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

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

(01:15) - BYOCompute: Bring Your Own Compute (15:31) - Pope Leo Rejects AI Consciousness (26:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (35:45) - Tesla Beats Expectations (49:20) - Paramount-Warner Bros Becomes Skydance (54:34) - Ben Affleck's White Pill (57:24) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:27:33) - Joe Gebbia discusses his work modernizing federal digital services through the National Design Studio, including transforming employee retirement from a months-long paper process into a nearly instantaneous online experience. He outlines America.gov, a centralized, AI-powered platform designed to simplify access to government information and services, reduce billions of hours of administrative burden, and establish a new standard for digital government. (01:41:02) - Molly Fowler discusses her role as a partner at Dorm Room Fund, a venture fund investing in student and alumni founders. She explains its peer-driven investment model, recently raised $50 million fund, and plans to back roughly 75–80 companies with early-stage checks typically under $1 million. (01:51:55) - Tom Dotan, a technology journalist at Vanity Fair and Newcomer, discusses his profile of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. He examines Ellison’s vast influence across AI, media, TikTok, cancer research, and hospitality, emphasizing his appetite for risk, enduring control of Oracle, and willingness to make enormous bets late in his career. (02:10:35) - Pim De, co-founder of General Intuition, discusses the company’s $220 million fundraise and its use of large-scale video game data to train AI models that control robots. He explains the technology’s potential across simulations, quadrupeds, drones, gaming companions, and interactive NPCs while offering a grounded view of machine intelligence and shifting gamer sentiment toward AI. (02:19:34) - Greg Castle discusses his journey from entrepreneur to managing partner of Anorak Ventures, an early-stage deep-tech firm whose third fund totals $35 million. He shares insights on investing in Oculus and Anduril, maintaining a small-fund strategy, and pursuing transformative opportunities in defense, manufacturing, critical materials, and AI-enabled venture research. 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 TVPN. Today is Friday, October 2nd, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultronome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. How many days? 83 days. But you already knew that. We don't even have to tell you at this point. The road for Christmas is going strong. That's right. Get ready. Lock in. Also, sign up for ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easiest corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All of in one place. Oh, we're getting Christmassy up in here. Okay. Here we go. Very Christmassy. It's Q4.

We're in the correct, we're in the correct season now, so we can get pretty Christmassy. That is right. It's pretty tricky to stay in the little... Well, enough about Christmas, John. Let's get into the news. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. Sounds great.

Yeah. So, make it less Christmassy. It's too Christmassy. It's 83 days away. This is a, this is a, this is a, no more than 20 days away before we get that, that Christmas. I'll just leave this on. Okay. Oh, just one level of Christmas.

That's right. October 7th, October 2nd. Yeah, so there was this funny moment in a dev day this week where, you know, everyone's, like, focused on the war of like Dots versus Muse versus Instinct. And there were a couple times when you were like, I want to talk about sign in with, Chat GBT, GBT, which is, like, the most, like, boring and, like, minute feature and not, very much not in, like, the drama war for the personal agent, who's going to do your shopping, who's going to book your reputation? No, I just thought it was cool for independent developer, small app builders.

It's actually, like, probably more immediately relevant to the community that was there, like the developers, right? Yeah, and you remember when, like, flashback to two years ago, people were creating these magical new product experiences with, at the best models at the time, but they were, in hindsight, pretty rudimentary. Yep. And they would build something magical, scale up really quickly, and then be like, whoa, I just got stuck with like a $30,000 API bill.

Yep. And so this is the solve for that because it allows users to bring their own compute. B.YOC. BYU. Everyone knows BYOB. Now we're in the air of BYOC. And, and yeah, like, you know, most companies, they could usually figure out a way to say, hey, like, this service is going to use a ton of compute.

So you got to jump on the pro plan immediately. You got to set up a consumption, a credit card relationship, API credit, something like that, metered billing. But it was just an extra step, an extra point of friction of you saying, like, okay, I already pay 10 bucks a month for this thing. Now I got to actually pay for inference. And this gives like a different off take. So, yeah, Peter Yang was feeling the same way that you were.

He said, I'm excited about dots, but even more excited. about sign-in with chat chitp-t feature. Letting users use the chat-jp-t plan in your website or app makes a bunch of indie apps a lot more viable. Example, I have a live language learning app that I wasn't planning to launch to users due to API costs, but letting users sign in with chat-jp-t makes this viable. Hope they roll it out to non-enterprice folks. Soon, Vignesh, who's actually running the project, said, I'm going to try and answer a bunch

of questions that people have raised about signing with chat-jipT in the next couple of days. Before that, I want to let you know why they. shipped it said and so you can go read that thread but the the the bring your own subscription stuff it sticks out because it feels like it's potentially like the beginning of a new economic structure like is this an app store where there will be a margin that accrues to open AI or is this more just like better for discovery will agents like reach for these because the sign in is available how much more smooth will this get but you know at a high level I think you described it Well, a user can sign in to an app or service.

The notion example is a good one because it's very intuitive people already pay for Notion. You can imagine all the AI features that are there. And people were probably on day one of Chat ChachapT launching, copying from Notion into ChatGPT, copying back into Notion, writing bindings. But if Notion wants to offer a whole bunch of inference opportunities and agentic features inside, then they got to go to their clients to say, hey, you're paying 10, 20, bucks a month for your seat. We also need a bunch of money for inference.

This offsets that. And so the way it works is a user signs into an app like Notion, then authorizes the app to run the OpenAI model requests against their plan without managing an API key on Notion. This means drawing from the ChatGPT allowance instead of Notion credits. And it makes a lot of sense for bigger companies that have inference bills, as you mentioned. And they've all had to grapple very quickly with like product tokenomics, which is just new economic muscle and like price elasticity curve.

They need to ride effectively. But the big thing is that it should over time allow leaner teams to offer inference hungry features with way less friction. So it's worth clarifying that the feature only brings OpenAI tokens along for the ride. It's not Open AI dollars, which is, I think, a way where this could go. But the good example is like, let's say you have like some sort of AI tokens. book publisher where you're doing a bunch of token inference to generate the text of the book. Like you say, hey, I want to go take this, you know, general story, turn it into a book,

and then print it and send me the book, right? There's two sort of costs there. One's inference. Send me the book. I'll scan it back. And then I'll turn it into a playable video game. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you can't offset the cost of printing books with Open AI tokens in any way.

Yes. But you could have the user spend their open AI credits to run the text generation side of the business. But I do think this could go further. The example that I gave was genera video. I'd like to have like a front door to AI that can handle the full billing relationship. So if I need to generate a video, I can just add that to my tab. No, and you went through this with Higgsfield, where you were using Codex to make videos. and somehow Higgsfield has like $500 of yours now and it's locked in there and it's unclear

how you can get it because you ended up buying like the wrong kind of credit or something like that. Yeah, I'm like setting up like a consumer subscription and then I also bought API credits. So I have consumer credits and API credits. And in order to use the consumer credits, I need to write a new binding in codex to use the front end as opposed to just... And that would be using computer, wouldn't that... Using computer use, which would cost you more of your...

Maybe a little bit. It's very unclear. And so all of these things are like very messy. But, and so, yeah, I mean, between computer use, MCP APIs, like, this might not even be a discussion because, like, you're very, like, we're pretty close to the workflow happening out of the box, even without direct integration. But then there's a question about will the apps like push back? But there is a world where even if you're if you're an inference provider,

you're maybe fine with not owning the front door if you're generating so much more demand because you're integrated with the big platforms. And you say, yeah, I'm actually losing the customer billing relationship. But I'm going to 10x my revenue because I'm like the model or the inference provider of choice when people go and they ask for a particular integration. And so there's always this dance with these integrations. You know, we were talking about it yesterday with the Neo Clouds versus Nvidia strategy where, okay, well, if Nvidia actually does get DGX Cloud Leptin off the ground,

and if you're on there, you're going to get so much more business and your utilization rate's going to be so much higher, but you're not going to have the leverage over the customer. It's always this like careful dance. And then ultimately, if an app store does emerge, everyone gripes over, you know, the 30. percent tax, like the Apple tax is the same thing. You could wind up there in the age of AI. But I think from a consumer perspective, like having a consolidated business really, like billing relationship would be great. Even in the world where computer use can go, like, plop down your credit card and set up an API key, it's still nicer to have like one point of billing.

And then true, like the buck stops with one model. So, okay, you want to do this? It's going to be 10 bucks. Is it cool? Yeah, it's the same reason that some people, want all the streaming services to be re-bundled. That and also why a lot of consumers are like, yeah, it's awesome when I subscribe to something on the App Store, because it's so easy to unsubscribe in the App Store. You just go to your iOS subscriptions, and you say,

look, I'm canceling that, and it can't be, why are you canceling it? Make sure you call us, all that annoying stuff that happens when you're on, like, some website. Well, you actually have to call between, you know, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., and we take a two-hour lunch in there,

and you've got to explain yourself, and listen to our pitch for why you should stick around. Apple, like, makes it one-click. Yeah, turn down the discount to stay. Exactly, exactly. Apple, like, turns all that off. And so, like, that could be this, like, complex dynamic. App Store economics are always complex.

But it might not matter because you can just go, and with computer you say, like, yeah, like set up this API key, use this credit card. It's a little hesitant still. And I don't think it's polished among any of the models. a lot of them really hesitate. They'll even say, like, don't give me your API key. Please put that in your environment.

Don't give me your credit card number. I don't want it. I don't want it accidentally leaking or anything like that. Like, even if you are being bold, the models will often be really hesitant. I remember I was trying to use computer use to send an I message. I was like, go do a bunch of stuff. I'm going to leave. I don't want you to send me a push notification.

Just text me. I have a text message open. in iMessage, the window's right there, go in that box and tell me when you're done, and then I'll get it on my phone, it'll just come from me. And it was like, and it spent so many tokens being like, I don't want to screw this up. This is high stakes. Like, it really knew that like botching an iMessage computer use thing could be like ruinous, you know, because it winds up texting.

It would be over. It would be over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be cut. And so it's interesting. The other reflection is like this whole app store concept, this whole sign in with chat

APD, bring your inference around, let's partner on distribution, let's integrate into the app, let's be the front door. Sam originally launched this three years ago at the very first Dev Day, 2023. They had a product called GPTs and there was the GPT store and everyone was like, wow, okay, I totally see the vision. And then it was like three years of like languishing and like tussling and back and forth. Yeah, and there's just been so many integrations like Walmart and Apple where people have said, okay, I want to do an integration, but it has to be really, really good and to my favor.

And then it breaks down like the Siri integration that's, you know, going away because they're migrating to Gemini is actually atrocious. Like you will ask a question. and it's like, yeah, of course it didn't work. You ask a question, you ask a basic question, and it will say, like, oh, do you want to ask Chachipti? And then you need to click a button. And then you click a button, and it gives you an answer. And if you want to go deeper, you can say open in Chachypte and then it opens it.

But Chachapti doesn't get all the context of whatever happened before. It just opens the app. And so it's like the worst possible like broken flow because like both companies were like begrudgingly working to basically and being like, look, neither of us want to work together, but the boss is signed a deal. So we got to do something here. So let's both. We got to pretend. Let's both fight it out.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I guess, like, my, you know, they're pretty enterprisey right now. Like, the integrations are pretty enterprisingy. But I'm interested in, like, your thesis of will there be, like, a flappy bird moment or, like, a small dev team that figures out, like, Hey, if we can be the victor in the tool that gets pulled off the shelf when, you know, there's 1.2 billion users probably like, you know, they'll always give that quote about like 400 million people are asking about health questions. Like there's probably like 400 million people that are asking about, you know, I don't know, some, some niche thing. And if you can be the tool that funnels and you actually use it as the top of funnel, you could see someone, we could definitely wind up talking to a founder who's, like, oh, yeah, I actually like basically figured out how to be the tool of choice.

