah, it sounds a little bit too good to be true that.

They're not just going to rack for you and just let you. If you sign up once and never use it, that's just inefficient compute resources. But it's just funny that we live in such a virtual time that someone can very seriously and basically correctly be like, it is real. It's a virtual machine. It can't get any more real than that. It's like, yeah, it could, but why would you? So no one cares. Anyway, Microsoft's doing the same thing, virtual machine for everybody.

It'll have its own computer workspace and memory to work continuously. When I ask about Microsoft's consumer strategy, he points to its 100 million plus consumer subscribers, people that subscribe to consumer Microsoft services, call of duty. Xbox Live. These are the consumers. Now, Xbox is still like pretty anti-AI. They've been signaling like, hey, yeah, we're not going to lean in. We're not going to stuff co-pilot all over Xbox Live. I'm personally, I hate that because I think they're so much.

I want to basically like a company built aimbot. No, I mean, yes, of course. That's funny. But no, what I want is I want to be able to text my Xbox and say, hey, like, Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out. I want you to pre-order it. I want you to get it installed. And I want you to open it up and do the little configure. Because every time you open a game now, it's like downloading an update,

accept the terms and conditions, accept the privacy policy, adjust the HDR, adjust where the HUD is on the screen. Do you want any accessibility features? Do you want to do the tutorial? It's going to blow your mind. But if you press forward on the stick, you'll move forward. Lock in. We got to do this tutorial.

Here's how to jump. it's going to blow your mind. It's the X button. Push it. Now. Push it again. Okay, you ace the tutorial. It's like, I want to be able to jump into the game. And I do think an AI agent could help me with that. It can certainly do it on desktop. You can say, hey, go play the whole game for me. Level me up until I'm ready to really get in the fight because this is my first rodeo. But the Xbox's been pushing back on it. Microsoft broadly, they're going all in with autopilot. Autopilot should also go to the consumer side. He sees consumer agents potentially. cutting out today's middlemen, making that market more zero-sum. In the enterprise, he thinks agents will make the market bigger than cloud by orders of magnitude. We got room to run. Sotcha said it himself, he's going to 300-tri-tillion-dollar company. I like it. What do you think? So, I mean, the first thought is that, again, everyone is building the exact same thing. So we went through this for the last few years. Yep.

Everyone had a chat app. Everyone's building in chat app. The funny thing is the lore on GPT4, that was first available in Bing. Like, GPT4, the thing that, like, GPT 3.5 power, the original chat GPT, GPT4 was only available through Bing. And then everyone was like, oh, I guess like Microsoft's going to make a plan. Bing's going to be doing AI. And like, this is going to be a challenger to Google.

and then they sort of like pulled back. Well, and at that time when Microsoft was backing up the Brinks truck or Open AI, they certainly, I don't think it was, it certainly was non-obvious at that time that they would be creating a company that they would ultimately compete with as much as they are partners. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaught, chimed in.

He said Microsoft shipped a really compelling product on top of OpenClaw today. We worked with them since March to make the code base ready for large-scale deployments. And of course, there might be some IP sharing agreement, right? Because didn't, oh, no, because Open AI hired Peter, but they didn't acquire OpenClaw. Yeah, OpenClaug. Yeah, open-clause. So anyone can build on top of it. Yeah.

But what's odd is that I think Nat Friedman stated that they didn't fork open claw. They built something from scratch, but there are just conventions. And so you wind up having similar looking dot. dot MD files. It's just like, you know, if you build a web page, like you're going to have a product. If you build an e-commerce site, you're going to have a product detail page. You might have a similar site map and architecture. It doesn't mean that you forked Shopify to do that or whatever.

Let me actually tell you about Shopify right now since I mentioned it. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So the debate point is how big will this be? What is the actual impact to Microsoft? How, like, there is the cool macro tech story, which is just that the models have advanced to a point where there is a new use case. Like, they're useful in a new way, not just knowledge retrieval, not just go and write a bunch of code. They are useful.

but that requires a new type of harness, just like when the models got good at code, the harness became very important. We saw ClaudeCode and Codex and Cursor and a bunch of other companies. Cognition really, like, define that era. Now the models are pretty good with personal agent stuff,

sending text messages, talking to people, integrating with Slack, etc. So the harness and the integrations and the partnerships matter. So we're talking about partners with Amazon, who's going to be Amazon's dance partner, who's going to be Walmart's dance partner, who's going to partner with Shopify,

how big is the open ecosystem? You need a different harness, you need different integrations, and you need a lot of new user education because I think there's a lot of people, I mean, there's people that are still online being like, these things hallucinate. Like, they have a knowledge cut off

because they're talking to like the voice model. Yeah, the main thing with this launch is that I don't think there's anyone on X that's seeing Microsoft launch and an open claw powered agent and thinking, I've got to use that. I'm so excited. I really want it.

That's my view, and I think it's correct, and you're free to steal man it. That being said, they have such incredible distribution. They can still roll this out to a bunch of people who are going to try it and be like, wow, that's really cool and useful and helpful and be the first way that they experience this new paradigm of agents. And so as much as, like, I just think there's basically zero excitement from, like, the core insider. agent maximalists, there's going to be just natural excitement from everyday Windows and Microsoft users. Yeah. Yeah, it is uncommon in tech and maybe it's uncommon in X to like run your entire organization, your enterprise on Microsoft. The default tech stack for most startups is

Google Enterprise, Gmail. You set up the Gmail account for your, for your employees, and then you add Slack, so then you're in the Salesforce ecosystem. And Microsoft is there, but usually with like one-off Excel licenses here and there for the finance team, does that resonate with you in terms of like how these products like fit together? There's usually some Microsoft, but you have to go to a financial company or like a real economy company to see like, okay, these guys are all in on Microsoft as a tech stack, like Outlook down to. bang down to the databases and like fully integrated in Microsoft. But there are hundreds of millions of people who their life at work is just pure Microsoft and they're like, yeah, I don't use Gmail at work.

I don't use Google Calendar. I use Outlook. And for those people, they're like, okay, I get this thing like probably for free added to the subscription. Maybe we already have some co-pilot stuff. So this just rolls in. And I get, you know, near frontier capabilities, good enough. And there's such an overhang in terms of what I can do, that just going from zero to taking advantage of some decent automations is going to be potentially popular. It feels like it could be more successful than the old co-pilot, and a lot of that's driven just by capabilities. The models are better.

The harnesses are better. The integrations are better. And so you can do more things. I think there'll still be a lot of point solutions and a lot of competition. The big question is like, when is Google going to fire back? Because are they going to wait until the next IO? Like, that's a long way away. But they do love releasing on, you know, those annual schedules.

And so it's like we might get a Google, like a crazy Google open claw agent, personal agent in mid-2020. And then Apple's close behind in like 2035, something like that. They would launch something. I mean, Google does have, there is Gemini Spark, which is like a 24, seven always on agent, but like no one... Does it have a VM? Does it have a real virtual machine?

I mean, it says even if your phone and laptops are turned off, it'll still keep working. But I've seen like very little, like no one's really talking about this. They aren't really pushing that because they are pushing Gemini as like the chat interface, but man, that thing falls short. It's so funny and frustrating that you have all these companies building personal agents, but none actually has 100% coverage over the server. Oh, Monopoly guy over here. You're going to advocate for monopolies?

Not advocating it, but it would be helpful right now. Because even Google, right, everything around the full Google set of products would be absolutely amazing. But then you don't have like native iOS integration. No, this is the irony of monopoly is that it's bad for, you know, pricing in some ways. But it's great for user experience. And it's often great for customers. Like how many times are you advertising on Facebook and you're like, oh, I wish like ad manager would just like also run Reddit ads and also run X ads and also do my YouTube ads.

Like just do it all. And the same thing is true. Even when you fire up like a like a Netflix app, you're like, oh, is the movie I want on Prime or Apple TV or Netflix or Paramount Plus or HBO max or Peacock? Like there's 25 different things. And as a consumer, you're like, I'd love just one. But then they would have pricing power over you. And so you've got to look ahead and know that there be dragons if you allow the monopoly to flourish, potentially. At the same time, we've been in this odd regime where the monopolies have not actually damaged consumers.

Like this is how Amazon got out of antitrust again was like they didn't raise prices perniciously against their consumers. And so the current antitrust law is written such that you have to prove customer harm. It's not enough just to have concentration in the market. You also have to be extracting monopoly rents. You also have to be raising prices, increasing profits, and hurting the consumer financially. And so for something that Google has a search monopoly,

it's still a free product, so it's very hard to prove consumer harm because you're just like, yeah. G Suite, they are steadily hiking prices. Okay. But there's viable alternatives. Yeah, that's much more oligopolistic for the technology suite.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if there's like, you know, a niche community of like, yeah, I'm a Microsoft autopilot guy. I mean, the cod integration could change things. It just depends on how you're positioning it. Like if the brand, if you talk to somebody in there like, oh, you know, are you a clog guy, are you a code guy, a cursor guy, like all those things say certain things about you aesthetically. You're a muse, okay, we get it.

You like the Luboo guy. But if you come out and you're like, yeah, I'm actually a Microsoft autopilot guy, that could say two things. It could say Excel jockey, king of the financial markets, apex predator of the economy. Or it could say, you know, dropping a nuke on God. Prestige Max. Prestige Max. He has diamond camo. Diamond camo?

No, it's dark matter. Dark matter. Yeah, that's when you get diamond on all of the camera. Yeah. So if it helps you grind to dark matter, I think they got a winning product there, don't you think? I agree. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

Okay, we spent way too long on that. We got three more, and our first guest is joining in noon. And we still, we got to figure out a way to make the tensions go up and actually get an argument going here. We were fighting a little bit. That was too friendly. That was too friendly. Okay. Okay, well...

You wanted to argue that everyone, all the tech insiders, couldn't wait to get their hands on autopilot. That was your stance, right? Yeah, yeah, this is a tough one. Tough to steal me on that. Anyway, Doge designer shared a photo from a dinner that happened at the White House featuring important tech people and none other than Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.

So Elon Musk, President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump. Trump for China's first lady. AMD CEO Lisa Sue, NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Wong, and Apple's Tim Cook got the prime seating right in front of Donald Trump. And they were at the prime table together. No translator that I can see in this image, although there is an empty chair. So it's possible that there was a translator at this. The empty chair would almost certainly be for Donald, right? Oh, yeah.

That would be. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So we're going to put the translator just between Xi and Milan. Yeah, because Xi Jinping is, whenever he speaks, he gives his speeches, even in America, in Chinese. But he seems to be able to hang with Tim Cook, Elon, Lisa Sue, Jensen. Although maybe there's some, maybe those tech leaders at least know that one important phrase. If you want to really ingratiate yourself with a Chinese speaker, what do you say?

of them? Well, hunch you want pizro, right? That's what you got. Always worked for me. If you're ever seated with Siegeng at a dinner at the White House, just throw that down and he'll be like, one of us. One of us. Now it's time to deal. Notable that Elon and Tim, no plus one. They're locked in. Okay. No time for, no time for, no time for guests for them. Yeah, no John Ternis. I feel like Tim Cook should get the John Ternis plus one. Elon should be able to bring like Nikita beer along or something, that would be fun. But it was a pretty tight guest list, although some people did get plus ones. Jensen Brose's wife, Lisa Sue brought her husband. What's interesting is that Dario wasn't there.