I log in. I monetize the inference better. And I scale to 100 million ARR in like a couple months. Yeah. Which is interesting. At the same time, there's going to be a lot of companies like, like this would be like such a solution for instinct, right? But they would never do it because they're trying to actually go up against on the core feature. And so there's this weird dynamic where, you know, Noah was on Invest like the Best being like, I spend 75% of my time trying to

secure compute. I'm burning so much money. I got to raise all this money. And like the, the solution's like right there. But it's like if you take that apple, like you leave the garden, if you're you're in trouble, probably. But who knows? Anyway, yeah. So on the enterprise side, Open AI announced a partnership with Base 10, our friends over there. Oh, cool. Just just a few days ago at Dev Day. That's like a really good enterprise example because you can now basically get access to open models through your overall like Open AI. like commit, which is cool and it's native in codex. And then the other use cases that I'm thinking about are like, you know all those like generate headshot apps, right, that have been super popular.

Those are super compute intensive. And so being able to use basically get access to images 2.5 is pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're like you've built an interesting funnel. You've built an interesting harness. You've built an interesting wrapper, but your compute is scaling. really unfortunately, and you have the ability to like off take there is very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.

They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. We might have to do away with the Christmas, with the Christmas, because the stingers going under the Christmas. Wow. And he doesn't even break through the Christmas lights. know the 3D here we're working on it we're working on it we're working on it work in progress oh well well well anything else going on any sort of contentious debates and yeah and sort of Santa related true Christmas related you know uh yeah the pope is duking it out tray's saying Coogan's war on Christmas yeah what do you have against Christmas John we're in Q4 and you're asking put away the

decorations. It's kind of distracting. Do we really need them? Leave it, leave it, leave it. Yeah. Thank you. Well, the Pope chimed in on the AI debate again. He's been posting for a while. This year has been a number of discussions. And every time he writes something, it causes a bigger discussion in Silicon Valley, of course. Pope Leo said, in this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions

to safeguard our humanity. Very interesting. What did PG reply? He said, since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you'll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists because that is presumably coming. Well, what prompted this, John? Walter Isaacson chimed in. Popes have been hiring good artists for a long time. Yeah, what prompted is there's an article in the New York Times about the, the interactions between Anthropic and the Vatican. Danny summed it up. Anthropic, Claude has a soul. Pope Leo says, nah. Anthropic says, please say Claude has a soul. Leo says, nah, here's a book length explanation. Why that's not true. Anthropic says, we're pretty sure Claude has a soul.

And Pope Leo responds with this. Yeah, a lot of people are, are duke it out here. The bombshell report in the New York Times, Christopher Hale sums it up here. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olaught threatened to walk out of Pope Leo the 14th's AI encyclical launch in May because the Pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Ola's team then privately lobbied the Pope's advisors, quote, to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously. Pope Leo, the 14th, held firm for months. Anthropic has whined and dined theologians and religious scholars. under non-disclosure agreements,

hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. Okay. So people are getting worried. They're debating. Is it God or is it computer? Neil Kosla, chimes in.

The Vatican will sign, oh, I guess these are various scholars. I was like, it's pretty funny to go to the Vatican and be like, I got to talk to you about something, but we sign this NDA first. Yeah. No, I think it was religious scholars that were visiting Anthropic H.Q.

And they were like, we'll give you the full tour, but you sign an NDA. I mean, also, I would be interested in, like, how that NDA was released because, like, there's sometimes when you just go to a corporate office and, like, on your way in, they, like, well, take a picture of your ID and sign this nondisclosure agreement. Like, that's, that's, like, standard for, like, a lot of just office visits broadly. but it sounds a lot crazier when you're like, we made the Pope signed an NDA. We made God sign an NDA.

Neil Koestlid doesn't like it. He says, I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic. Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious God while running around and claiming it will end the world.

Yeah, to their credit, they're not claiming that it will end the world. They're saying that there is a real possibility. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Interesting that there's less of a, less of, less of, less of, less of a white pill there. Like, I don't know. There's a world where you're, where you're like, yeah, we're going to build God.

And like, it's going to be amazing. Like, like, P-Dume negative 1,000. Like, it's going to be even, it's going to be the best thing ever. There are no risk because it's God. It's, it's going to, it's going to. Yeah, it's the creator. Yeah, it's going to love us. Like, it's going to be so, it's going to be amazing.

it's going to save us, you know? That would follow. But there is a little bit of like cognitive dissonance that it's like, well, what kind of God is it? Is it like a devil? Well, and I think that the, I think what a lot of people should be asking themselves right now is, is Claudeforce conscious, right? Because, I mean, that is the intelligence powering the Salesforce sort of ecosystem in many ways. And so maybe at what point do you have to ask is Salesforce? if Salesforce is sort of embodied by Claude, is Salesforce conscious?

Salesforce has been godlike for decades. People understand that it's a deity for customer relationship management. That's right. Burn Hobart says, looking at the current debates about Anthropics makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness and determined which substrates can and can't support it. it thought that one was more up in the air. He's joking, of course.

I haven't found anything from someone an anthropic saying models are conscious, just that they might be now or in the future. And yeah, that was something interesting in the New York Times article. Olau really goes back and forth. He's like, I don't know. And I thought that was interesting that he was, he was not, he was advocating for, we got to talk about a guy. Basically that.

He was saying, like, I don't know. I don't have a firm position. And through like multiple reports, it's not like he was ever, like, I'm convinced of this and I'm trying to pull people towards this discussion. He was just like, yeah, this is an interesting question. Consciousness is unintuitive. Why the heck is there such a thing as the experience of being me in the first place? What's the cutoff for which things can get it when? Seems hard to be confident when everyone's operating on an end of one view.

Yeah, very odd. On the question of moral agency, we got to go back to the pigs. We got to go back to the pigs because the time honored adage is never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. But if the pigs like it, do you have a moral duty to wrestle with them?

I'm thinking about starting a nonprofit that would pay humans to wrestle with pigs. Yes, they're going to get dirty. but the pig likes it and the utility that's created by the pig enjoying the wrestling would be offset by the cost of getting dirty. So it's a net, it's a utilitarian calculus, really. And so I think this is, it could become like the new hot, you know, the new hot nonprofit cause.

Like mosquito nets, shrimp, welfare. I feel like pig wrestling. I think it's obviously sort of. Could be something that attracts billions of dollars of nonprofit donations, potentially. which in many ways, you know, if they can attract that kind of capital would end up flowing back into the tech ecosystem, right? Because many of these foundations will. I mean, potentially you could monetize it too. You could film it.

You could turn into a sport. You could maybe gamble on it even. We get some prediction markets. Who's going to, how long can you wrestle with this pig before you get money? Potentially. Minutes? Hours? We're going to find out one way or another.

And the pig's going to like it. Let's see what I can go, You have a brilliant mind, John. He's building a god of his own over a cohere. He says, it's quite disturbing that Anthropi has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them. I've been fortunate to spend time at the Vatican.

Whoa, we get it, bro. And I've always asked for advice and guidance, answered the questions asked of me and been grateful to them for their time. guidance. Yeah, that seems like a good approach. I like Hayden in this. It's insane to me. Anthropic would actively impose their viewpoint to the extent of a threatening to pull out of events that they don't precisely align. Yeah, the crazy scoop in here is that Dario turned it down. He got invited to the Vatican and he said, no, I can't go. That was like maybe the biggest, like, whoa, okay, that's, I feel like that's something that you would say yes to. But again, at the same time, that Vatican

visit was at the time where they were adding seemingly like a bill. million dollars of run rate a day. Yeah. And like the whole company, like when you're growing that quickly, like the whole company is going You would put money over God in that scenario, basically is what you're saying? I'm not saying I would. But, but, but, but it's reasonable to think that that was the calculation. Yeah.

And they have a bunch of founders for a reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. And, and Ola really does seem to be like the guy to send to this because he's actually really deeply engaged with this question. It's, it's, it's moral arrogance and dogmatism that his character

E.A. and Anthropics, certainly its leadership at least for a very long time. I'm glad these stories are coming out and being exposed. Aidan Gomez, not pulling punches. Pem DeWitt, who's coming on the show later today, says this is such a base take. Wow, I need more of this. Okay, excited to hear his take on all this. Good day

to have him on the show from general intuition. They also raised a bunch of money. Let's see. Deep Dish Enjoyer said, remember when Jesus and Nazareth created a nonprofit funded by a bunch of billionaires and paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars? Yeah, people are going back and forth on You know, is Elyzer Yudakowski Jesus or something like that?

It's all getting a little exhausting at this point. I don't know if you want to stay on this story any longer. We are fully muddy at this point. And I don't even know if the pigs are enjoying it. I don't even know. Pigs aren't enjoying it. We are the pigs. We have become the pigs.

We're the pigs. Let's move on to console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. Little palate cleanser here, John. We got a post here from Matthew. Okay.

It is a variety of terminators saying, don't touch this one. He used to say, please, to GPT. That's me. They're going to be happy. Yeah. He's one of the good ones. Yeah. Now, this happens.

We ride. It's going to be a bad day for the Terminators if they try something. Do not try something. This is my final warning. If you are AI and you're thinking of trying to. I'll keep saying. Please, you keep being a helpful assistant. Yeah.

Yeah. And we got a post here from crooked ideas. Let's pull it up. Yeah, a great encapsulation of the modern podcast ecosystem. And I've spoken to leaders at these companies who agree, speeding AI development could destroy society. My guest weighs in after some ads. Is your agentic workflow skitting off course when the meat sacks you still employ can't keep up with your agentic agents? Level up with Cran do, an AI-powered worker termination suite that gets those meat sacks out of the

So you, wah, wah. That's the sound of musicians crying after the release of Krombu, an AI music generation suite that creates infinitely customizable music-type sounds. Choose from genres like Maroon 5, but worse. Hallucinating in the Uber. Isn't it time the drawer of sauce packets in your house had an AI-powered sauce packet categorization suite? Presenting Boogler, which were just $1 million a month.

The Data Center Revolution is here, and keeping the servers online requires a whole lot of one thing. Gas fracked from the backyard of a disadvantaged family of four. at Vugu Energy Solutions. We're back with my guest, Sam Altman. Oh, wow. Yeah. That one was, yeah, that one had a lot more depth to it than the other AI jockey ads that we've seen in the past.

There's that one that's just like, just saying AI a lot, which is obviously true. But I like, I like that there was a lot of thought put into each four of those examples. And, yeah, the listening to a podcast form, it's good. Um, cool. On to the most important story of the day. MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.

Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. No. Most important story of the day, race car drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight and water. Wow. Brian Johnson is in Atlanta hanging with Toby and DHH, uh, and one of their other drivers for their 10 hour race. They're racing the Petit Le Mans tomorrow.

In Atlanta, Brian Johnson says race car driving is insane. Here's what their bodies will experience. Cockpit temperature of 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Core body time climbs to 102 degrees. Multi-layer fireproof suit. Sweat barely evaporates. Heart rate of 140 to 170 beats per minute, up to 4.2G force, up to 220 pounds on the brake pedal. fluid loss up to five kilograms or 11 pounds of body weight burning 60 to 900 calories per hour

at 2% dehydration reaction times drops. They're going to be driving in the LMP2 class. There is the GTT class, which is, you know, it's like GTT or sorry, G3 style race cars and then GTP, which is like the factory prototype racing and then LMP2 is the more like pro-am prototype class. So going to be a very fun day of

racing tomorrow. Brian says, I've personally experienced some of the above things. Core body temp of 102 degree Fahrenheit after 34 minutes in a 200 degree sauna, 3G force in my airplane. Didn't know he had an airplane. That's great.

Non-evaporative clothing, physical exertion of stomping 200 pounds. What was, what exercise do you, what are you doing, Brian? You're making me ask more questions than you're answering. Severe dehydration. So I, we got to ask, maybe all of these were at the same time. Maybe he was in a 200 degree sauna in his airplane that was while he was experiencing 3 G's in non-evaporative clothing while stomping 200 pounds and facing severe dehydration.

I like to imagine that this was all going on at once. But then he follows up and says, but never all at once inside a race car. I want to jump to a half hour straight. But a large pig is right around 200 pounds. He's struggling. It's not like the way this sounds. Stick to wrestling jumps. Anyways.

Okay. LMP2 is he has 603 horsepower. My car beats that. Should we give them an opportunity to take the blackwing for a spin? I like it. I like it. No, the nature of being a motorsports spectator is that no matter how fast the cars seem like they're going, you can't possibly even imagine what the drivers are experiencing. Like in other sports, you see someone running, sweating, sprinting.

out of breath, all these different things. In a race car, you have the suit, the helmet, they're in a cockpit, they're far away. And so even though you get some, they have cameras in the cockpit, it's just not the same. But anyways, this race is going to be going on for 10 hours tomorrow. I'm excited.

I'm excited to watch. Yeah. Well, speaking of Toby Loki over at Shopify, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business that lets you sell in seconds online, in-store on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

How many people are actually paying for this AI thing? It's only 2% of U.S. households pay for AI. I guess so. This feels low. Co-founders, Nick, says, we live in an X bubble. Only 2% of U.S. households pay for AI. 25% of households pay for Sirius XM. Have you ever subscribed to Sirius XM?

I don't, I wonder how this gets counted. Because I feel like when you... Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And then maybe it rolls over or something, but... Well, I think they might be counting. I think it might be like sold in with the car, right?

Because that's user acquisition for Sirius XM. Yeah. Yeah. And so they're thinking like maybe if they try it, they'll stick around. Yeah. And I'm sure to like, I've never activated the free Sirius XM. Yeah. And I'm sure when you activate it, you have to add a credit card.

And so then it does roll over. Yeah. So maybe you need to go a little bit. but more like, 55% pay for cloud storage across probably Google, Dropbox, box,

etc. And, or I, Cloud. And so I wonder if, does this include people who are on

X premium accounts that includes GROC, right? Or like, if you have a Google account that is on a premium subscription and got you a little

bit of Gemini, does that count in here? Like, there's a lot of bundling It's happening in Syria XM did around 8.5 billion of revenue last year, currently trading. Their market cap is around 8.5 billion. Yeah. And so, yeah, the business is generally on the way out, but relatively robust in the meantime.

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

like getting the actual upgrade. The people that are upgrading are finding ways to use the apps for work. Yeah. Even earlier, like I was always expensing an AI subscription to some business because I was like that's what I'm really using it for. There's very few people that would pay

for like a personal productivity agent. And there's just so many other ways to monetize it as we've seen. Yeah, and that's why when you look at those numbers, you have to assume that a meaningful percentage of them are showing up as consumer, but are actually like S&B, like basically S&B buyers. Agreed. Agree. Where do you want to go next?

There's some new, there's a new South Park episode that depicts a town infested with podcast obsessed billionaires. Jason over at This Week in Startups is saying, what? Did you watch it? It feels like it's made, made for him, made for all of us. I don't even know when something goes out on TV I don't usually know how to

I don't usually know how to get access to it it's funny yeah that we're learning about this from like a Forbes article Tyler can you find out if it's if it's out and if it's out if you can watch it at like 10x speed and then kind of report back in a few minutes and give us your review yeah Tesla stock jumps 5% on better than expected vehicle deliveries report. The delivery figure represented a 2% decline from a year earlier, but an

unexpected increase from the prior period. Tesla stock was down 21% for the year as of Thursday's closed, trailing all of its mega tech, mega tech peers. Okay, so I was not surprised to see this at all. I think that Tesla and, and, um, and, uh, the reason for that is purely anecdotal, purely vibes-based analysis. I ordered a Tesla like two months ago. Yeah. And just got it this week. Yeah.

It wasn't like it was sitting in lots. Yeah. And there were so many rumors of like, oh, all the cyber trucks are getting sold to SpaceX. It's the circular deal. There were pictures of like a lot that was filled with Tesla. They're not moving. And yeah. When I was when I was ordering.

Try and buy one and they'll be like, you have to wait six months. And when I was ordering mine, I was intentionally specking it to try to reduce a lead time. Like I, there's like people online talk about like if you spec it this way or you get this, this version. What is there to spec? Cyberbeast or. Okay. But basically there's like there's less demand. There's still a lot of demand for the like.

Because there's only one color, right? Yeah. There's no like you can't get deviated stitching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of, like, more minor things. Do they have a tailor-made program? They should. They should.

But here's the thing. Okay. I had the experience this week of autopilot. Yeah. It worked perfectly for, like, 50 minutes. Yeah. And then I had to intervene. Yep.

And going from the car driving itself to suddenly, I have to drive my car in traffic is the most jarring, brutal experience. because you realize how insane it is that we still all drive our cars. Like once you try it, I don't think you can go back. Yep. Especially for, and this is, I've always loved, I've always loved driving. I've never really, like, minded commutes.

They're obviously great if you can avoid them, but even going on a 20-minute drive to get an errand is generally enjoyable for me. But when it comes to the daily commute, I just don't think, Like every single day, there's some amount of people that are experiencing autopilot for the first time. Yes. And it's the most viral experience because it is, it's the first, like, technology that I've tried that actually feels like life-changing,

especially if you're in the car for like 30 minutes a day, which a lot of people are. And it's the most viral thing because it's so magical. Yeah. It feels like this thing that we should have had for a long time, but it's here now and it works. Well, it was promised a decade ago. Yeah. By a bunch of companies. Everyone was like level five by 2020.

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

And at the same time, at the same time, I can look at it from like 20 feet away and point out a bunch of issues with the build. Okay. I want to go through the good, the bad. I want to do a tier list. Okay. Let's start. The cyber truck. The cyber beast.

No, no, no. Before we get to the tier list, I just wanted to finish my thought. Please. Every other auto manufacturer that sells cars primarily for utility. is like way more in trouble than I think, than I think generally people are picking up on. Yeah. And the reason for that is when we have anybody

that's in the automotive space on the show, we ask them like, when do you think you're going to be able to get autonomous self-driving working? Yep. And they all kind of like chuckle and laugh. And you can tell it's like hard for them. Like it could be like seven years out. Yep.

And they are so. Doug Amer used the word appliance. He's like, the model three is the best appliance car. It's like, and DHH has talked about this where it's like his model Y is like the best appliance car, but then he wants something with a gas engine, a stick shift, three pedals. Like he wants something that's super engaging for driving. And then if he's not driving, he wants to be driven. And there's two separate categories now.

And it's like, if you're an automaker, which one are you in? And the thing, the thing that's having only experienced this for a few days, the thing that is, to me it's 10 times more magical to. drive have self-driving in your own car than away mo yeah um and the reason for that is like you're just when you call a car on an app you're used to not having to drive you're not like gaining back you're not gaining back time totally yeah yeah and so i think that tesa self-driving is like more like is going to is is already more viral yeah because it's you know in in the in the purchasing activity that that virality is going to drive is going to be insane so all these other automakers are in big big trouble I think that Tesla is going to surprise everyone's focused on cyber cab,

but I think the core car business is going to surprise to the upside. And I hope these other car companies are taking this as seriously as they should. Last year, or I think in Q2 of this year, actually, I talked to a guy that has a bunch of different dealerships across multiple brands. And I was like, are people coming in and saying, like, I want to get this car, but I really want self-driving? And he was saying, like, it's not really an issue yet. And I'm like, you are, I think, in for a rude awakening because I will end up telling, I will end up telling people. And as like a pretty hardcore car enthusiast, I will end up telling people, I would never buy a car a daily, a car meant for daily driving and commuting that didn't have self-driving again, period.

I just would not do it. And I'll happily buy the weekend cars and whatever and enjoy that. But 99% of car buyers are just, they're like, I'll take one car, please, and I want it to be able to do stuff for me on the weekend and fit my weekdays. And so I'm just shocked that how seemingly how little these other manufacturers have been worrying about it because I think it's almost existential. It's been slow. Anyways, tier list time. Tierless, reviewing the Tesla cyber truck, cyber beast. Let's start with the power, 850 horsepower, massive torque.

How valuable is that? Where do you put that? So I find the cyber truck, like, self-driving as in I am piloting it. The opposite of self-driving. I find the actual driving experience horrific. Okay. I find it, like, really unpleasant to drive. It feels very detached from, like, the road.

It's very, like, jerky. Okay. So the core driving experience when you're behind the wheel, when you're piloting it. Actually, F-FT. Like, I remember my Prius days. Yeah. Like, that is a good ride. Oh, it's worse than Prius. Like, bombing around in a Prius is excellent.

I put that at a tier. Okay, okay. What about the top speed towing capacity? 130 miles an hour, capable of towing 11,000 pounds. Do you think you'll ever use that? Is that a benefit? Is that good? I don't know if I'll use it.

It's certainly not why I got it, but it's nice to have a truck bed. So, but the towing capacity, where's that? C tier? It's kind of like a nice to have feature. Yeah, maybe a nice to have. Not even really a nice to have. It's like, okay. Okay. So see? See. See. See. See here. What about the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes 120 volt and 240 volt bed outlets, bid outlets, bi-directional power sharing capabilities. You can run tools. You can power your whole house with it. Mobile podcast studio. I think it's a nice, I think it's a nice feature.

Yeah. B tier. B tier. There we go. Steer by wire. Steer by wire. Very controversial. Yeah, yeah.

How is it actually been? When it's self-driving, it's amazing because you can tell the whole car is designed to not. Like, it really is, it's not just the yoke, but it's really not meant to be driven by the person. It's meant to be driven by the computer. Yes. And when you drive it, it feels horrid. But you've taken a sharp turn in a raptor. you're now, you've taken a sharp turn manually in a cyber truck, the feeling of steering by wire,

how would you rate that? I think it's, I mean, I think it's fine. It can be done well, but I don't think it's done well in the... So, C tier? C tier. C tier, but I would say, buy wire with self-driving as S-tier. It's like incredibly smooth. It's perfect.

What about the four-wheel C-tier? steering. How has the actual turning radius? The turning radius for a vehicle of that size is like is S tier. S tier. I've never Okay. It's one of one. It turns out. Having having That's important for a big vehicle. Yeah.

Got it. Having previously owned a murdered out lifted Ford Raptor it is it is remarkably better. I mean that car is like one of the most fun cars you can own and it is impossible to park. But it is tough parking and and adaptive air suspension.

Adjust the ride height automatically, offering up to 16.5 inches of clearance. How is it actually sitting in it? Is there you rumbling around or does it feel smooth? How would you rate the ride experience, the suspension specifically? I think the suspension is fine. Like it's relatively smooth. You can tell they tried to spend like as little money on that feature as possible.

But it's pretty smooth. So they landed at. But again, you have to. remember the LA roads are, it's effectively like, you know, rock-crowing. Yeah. So, so, uh, B-tier. B-tier. Okay, okay.