He's sparred with the administration before. We've seen this. He's also attended plenty of meetings in D.C. And Tom Brown, the co-founder of Anthropic, has been on a reset with the administration. administration and even went as far to praise Trump's Let Data Rain post on Truth Social. This was September 1st. He said to Howard Lutnik at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, quote, I really loved President Trump's post from earlier this week.

And so there's clearly olive branches going out, but they haven't been fully received because the dinner invite was maybe didn't materialize. or maybe he turned it down. We don't actually know. But I was offered 15 plus ones, maybe 10 plus ones, maybe 5 plus ones. And he decided to lock in and grind for the, grind for the ASI. Well, you know who was there? Who was? Lynn Martin. Lynn Martin from the president of the New York Stock Exchange, our friend to see it. Holding it down. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York State Exchange. There's Lynn. She's been on our show multiple times. times, dear friend, and also, you know, an important person to get around the table when the capital markets, when the future of the global economy is at stake. So very, very exciting to see her there, as well as many other guests who made the list. The list is, is Wild Signal,

was really having some serious fomo. This was hilarious. I'll read it. Okay. Would have paid my entire net worth just to be a fly on the wall this gathering. I can only imagine the conversations, the subtext, and attention in that room. Also, where are the venture capitalists? It's such a good... Actually, wait. Also, where are the venture capitalists? V.C., congratulating themselves.

Won't someone please think of the venture capitalists? Yes. Yeah, I really showed that there's levels. There's levels. It is, this is this a copy pasta of the like $15 million or dinner with Drake meme? Yeah, dinner with Jay-Z. Five hundred care of dinner. with JZ.

For the grant card down. Like, yeah, I slept in my car last night to come here. Yeah. And then it is very funny because like there truly are levels. And if you as the humble poster, I obviously have a ton of respect for signal. But if he or I were at this dinner, we would just be seated way in the back and we'd be like, wow. Look, it's Jensen. Wow.

That's so cool. I wonder what he's talking about. Cool. And then you get to go up to him for two seconds and be like, dude, I love the GB. Well, to be clear, he didn't want. to be, he didn't, he didn't want to be a guess. He wanted to be a literal fly on the wall.

That's true. That is different. And you can see in that original image. Hope there's no flies around here. If you were. We got some flies on the wall today. But, but yeah, it was a stacked, stacked list.

There's a lot of folks. Sam Aldman, Greg Brockman, Anna Brockman, Sergei Bryn, Satchinadadella, Sundar Pichai. Christiano Amman from Qualcomm. Our guest this week made it to the dinner. Came back from Hawaii. David Solomon from Golden Sacks. Tons of other folks.

Exxon Mobil. It was really who's who of the global economy. Son of Bernard Arnault. Also Bernard Arnau is there. A lot of people are saying Ty Lopez was snubbed. Yeah. I would have liked to see a Jaka Willink. I would have like to see a Joe Rogan on this list.

Sort of disappointing that they didn't include podcasters, except for David Sachs. He did make it. He's a podcaster and a venture. Secretary Kennedy also has a podcast. There's actually a fair amount of podcasts. Brad Gersoner. Sam Altman ran the Wadcombinator podcast years ago,

startup school, so former podcaster. There's a few other people on here. But lock in, get your, I think if you put your entire net worth into potentially becoming the CEO of a really important company, Maybe you do wind up as a fly on the wall. Never doubt yourself signal.

I think you can make the next cut. I believe in you. I also believe in Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app services or more. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. My take on this is that the question is like should Dario have been invited? I think even though they're having beef with the administration, like it's such an important company.

It's important that he's in the conversation. He also has like a very, very hard line on China. And I would feel better about his positions on China. He's like, yeah, Magistachian Ping. I really do hate him or something like that. I don't know. You know, it's informed from like a 30,000 foot view. Wait, Dario?

Yeah, Dario's like. He worked at Bidu. Yeah. But since then, his positioning has been like, we got to win the race against China. We have to, you know, dismantle authoritarian. regimes, et cetera. Maybe he looks, Sieg and Ping in the eyes and gets the stare and he's like,

oh, wow, I had you all wrong. You never know. Yeah. But I want to see the sit-down happen. I want to hear the downstream. I want to beat the fly on the wall. Anyway, 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. Has the AI slop gone too far this time? That's our third

debate. The third debate that will shock you. So we can pull up this Kalshi. ad. It's their latest direct to consumer, direct response. For everyone at home, this is a karaoke moment. You're sitting in the office. This is going to be on the... Open floor plan. Don't be afraid to start singing.

Yeah, add it to the Spotify playlist. So Brian Pempsis says this Kalshi ad is among the most dystopian ones I've seen from any betting app. And you can sort of hear

the AI song. over the Pixar-inspired AI Generative video. The lyrics are also odd, not to nitpick, but it says like he sends his girlfriend money and then he's handing her money. Every month I send her money from groceries. So there's a lot of like, it lacks the polish that removes something from Slop.

Every once in a while you see a video that is AI generated, but you're like, okay, there was enough attention to detail there. This was, let's just rip it. This is actually a popular format AI swap that's been going very viral. It starts with a really dramatic hook. In this case, the man thinks his partner is having an affair.

But actually, she's just hedging food prices on cows cheese. Yeah. Because she has inside knowledge on the market from working at a bakery in the morning. Yeah, so that even though egg prices are going up, she's able to net out and remain even because she is profiting on trading the egg futures market on Kalshi. I don't know how deep the market is. I don't know how real those markets are. Do they really have egg futures markets on Kalshi now?

That's kind of interesting. I don't know if you can actually hedge your groceries. I want to see a version of this ad from the Chicago Board of Trade where she goes a lot further, gets a Bloomberg terminal, establishes a relationship with J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley. She's visiting the Chicago Board of Trade regularly, trading in size. she's talking to counterparties, Millennium, Citadel, you know, she's on the phone constantly moving huge volumes of commodity futures at scale, kind of elevating herself past just the prediction market

small ball and getting into the big leagues. That's the future. Jane says, would you gather your girlfriend, insider trade, egg futures, or cheat on you? No, so this is not insider trading. You can actually do this. You can be a baker and realize that prices are going up and trade the commodities markets. In fact, the commodities markets are designed specifically to give that signal and that and that that that is the purpose. The purpose is to is to understand, okay, the weather is bad. People can trade that. Fundamentally, there's there's no law against insider trading in commodity markets effectively. But there's a question of like, is this a consumer ready product? Like, is this something that's someone who is,

maybe doesn't have, you know, whole desk and a research team and a Bloomberg term. One interesting thing is I found egg prices up in September the market. Right now, there's a 72% chance. Okay. But there's only $417 of volume. Yeah, but if you're only buying $20 of eggs, that's enough depth. So it is a viable use case. It's not, it's not fraudulent. I think most people are responding to just like the sloppiness and like the the clickbaitiness of like the weird hook. But somebody posted one of these that was done by a much less prestigious brand in, I think like weight loss. It was some sort of weight loss pill, but it starts with like this insane hook about a secret relationship, very soap opera script. And I feel bad, but I actually watched the whole thing because I couldn't look away because it was really the

Pandora's box. It was infinite jest for about three minutes. And all the comments were like, why did I watch this? And someone had put it on the timeline as like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. Yeah, the funny thing about this, the funny thing about this ad is it seems like there are no one like proofread it because there's a lot of elements of it that just are not, not even phrased properly. But sometimes putting in those details, gets people to talk about, it gets people to go in the comments, actually amplifies things. It draws your eye in. And so you never know with like the algorithmic ad generation where all this stuff goes. What about the, the interesting thing is I think the consensus, and we're going to talk to John

Arnold about sports betting and prediction markets at noon today. But there is another interesting side of this, which is people seem to be coalescing, at least the vibes in the timeline are like, this is not good. Like this is like either you should person. stay away from it. I don't advise you to be sports betting, and I think that's John Arnold's position. There is a second debate point in question, which is, what about the dopamine sites? How do you feel about dopamine sites? So in South Korea, we're calling it a final frontier of consumerism. My current concern about the state of the hyper casino that our world has turned into, is that, like, as an adult, I feel, like, confident in my own decision-making ability

and the ability to see ads for gambling all the time everywhere and still make the call that's not for me. I'm not interested. So you've never lost a dollar? I've tried. One weekend. John got to witness me one weekend. I was like, look, I think I should try this gambling thing. It seems super popular.

I got to get to the bottom of it. I tried it. I'm running in the red. And this is generally true for being said, like, you know, you're stuck in your mind. As a 30-year-old, I've been, I've been advertised gambling products for a decade now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And my concern is that, well, adults have the ability to just make the decision, like,

hey, this isn't for me and you have, like, more. Yeah, if you start young, you're more likely to stick with it for a long. Yeah, but young people today, are going to go through, that you're growing up on the internet, are going to go through this just like, they will probably be served like a million gambling ads by the time they're 18. It's a lot.

Yeah. And so, it's so normalized. It's so a part of society now. It's instantly accessible. If you're getting advertised stuff like this, that's basically saying, like, hey, you're sending this message that, like, this is your way out, right?

Like, this is. Yeah, the deep iron. is like the way out is to not participate and be one of the people that makes it through without forming the addiction. Yeah. But maybe we need to rent a slop ad about that. We want to do a slop ad like this where it's the same premise. Oh, I think my partner's having an affair. And lo and behold, they're just watching TBPN for three hours every day getting informed about technology and business news.

What do you think about dopamine sites, though? Because dopamine sites, which is where... Explain this. Dopamine sites are fake shopping experiences. It's an e-commerce site where you can buy luxury goods, but you don't actually have to pay them and they don't arrive. So this is from an article shared by Adonis on X. The final frontier of consumerism has arrived in South Korea.

This week, I placed orders for a $44,860 Patek Philippe hand-engraved watch, a $12,500 Hermes bag, a $9,800 Tiffany Diamond Ring. Chiching. Oh, I didn't realize that was the analog one. That's great. And a $7,350

Cardier love bracelet in yellow gold. I don't need any of them. I certainly can't afford them. Thankfully, they'll never arrive. Instead of Amazon, this individual spent the past week browsing a new breed of website known as dopamine sites, a trend that emerged in South Korea.

these websites like dopamine shop and food never comes, recreate the entire ritual of online shopping. You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery. But it's all imaginary. Is this not as bad as sports betting? Is this not bad at all? What is this? It's sort of strange and sad and a reflection. of our society that is so infatuated with pure consumption instead of creation.

Yeah. And it's dystopian. But I don't think it's- We should do a dopamine site for TBBN merge because you never sell it. You just don't work on and create a carton. Well, I was thinking you should make like dopamine ARR where you log in. Oh, build a fake startup. It looks like a stripe dashboard and then you just see like, you know.

There's a game that I play that is basically that it's like a cookie clicker game. What are those mindless games? Is it like Adventure Capitalist? Yeah, I played Adventure Capitalist, and you just like click a button, and it's like open the lemonade stand, and then by the end you're like farming robots on the moon, and you just watch the numbers go up. No, we made a game called Burn the Runway back in the day.