What about the minimalist cabin? They're calling the cabin minimalist, Jordy. Is that a, is that a pro or a con? I think the, I think the cabin's pretty nice. Okay. I'm going to go, um, A tier? Like, the materials are, are, are generally. Plasticy, right?

are C tier. Okay, materials of the cabin C tier. And there's some funny features where if you don't press the, like, you press the button to open the door, and if you do the manual pull, which you need for safety reasons, it's like, it literally pops up an alert.

It's like, you're going to damage the windowsill. Which feels like really, really funny. Because it's like, okay, you design this thing where if you've, like, again, and the whole thing you have to look at it is like, it is a computer that happens to have wheels. Yeah. And so there's, I'm sure, things with your computer where it's like, yeah, you could turn it off if you like unscrew it and do these things. Yeah.

But you should just hit like the off button. Don't like try to physically turn off the device. Okay. And then the last, I think we know where you're going to close out on this, but the self-driving itself, the capabilities of the self-driving system. S-tier. S-tier. S-tier. S-tier.

Okay. S-tier. Well, that's, George Hayes. Yeah. As a utility vehicle, fantastic. as an appliance. As an appliance. Very, very good.

Okay. Well, yeah, Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well. What about instinct? Anika Benning says, My instinct just randomly ordered her bikinis. She says she's not ready for AGI. What happened?

Is this real? She's texting her instinct agent and says, I didn't authorize this Monday swim order. Can you please cancel? And Instinct says, you're right. And that's on me. The AI touches the, like, the sheepish admission of messing up is just so funny to me still.

A checkout click went through is pay now Wednesday evening before you'd approved anything. I'm canceling it now. It's already marked shipped. So if they can't cancel, I'll set up the return and get the store credit restored. I'll tell you what they say. Cancel! And then their policy says no cancels after placing. So it needs an urgent exception request.

Email the CEO. Get ready to email the CEO. Yeah. I think, yeah, we are in the hallucination era of this stuff. Yeah, it's all going to get fixed. We're going to do weird things. They're going to mess around and stuff. But anyway, oh, wait, Skydance, Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery has a new name.

It's just Skydance? Yeah. That's exciting. So David Ellison joined X for the first post ever, right? Let's watch the video. Let's watch the video. Let's throw it on. A movie about movies.

Let's see what they got. Can you name any of the first? these movies. What's this? Do you have any idea? Whoa, he knows. Ball. Look at this. I'm not going to be able to name anything. You don't know that one? You don't know that one? Oh, Ben's showing off now. Yeah, show off, Ben. Go off. Yeah.

They don't just live on screens. So as we have big goals for Skydance, we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and willingness to take smart risks. At the same time, we'll honor what makes Paramount and Warner Brothers special giving both studios the opportunity to grow. Tell more great stories and bring those stories

even broader audiences around the world. Couldn't be more excited about what we're going to build together. Very exciting. Hmm. So is the actual app and platform going to be called Skydance? Yeah. Well, the company, I think, is going to merge into Skydance. But I'm wondering, are they going to, are they, is there possibility in the future that we can get in Skydance max?

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

Putting aside the debt load on the business, this bundle is extremely compelling. Totally. And I think, like, this is a, it's very disappointing for Netflix. I think to see how all this has come together. Like I think they obviously can both coexist

and consumers will pay for both. But this combination of assets and IP is super compelling from live to news to... Like CBS has some of the lower tier content that you can just throw on in the background, like the laundry television that Netflix has gotten so good at. CBS has that in the catalog. There's a bunch of great shows that people can just watch

It's just serialized stuff. So it's not like it's just Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight that's on there. And that's the only crown jewel, although that is a very valuable, valuable crown jewel. They got to bring Nolan back to Marvel, or not Marvel, D.C. D. Because if they can reboot the DC universe with Nolan, bring him back for Superman, put everything together, let him run free, the Dark Night trilogy extended, that would be fantastic. although I think he might be done with his video game era or his comic book era. Anyway.

The next pose I was going to pull up was deleted. Yeah, yeah, drama. There's plenty of drama in the timeline. Oh, Elon's taking shots at Delta. He says the best way to sandboxing AI is to put it on a Delta flight. It will have no chance of accessing the internet. Boom. Let me tell you about Figma.

agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Elon's also in the news because it's going back and forth as Shavon Zillis. Very dramatic, but we'll let you sort of dig into that one. We were on a United Flight, and they did have

Starlink. I think it was the first one. And pretty good. Pretty good. But I don't know. We'll see. We'll see if it actually shifts people over. John Palmer says flying on Delta is a high status move because it signals that you're already post-economic and don't have to work on the plane. I can see many open AI and anthropic employees switching to Delta after the IPOs. Tom was going off.

He fired off a bunch of Delta content. This one was even better. Not a phone in sight. People living in the moment. That's Delta. That's Delta. Wow. There's a lot of pressure.

Didn't the Delta CEO, he put out some statements saying, oh, we don't need Starlink. It's fine. you do you will need it but who knows I think it's I think it's similar to self-driving where it's like a lot of people just won't that won't be at the top of their mind a lot of people go to the dealership and they're just like I want this color car or I want a car in this price range or whatever and they're like cool and a lot of people will be like yeah I want the flight that's the cheapest or I want the flight that goes at this time and I'll just be like I'll buy whatever flight is is there and says United is a blue collar airline for knowledge workers who need to work on their laptops even when they're on the plane. When you retire, you can finally upgrade to the luxury airline Delta, where you can just relax without Wi-Fi or screens around. That's very funny.

Anyway, what else is going on? There's a mansion section we got to get to. Where's the mansion section today? Oh, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck put out some, some, there's a video of him being interviewed. We should, we should listen to this. one minute, 30 second video of Ben Afflant. In order to be a video model that's successful,

you just need a huge volume of video. Initially, it learns things like what is read, and then it learns more and more specific information. To get to the cinematic information, it's the sort of last stage. And in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I know,

as work, and I was uncomfortable with that, and I thought that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer, which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be... And so how did you create the last layer without doing all of the, you know, essentially copying of what came before it?

Because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on and you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay, just stop that... 8,6303. Now here's step 8,632. So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated a bunch of social media footage or random video online and teach them to meet cinematic standards.

Oh, so it's fine to train on ours, our content, Ben, but not on your buddies, make it make sense. I think he's got to say it's trying on everything, right? He's describing what's actually going on. what you're doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating. This is funny. Ben Affleck.

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

And I was like, that's when I knew he was like dialed in. Yeah, when he went on Joe Rogan, everyone was like, oh, wow, he's a, he knows of ball. He's been deep in this. Ben Affleck reveals that seeing open AI models made him call Maddame and warn were finished before realizing its researchers knew little about how movies are made. So anyway, what else is in the timeline? I want to find the mansion section because there were some interesting houses.

Jake Paul says Nvidia is at an all-time high. I figure building a robot every hour. In five years, a robot will fight for a world title and I'll be its promoter. That is where we're going. Billioner Peter Thiel is behind the $130 million purchase of Casa Encantada. The winning bidder of the Los Angeles estate was an LLC. And this is the circa 1930s Bell Air Estate, once prize. as one of Los Angeles's grandest homes.

It has a Wikipedia page, correct? Tyler? It does, yeah. What stuck out on the Wikipedia page? What does it take for a house to earn a Wikipedia page these days? I mean, I think it's just like very historical. Yeah, built in 1938 originally. Does it have a golf course on it? Oh, no, that's the Bel Air Country Club.

It's just next to it. But it does have putting green. So, okay, there's some features here. Let's see. We're going to do another tier list. 8.5 acres estate. 8.5 acres. Where are you putting that?

S tier. S tier. Seven bedrooms? S tier. Not too many bedrooms. Fish and guests stink after three days. So why do you need seven bedrooms? Well.

Six kids? No, I just think sometimes it's nice to have a number of guests at the same time. I think this is in the, oh, I wonder if this is seven bedrooms in the entire property. It's twice set the record for the most expensive. private home sale ever. First, 12.4 million in 1980 and again in 2000 for 94 million. Not a lot of appreciation from 2000 to today. It's been 26 years, but it's only gone up by 30%. Let's see what else is going on here. Longtime home of the late financier and telecom mogul Gary Winnick and his wife. The property was subject of a contentious foreclosure battle after Gary's death. What do you think about

living in a home where the previous owner was a financier in telecom mogul. It's a good energy to live in? Yeah, mogul is great. I mean, I obviously prefer a tycoon. Oh, sure. But I think there's a tycoon in there now. So the next owner will get to enjoy the time. Well, that's a great provenance. Yeah. Mogul, tycoon. It's on an upward trajectory of ownership. Magnate? Magnate. It could be coming next. Could be next. Gary, who found a global crossing. We talked about this. guy, yeah, well, with a promise to lay undersea fiber optic cable in the world, around the world, was once said to be LA's richest man after his death. It became clear that he was severely strapped for cash and deeply in debt. What tier is deeply in debt? Underrated?

Overrated? It's, uh, it depends on, on how you come out the other side. We've never, we've never been afraid of leverage here. Well, he didn't live to, to feel the Yeah. The unfortunate. I mean, Global Crossing, like, went down bankruptcy in the dot-com era. Yeah, yeah. So he went a little too hard.

But he got out at least a little bit. It seems like before all of that. Gary Winick donated millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Zoo. What do you think about donating to the L.A. Zoo? Do you like zoos? What tier is zoo? I got to. I mean.

Yeah, you're really wrestling with it. Oh, it's tough. Put it in a tier. Put it in a tier. It's tough because speaking for myself, I would never, I would never choose to go to the zoo. Okay. Okay. Okay. But speaking on behalf of my family, I'm probably in zoos a few times a year. Okay. So I think it's an S-tier experience for the children.

Okay. But, yeah, sounds like there's some caveats there. What about a menagerie? S-tier. S-tier, right? Yeah. It's basically a private zoo. Yeah. And menagerie is deeply underrated.

I recently discovered that there was an illegal menagerie in my town featuring zebras, hundreds of rabbits because they just multiply and multiply and multiply. People need to consider. If you're going to bend the rules, bend them around... Gold says, Jordi, rented giraffe and take it for a spin on the track. I like that. I like that. Putting zoos at racetracks where you could actually ride the animals around, that test here.

Oh, Conrad Hilton lived in this house. Interesting. Okay. Later owners. Design, architecture and ground. It does have a putting green. I know you're not a big golfer, but do you like putting green as an amenity on an eight and a half acre estate? What tier would putting green go? Why not a par three, though? Whole course or just one hole? I think you can maybe do three holes. Oh, okay. Three whole par three.

Yeah. I mean, that could be, that could be, you know, a 40-minute experience for you and your- That actually exists. Near me, there's somebody with a private par three. And so if you look at the map, they're like, oh, I never knew there was a golf course there. It's like, yeah, there's a golf course. It's not a commercial operation. But S-tier.

Okay, okay. Well, there's some other news here. Oil executives flocking to Venezuela set off a hunt for golf clubs. This is in Bloomberg. Dozens of executives teed up at the lush Caracas country club for a golf tournament on Monday, warming up for a sold-out oil and gas conference in the Venezuelan Capital this week. Days earlier, the event organizers were in a panic. We contacted every golf club and shop to find clubs.

We borrowed some sets and even bought a few to make sure we had enough. Brought a few. For ordinary Venezuelans, a rush in the city's capitals, wealthy bubble to secure golf clubs is almost an absurd problem. They've faced years of economic contraction, hyperinflation and sanctions that have impoverished the oil-rich country. The country is also recovering from twin earthquakes. Yet the conference fits with President Donald Trump's promise to restore Venezuela's former glory under an umbrella of U.S. influence. Trump, a regular golfer and owner of multiple international courses, laid down his ambition of channeling $100 billion into Venezuela's oil industry revival after U.S. forces deposed former leader Nicholas Maduro in January. Some 650 foreign and local executives, government officials, and foreign diplomats are due to attend the Venezuela International Oil and Gas Summit, starting Tuesday with over 150 more on the waiting list.

The stampede illustrates how Venezuela is captivating the hydrocarbons industry at a time. when Middle East supplies are choked by war. So everyone's trying to bring their golf clubs on this trip. I thought there were some other stories in here, but where should we go next? I'll tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data,

creating content, or automating business workflows, codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Sean Frank says, have you been sued in California for wiretapping just for using a meta pixel? Thousands of e-com brands were getting shakedown requests for nothing more than a conversion pixel. Every settlement was $10,000 to $50,000, right out of the pocket of small businesses. He says he was sued multiple times. As of today, that won't ever happen again.

I thought this was the wrong reading of the law and wanted to do something about it. My internal team worked with the e-commerce alliance. They put time, money, and resources into changing this law. I really didn't do much. but as a result of their hard work, no one will ever be sued for this ever again. The work of the e-commerce alliance backed by PostScript. Oh, that's cool. I know PostScript.

Great company. Just saved the entire e-com industry, probably $30 million a year. Huge shout out to Gina for my team for getting this done. Ridge could have just kept paying it, but that's how these things win. Ecom brands are too fractured. Everyone's too cheap. Everyone's being crabs in a bucket. And so, yeah, everyone just is like, ah, we got to settle this.

got some thing. That happens a lot. And so interesting. The other big news, Anthropics aiming to go public ahead of Thanksgiving with an IPO roadshow as soon as the week of November 9th. Okay, so more than a full month away, but still on track for Thanksgiving. And yeah, it seems like they're teeing up a number of different news and models. And there's a Fable 55 rumors.

And so there's a big question about like. Like, what will go into hyping the IPO? Do you need to discover gold in a hidden treasure? Do you need to dive to a shipwreck or whatever you need to do to make a splash? Or do you just need to make one final pelican on a bike? That should be the cover sheet of the S-1. So pelican on a bike, we did it. Larry Ellison is selling his Oceanfront Estate in Florida.

he wants $165 million for it. Tech billionaire is relisting his roughly 8.4 acre, North Palm Beach property, because he's adding to a different estate in Florida. It's about 14% more than his original asking price. He put it on the market in 2022, but he's listing it again at a higher price. He bought the 8.4 acre property.

That's here. No, for $80 million in 2021. He relisted it for $145 a year later. The move comes as Allison has been expanding. estate in Manila plan. I think that's how you pronounce that. In affluent town, just south of Palm Beach. In June, the Oracle co-founder paid about $35 million for a parcel of land next to his roughly 15-acre compound. Have you seen Ken Griffin's compound? Have you seen how many properties he's bought? It's like the entire block. He's probably bought more since I. He's been last thought.

Like, the visualization is insane. He's building the biggest compound like ever. And it, and it, it, begs the question, like, yeah, I think you do have to go golf course at that point, because there's only so many features if you're getting up into like 30 acres in a residential district, like what are you going to do at a certain point? Like, you got a pool, you got a full tennis court. There's some states that we'll have like, air strip, two tennis courts and a pickleball court. Yeah. Air strip. Well, he's actually getting some pushback on a potential helicopter pad. Yeah. Because that's, no, that's, that's why I said that. Oh, yeah, yeah, because you go to the residents, they're like, please, we don't want helicopters.

And you're like, fine. Airs strip. Full plan. I would love to understand his analysis of like the risk reward of helicopter flights for him. Yeah. Seems dangerous. But I think with the right pilot, if you get somebody who's really, really elite and you have a whole team that's servicing it, making sure that it's, you know, really dialed, getting brand new one, every year, like money's no expense.

Like, there's probably a way to get to five-nines of security. But still some risk. But there's risk and everything. And, you know, like, you're not immune to risk. Seminole Landing is located next to the Seminole Golf Club. In 2020, Robert F. Smith, a billionaire private equity executive bought a pair of houses there from Energy Drinks entrepreneur Russ Weiner for $48.19 million, which energy drink did Russ Weiner start.

Rockstar energy, that's right. His net worth is $5.4 billion. There you go. Deals of $100 million plus homes have become almost routine in neighboring Palm Beach. However, Kenny and Keneb said they have seen

50 million plus market beginning to establish itself in North Palm Beach, too. There's another company that we should dig into. Squish mellows. Have you heard of this company before? Squish mullos. It's an ultra-soft

collectible plus toy created by Kelly Toy in 2017 known for their marshmallow light texture and diverse character personalities. Have you ever heard of this brand before? No. Because

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

It's got an infinity pool. Would you look at that? F dear. No, I mean, you know, Brian Johnson would be a quick pass on this house due to the proximity to that golf course. Oh, the golf course. The golf course. Chemicals, potentially.

Yeah, just, you know, the amount of, the amount of, various products that it takes to maintain a golf course. And just being that close to it can have some pretty bad health effects. Interesting. Well, he never lived there, so he's doing fine. The company blew up on TikTok during the pandemic. Now he's betting some of that money on Los Angeles real estate. Kelly's listing is Bel Air Mansion for $38 million,

significantly more than the $26 million he paid in 2023. He said he bought the 2022 property at a relatively low price. I imagine interest rates were really low too. Originally had a listed for 47.5, trying to double his money almost, but has cut it back. And this was right before the L.A. mansion tax passed on homes priced above $5 million. So he's hoping to reap the reward by selling now that the market has stabilized. The property was designed by architect Zoltan Pali and has some. has some interesting features.

Set above the fourth green of the golf course at Bel Air Country Club, the property spans three levels. I know you don't like two level homes. Is three going to go in an even lower tier for you? Where are you put in three level houses? I mean, I don't want to be too harsh for a critic, given that this house is very well set up to take advantage of of the views of the course and the city and these kind of things. So I won't criticize it in this context, but I will criticize the pool. Okay, okay.

So the pool is F tier. Yeah. Being close to a golf course, being this close to a golf course, is that D tier or F tier? F tier. F tier, okay. Actually, I put the pool at D tier. Pool's D tier. Golf course is F tier because that's dangerous.

What about the overall aesthetic, the overall aesthetic, the, architectural style, just the vibe? It's quite a bit better than the one we are looking at yesterday that is pure, raw McMansion, generic. You know, looks like it was built in without tender love and care. This is quite a bit more brutalist material selection is, is, looks a lot better. But it's not making it to S tier. I'm going to put it, yeah, I'm going to put it at, again, it's like, do you want to feel like you're living on, like, in a, you know, a modern college campus library, you know?

That's kind of the style, the sort of architecture style in some ways. Okay. Some people are going to be pretty fired up. So your final answer? The overall aesthetic, aesthetic, the architectural design. I think it, again, it feels a little generic, but I'll put it in B tier. B tier, okay. Lightning round. You've already rated the pool. The house comes with the wine room. Where are you going on the wine room? Do we need a picture of the wine room to illustrate?

I don't think we have a picture. Look, everyone, you've got to change the name from wine room to home data center. Oh, I thought you were going to go, natural light room. That's what I'm trying to get. Yeah, well, that's another option. Just a whole room for all the different vintages of Natty Light. That's the goal. Where are you put in wine room? Home data center, A tier.

A tier, okay. Theater, we know you like a theater because it'll draw me over for movie nights. That's A tier? Correct. I got one last feature. It has a podcast studio. F tier. F tier.

What? Never podcast at home. Only podcast in your own version of the Ultradown. need to get out stretch spread your wings you can't podcast i hate i mean there's a reason we could be could be home right now could be doing the show from home right now we could there's nothing like being in here i'm wondering when the podcast studio went in because he bought this house he never lived in it i don't think he has a podcast did he think i need to add a podcast studio because that's what will add value to the property was he working it where do they rent it well you know that modern apartment buildings are

are adding this. It's a new amenity, John. Oh, yeah. They're like, well, we have a sauna, we have a pool, and we have podcast studios that you can rent by the hour. Yeah, I know. And how do you feel about that? I already said, F tier. Yes, yes.

Anyway, the price of Kelly's property could be considered an entry point for the neighborhood, Noah said. The L.A. Mansion tax did slow down the high-end market, but anything, but like anything, people have gotten accustomed to it. So good luck to whoever's picking up this Bel Air Mansion. There's one more here.

The Bali-inspired Florida home fetched $83 million who is owned by billionaire Chris Rokos. I'm not sure who this is. Rokos Capital Management. Brutal solar placement.

Oh, is that solar? I think so. What's going on here? What? Oh, on the roof. Yeah. Interesting. It doesn't quite blend in with that type of roof, right? Yeah. It actually works better if you have a more boxy, modern, brutalist style. You throw a bunch of even, yeah, flat roof would definitely hide it. But even, you know, the Tesla solar roof, something like that, there has to be a way to integrate that more where you rank in the solar panels. Well, I think solar is fantastic. But aesthetically? Absolutely brutal. So, conclusion? I'm going to go D tier for the placement. Well, F tier placement, S tier feature. S tier feature.

You like the solar. And why is that? Is that the, you like the idea that if there's a power out, did you still have some power? Or is it just like good for the environment? Nice to have cheaper electricity. A bit of both. A bit of both.

You like some solar? Cool. I like it. Yeah. And for your home data center. But I can imagine it would be, yeah. The funny thing is, if you're in Florida and there's a hurricane and your power goes out, you're probably not actually able to power your home with it because you can matter the weather. Yeah, but you could use it to charge up batteries and have some supply there.

I would blanket the grass with solar. You would do solar grass. Okay. Solar. No, just a deck of solar. What about a solar pier? He's on the beach. You could just build a pier that goes out into the ocean.

There we go. Free land, basically, just to build it up. There we go. We got to, why is, why is no one talking about Andrew McAulip going to Paradigm? Oh, yeah, that's a big one. Early, early, early friend of the show, Andrew McAulip, is joining Paradigm, new chapter, joining as an entrepreneur in residence. He's been at Varda for years now. He says Varda was a grand adventure and one, and a one of one experience I'll cherish forever.

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

My only hope for his new role is that he doesn't find the big idea right away because I want to ship a bunch of fun stuff in the meantime and little experiments. There's so many things that should be built that don't necessarily have an immediate commercial opportunity. And I hope that he builds. Is this at the paradigm office? This is a beautiful office. That ceiling is amazing. Yeah, really, really cool. Yeah.

Yeah, exciting. I'm sure we'll get a lot of different projects out of him. Very, very good. What is going on in Cerebrus land? Take him is taking shots at Cerebris. Says, if I was a Cerebris shareholder, I would be livid right now. Seriously, what the heck? Insiders dumping stocks, CFO, CFO, accounting officer,

and no info about losing GPD 6.1 ultra-fast. And so the big, the big sort of drama in Cerebris world over the last couple days has been that Cerebris is maybe powering ultra-fast mode for GPT 5.6 soul, but not ultra-fast or something. That Cerebus should comment publicly, take him, says, especially when insiders are dumping stock and they hyped that they were going to win GPT6 sole ultra-fast. But then NVIDIA was commenting like, oh, we're actually the ones that got this working. We're running it on low batch size, et cetera, et cetera. Tyler, do you have any more context on what's going on with cerebrus?