Oh, yeah. I put it in the chat. You can pull it up. Wow. This was pre- vibe coding. You did it the old-fashioned way by hand. It's crazy. Do you think this counts as LARPing?

It's not actually live action, right? But it's like the spirit of lurching. You will eventually develop like an encyclopedic knowledge of luxury goods if you spend enough time on here. I don't know. It seems like it's nowhere near as bad as something where real money is at stake because you are wasting time, but you're not wasting any money and there's no risk of downside. So why would you buy bananas? Well, that's the cheapest item. Okay, bananas.

But you can buy the max amount of bananas and then. Oh, okay, okay. So you buy different things for your startup and then you wind up running out of runway at the end? Yeah. Interesting. came over immediately. Wow. To put this into perspective, there were no AI companies even on this list. Wow.

Then it was we work. You had early Anderil. Anderil had only raised, I think, a couple hundred million at the time. You had Quibi on there. Okay, okay. The whole. Well, it's not all bad in AI slop. There's a video that AITS shared by popular demand, his magnum opus. No, it is.

is all bad in AI slop. You think this one's bad? Rewind. There's this guy. Henry says I am so beyond obsessed with this account. For me, this is the moment that I am now very, very, very bullish on AI video. There's an account called Jean Filentro, who's like a French guy who's a boxer. Yep. It is just somebody using, basically making videos and then translating this guy with a funny haircut. Yeah, it looks very silly. And he got 230,000 followers. on Instagram. Yeah. Million, you know,

hundreds of millions of coins. Hundreds of millions of views. And so the new, the new meta, I guess, is, you know, making an AI character. Sure. That's silly, strange, run up the views.

And then, and I think this was one of the top tokens. Okay. A few days ago. Yeah. Well, sounds like a mess. Anyways, over to eights. To what?

This is the video you were talking about. Oh, yes, yes. By popular demand, his magnum opus, he has repurposed the famous scene from American Psycho, the business card scene with pickles. New pickle. What do you think? I can't really hear it. We're doing I am. Very nice.

Look at that. Pick them up from the deli yesterday. Good coloring. That's dill. And the brine is something called mustard seed. It's very cool, baby. But that's nothing. I remember when you had to do this, you had to go into after.

After Effects, track the actual business card, roto out the hand so that the card, whatever you put on the card was underneath, and then you needed to blend the new card in if you wanted to make a joke. It was very time-intensive. It took hours. And now you can even change the voices. It's pretty crazy. This is a next pickle.

There's something for any of a pickle coming out of a whole peppercorn. Extra crisp. Impressive. Sparknoy. Let's see Paul Allen's pickle. See, there's still like a spark of genius here, you know, mixing pickles with... Let's see Paul Allen's pickle. With, uh, and the fidelity is...

That's a little olive coloring. A tasteful thickness of it. All right, we can move on. We can move on. Let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock real-time. seamless experiences and new value with Cisco. Anyway, there's a white pill on the slop narrative.

So AI video is clearly in the depths of the sloppification. But code was there a year ago. People were saying that the slop code would never get good enough. And then if it did, it would destroy everything. DHS is out with a new speech at Rails World, 2026. opening keynote. He says it's pencils down people, writing code by hand is no longer an economically valuable, viable skill for most programmers at most companies. Of course, if you're in some highly secure environment, it might make sense to still write it by hand. And so it sounds like a

black pill. But then he says, but the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment? So you can go watch DHS's full presentation. Looking like a megachurch preacher. Yeah. He's having a good time. So our fourth debate, our fourth and final debate, to what degree

is the AI build out driving interest rates upwards? People are going back and forth about this. Interest rates are spiking specifically the 10-year yield has jumped 12%. So it's actually, what is that, 1,200 basis points or something?

Because you're trying to explain the move in the rates. So it's not that we're at 18%. We're at 5.18%, but we were down much lower in the fours earlier. And it's causing nervousness. You know, last time interest rates went up, the venture capital world collapsed and nobody likes high mortgage rates. Can you afford a home? There's a lot of knock on effects. We've covered this a bunch. The vanilla explanation is just The Iran war was unexpected. It caused an energy crisis.

That caused inflation. That caused interest rate hikes and expectations for future interest rate hikes, and thus, interest rates are higher. AI is important in driving the economy, but mainly a sideshow in this story around interest rates specifically. But in tech, there's a view that the data center debt is simply too good to resist. the capital markets are flooding over there. But there's a lot of debate around this. So, Roon said, Iran oil prices is short-term driver,

but broadly this is due to demand pressure from extremely attractive AI CAPEX opportunities that are borrowing at nation's scale. They're certainly hoovering up trillions of dollars. I think the total data center, CAPEX, hyper-scaler debt is now almost 20% of what the U.S. government is buying something like that way. No, so it's actually higher.

I look this up. So basically, hyperscaler, and NVIDIA, like, debt issuance as a percentage of, like, total treasury bond issuance through 2026 has been, like, 70%. Whoa. So, and I think 2025, it was, like, around 30. Yes. And so Astrid Wilde says, this is correct.

Global yields will continue to go higher because why would you invest in literally anything other than data centers when they have such a short payback period, and you can throw tens of billions at it? I mean, we saw ClusterMax one, I think, had a few dozen neoclodes. Cluster Max 3, which we talked to Jordan Nannis about yesterday, had 326 neoclods. And they reviewed, I think, or they rated 200-something of them. And then that's not to mention that there are also data center construction projects from the actual hypers, the labs weren't on there.

And then the chip companies, Jordan called out. He said, like, Cerebris will have a neocloud, and Positron and ACHD will have neocloud. And so there's going to be a lot more of this. At the same time, there's the flip side of the argument. Deep Dish Enjoyer says this is definitely currently not true. Those opportunities are not riskless. And importantly, you can't use private illiquid AI CAPEX as collateral. So if you're a bond investor and you're looking at two different markets,

are you really shifting out of government treasuries that are historically the risk-free rate, that they have a monopoly on violence, they have the ability to tax their citizens to pay back the debt, a neocloud that's doing a data center, if they go bankrupt, you might actually suffer a capital impairment and get back 70 cents in the dollar, maybe 90 cents on the dollar. So it stands to reason that there is more risk associated with the AI buildout,

and so they're not completely apples to apples, but I still think that there's probably some sort of effect here. So it's true that as real GDP growth increases, substantially. Rates should rise, though, but we aren't there yet. Colin and Roche has lots of scary talk in bonds these days, but it's mostly recency bias since 1960 to 10 years, average 5.8%. We're at 5% below average. If you'd fallen asleep 20 years ago and woke up today, you'd think nothing happened in the bond market the entire time. Ignore all the sovereign debt crisis talk, inflation

expectations are adjusting to something more historically normalized. Carry on. Carry on. So which do you think it is? I'll defer to John Arnold on that, John. Okay, we'll talk to him about it. I think that the recent spike is 80% Iran War. Because I think that the AI buildout has been going on for a while and has been maybe driving rates upwards broadly,

but the AI buildout has not been the thing that's been driving. This most recent spike, which we've seen over the last 30 days. And it's not like we've been seeing a flurry of like, oh, wow, like, we didn't know that Oracle was going to back up the truck. We didn't know that Amazon was. So there's no, like the expectations in the last month. Like, we've been covering this every day. We haven't done that many shows. We're like, whoa, we didn't realize that this was going to happen.

But we didn't know that this was going to be a thing. Now, maybe you could say Jensen's securitization of GPU's initiative with all the big banks. Maybe that's having knock-on effects now. But in general, it hasn't felt like there's acceleration that's a departure from the trend. It's like, yeah, we're going to 3x compute every year. We're on trend. We've been talking about this. Some people don't buy it.

Some people are skeptical. But in general, there hasn't been like a massive revision to the upside. it's hard to say like yeah rates are spiking because muse is taking off and personal agents are going to drive token demand which is going to drive the build out further like we're not quite there yet there's a couple million yeah the other thing is when you look at these large pools of capital it's not like they're sitting there saying I was just going to go all in on treasuries but instead I like this is still put it they're still putting capital at risk yeah right and instead of make there's a there's a number of other investments that they might make outside of AI CapEx, but it wasn't like it's just binary thing like one or the other. Well, whatever you want to do in the age of higher interest rates, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries, and more with great customer service. So the Wall Street Journal is sort of putting the higher bond yields in context, saying the robust U.S. economy powers through rate hikes and rising bond yields.

The U.S. economy keeps powering through inflation, tariffs, and higher borrowing costs, defying a run-up in treasury yields, and a Fed rate increase that has the bond market spooked. The usual economic breaks aren't slowing growth, hiring, or an AI investment boom that looks to be unstoppable. To some, AI's potential return seems so bright that even steep interest rates won't slow down tech companies' investments. And it does seem like the math on the AI buildout is wildly different. talking to somebody who was saying, like, he knows a lot of people that are falling in love with the spreadsheet. And so they want to start neoclods and data centers because the payback period is shorter. I also saw an Instagram sort of like course hustler talking about how he bought a

bunch of GPUs and is renting them to a data center and saw that as an attractive opportunity all la like, oh, I bought a multifamily apartment complex. You must have watched the Dylan Patel interview, the recent Dorcas one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is, This is all related to that for sure. And also a lot of the AI buildout, a lot of the AI companies were very much born in the era of higher interest rates. So I do believe that if you're a software company trading at 100x revenue multiple and you weren't forecasting real earnings for 10 years or something like that, like the traditional SaaS playbook, and interest rates go from zero to 4%. That's a lot more damaging than, okay, you were already. born in the era of higher interest rates and interest rates go from four to six percent or something,

it's just not going to move the needle in the DCF that much because, like, you were already discounting cash flows in the future, 4 percent. And so as opposed to zero, you're basically counting future cash flows as today's dollars. So anyway, that's the take from the, from the, from the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal also had an interesting article about real estate bargains in a higher interest rate environment. They say looking for real estate bargains, watch these apartment loans. And it's an interesting article. So one pool of multifamily apartment mortgages issued in 2021 is already 53% delinquent. And so what this means is that whoever bought the building had a floating rate interest rate and is now that the interest rate rise has put

so much pressure under them that they might have to sell units, they might have to sell the building, and this is public information. So you can actually, I actually went to Kodak's and was like, bind a bunch of apartments that could potentially be on the market for way below market rates because there are public filings of the loan delinquency. And because those might be interesting things. I found some interesting stuff. Yeah, I mean, one indicator of just how brutal the whole multifamily investing world is, is like five years ago, the multifamily guys were extremely active on X, right? Posting multiple times a day, clearly, like, incredibly fired up, doing tons of deals. And then most of them have gone completely silent since then. And it's in large part

because a lot of their bets are completely underwater. They're, you know, basically, there's been a number of funds that have basically not just lost money, but gone to zero. Yeah, no, totally. There's also some interesting local knock-on effects. Here in L.A., Los Angeles implemented a mansion tax for houses, in theory, houses above $4.5 million, $5 million, something like that. But it applies to commercial properties as well. So apartment buildings that change hands have to pay something like a four or five percent tax. And so that's obviously going to hurt the amount of building because when you go to sell and transact the building, you're taking this five percent fee off the top.