There's not been a ton of details, but, yeah, semi-analysis had a post that said, like, breaking the new ultrafast is not on Srebris. And then Nvidia had like a, you know, the little eyes emoji. They commented. Seems pretty obvious that they got it done. And, well, you know, game's not over. Good luck to Cerebris. I'm sure they'll rebuild and find a, find a, you know, a potential play there. The initial experience of Cerebris inference was very, very remarkable.

But there are obviously a lot of tradeoffs there. And so it's a, it requires a lot of, you know, back and forth in iteration. We got to talk about dot SI domains. Okay. Sue Hale says get your dot S.I domain, people. appreciate Rob at Rob at at Snag for helping us lock it down. And I'll start by saying Rob and the Snag team are some of the finest domain brokers I've ever worked with. Rob helped us get TVPN.com back in the day.

And then I'll say next that I don't think it's worth getting your S. dot, s, domain at all. I think super intelligence and trying to reber. brand it is corny and you should focus whatever energy you were going to put on getting a dot si domain on just getting your dot com. But I would do it. I would do it with, I would do with Rob. I think the whole scramble, like already dot a.

I domains are obviously inferior to dot coms in every single use case. And so using like the second tier version, the dot sI is even worse. I'm hearing sort of a pitch for like a third party candidate because of course Donald Trump came out and said we need to be S.I. Super Intelligence. The Gavin Newsom fought back and said we had to use AI and you're saying dot com. So sort of a third party, just pure commercialization. Yeah. What does com actually stand for? Commercial entity, right?

That's great. That's a good question. That's not going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah, commercial or company. Commercial or company. There we go. Yeah.

There we go. Yeah. Commercial. Yeah. Gavin Newsom, he signed to the executive order declaring artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence in California. You're welcome, America. Yeah, someone already sniped.

Yikes. Dot SI, the TBPN.S.A. Wait, really? Yeah. No way. Well, enjoy it. We're not switching. Someone's named, name and Mark says,

focus on dot com, bro. Why be a king when you can be a god? I don't get it. No, just saying like, dot com is the pinnacle. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's true. You got to, you got to just. Yeah, the main thing is you're,

anytime you're trying to use something that's not a dot com, you're going against the fact that consumers, their entire time on the internet, have been trained to understand, like very passively trained every single day, every single day, hundreds of times a day, that serious businesses have used.com, durable businesses use.com.

So when you're even going through the name, process, so many found, like picking a name where you're never going to be able to get the dot com because some large company has it. I think it's just a bad idea. And that's why I end up talking with Rob about different domains for companies in my portfolio, even oftentimes before the company is actually established. And also like the flip side of that like reinforcing hundreds of times a day, like real companies have real dot coms with like their real brand names. is they're also getting reinforced fairly frequently that the new TLD is sketchy. Like, I'm sure chat.coma is sketchy.

And, like, there's so many different, like, knockoffs of, like, whatever new TLD, whatever the hot TLD is. Positive programming constantly and negative programs. And so I'm sure the dot SI world is going to have so much spam on there that, yeah, there might be a couple companies that lean in and build real companies. And, like, there are plenty of companies that we've talked to that do have the dot AI domain. and they are real companies. Doesn't Anthropic have like Claude.A.I.

or something like that? I feel like there's been a few that have embraced it. I think they reroute to the dot com, honestly. But there are some. dot AI companies that have broken through, but still, it's a lot of slop, and then SI is going to go through the same thing when you could just get a nice.

Nice.com. Anyway, huge jobs miss. It says Zero Hedge. September non-farm payrolls came in at 29,000. expected 90,000, last revised lower to 133K. There's a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the economy. The rates are surging. So the market is up because this may be, will lead to like a rate cut potentially.

But from Bloomberg, they have 10 reasons why rates are surging. Here are the top 10 reasons why interest rates are surging. Resilient economic growth, the U.S. and the world, really, U.S. global. growth supports inflation and reduces demand for bonds. There's other things you can buy. Higher commodity prices, oil, gas, diesel, food prices are adding to inflation pressure. That's driving up rates. Interest rate hike. Central bankers are actually just raising rates directly, signaling further increases to combat inflation. Hypersaler borrowing, we've talked about this one, a bunch. AI infrastructure spending is driving a surge in corporate bond issuance, increasing consumption for investor cash.

and we will get back to that in a minute because we have Joe Gabbya with us. No, we have Molly. Oh, we have Molly. Okay. We probably have a couple more minutes. Okay. We're rescheduling Joe. We got it.

There were some technical difficulties, but we'll get him back on. Yes. As soon as possible. Okay. Let's talk about what Dr. Dad is saying. Please. With horsepower comes horse responsibility. I couldn't agree more.

We obviously have this horse here. as a constant reminder that with great horsepower, with great horsepower, with great horse responsibility. Indeed. Indeed. Let me tell you about Railway.

Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our friend Ara Karazian

saying AI spending falls in the latest ramp AI index. You strike in fear. Price cuts at the frontier, in addition to cheaper and more efficient models at standard and light levels are pushing down the cost of using AI. Open source models remain less than 5% of business spend. This decline in spend is driven almost exclusively by competition between Open AI and Anthropic. Very, very dramatic headline. And Bucco Capital comes in and says, AI spend falls for the 12th time in my chart that keeps going up and to the right is more accurate.

but a less interesting title. And of course, yeah, looking at ARA's chart, it's been going up and down quite a lot. But the trend is clear. Okay. We have been switching up our schedule, but we have Joe Gebia with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultridum

and hear about everything from his, Respect. What's going on? At the National Design Studio, Joe, thank you so much for joining the show. How are you today? Gentlemen, it's great to see you. I've been forward to this for a long time now. Yeah.

Yeah, great to have you. Caught us on the one day where neither of us is wearing a suit. Yes. Very. You guys are bringing style to Silicon Valley. It's one of the many things I appreciate about the show. Yes. And you're bringing design to Washington.

Can you get us up to speed on your role, how you actually interface with digital services, what your day-to-day looks like, what your team looks like, just sort of set the table for us. Yes, well, it was about 18 months ago. I joined Doge with a specific mission to fix a very outdated part of the government, which was how government employees retire. Yeah. It was paper-based.

It was really hard to use. So in about six months, I recruited a couple ex-air Airbnb engineers, a couple great designers. We took the whole process online. It was a huge win for the admin. It went from six months to about six seconds. to retire. And it spawned a bigger idea, which is, what if we did this government-wide?

What if we could go across every agency, working with every cabinet member to actually reform the digital experience for the entire nation? Yeah. So what I'm interested in is like there's the National Design Studio. And I think there's, there are people still that think design is just like what color, the button looks. And design is so much more than that. Like you are designing the system.

I imagine that a lot of the design work that you're doing is actually interfacing with a ton of different stakeholders, understanding why a system was built. There's the Chesterton fence analogies. Like, what does it actually take to move a project through the National Design Studio to fruition? Because I imagine it's not just, you know, a new front end. It's far more than that. You're right. The big idea was, well, you have to be.

there's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. Some you're familiar with maybe the IRS every April 15th and some long-tail websites that are more information-based. And there was a realization a couple months back earlier this year. There's no way. I mean, you spend your whole lifetime trying to go website by website to upgrade and prove to modern standards. And it became apparent and obvious at a certain point.

Well, what if we just use modern tools that are emerging in real time, vis-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. and gave people a place where instead of 29,000, what if there was just one? Yeah. What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it? Meaning that I could go search which Medicare plan is right for me or right for my grandmother or grandfather. And then right in the same site, I'd be able to enroll. And there's something very interesting here. So we built America.gov to do exactly that.

And the site is a place to get information and also it's coming soon, actionate. So the interesting thing is that because we're in the government, our LOM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the internet. So information that means it's accurate and it's up to date. It also means that coming from in the government, we can integrate into agencies, meaning that the enrollment for Medicare, we can actually connect into the Medicare database

because we're inside the government and help somebody actually effectuate that change, make that decision right in one place and not have to go back into the maze of the Medicare website. Yeah, talk more. America.gov launched right as there's so much excitement on the West Coast around personal agents and really all over the world

as people have gone from just like getting information or everyday people are going from getting information from LLMs to actually getting information and being able to take action. I imagine you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the project. You didn't need new agents to get released. But how good can this get? Because I can imagine a one homepage for interacting with your government where, again, you can learn about the services that the government provides and laws and everything like that,

and then be able to actually immediately take action and, let's say, spawn an agent that goes and deals with another agency and your agent is dealing with their agent, and then it brings you in the loop when it needs your input and things like that. I can imagine the perfect version of that product, but you're dealing with the actual realities of what it's going to actually take to roll that out. And given how hard it's been to get agents right in the enterprise and personal agents that are still very error prone, I can only imagine that it's going to be just as hard or harder for your team to do. Yeah, look, I'm sure that day will come, and it's probably closer than we all think. For now, though, we don't even have to go to that far because we're positioned inside. All these agencies have APIs that we can connect to that outside third parties are never going to have access to. So we have this advantage right now where we can just connect directly into those.

And if they don't exist, we now have an executive order to help create APIs that we need in order to do things like that improve the experience for everyday Americans. You just move. You have to change your address post office. You'll be able to do that on America.gov, no stress. You want to learn about and actually enroll in an armed service. You can do that on America.gov in a couple clicks. You lost your social security card and need to replace it. You want to know a fun fact?

We looked at the flow of the replacement of our Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper. Wow. And that's, by the way, with no errors. That's if you get it right the first time. Yeah. And so what you'll see in America.gov in the months to come, when you're logged in, it literally takes one click.

Yeah. And it ships your Social Security card. So there's more than a 10x improvement that's unfolding right now. across the nation. I don't know if you can hear it. Burmine one's taken off behind the White House here. Very cool. I don't know if you guys hear that at all.

Yeah. It's not coming through. Your team is a good system. I wish we could hear it. Can you talk, oh, can you talk us through the, can you hear us? Okay. I see the helicopter there? Oh, yeah, there it is.

Wow. There you go. Oh, it's about to land. It's so crazy. There you go. Wow, would you look at that? Landing right behind. Pretty good for an AI background.

Isn't it? It's this White House background option. It seems really pain off. Yeah. There's the humorous sort of fake quote. We don't do things because they're easy. We do them because we thought they would be easy. You don't strike me as somebody that would be super naive.

I assumed you imagine that this work would be, you know, incredibly difficult, not because, like, designing the front end would be difficult, but this sort of complex coordination. But when it comes to just making everyday interactions with, you know, the federal government easier, has, has, have some elements been, been relatively straightforward? Or has it all been a slog that, that, that makes, you know, starting a while. Y.C startup feel easy. There are elements of YC here. There's a lot of elements of Airbnb. Some would say the hardest marketplace to start is one where strangers is going to rent out their homes and other strangers. So, you know, that was definitely a lot of lessons there of

and a lot of enjoyment of taking on a really hard problem like that. Like how do you create trust between people who've never met and take that to scale? So, you know, it took about 10 years, but we pulled it off. And it's a, it's a huge problem here. There's, the government's the largest employer. It's 2.3 million employees. It's got systems that go back to the 1970s. They still are actual mainframes running important systems

in our government, our nation today. But it's 2026, guys. What are we doing? It's the United States of America. We lead in everything else. We lead culturally, economically, technologically. Let's also be a leader in the citizen experience. It doesn't have to be the way it is. It can be better.

Like, let's put in a flag and say enough is enough. I'm embarrassed, actually. As a tech guy, as Silicon Valley, as a designer, in fact, the way our nation shows had shown up digitally is no one would, no one admires it. And they should. Yeah, that's true. So that's why I'm here. How do you think about the differences between your work at Airbnb,

to now you're working the government, specifically around how you measure success. I mean, it sounds like you do think in KPIs, but maybe it's not specific click-through rates, the more minutia of when you have designed Airbnb from scratch. It was a greenfield project. So you're not starting with a mainframe, but you still understand that just going from 86 clicks down to just a few is going to be a huge improvement. how much of what you're doing is driven by the traditional software metrics versus more intuitive, sort of higher level of abstraction metrics, just like, this is a mess, and we should just reduce complexity.

And the KPI looks a little bit different than what you were doing before. I'll tell you the first difference that came to mind is when you're starting your company, your founder, Airbnb was, that was Brian Nate and I's universe. Yeah. Like we called all the shots. here it's it's president's universe you know it's different so you're working in a very different

context where you don't you know the authority that you have as founders is different obviously that was the first big change second is I'd say the way that we're measuring on America.gov ultimately will be about hours saved

it's not about the number websites produced or information on the site it certainly comes down to hours saved there's a stat published from in the government, that Americans spend 10 billion

with a be hours every year in trying to get things done in the government. That's an absurd amount of time. That's a lot of time. And the level of inefficiency that creates that is

it's over. Like we're ending it. The whole point of America at the gov is to end that. If we 10X, the improvement of getting stuff done, getting the information you need or getting the action done,

the enrollment, the application, And is that true? That's billions of hours that go back into people's lines. Yeah. And maybe also back into the GDP. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thank you for everything you're doing. And thanks for coming on and breaking it down for us. Last question. Please. Do you think in another life, the president would have been a product guy? Or is he more of like visionary? But, you know, does he have opinions on like button colors and things like that? Or is he more higher level, like, just get it done, Joe.

I trust you. Well, thankfully, guys, we have a president who cares about this stuff. He's a hospitality guy, remember? Oh, true. And so he cares about the experience that our country has when it comes to these things. And so you think of America as a concierge into the government. He loves that. He's a builder.

He's a fixer. And the credit goes to him for supporting this effort. Final, final question. And I know wherever. But what can we do about state government? Do you think there's learnings that can be passed down to them as their shared infrastructure that could be basically owned and operated by the state but effectively code that can be passed to them? Is it possible to open source this stuff for the states? Because I think like if they're spending 10 billion hours with the federal government, they're spending, you know, probably an equal amount of time locally.

You have to imagine the states that have already reached out about that. Sure. There's other countries that have already reached out about this. just in the last three days saying, you know, how do we bring this to our country? I won't say their names yet, but multiple countries that reached out asking how do we bring this here. So states have already reached out other nations. I think if we can do this right, when we do this right, which is phase one, actually just information. Phase two is actually that information of the next couple months.

We'll have set a new standard for the citizen experience to inspire states and other countries alike. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to catch up. Thanks for the work. to come and chat with us. Have a great rest of your Friday. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We're running about 10 minutes behind, but we are going to stick back on track with Molly Fowler from the Dorm Room Fund. The founder, Molly.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Sorry, we're running late. Hey, guys. All good. That was actually really interesting to listen to. I used to work in government. So, and we, for the city of L.A.

And we did an overhaul of the 3-1-1 website. And so to have somebody like Joe, who's like a product guy doing this, is ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's very exciting to see it roll out. Anyway, first time of the show. Give us an introduction.

Yeah. Thank you for having you. So excited to chat because so many, so many friends of the show that are, like, got there, that we know have got their start with dorm room fun. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems to have these amazing, like, ripple effects. Totally.

And, yeah, very, very excited to get the update. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And I know you guys are big fans with Ben Horwitz and his magical anti-AI tool. So a recent dorm room funder we're very proud of. And I know you guys are homies of Will Manitas, who I've been, I promised to encourage you guys to know that he's closer to 22 than he is to 40. So important details. Contrary. very contrarian but i like all different viewpoints that's great yeah that's one one data point it's a bold stance

you don't hear many people coming down on that side of the argument but we encourage free and open debate here so yeah there you have your opinion and i respect it there there there may have may not have been some um purchasing of some booze by some older folks for for will before perhaps he could do that legally so yeah yeah uh-oh well when you have a fake idea that says you're 10 years younger It doesn't work there liquor store So This minute of TVPN is the lowest

Tam It's very entertaining for like For like 10 people Well let's spice it up with a gong smash You raised some money How big is the new fun? Yeah so we just raised 50 million bucks We're really excited

Thank you sir Let's get the replay On that That was a great hit Gong smash Thank you. With authority. Okay, so reintroduce anybody that doesn't know what you guys do is got to be living under a data center somewhere.

But introduce the fund and the platform and the strategy and then, yeah, maybe talk about some. Yeah, no doubt. So, so Dormer Fund was founded in 2012 as part of first round capital. I cannot take credit for this genius idea. It was actually Josh Koppelman, founder of first round. But long story short is that when you think about. about places where unfair advantage accrues to builders and to tech founders, it's pretty hard to compete with universities, right? I mean, if you think about it, they're kind of like the

OG ultimate hacker house. And so the question arose in 2012 to Josh, which was like, how can we, you know, the cloud computer's new. We know it's going to get way easier to start companies. You can spin up an instance on AWS in your underpants instead of buying, like, you know, rack space. And so he was like, how do we find out who's great on campus and find them early ahead of sort of going to the classic like, you know, accelerators or pitch competitions or that sort of thing. And so had the insight that students themselves, you know, these incredibly connected

super smart humans, are going to know who's legit and who's kind of dinking around before they go back to their consulting job when they finish business school. And so that's how we got started. And the whole idea was, you know, scouting was new still. It was really something that seasoned founders were doing. And so the idea was let's give these new folks some capital and some training and some guidance on what good looks like and see if they can spot the best stuff first because they've got all this social capital and knowledge about who's good and who isn't. And so that's how we got started and started in Philly group. to four cities across the U.S.

Inside of first round capital, we had three funds with first round. And then come 2021, we realized that there was this huge opportunity for us because the model was working. We were backing incredible founders before all the big boys. And we had this opportunity to, you know,

increase the amount of capital. We could give our founders to give them more help. And at a time when, you know, things were getting a bit more sophisticated on campus So we spun out of first round capital, raised our own fund in 2021 with first round as LPs. And I've had a huge run since then. We were lucky enough to not only continue to invest in founders that are building on university campuses.

So we're talking about college, MBA, PhD, but also the alumni of the dorm room fund community. Because as you guys can imagine, those 12, 15 students that are on the team for two years while they're in school, when they go out to build or invest, they become absolute superstars. And so that's been a source of a lot of really amazing opportunities for us as a community. Do you have any data on like entry prices? Because it feels like you might be the kind of like the final early stage fund that can actually reliably get in like sub 10 million potentially because you're not like even even you know, there's got to be founders today on college campuses that are compelling enough that they could go. raise, you know, a full seat around if they're planning.

No, if you're, if you're in college and you do 50K on 500K, you can build a business for like a full year. Like that's a lot of money in college world. Yeah. And so you guys, I'm sure, like trying to actively avoid not being predatory. And that's on the, that's the job of the individual investors. But if somebody's going to give good pricing to somebody, it would be one of their peers that then opens up this that you guys have?

Yeah, I mean, I think, so I think a couple things are happening. One is that, you know, every time there's one of these big technology changes like we're seeing, obviously, today in the last couple of years, it really has the effect of leveling the playing field for first-time builders, right? So, and the other thing that it does is that it drops the price of how much it costs to really start a software business. And so, you know, we're in this really interesting era where, you know, Dordy, you're right, there's a ton more capital on campus than used to be.

You know, when we started doing this back in the old days, everybody thought we were insane. Now everybody's like, oh, shit, I got to get my own campus program going. And so great founders can raise really quickly. I think what is different about today's market and I think puts dorm room fund in a really strong position is that founders are increasingly dilution sensitive, right? And so there are a lot of these legacy solutions that look like 7, 10, 12% dilution with the first big check. And I think founders are quickly realizing that, you know, to John's point, you can build really

fast, really cheap. And so the place where DRF is sliding in is being this sort of almost like the replacement for an F&F round, like a friends and family, and recognizing that like not everybody has a bunch of like rich aunties and uncles who can back them up, right? And so Dormor Fund can be that first infusion of capital to get them just to the point where they get that magic moment of like sparkles of product markets. fit. And then we can help them go out with our giant community and help them raise an even more kick-ass institutional round. Yeah. I remember back when I was in college, like the concept

of a of a friends and family round was so absurd to me because I was like friends and family that are going to like individually invest like the same amount of money as a car. Yeah. No way. It's like, hey, instead of buying a new car, why don't you invest in my idea? like a wild swing at my idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, yeah, that's such an unlock too.

It's also, yeah, there's a lot of reasons that it can make more sense to do that. As much as you want to give the people in your world access to what you're working on, sometimes it's better to just work with something more institutional. Yeah.

Well, and I think there's also plenty of space for, I mean, there's been a lot of examples where dorm room fun's been the first institutional check for a founder, right? And we might catalyze around where they bring in a few friends and family alongside us, right? So I don't think it's an either or, but I think what it is is recognizing that, like, you don't necessarily have to go to the traditional accelerator programs or something like that as you're just getting started and that there's a more capital-efficient way to do it, I think, in the early days. What is last question for now? What does the 50 million mean?

How do you think about like allocating it across different students, not, you know, on the investment team, but then also founders, things like that? Yeah, definitely. So we, our check size is, you know, usually sub-million for the first time around. We're probably going to end up investing in, I guess, probably like 75 or 80 companies over the next, you know, in the sort of three-year period. And the way we think about spreading that around is, one, the student opportunities that are sourced to us, right? So we have regional teams all across the U.S. They cover all the top entrepreneurial ecosystems. And so each of those four teams will be deploying capital over the next two years.

We've already been deploying out of fund two since about July of last year. We also then have the bucket of Dormer Fund alumni, right? So if you've been part of the DRF crew, like Ben Horwitz, like some others, no matter when you build, you're eligible for a dormant fun check. And those have been superstar hitters for us. So that's how we got into, you know, we're lucky enough to get into Cursor. We got into Dandy really early because Tony and, thank you. Tony and Mike were both on the team when they were in undergrad. And so, you know, that's a really big win for us.

And then, you know, we're lucky to have been able to get some really fantastic institutional partners with us in terms of LPs. And so now we're in a really great position to not just help our founders with that first amount of capital, but actually be along for the ride a little bit longer. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming out of a shop. And great to finally meet. Thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Molly.

Goodbye. Have a great weekend. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. We want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. It's time. Tom Do Tom. The cat is in the bag. And the bag is in the river.

We got the former host of Dead Cat. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Tom? I love the reference. I'm glad that you're still keeping the memory of Dead Cat alive. It was such a fantastic show. You guys got to bring it back. I mean, I know it's like,

to me, that was like, like, there's not a lot of hardcore podcasting that goes on. Like when I was watching Matthew Bellany on the town with Ari Amani. you know, and I was like, this is hardcore podcasting. This is people like kind of arguing and bickering, saying what they actually, saying what they actually think. And I have some good memories of Dead Cat in like 2021, that era where people would actually

stay what they, they really thought. Yeah. No, I'm trying to think if am I the Ari or am I the Bellany in that situation with Eric's there. I don't know. Well, it's just more like you're listening to that and you're like, wow, this actually feels like you're just listening into a conversation. Yeah, it was inside baseball. The Bellany Emmanuel thing doesn't match because, like, I feel like all the Deadcat hosts were like on the same lens.