But it's also, yeah, putting pressure on existing housing stock. And sort of is like an odd knock on effect because voters obviously go and say like, yeah, if you can afford a $10 million house, you can afford a $500,000 transaction fee, go for it. And it was a very popular bill or changed the law of popular tax. A lot of people would be like, wait, my apartment is going to be taxed too? Because I just live in a building that's over $5 million in aggregate. Like this is maybe not what they wanted. And so who knows where that goes, but people are disappointed.

Anyway, moving on to CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is security. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. America's newest trophy asset is a country home in the Cotswolds. Cotswolds can never pronounce that properly. Harry and Megan's return to the UK has put the region in the spotlight at bevy of U.S. buyers are looking for homes in the area.

Not very American to buy or invest out here. Strange to see that it's becoming a sort of an American investment trend. Well, everyone saw what Paul Graham did. And they said, I want to be like that. That's right. I want to putter. Are you interested? Absolutely not.

Yeah. Next story. Moving on. A modern home in Silicon Valley, though, lists for 44 million, sort of the Cotswolds of America, Silicon Valley, five-bedroom house,

which features four distinct courtyards of pool and is the most expensive listing in Palo Alto, California. Now, I want to do a little tier list. As I read you the various features, I want you to put them in buckets from F tier to S tier. So I'll read through the article and I want you to quickly assign each feature of this $44 million Palo Alto home, a tier. So for years, tech entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and his wife, Helen McLean, dreamed of building a modern house in Palo Alto. The couple, however,

worried about clashing with the Mediterranean-style architecture typically associated with their neighborhood of old Palo Alto. So they tapped an architect to design a home that paid homage to its surroundings with stucco, mahogany, and titanium zinc plating. Where does titanium zinc plating go for you? Kick it off. You like it? A tier? A tier. Okay. We're leaving some room for an even better feature. They spent 20 million over several years barely in the house, completed in 2005. So now, looking to be closer to their adult daughter on the East Coast, They are putting the five-bedroom home on the market for $44 million. Wogofold is an angel investor who co-founded Redback Networks and telecommunications equipment company.

McLean previously had a career in fundraising. A couple purchased the roughly... Career in fundraising. Let's go. Generational run in fundraising. So the couple purchased the roughly 0.4-acre site. In terms of lot size, where are you putting 0.4 acres? F-tier.

F-tier. F-tier. Okay, you need at least 30 acres to really make a splash and earn S tier. They demolish the circa 1930s Spanish colonial home, the house they built pinwheels around a central staircase. What do you think about houses that pinwheel around central staircases? I like classic California one-story ranch-style homes. You don't want a staircase at all. Because the alternative is two staircases.

you have a front staircase, a main entryway, and then a back staircase. This is a central staircase, but you're no staircase, guys. So where is inwheeling around? Once the kids are older, then you introduce the staircase. I could explore it, but for now I'm putting it. Staircases in general going in D tier. D tier. Okay, staircases are out.

It has 7,900 square feet of livable space. Where does that go? split across multiple floors. I'm going B tier. B tier, okay. Four distinct courtyards. Are you a courtyard guy? Problem with courtyards is like they're very cool in theory,

but how often are you actually like, it's really just like a feature that goes on use? Sure, sure. I feel like the average courtyard gets like five minutes of someone's time annually. So I'm hearing like a C tier? D tier. D tier. Brutal for the four courtyards.

What about the pool? It's got a pool. Where are pools for you? Pools are still underrated. Okay. So what tier? A lot of people would say pools properly rated. Everyone thinks they're great.

I think they're better than the average person thinks a pool. I'm hearing S tier. Pool is S tier. Okay. We need to, I want to see what the pool looks like. Okay. A key feature of the home is a cast-in-place concrete wall or spine. Do you like a spine in your house?

Concrete wall? Two stories high, 80 feet long. There's a little bit of control. I like it. I like it. Some sort of a continuous theme through the home. I'm into it. B-tier?

B-tier. B-tier. Okay. He said his wife and him are thinking of the next phase of life. They also have a home in Sun Valley, Idaho. S-tier. Second home in Sun Valley is S tier. S tier.

Right now they're trying to emotionally let go and decide what to do next. Palo Alto is the center of venture capital and tech startups in Silicon Valley, home to some of the country's biggest tech titans. Sales volumes and prices are rising with a median sale price of $3.5 million for the three months ending in August, up 5.8% year. Yeah, it's tough to get excited about this home in L.A. This is like a probably $12 million home, depending on where. it's located. But over there.

It's but over there. Apparently it's S tier. Apparently it's S tier. Well, someone will pick it up and hopefully they enjoy it. Hopefully they're into courtyards. They're into concrete spines in their homes and they make it a wonderful location.

I think it's that time. It is that time. Let's bring in John Arnold, co-founder, co-chair of Arnold Ventures. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Doing great. Thanks for the invite. Yeah, thanks so much for helping on. I would love to start with just a little overview of your career since it's been a fantastic journey following it from afar and hearing you describe it. But for our audience, how do you tell the story these days?

Yeah, so my first job out of college was Enron. So going there as a 21-year-old. It was kind of got there in 1995. If you remember, company went bankrupt in December 2001, and I was there to and through bankruptcy. And it was kind of a remarkable ride up and a very educational and sad ride down and probably learned more on the latter than I did on the former. But came out of there, we can talk a little bit more about that if you want to. But I came out of there and tried to decide what I wanted to do next. you know, kind of really wanted to run my own division of something.

I was running a trading desk at Enron. I was, you know, in very quick order had become the head trader at Enron, which was the largest natural gas trading firm in the country. So I kind of had that top seat in the industry. And I wanted to kind of take the next step and run a division of something. And so looked at, you know, should I do this at a bank? Should I do it at an energy company? at another hedge fund, but I got the chance to start my own hedge fund.

There was, got approached by a few people and said, well, back you if you want to go do your own thing. Well, yeah, why were you, why weren't, why wasn't your immediate impulse? Most of the people that come on the show for better or worse are like, I couldn't imagine working for anyone but myself. why were you more excited initially about running a division at a bigger sort of platform? Yeah, so I think the question was how much of the information flow that I had at Enron that kind of helped create this kind of a very profitable desk there, could I replicate on my own? And if you could replicate 95% of the information flow, did that translate into an 80,

or 90 or 95% of the profitability? Or was that the 5% that last 5% was at all of it, right? Did 95% of the information flow mean that you got 0% of the profitability? Yeah. Yeah. What was the information flow at Enron in natural gas in 1995? Did you know that you were stepping into an organization with strong footing there? I know the later years pretty well, but I actually don't know.

know what the brand positioning was to attract a 21-year-old at that time? Yeah, so if you look back at the history of the natural gas industry, and like many industries in American history, at one point it was very highly regulated to the point where the United States set the price of natural gas. And you had producers who would go produce it, and they would say, you know, if you produce gas, you get X dollars for it. It was viewed as, you know, as an industry having some monopolistic characteristics. And those characteristics were mostly around the pipelines, right? So there's, you know, not necessarily three pipelines between point A and point B, and it's more of a

monopoly type of industry. And so over the years, and of that kind of government price setting, as you can imagine, has a lot of downsides. And so sometimes you would end up with shortages, sometimes you would end up with surpluses. And so starting in the 70s under Carter and then continuing with Reagan in the 80s, you know, you had to do regulation of a number of sectors, including natural gas. And the way that gas was deregulated was said that the production of natural gas is a competitive field. The end use of natural gas is competitive. But interstate pipelines are kind of monopolistic at times and should be federally regulated.

And so kind of that happened. Enron at the time was this integrated natural gas company, and all of a sudden, you have, okay, you have a pipeline division that has Chinese wall between the production side and the unused side. And kind of much like a bank, now all of a sudden you have to, somebody has to be that intermediary between the two. And so you have a producer producing gas in South Texas, you know, a certain amount wants a certain pricing mechanism over, you know, certain. time period and an end user someplace else who wants kind of different characteristics about how their gas is priced. And somebody had to get in the middle of that. And in fact, Enron's kind of first business coming out of this deregulation was kind of

Enron gas bank. Again, very similar characteristics to what a bank does. And so this industry was really kind of getting started in the late 80s, early 90s. And when I got started in 95, I had the benefit of, you know, this was not a high mature industry. In fact, it was still trying to find his legs. And so as a young guy coming in, I wasn't that far behind because everybody else was kind of starting afresh as well. Yeah. How did you process the famous Enron pitch to commoditize and trade bandwidth? Did that, like, were there other people that were like, ah, they might be too homogenous of a market. I don't

know if it can be commoditized or was there at least some glimmer of hope there? Yeah, maybe luckily this was not my area. Yeah. But I think there was kind of this notion that by pricing and managing risk and connecting the producer of a commodity with the end users that you could create value. And so, you know, it just started for Enron and natural gas, although, you know, the commodity markets, you know, had existed long before that. Oil had been a traded commodity for a long time. But electricity started to get deregulated, and Ron kind of moved horizontally into that. And then it started thinking about what other areas, you know, what about water?

What about trucking? What about bandwidth? And I think many of those, you know, had characteristics where you could tell an argument about how they could be an actively traded commodity, but many of which I think went Enron got into him was a little ahead of their time and didn't work out very well. Sure. Can you tell us the story of all the options that were open to you post-Enron? There's the famous story of Ken Griffin and Citadel coming in. And I'm wondering, like, going back to that pitch of, like, the thing that a platform can

offer, the actual profit pool that's available, like, how was that articulated? And how did you make a decision there ultimately? Yeah, so I think around this time there'd been, I have a number of hedge funds that were doing these arbitrage type strategies. And so, like, Ken Griffin famously got started with convertible bond arbitrage. And there were kind of a number of low strategies. But, you know, they were limited in number as they were successful, more capital came into them. And they started to get armed away. And so the returns for the hedge funds that were doing this were.

were starting to decline, and their assets were increasing. And I think a number of those hedge funds kind of had to realize that they needed to start moving a little bit further out on the risk spectrum. You take more risk rather than doing kind of pure arbitrage-type trades. And, you know, the most aggressive of that was Citadel. And to the extent where whenever Enron went bankrupt, I think Citadel was already interested in the commodity markets, was already, you know, kind of, trading some of them, but they viewed the Enron collapse as a great catalyst in order to get into it.

And they sent a whole team down to Houston, kind of set up offices in the hotel across the street from the Enron building and just started interviewing almost everybody on the floor. And they were just kind of recreating, you know, what was the edge that Enron had, what was the org chart, who was doing what, who were the real kind of value creators of the future? field. And I could kind of see what was happening. I didn't really want any part of it. And so I kept kind of, yeah, the recruiter was calling me. We come talk to us. And I saw people around me were doing that and I just said no. And then there was kind of a weekend trip with a kind of industry trip. I was headed to Aspen. Ken Griffin called me at the airport and says,

you know, can I talk to you? I said, I'm actually headed to Colorado right now. He calls back a few minutes later, says, if I come to Colorado tomorrow, will you meet with me? I said, of course. Like, if you're going to put that effort out, then you're serious about it and I'll meet with you. And, you know, I had a great conversation with him. I had great respect for him, great respect for the Citadel organization. But kind of by that point, I realized that, you know, the economics for me would be better if I did my own thing. And then, that the real value that they could provide me is capital on day one. And if I could raise that money, then I should do it on my own.

How did you think about risk when you were getting your firm, you know, maybe in the first three years of building your own firm, having gone through, been able to experience, at least participate in, be involved with the firm that experienced total collapse. I feel like that probably does something to your psychology. At the same time, you were quickly able to put up the kind of returns that typically would take a manager taking on extreme levels of risk. But I imagine that was probably priority number one, don't blow up. Don't blow up. Yeah, I think that's priority number one for anybody managing money is don't blow up.

And especially if you think you think you. you have an edge, and then there's real value in getting to come back tomorrow and play again. And so the biggest challenge was, you know, coming from a corporation using a corporate balance sheet and not really thinking about capital usage. And now all of a sudden I have just an investment account with X amount of dollars in it, and I got to stay under that in terms of capital usage, as well as. thinking about what's the right value at risk that I should be running. And these markets, you know, the natural gas market, especially in that time, could be exceptionally volatile.

And so there was huge risk in, there was huge tail risk. And that created a lot of the opportunity was that, you know, there was, you get paid if you had capital to provide some insurance at times. but to do it smartly, to size it correctly so that whenever you had to pay out on that, you could again show up the next day. But, you know, I think that the biggest challenge for me was this transition from corporate balance sheet to running my own money. Does, I mean, I think most people have heard the story of how you made your first dollar. I'd love to have you tell it again.

But I'm wondering if there's actually like a true lineage between. you're, you know, trading baseball cards to running arbitrage at Enron in 95? Or are these sort of just coincidences that these two things happen? Or do you think that there is a clear line between like what it takes to make it as a trader showing up early in your life? Yeah. You know, I actually think that there were a number of similarities between between these two things of kind of trading baseball cards and trading natural gas.

And, you know, to some extent, you know, sports cards are a commodity, maybe a little bit less so today is there's so much specialization. There's the one of one card or one of ten cards, you know, trying to make them not commodities. But back then, they really did feel like commodities. And, you know, I made money by knowing, you know, what every product was worth at every moment. and so I kind of connected, you know, when I was 15, 14, 15 years old, you know, through this dealer network that was on, you know, out of an early bulletin board that kind of connected dealers around the country and into Canada. And I was one of the few guys in Texas. And so there was a lot of kind of geographic arbitrage that I was doing. But also just, you know, that the prices were volatile.

volatile, they would change week to week. And if you knew what a product was worth in New York that week, you could go around and buy things cheaper and send them up to New York and make that money. And so kind of that notion of know what every product within the industry is worth at all times certainly stayed with me and was a skill I used throughout my trading career. And I think the second part was kind of just this entrepreneurial aspect of, you know, that I wanted to do my own thing. And, you know, you kind of took, took some courage, you know, at age 27 to go out and start my own firm, you know, hire people. I kind of put most of my capital at risk and just say, let's give it a shot.

And if it doesn't work out, I'm still young. I can go do other things, but let's give it a shot. It feels like there's a sort of fork in the road that's been intentionally designed to potentially take advantage of young people where you can get into sports, which are fun. I mean, every kid plays sports as a kid, peewee football and Little League and AYSO soccer or whatever. And then you can get into cards. And then you can get into cards. And then you can get into natural gas trading. Well, now it's not even getting into cards, but the sort of digital representation of cards.

that, you know, function as slot machines and sort of fully disconnect the, the sort of, like, passion for the thing from, from the just sort of like finance, you know, it just becomes purely sort of a financial activity. Yeah. And we were talking earlier on the show how, you know, I feel very lucky to be, you know, uh, uh, you didn't get hit the gambling bug. Yeah. Yeah, you know, as a 30-year-old, by the time we entered this sort of era of hyper-gambling and everything becoming a casino, you know, my prefrontal cortex was, you know, developed.

And I could say, like, you know, maybe that would be fun or maybe there's some money to be made there or loss, but it's not for me either way. but it feels like there was there was maybe a beautiful moment where you could just be into trading cards and then establish a business you know arbitraging yeah but not go down this crazy road the industry was much less of kind of the lottery system that i sometimes fuel it is today right you know there was a card that was just pulled a couple months ago that i got auctioned today or yesterday for eight million dollars, this Cooper flag card, right? And so someone, you know, buys a pack of cards, gets an $8 million lottery ticket in there. And I think it's, there is this kind of waterization of much of society. You see this in a lot of financial markets today, right? It's not sexy to, and buy the index fund and just sit on it. As the markets have progressed,

You've gotten to shorter and shorter time frame trades that are more on the binary nature of I either lose one or I make 10 and that have a lot of characteristics of a lottery. And so back 20 years ago, this was day trading. And, you know, there was, yeah, there was only so much risk out there. That was more of one for one. You can make one, lose one. But then, you know, financial quote unquote innovation happens. And people come up with products that allow you to take a lot of leverage, either through options or through just straight leverage.

And so if you put a dollar up and try to make 10 or try to make 100, and there's this kind of whole conflation between investing and trading and gambling. And there's always been some great area across those. But, you know, you open up a Robin Hood app today, and it's, you know, Do you want to day trade? Do you want to buy zero-day options? Do you want to gamble on the sports game tonight? Or do you want to buy the index fund?

And it's kind of all presented as this is all investing. And I think that's really, really scary message that we're teaching, you know, the 16, 18, 20-year-olds today. Are you – so I think the ton of agreement there. I'm interested in where this goes forward. Obviously, there are things individually you can do, just like stay away from the aggressive gambling products. There are things that you can do in your community, encouraging people not to take on unnecessary risk

and stay with the safer investments. On a national level, there is a conversation about regulation, restricting, banning, more aggressive financial products. There's another side, which is maybe fund more, education to teach people about this. It's sort of what we did with cigarettes, where there was a lot of regulation for who could buy them, but also a lot of education where pretty much everyone knows that they cause cancer.

There's labels on there. And I'm wondering if you're more optimistic that we get out of this with an education strategy or through a regulation strategy, or is there no hope and it's every man for themselves, and they have to resist the temptation individually. Yeah, education strategies take a long time. Yeah. And you also kind of have some vices that kind of catch on like wildfire and will eventually burn themselves out. And you can look at a lot of illicit drugs will have that type of characteristic. Yeah.

And regulation's always going to be slow, but I think it's faster than the education. I think the scary thing today is that there's a number of products that have kind of been, again, innovated to be of higher intensity and easier access than what they've ever been in the past. And the challenge is regulation lags on those. And so you can think about things like marijuana, right? And like the marijuana of 20 years ago is very, very different. than it is today, and the access is much more available today. And you can think about pornography.

The intensity of porn today is very different. The access today is very different. And gambling is the same way. Historically, you either had things that were high friction and high speed of play. So think about like a slot machine where you have to go to a casino. Oftentimes that meant getting on a plane and going someplace. And you sit down, you could pull the arm of the slot machine pretty quickly. In fact, it was too slow, so they made it a button so you could just sit there and boom, boom, boom, boom.

Right. But there was friction on high speed of play. Or you had something that was low friction, like I could buy a lottery ticket at the supermarket when I'm buying my meat. But it's low speed of play. I buy my ticket, you know, I wait eight hours or three days or, you know, I find out whether I want or not. Yeah, or trading cards now, you can buy a pack of cards, but you don't have to wait for them to arrive with you to know what you got. And you can decide, I don't want any of them. I'll just roll the dice again.

Roll the dice again, yeah. And so what gambling is today, right, with the phone, access through the phone and being able to, I don't even want to wait three hours and figure out whether my team one or not, right? I can bet on the next pitch. I can bet on every play. Yeah, there's one minute markets now for. Do you think Bitcoin will go up or down over the next one minute? And so that is effectively a binary option on one minute, which is barely, fairly close to just a pure slot machine. Yeah, flipping a coin, right?

Yeah, flipping a coin. Exactly. Because no one has information on a minute-to-minute basis. I mean, maybe something else. But, yeah, certainly not the average gambler. Yeah, and so you're mentioning earlier just about, you know, luckily this is how much. happening when we're older, but I have a teenage boy and teenage boys are kind of the most susceptible to these things.

And there's tens of millions of teenage boys out there who are all getting drawn into these products. And I think there's real risk to society. And so the question is, what's the right way to allow access to products? I have libertarian bones in my body. Sure. I think, you know, we need to be careful about banning access to products. But, you know, what are the right smart guardrails to put on them?

Yeah. Yeah, in some ways, in some ways, multifaceted approach to regulation would help a lot of companies that are in positions where the right thing to do for shareholders is actually to make the gambling product, right? And we've seen this because there's investing out. now that make more money from, you know, gambling products, whatever they want to position them as, than stock trading. And we even saw four months ago there was a series of headlines around how meta was exploring, building, you know, prediction markets, which, you know, I always felt was completely at odds with their stated goal and mission. But at the same time, you can make the argument as a meta shareholder that, you know, they have a lot of attention. There's people

that are making a bunch of trades based on information they get on meta and that product should be integrated into the product because it's generally legal, right? And it just feels like companies in many categories will get punished by not rolling out these products because their competitors will and they will, you know, onboard more users and generate more revenue and be able to spend more money on marketing. And it's sort of this like really, really, really vicious cycle. And so I've gotten to the point where I pretty strongly believe that a lot of this stuff needs to be pulled back or banned. Of course, that sort of human desire and energy to speculate will just naturally flow to other places, right? You saw in some ways the AI trade over the last year

sucked a lot of the wind out of the sales of like crypto, right? There was like way less appetite for Bitcoin when you can make 10x on some bottle. trade. I did want to get to as much as we can spend hours talking about our casino world. I did want to get your point of view on how you've processed the overall sort of AI super cycle. There's so many different elements of it that I'm sure you've drawn. You have experience in through the early 2000s in that period, whether it be obviously energy markets coming into play. in tech for the first time in a really meaningful way. Massive, you know, CAPEX and debt cycles and seeing some of,

some of these companies that have historically had pristine balance sheets, you know, figure out all these, you know, super complex structures. And then I actually want to get into compute markets as well and how we should be thinking about that from your point of view. But maybe start how you've processed the sort of the last five years and maybe your mental model for where we are today. Yeah. You know, I probably started talking to people in this space

around the 2020-2020-2020 time frame. And then kind of like everybody in 22 was kind of surrounded by it. It's what I'm amazed at is the number of predictions that came true. Yeah. And when I heard it as a guy that's kind of outside of the time, tech world that it just seemed farcical, the growth that they were projecting, that they were saying that things would keep scaling forever. And tech people have been wrong so many times, VR and flying cars and self-driving

and NFTs and all this stuff. And then this was the one where it was like, oh, again with the crazy predictions. And it's been right on track. Very different. Yeah. And that you could. keep scaling, right? And that you would never hit that plateau. And again, like in every other field, you know, you hit plateaus, you start getting kind of significant decreasing marginal

returns, inputs. And, you know, that that was my expectation of how this would play out. And it certainly has it. And so I think I've been open to the possibility. but skeptical. And now, whenever the big money was coming into data centers a couple years ago and you had kind of the calls for the bubble, I was, I think my view was just because a lot of money is coming in doesn't make it a bubble. Now, it is true that you always say it's different this time. And occasionally it actually is different this time.

And the real test for the industry is, can you find useful products and services that people are going to pay for? And if so, it works out great. And if not, it's going to be overinvestment. I do think that every commodity market goes through these booms and busts. And that's because the producers see the same price signal. producers and end users see the same price signal at the same time and typically react in the same way. And so that creates, you know, whenever prices are high, people increase investment. There's a delay before that comes on.

Oftentimes the end users have figured out ways to kind of optimize their demand or define substitutes. And then you get that bust that happens because too much capacity shows up in the future. I think that's the big risk now with data centers is that every every megawatt that's been built thus far that keeps being worth more, right? And it's kind of a highly backwardated curve where if you can provide compute tomorrow, that's worth a lot of money. Compute in two years is worth less. Compute in five years is worth a lot less.

But everybody is seeing that, that if I can build today and supply today, I can make a lot of money by even running it out in the short term. And I think the question is, is everybody overbuilding a little bit because they look at the same price signal and say, you know, even if we overbuild, we're okay because we can sell it to somebody else. Yeah. Yeah, or even, or even, you know, you can imagine some of these models saying, well, yeah, you can discount the rate by 60% and we're still, we're still making, you know, we're still going to be making. money here. So of course, there's, that should be plenty of margin of safety when in reality you could see a much larger, you know, drop depending on how, how much of an oversupply there is. Yeah. Have you, have you been able to tease out the impact of AI on markets from other

factors? I mean, we were looking at 10-year, 10-year interest rates are at, you know, very high. There's been a big spike over the last 30 days. All the tech people are sort of saying, look, it's evidence that data centers are just too good. And so everyone's investing there. At the same time, there's a war in Iran. And so that might be a bigger factor. But even in the GDP numbers, it's very hard to actually get to a ground truth of the impact on productivity. The internet famously never really showed up in the productivity statistics. An incredible amount of wealth was created. So how do you think about teasing out the different effects? Does it even matter? Or do you have a process? Do you have a view right now on how much growth or effect on markets AI is actually

driving? Yeah, I think it's really hard. I think you did a great job and setting the stage for the difficulties the field is having. You know, I think the financial world and economists are a notoriously just very bad at predicting interest rates and inflation. And it's even hard to describe, you know, why have rates spiked so much just in the past month. Yeah. And part of this is, you know, they probably, you know, there were times when everybody was scratching their head about, you know, why are rates staying so low for so long? And now it's kind of the opposite that, you know, inflation is manageable at least today.

right, kind of at, you know, the two and a half, three percent levels, you know, having the 10-year, you know, what, 520 or so today, it seems like those rural interest rates are at a level that I think people, many economists, were doubtful that they would see again. And so I think that the question is this is how much of this is being driven by the AI super investment cycle? And is there just too much demand for capital because there is both all the sovereigns are issuing enormous amounts of debt as well as all everybody associated with the AI industry is trying to do the same. You know, I think it's always easy to kind of assign causation after the fact. But, you know, trying to predict where this is going in the future, you know,

It's ended the careers of many a trader. Yeah. How do you think about the bullwip effect? One thing that a lot of tech insiders have been pounding the table about is why isn't TSM building new fabs fast enough? We finally got AI working. It's going to continue to increase and scale, scale, scale forever. Nvidia is ramping up.

Everyone's fighting for chips. And yet we can't seem to get TSM to mention A. on an earnings call, they're starting to, but they've been burned before. And I'm wondering if there's parallels in other markets that you've seen. And how do you actually think about the nature of that bullwip when it actually comes around? Yeah. And I think that's exactly it, right? If you're a commodity producer like the memory chip companies, you know, kind of are,

after you've kind of fallen for this, you know, the boom bust, you know, that you expanded capacity at the top of the market. And again, like every, all your competitors saw the same price signals and did the same thing. And, you know, you have that bust. And that bust just causes so much financial pain that at some point, you know, you're like, I'm not doing this unless you, my customers are going to sign, you know, a three or five year. off take agreement at prices that pay for the whole factory and then some such that if we've overbuilt, you know, that's on the customer. That's not on me. And you can certainly understand why a couple years ago, you know, all the hypers were asking memory companies and the chip companies to increase production, increase capacity. And, you know, because it would be beneficial to the

hypers who were buying this stuff. And the producers were just saying, like, you know, you know, because it would be beneficial to the hypers who were buying this stuff. And the producers were just saying, we're just much more hesitant to do so. Because, again, a couple years ago, AI could have gone a number of different ways. And, you know, it's gone the bull case to date. But where it goes from now, I don't think these companies want to bet their future on it. And you've seen the same thing kind of in the oil markets where the reaction to high prices, the industry's interest.

And investor interest in funding, kind of recycling all the money back into drilling is much lower than it used to be. And investors are saying, like, we felt for this in the past. Like, whenever you're making the big returns, pay him out to investors. Can you sort of reality, check me on my history around the Shale Revolution? I'm interested in could that have happened anywhere other than the United States? How much of it is a technology story? how unpredictable was it? Because right now in tech, everyone's talking about energy.

People are talking about nuclear capacity that might come online in 2030, 2035. If it comes, I don't think it will be a surprise to the technologists who have been raising money and proselytizing and evangelizing for nuclear. But from my perspective, as like an energy outsider, the Shale Revolution looked like something that was an unexpected boon to energy in America. But what was it like on the inside? Yeah. So, you know, the shell volumes have really been over the past 20 years.

But this is, you know, this industry kind of got started maybe 50 years ago. Okay. So in the 70s, federal government started investing in the technology through some basic science grants. In the 80s, George Mitchell, who was really the grandfather of this industry, started investing and doing some, you know, using his company's capital to go test wells. It was really in the 90s whenever George Mitchell kind of came up with the slick water fraction, sorry, fracking, that you could see wells start to become economic. and the industry kind of had the bonus of the commodity boom that happened in the 2000s, kind of culminating in 2008 when natural gas got to $13.5 versus the $3.00 sits out now. Oil got to $147, where a lot of those wells, even though they were expensive to drill, were economic.

And that's when, kind of that 2005 to 2008 period was really where, kind of the shell started to work. Yeah. You know, the technological triggers had happened and you had high prices. And then the 2010s, you had kind of the industry really start to figure out how to do this at scale and get all the benefits of coming down to the learning curve and the benefits of going from, you know, drilling, you know, a well here and a well there to really kind of turning this much more into a manufacturing process.

And in 2020, it's now a mature industry. So it was 50 years in the making. And I think the question is on nuke, what happens? In many ways, there are aspects in which United States is very conducive to the nuclear industry. We have very robust capital markets. We have a lot of great technologists here. We have a lot of land in the United States. very deep electricity markets.

So if you come on with a gigawatt of power, you can place it very easily. Yeah. And you have bipartisan government support for the industry. Sure. All those things are working for it. And the downside is that the U.S. actually has fairly cheap electricity. Yeah. We have fairly high cost of labor, especially kind of the craft labor. And to build a nuclear plant requires a lot of labor, at least today.

You know, citing anything is hard in this country. And you have this kind of very bifurcated utility system. We don't have a national utility. It's kind of state by state. It's utility by utility. And you have their investor owned. And does the investor get the benefit of this? They certainly get a lot of the risks.

And the last, I think, we just don't have the workforce that's trained on in this field today. And so like in some ways, maybe the optimal thing is we develop the technologies here and they get built somewhere else where it's just easier to build and cheaper to build. Yeah, we've seen that with a couple of nuclear companies that have done their first plants in Southeast Asia and internationally and seen opportunities elsewhere. But I'm certainly hoping for it to hit America. I have one more, but please, Jordi. How have you processed the growth of the private markets and the subsequent disconnect between the private markets and the public markets. I've been personally, having made at this point 70-odd private market, you know, early-stage

investments over the last number of years, I've been really feeling like the inflation, like inflation, the feeling of inflation in the private markets where you have companies that are a $10 billion company, but only because they're... are a bunch of venture capitalists with $10 billion, right? And so you just have these prices pushing up not based on the quality of the underlying asset or the category. And I just, so my head is really thinking about how long can you have this disconnect. Like the disconnect can't sort of continue forever with how extreme it is right now.

And so I would expect it to correct sometime in the next two years, maybe, you know, who knows. but how are you processing it? Yeah, we're certainly seeing that question right now in the energy tech industry, right? Where a year ago, it's kind of probably the peak of almost exactly a year ago, peak of a lot of the SMR, small modular reactor nuclear companies, and they've kind of been on a steady decline since. And then a few months ago, you had, you know, Fervo go public. that, you know, had a great kind of first day, first couple of weeks, went public at a big number,

and that's kind of gradually sold off. And when Fervo went public, you know, a lot of companies in the energy transition space thought that the IPO door was open. And everybody called the banker, the bankers call all these companies and say, okay, like, get ready, we're going. and then everything is kind of sold off from there. And now they're all getting the same message, which is, okay, the door closed really quick. And now what do you do? And, you know, the highs are higher in the public markets, but the lows are lower too. So if you have these companies that still need to raise a lot of capital, and going public,

if you catch it right, can work out really well. well, it can also kind of be handcuffs on you. That if your stock trades poorly from the IPO on, and you have to go do secondaries in the market for a stock that's down, you know, 50, 60, 70 percent, it becomes enormously difficult. And so there's a lot of CEOs of kind of those energy transition companies who are now like trying to decide, do we force this? Yeah.

Even take a lower valuation and try to get public. Or do we stay private and where we can have more nuanced conversations? We only have to convince a few investors to come in rather than the whole market. Yeah, it'll be more stable. Yeah. Yeah, the other dynamic that is endlessly entertaining to me is companies repricing based on the category leader in their category. So you saw this with SpaceX, right? Like SpaceX is far, you know, is.

is probably like a thousand times more important than the next space company, right? But every company right after the IPO starts to reprice in the private markets based on that. And, you know, you can see the logic from the private market investors. But again, there's those disconnects that have to be righted in the fullness of time. Like you can't know, it doesn't matter how big your venture fund is. eventually your businesses are going to price based on market realities. Last question I had for you, I know we're over time. How did you process the compute markets ban?

We saw, recently we saw a couple prediction market players try to put up compute markets, and apparently they got a tap on the shoulder from Washington, and were asked to shut down, shut down the markets. It seemed somewhat curious. But how would you read into that? Yeah, I haven't followed this too closely. I've always been somewhat, the big question is that compute is not a commodity where one data center is providing the same product as another data center.

And in order to have a, you know, a real tradable market, you either have to deliver into a certain product that needs to have a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers, you know, that are able to take that specific product to create an arbitrage-free type of ecosystem. Or you need some type of index that the industry trusts that might look at across a number of different types of compute and say, you know, compute that has, you know, characteristics in this range, the cost for that for the month of September is X. And so, yeah, either a robust index or a kind of physical delivery product. And I think both are really challenging in this

field of compute. There just aren't that many short-term deals. transparency into those is difficult. The distinctions between the chips and the design of the data center and all the specific needs is just different. And so trying to either come up with the physical delivery mechanism or the index that everybody trusts to be right is really hard. Yeah, the other dynamic is just how much more valuable compute is to a couple. companies relative to the broader market, which feels quite different than some of these other commodity markets. I did have one, my second final question, and then we'll actually let you go. How much of you opened your mind to various sci-fi predictions, given how correct many of them

have been in the lot, let's say from 2020 until 2015 until 2025, so many. of them sounded, you know, crazy at the time and, and almost impossible things, things happen that were almost impossible to predict. And given how correct many of them were, it's hard not to place way more weight on them going forward, except that they actually only get more insane from here. So you have to, like, take another leap of faith. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I'm a natural skeptic. I've always kind of been a bear trader and make more money when the markets are going down than when they're going up. That would be a terrible VC because of that. And I would tell you all the reasons why this company is going to fail rather than why it's going to

work. Sure. I think getting to an entrance into the tech sector that I've had of late has helped kind of open my eyes. And like, you know, rather than being naturally skeptical, I've tried to be kind of naturally open-minded to this. But in terms of specifics, you know, I think the next 10 years could be crazy. It could be a normal technology. And I think that's this huge question here. And I try to keep my mind open to both of those. We're going to find out one day at a time.

Yeah. Just one day at a time. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat. Yeah, really enjoyed it. Really informative conversation. Yeah, it's been great. it again soon. Yeah, great to hang on. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye. Let's move right into our next guest. We have this walk, Hulu. The founder and CEO of Invetta, with a huge fundraising announcement. Get that gong ready. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Longtime listener, first time

caller. Sorry for the delay. We had to shift things around. I'm so happy that we get to talk to you. Let's kick it off. Jordy's warming up the gong already. Tell us about the most recent fundraising round? The most recent round was a lot of capital to get a lot of medicines to people. There we go.

And what's important is it allows us to build. I'm guessing I'll be back. Okay. So, yes, what you're building? We're building. The easiest way to describe it is think of it as a sequencer.

but for life's chemical code instead of life's genetic code. Sure. About 400,000 compounds have been discovered by the collective human endeavor from throughout history to now. And it's expected that there's about 1 to 10 billion. So 99% of what makes up you, a tomato in your garden, or a random sample in the Amazon rainforest, is still a mystery to science. And that's because we've never built anything that can take a biological sample and answer two really important questions. What are the molecules and what do they do? So we've built the tech to do just that.

Talk about the positioning of the company as actually developing drugs, going through FDA processes, versus selling a software product to existing pharmaceutical companies or versus focusing on more general use, artificial intelligence technologies. How do you land where you did? And what are the benefits of that approach? As far as we can tell throughout the history of the industry, there's only been one way to build a big company in this space. And that is to make and own drugs.

And even the biggest companies in this space are largely underpinned by cash flows from a single blockbuster franchise. Something like 70% of Lily Zee, is forward sales multiples of the GLP1 plus family. 80% of Novos is the same. And 30% of Sanofi's is half of one, a drug called DuPixin for Exema.

So if you want to build a large and impactful drug company, the rule is super simple, make drugs and make drugs that matter. Give me some timelines. AI is focused on curing cancer, and I feel like we got to cure peanut allergies before we cure cancer. It just seems easy to me. Am I misinformed? What are your peanut allergy timelines?

You know, it's just something that seems a little bit quicker to test than cancer, which could take, you know, months to actually fight and verify that you're in remission. If you have a GLP1 for peanut allergies, you probably test that? This weekend, John, figure out how to give yourself a peanut allergy. I need a million dollars to compute, I think. And then fix it on Sunday. But the more anodyne diseases, are those actually more tractable? Or is it a straight shot to cancer in, like,

the big ones. I think they're both difficult in different ways. I'll start with the simple fact that cancer isn't one disease. Yeah. And it's thousands of diseases. And we just call all of those diseases cancer for something that grows without control and invades other organs. So I think that's going to have to be disease by disease. And we've made a lot of progress for a lot of these diseases, but it's going to help, I think, for us to be very specific about what cancers have been most recalcitrant and why. And I think I'd love to see AI come up with completely new ways, whether it's molecules or mechanisms, to be able to hit cancers that we struggle the most with. Common diseases are difficult for two reasons. They're complex and multifactorial.

So in other words, obesity is something you understand quite simply as excessive. fat in your body, but we now know that at least two organs, likely more are involved in obesity. So your fat tissue, your brain, your muscle, your pancreas, all of those coordinate to ultimately give you that. The second reason they're hard is the way each of these factors collude to give you obesity can be massively different across the population. I was just reading something as I was waiting for you guys since you went over that 10 to 15% of patients don't respond to glip once. Whoa. Right.

And it has probably something to do with the fact that hormones affect JLP1 massively. So women tend to respond better. And there's lots of other things that are just beginning to come out from the data. And these are the two things that make common diseases more complex for AI. But I think there's no reason to stagegate. We should absolutely attack all of them at once and continue pushing the frontier for better medicines so each of us can live, you know, a better life on a day-to-day basis. And that's the test we want each of our molecules to pass. So yeah, I mean, it seems like you're taking a pretty

broad approach. But is there a decision criteria where you're looking at the economic opportunity of a particular drug and treatment versus the total harm cause? Like obviously, cancers at the top of the list, peanut allergy is a little bit lower. Or are you more just like, let's generate a bunch of stuff and see what the impacts are. Oh, turns out we cured, you know, we cured cancer one day, and then the next day we cure peanut allergies, and it's sort of a random downstream effect. How much of it is you picking the target versus just seeing what you're capable of?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So at Inveda, we haven't started efforts on trying to treat cancer yet. Okay. We're focused on really large diseases that still have big, big swats of, what we call unmet medical need. For example, if you suffer from asthma, there hasn't been an oral medicine that isn't a steroid that has been approved for over 25 years.

Interesting. Wow. Right? If you are one of the many, many Americans and the world's citizens that has trouble managing your weight, you can get on GLP1. In one or two years, you're likely going to be off of it for one reason on another.

And then you have no idea what to do about your weight. Interesting. So our first two drugs are hitting exactly those problems. We want to make a safe non-steroidal oral for diseases like atopic dermatitis or eczema and asthma, for which there's millions of people in America alone and there isn't an ideal solution. And our second molecule discovered a new hormone that's produced after you go for a sprint. So it's essentially the chemistry of exercise. And we did do it what semaglutide did to GLP1.

So we put it in a pill that you can take once daily. and we think it'll allow you to maintain your body weight and metabolic health over the long term, giving 55 million people in America an off-ramp over the next seven years that will have taken a GLP1 and then not know what to do next. A lot of discussion over should we give superintelligence a wet lab? What is the actual human in the loop? I mean, it feels like you're hiring. It feels like this is a very rigorous process where you're coming up with candidate molecules,

taking them through the full FDA process, but how do you make sure that your product is safe? Are you confident in the current system, or do we need to create new rules or slow down, or what's your view on the future of actually getting new AI-aided, AI-designed products in the hands of Americans? For better or for worse, three quick things. The first one is Enverda's core AI models

allow us to understand what evolution is already made. So they're not optimized for creating new things, either benevolent or malevolent or anywhere in between. And so this allows us to, for example, push forward our frontier very, very quickly without being particularly bottlenecked by the safety question. Second is for people whose models are designed to make molecules, I think that the most important aperture or filter that those models have to pass through is the simple fact that most things that a model can design, are not something human chemists can make. And this doesn't get talked about often at all, but 99% or more of the chemistry that any particular model comes up with is constrained by the physics and energetics of putting it together.

So I'd say just because AI can come up with an incredibly powerful toxin doesn't mean that it'd be produced right away. And that's the bottleneck even when you're trying to make medicines produced by AI. Third, I think the big bottleneck overall, that encompasses issues one and two really is the fact that AI is really bad at moving things in the physical world. And I think a lot of biological surgery, whether it's of cells or genes or assembly, involves things that require custom workflows and automating and roboticizing that still

is an endeavor that we're not very good at. So unless there's a rogue agent in the loop with the AI, I think it'd be hard. Now, could an rogue agent be significantly more damaging? Yes. But I think it's a more human-centric problem than it gets written about. Okay. I like that. Well, thank you for breaking it down.

Congratulations on the progress. Yeah, great to meet you. I wish we had more time. But come back on. Yeah, we'll have to have you back on soon. This is really great. Congratulations. Sign me up.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution. for access requests and password recess. Coming back on the show,

we got Jake Adler, founder and CEO Pilgrim. Jake, how are you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. No problem. Good to be back on. Thanks, guys. What's the latest in your world? You raise some money?

Anything gong-worthy? Anything that's going to make Jordy stand up and smash that while you're giving us the important details, deafening us all? What happened? Yeah, so we closed the $25 million round to build America's first file. Thank you, fine.

Fantastic. There you go. It's so funny, like, two weeks ago, I was, it's been probably a year since you've been on the show, but two weeks ago, I was thinking about you and Pilgrim because of all the biosecurity talk, and I'm like, he's got to be raising a new round just because it feels like you've, you've been building to sort of meet many of the current and future problems of our world. Yeah. How are you?

how are you pitching the company right now and then the specific products? Because there is sort of a differentiation there between being America's biological prime contractor and Kingswell, the actual product, correct? Yeah, there's certainly been a bit of an evolution. But I think the core, the core thesis has remained the same. Yeah. Which is really this idea that we're just trying to deploy biotechnology more efficiently. Sure. So there's like an abundance of like really compelling technologies that's like language in academia.

And the bad at Pilgrim is really on the mechanism to take these like really critical technologies and get them deployed. So, you know, at the core, when I think about, you know, what we're building today with like a system like Argus. So, you know, this is one of our early prototypes that we deployed. The idea really is to build up what is a really substantial wedge and can get technologies like this into the hands of the warfighter today. But on the basis of building what is a bio prime, it really does come back to that core mechanism of being able to actually get technology into the hands of warfighters sooner and ensuring that more, you know, warfighters can go into conflict and actually be able to return home. So it's been a very exciting mission, but it's all really revolved around just the idea of getting bio into the hands of the people who need it the most. The sign behind you says smallpox, keep out. Is that because there's smallpox in your facility? and you don't want people coming into the facility,

or is that because you don't like smallpox and you want to keep it out of your office? You know, you'd be shocked, you know, how easy it is to procure some like really gnarly biological issues. Black pill. But, you know, we don't have smallpox in the office. We have a bit of monkeypox here and you be able to procure, you know,

like a couple chemical weapons as well. But, like, you know, the amount of validation that's required for these things is bewildering. They'll call me up on the phone and be like, do you know what you're doing with these things? And I'm like, yeah, we work with the government. And they're like, that's all we need to hear. Which is, again, it's incredibly alarming, you know, considering a lot of the infrastructure we have, like deter, you know, a bio weapon attack or to stop the proliferation. Yeah.

Now this has changed in like 20 years. Yeah. But it's a, it's been a really cool mission, you know, it's a bet that we made nine months ago on August. And, you know, candidly, you know, you look to things this year like, you know, for example, the Pentagon shutting down four months ago due to like a false anthrax alert. Yeah. Like there are really serious events that are transpiring. And I think that the rate and the incidents around bio have grown dramatically.

Even to a point now where I think just did the sheer lack of that infrastructure has just become incredibly alarming. Okay. That Argus system looks portable. It's on a tripod. Where do you deploy that? I've heard about in terms of our biodefences, sometimes airports, waste water treatment system. There's a whole bunch of other places to plug in. How did you land on that portable of a system as opposed to tapping into basically like a stream of biological data somewhere else in the, you know, American economy or American industrial system?

I think the core bet is really on the platform itself. Like we really want to move beyond what is like the current precedent, which are like these very manual workflows. Like right now, for example, like if I was to, you know, if I was to Paul Georgian, and have him go work the line at TSA, for example, and some guy comes through, and I gave you, like, the best, the most portable sensor in the world, able to tell you whether or not some person has Ebola, that the question quickly becomes, like,

what are you going to do with that information? Right. So we definitely knew that the system itself had to be portable, but it had to go just beyond, you know, from a platform standpoint, just doing the detection, to actually enabling identification and characterization of the threat as well. The reason that we opted for this form factor first was very simple.

It was really on the basis. especially in the airborne environment, that that is the primary mode of transmission for viruses and for pathogens. So when we're thinking about how these viruses spread between populations, it's very important that we're actually monitoring the air. There's a lot of information that we don't typically see. So we wanted this system to look scary and really to stand out in an airport environment because we have to make a statement to our adversaries that if they attempt to come into our country and attempt to military freight, you know, a biological weapon. that we actually have the defenses in place to be able to deter and identify, you know, that proliferation very quickly.

Yeah. So that alone is really what contributed. But the core platform being able to detect, you know, viruses autonomously, that's just going to be deployed across all of these different types of media, wastewater, clinical, everything. Last question for me. On the actual sensor fidelity, is this going to be something where I'm going through the airport, I take off my shoes, they take a picture of me, they scan my thumbprint, I give them my ID, I give them my boarding pass.

And then I also have to like breathalize into this thing or is this passive? Like are they taking my saliva? Are they going to take a pint of blood from me? Like how far does this go? Yeah. You know, I think if we make the TSA line any longer, people aren't going to be very satisfied. Really, the goal here is simple. It's because we just want to monitor the environment.

Okay. A lot of, a lot of tools in the past, like a, you would call like contract tracing. And like even just thinking about like just how crazy of a time COVID was. I remember my sister, like Lysol, wiping bananas. You know, and this is sort of like the world that we are living in. A lot of the technology that has been built tends to be hyper-personalized. And what we recognized more than anything is, like, the current timeline to even detect a thread in the air is like a week. And, you know, that means like by the time you find out about a pandemic, it's typically in the newspaper, you know, before one of our sensors that are even picking up on it.

We're like Google search trends for I lost my sense of taste or whatever, yeah. Yeah, like literally, right? It's like these weird small ideas. So we wanted something that would be quick. It monitor the air. And it's like a, like, the joke more recently is like a Shazam for the air. Like, how do we just like that? Shazam for the air.

I like that. Any plans to put it on a robotic dog? You got the, you got the drug sniffing dog, the bomb sniffing dog. I like the idea of a pandemic sniffing robotic dog. Could probably carry that payload, maybe. Who knows? What are you thinking? Yeah.

I mean, it could certainly be interesting. I think that there's also a, uh, possibility of putting this thing on drones. Or wheels, yeah. You can drive around. Shut on wheels, yeah. It doesn't have it right after people at TSA. It's just like coming up to them and staring at them.

Yeah. It would certainly be very interesting. Well, good luck. Congratulations. I'm glad you have fresh funding to help keep the airways safe. Yeah, very important work and fantastic progress. Yeah, we love to see it. Great to see you, Jake.

Thanks so much coming on, Jake. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you 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. Our final guest to the show is the co-founder of Free Bean. We have Adam here with the first parents, but there's been a little Easter egg this whole show.

We have his product here with us in the TBPN Ultrodome on the desk. Cracking open a ramp. How you doing? How you doing? How we started the show. This was a dream of Jordi's. He had this idea a year ago, two years ago. I was searching for more ad inventory.

We had more ad inventory than any show on earth, but I wasn't going to settle there. I wanted more ad inventory. And I thought we're drinking. We're not getting paid to drink on the show. How do we fix it? You're not, but now you have some new ad inventory, courtesy of RAM. Yes, and free bean. So, yeah, tell us about you, your business, your career.

Get us up to speed on all this. Absolutely. I'm Adam Krasinski. I'm the founder of Freebean. Freebean is a targeted, trackable, and tangible out-of-home advertising medium built on free coffee. We started the business while I was in college, a senior at the University of Michigan. And I've never had a full-time job. So yeah, go blue, baby. Very, very, very great story. Yeah, I, uh, how much do you know about the, the sort of like white space and advertising inventory? I'm obsessed with, you know, uh, app love and finding that people were playing hyper casual mobile games. They went and found this pool that wasn't on Instagram, wasn't on Facebook and they blew it up to a huge business. At the same time on the other end, I know someone who did like free napkins and fortune cookies for Chinese restaurants, but put ads on them. And it was pure margin because the napkins are pretty.

cheap. And so they would go and say, hey, restaurant, do you want some, do you want some ad-supported napkins? And the advertisers would say, yeah, we'd love to put our logo all over that bar. What is the shape of these opportunities? Why did you pick beverage? And then, you know, how has it actually been going distributing this to various places to get in the hands of consumers? Distribution has been going incredible. We just crossed the 100,000 can mark across a bunch of different channels, accelerators and incubators in partnership with entrepreneurs first, antler, tech stars, conferences and trade shows are a huge channel for us as well. And then on the consumer facing side, college campuses and things like that. The reason for beverage mainly is because

it's tangible and consumable. We like to say that this is an ad you sip, not skip, when talking advertisers. It's really one of the only formats that's actually consumed. It's It's super unique. And the reason we chose coffee, 66% of U.S. adults drink it every single day. It's an extremely popular beverage. Yeah. And it allows us to target virtually any type of demographic, regardless of what brand is on the cans. It could be RAMP or it could be Red Lobster and other customer of ours.

Sure. Their customers all drink coffee or at least two thirds of them do. So it allows us to target those people effectively and drive high return for our advertisers and brands. Yeah. What's the sweet, oh, sorry. Fellow Michigan student just texted us and, and, or former student, just texted us. Didn't graduate, but, uh, just texted us if you plan to expand into beers. Is that, uh, is that a potential category?

I have been asked that a lot. Alcohol is tough. So we're, we're sticking with coffee for now. Maybe down the line, we'll expand to beer, but we'll have to, we'll have to work through the It might be a straight shot to the original Forloko recipe. Bring it back. You guys wrap it into brand. Four loco might be the move.

I know you, on YC Demo Day, when the guy had the humanoid and you were like, can you shotgun that ramp cold brew? And then somebody was like, oh, four loco. So maybe. Maybe. These are shotgunable, though. Maybe in the future. What is the key to success as a brand partnering with you?

I go to you. I buy a bunch of cans. I mean, the brand looks great on the actual can. But then should I mail these to my customers? Should I have this at my conference? Like, how should I think about actually getting the most out of the palette when it's delivered? Do you handle logistics if I want to send it to my customers to remind them that they should be talking to their sales, to my sales reps, for example? Like, what is the right way to actually get this in the hands of potential customers?

Sure. So when it comes to distribution, if we're looking at gifting, something that Ramp does a lot of actually, there's usually third-party fulfillment partners who will handle the packing of those cans and then chipping them out to, you know, maybe a prospect or something like that. For the right distribution channel for the brand, it's dependent on a couple of factors. Some brands take the approach of, hey, this is a brand campaign or some look at it as an acquisition channel. And conferences work extremely well. We've been outside some major ones, Figma Config with Paper, went super viral on Twitter. And they basically called it the highest converting booth at the conference without a booth. Wow. Because Paper was everywhere at their direct competitors conference. And so, again, you think about putting something that's tangible in somebody's hands where traditional advertising formats don't really deliver anything to the consumer.

Billboard companies, the consumer just sees a billboard. But when you allow a brand to put something in someone's hands for free, especially something that's expensive and increasing in price, you create this reciprocity effect where a person is opting in to seeing an ad. And they're saying, okay, I'm going to take an ad. I'm going to take a free coffee as well. And it just drives higher return for the brand. Yeah. Last question for me. Talk about what it takes to work with you.

do you have hard minimums? Do you have maximum capacity right now? What's the sweet spot of a brand coming to you? Is it a thousand cans for a conference? 10,000 cans? What's a really down the line pitch for you these days? For a conference, it's primarily dependent on the size of the conference. If we're talking about Dreamforce, a brand is going to want a lot more cans. If it's a smaller conference, they'll want a lot less cans. We do have a hard minimum. specifically for our storefront, which we just launched our grand opening on Wednesday in New York City between Ryan Parking and Grand Central. It is the world's first free coffee shop. Cool. And as you can imagine, the coffee is literally free. You walk in. Add supported coffee. You ask for a cold group or open.

Yeah, what are the different brands can I enjoy free coffee from? So at our storefront, we have ramp, Novig, warp, outset, paper, and outset. And bland. Wow. You can get AI voice-supported coffee. You can get gambling-supported coffee. You can get enterprise payment-supported coffee. It's really like a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing.

It is. What I think is also really interesting, there's a negative sentiment around AI advertising, more so New York than San Francisco, of course. But people don't seem to care. And as I alluded to where you provide value to the consumer. they're like, hey, I'm opting in to get this advertisement. And yeah, it's okay if a voice AI company is saying, hey, call this phone number to learn how customer calls can help. Yeah, nobody's vandalizing these.

Any plans at a speaker to the can, the bottom of the cans that can chirp out, you know, while you're enjoying the sip, you know, you might be interested in learning that, you know, ramp customers save an average of 5% on their expenses. Probably no speaker, but we are exploring thermochromic ink, similar like a cores can, where if it's cold, it displays something different than when it warms up a little bit. I like that. I like it. I love your clarity of thought on this opportunity. Thank you. It's clearly very sharp and, yeah, I'm excited for you to scale to billions of cans annually. Thank you guys.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah, let's do it. And we have a bunch more advertisers, so let's get them all on. We got more cans. We need more cans. We have a solid amount of crossover more than you think. MongoDB.

Yeah, fantastic. Ramp, obviously. We'd love to do more. Thank you so much for coming. Great to me, Adam. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

That's our show, folks. We'll be back on Monday at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars. A lot of excitement heading into the weekend. Yeah, a lot of people. I mean, you can just, you can just, you can. You can feel the energy in the Ultradome. Okay.

People are sitting here. We're hanging out. You've got three more sleep still Monday. Yeah. People are counting it down. Counting it down. Counting it down. Have people been counting down the days to Christmas?

I feel like we missed the road to Christmas today. Pull it up. What is it? I think we're at 90 days. A nice round number. That's a huge deal. We got 90 days until Christmas. So start shopping.

Start shopping. Start planning. Start thinking about it. Yeah. And again, this is the weekend to get on it. Get on it. get your tree, get set up, and get after it. It's also only 455 days until the next Christmas.

So you can start thinking about that as well. But, you know, you want to focus on the next 90 days. We'll see you Monday, folks. See you. Goodbye.