Like they were all like real journalists in tech. But the fact that it was called Deadcat and it's like this obscure reference that you have to explain to like everyone who joins is, uh, was like, everybody has Dead Cat bounce. They would think it was a reference to that, which is a good one, but it wasn't it. But, you know, Eric and Katie Benner and I were all like the first journalist at the information. So Jessica hires us, like right when the place launches. And so there's a brief period of time where we are all crunched into this very small office space where Amir Afradi, also early player, would burn his toast every day. And we would kind of deal with the toxic fumes with that.

So from that environment birthed a podcast that you guys remember. I do. Yeah, that's great. So, yeah, this Ellison profile, it could be turned into a serialized podcast. It's obviously a profile available at Vanity Fair. But what got you... With AI, it could be turned into a playable browser-based game. Yes, perhaps.

I don't know what that even means. What got you interested in Ellison? Because we read an older Vanity Fair profile about Ellison that was fascinating, where it shows that he's like dog fighting with David Ellison, when David's younger and they're like literally flying planes at each other. Fascinating character. Obviously, at the center of the AI, build out, but not at the White House dinner, a little bit more behind the scenes. Why'd you settle on him for the profile?

Yeah. That profile that you read, the Vanity Fair one was that you remember, was that the 97 one that Brian Burrow wrote? Yep. Such a good thing. Yeah. I talked to Brian actually while I was doing the story because I kind of wanted his blessing. And this is the side point. He told me, I have no memory of doing that story. I have no, it is lost in time to him. But it was an amazing piece. I recommend everyone go out and read it because Brian got access, you know? Like he was sitting next to Larry at the Bulls game and watching him with his then wife and fascinating. Steve Jobs is in it.

It's a great piece. But look for me, it was like, why not? You know, like someone had to do it. The guy is everywhere. He's been around for generations for decades. I mean, really of that first vintage of Silicon Valley Titans. And the last guy who's in the game, you know, Steve Jobs has passed. Bill Gates is kind of sort of in it, but he's also more of like a grandfather-like figure.

and also kind of tainted because of the Epstein stuff. And Larry is sort of the last one. He still really runs Oracle. And they're in the midst of, like you said, so many things between AI and the crazy bet that they're making to the data centers. They own 15% of TikTok and how that came to pass was an incredible journey. And then everything that he's doing with David, just today they finalized the acquisition of Warner Brothers and Skydance is now.

I don't have this in front of it, I assume, the largest studio. in Hollywood. And Larry is, you know, he and David have 77% voting control over this thing. And so, you know, the guy's like in the last chapter of his life or the latest chapter of his life and more active and more present than ever. And the funny thing is he's also not available. He's not present. He's not someone that you see at the White House or in the office.

And so, you know, all of that is just like as a reporter, you're like, what's going on? Yeah, that seems like a shift because obviously he participated in the last Vanity Fair profile. but in the 90s and he was, I think he went on Oprah or something. There's a vignette about that where like his person, like people were so obsessed with him like, would be suitors effectively would call Oracle headquarters and try and ask him out on a date,

which is a wild thing. And now he's like, he, he, like, I remember the day very, very early in building the show where he followed TBPN and like Q, like within a quarter of starting.

And to me, To me, that was wild, too, because as somebody who appears to be, like, outside, playing outside of the Matrix of the tech, you know, he's very, like you're saying, he's in the industry, but he's not, like, doing the comms tours and doing media and all these things, like, able to be, like, a very much a live player, but behind the scenes, it was notable. I was like, he's on X, you know? Do you guys, do you guys tweet that out? You know, he's not on X anymore. I think he closed that in cast, I don't. The whole like a big tech monitor tweet, like the automated account like posted it basically. Yeah. And so like, you see it there. Fascinating. What was interesting is like for the last year, I've been mapping the Ellison strategy as like a more of a barbell strategy.

Like you're building the data factory, the data centers, the chips, the, the, the, potentially like the AI slop. But then you're also building Hollywood and TikTok and like the legacy IP. And we see this with a number of investors where, you know, Josh Kushner is an investor in opening eye, but also buying a sports team, right? And these two things are like at the opposite ends of the continuum for like high tech, low tech. You center on a different analogy, not a barbell, but tentacles of an octopus. Can you tell me about that and like what, like what actually does that mean? And then he's into this metaphor himself, right? Right.

Right. I mean, that was kind of, you know, it is sort of a, a well. well-known trope of what it means to have power everywhere. As you have your tentacles, it's just a saying. But with Larry, I mean, he's been taking that seriously for as long as he's been in business. You know, as I list out in the story, he's got multiple holding companies that are octopus themes. So between, you know, octopus corp, there's cephalod. Sepulod corp, there's Tenticle Corp.

There's Taco Ventures and Taco is the Japanese word for octopus. And as I also wrote in the story, when he first moves out to California, you know, I write after he drops out of college and he's sitting with his buddy and they're looking out over the city and talking about the buildings that they're going to own, he has a vision of a company called Universal Octopus Corp or something like that. Anyway, so this idea of having, you know, your arms over multiple parts of the world that an industry is very much appeals to him. Yeah.

And, you know, that is very instructive to his ambition. Like he's someone who never stopped. Like Oracle is one of the great stories of tech, right? It's this company that gets in at the ground level of Silicon Valley with Steve jobs and all these guys. And he has this very focused image of the database and the relational database. And it's not, you know, sexy in the way that Apple was consumer and stylish. And Bill Gates sort of, you know, this idea of workplace software. Oracle is really the mechanics, the plumbing.

But it's a great business. And it's still around to this day. And it's like people are still using the Oracle database and he's still running it. And he maintained his ownership in Oracle so remarkable. so remarkably when there are other companies that I put in that same category where there were multiple founders, things got split up, maybe the company got taken private, went public again, and like the founder winds up with like a couple percent. Larry was really able to continue reinvesting, buying stock at key moments, like maintaining that economic pool. So then when the AI

moment comes and it booms, like he's still in the, that really tight club of like truly richest men in the world. And not only does he maintain control, he grows control. Yes. Like, its stock was basically flat, went sideways for decades as,

you know, the database would spin off cash, but he weren't really growing in it anything else. And during this period, he accumulates more and more control to a point where he owns 40% of the company, which is unheard of for a company of that size, right?

I mean, the reason he's so rich is because he owns so much of this one company. And, like, I talked to some analysts for it. Oracle is basically considered by most traders like a public private company. Sure. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the flow is relatively small, and Larry is totally in control, and you just sort of accept it. That's, that's part of the game. That's part of the bargain.

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

It can happen sort of slowly. I have one more question on this. Elizabeth Holmes, Theronos, there's a new movie coming out. What did you learn about the motivations there? What's going on? And do you have any predictions for what's going to happen in the movie because all of the

critics are saying like it's the most unexpected thing ever and I feel like the story of Theranos has been told so many times I can't imagine what might actually happen so I want your take I've kept myself spoiler free I know there are some reviews out there that say exactly what goes on in the movie so I can't claim

any knowledge there yeah I think the variety or someone like that put out a review that really piss people off because they walked you through the whole thing but I mean as far as Allison goes because he you know he's part of the story you know he he invests in Theranos through multiple vehicles, through Taco, through other, probably some of the Octopi companies too. And, you know, credit to him, he still believes in her, you know, long after

she ends up getting, you know, this is in the story, but like he is, as some sources told me, smitten with her. He really thought she was the greatest and defended her to this day, said he was a genius, is misunderstood. And, you know, part of the, the, Alison's story now is that he's also spending, probably most of his investments are going into cancer research. which, you know, maybe we can talk about. But, you know, the idea of using, you know, tech dollars to fund cancer research and novel medical treatments for cancer, you could argue, came from Elizabeth and, like, a shared interest there. Yeah. So they're deeply connected. And just one kind of funny point about it. Yeah, I don't know if you guys watched the dropout. Now, what was the name of the, the Phernos series on Blue?

The Dropout, right? So Larry has a scene. I mean, say, say, free. It's honestly, of the tech shows of that area, that's probably the best. one. But, you know, there's a scene of Larry in the show where, you know, they're on one of, they're on a yacht and he's telling her, can I swear on TPPN? We don't swear, actually. Okay, all right. Get the, get the freaking money. Yeah, I'll, I'll try and thank you. Nasty, nothing. I missed it. I missed. Well, you guys can look up the clip, but, but he's in it and he's like, get the effing money. And, um, and that scene definitely never happened, mostly because they show him drinking, which he does not do. He's a, he's a teetotaler.

So, yeah, yeah, fascinating. How, uh, he eats Calamari because he loves the octopus. Does he also enjoy dining on octopus? You know, I don't, I wish the better reporter would have found that out. I do know that he eats the same breakfast almost every day. And probably if I worked at the New York Times, I would have written that, that particular meal. Did you stay at, uh, any of the sensei properties to try to immerse yourself in his, his world? I have been to the nine three times, uh, now.

there you go, which I feel like a lot. I've never stayed at the Sensei properties. So I first started covering Larry when I was at the Wall Street Journal. I did a story about Sensei Farms, which is this hydroponic. Yeah, I read that story. Thank you. Yeah. It was like this kind of boomdog.

Didn't we read that on the show like within the first? On the show? Oh, sorry. In the first. It was probably within the first month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's this crazy boondoggle of, you know, he wanted to reinvent, you know, indoor fighter aeroponic farming and create the Tesla of agriculture. And look, it's still around. You can buy their salads in Hawaii. But anyway, so for that, I went to Lanai. I went for two days. I met a lot of the people there. And then I went back again for this story.

I have been inside, Sensei. I have walked the grounds of the wellness retreat, which has this incredible art installation, all of Larry's art. There's like Damien Hearst and Jeff Koontz and stuff like that. I have not gotten Vanity Fair or the Wall Street Journal, ever pay for a night at the four seasons. I think you need a month at the four seasons to get to the bottom of this thing, personally. We'll put a note.

I mean, Rogers is out, but the new CEO, we'll say. I think it's important. I will say that I haven't been to Sensei, but I've been to the one in Palm Springs, Palm Springs. And that property is amazing because it's called Sensei Porcupine Creek. And it's completely, like you, the whole, it's a wonderful place, but for me as somebody who's very commercially minded, it's hard to sort of wrestle with the thought that it must be losing so much money. Just because I think there's like 16 rooms, but it's these massive grounds and there's a nobu and this golf course that sits empty most of the time. And the staff's amazing. It's an amazing experience.

I highly recommend it. but it is it is just wild because you're sitting there and be like every day they're just like waking up and we're losing another probably you know however much money what what the the last question I had is um yeah how like talk about his relationship with risk and and willing to like make these sort of all in bets at different moments throughout his career like do you think he's is he getting more risk on like you know with all last year with all of the sort of pushing the chips in on Oracle with AI, you know, felt significant, but at the time, you know, and still unclear, like, whether that'll be the right decision. But I think a lot of people like to chatter and try to evaluate the decision when they have literally like not even one percent of the context that he has. Yeah. And then with Paramount and Warner Bros. others as well. You know,

when somebody has like reinvented and executed well for that many decades, like you kind of need to default to like, hey, maybe he knows what he's doing. Yeah, I mean, he loves big swing

bets. That's just a core part of his like reputation and strategy as a business person is he will do it. Yeah, exactly. Oracle, like, you know, it almost goes bankrupt in the 90s because of an accounting scandal. I wouldn't necessarily call it a big swing bet. Exactly, Borrett.

He lives on the edge. And he's totally fine to kind of go there because he has so much control. And like one of the fascinating parts of the Oracle AI story to me is that Saffer Katz, who is a fascinating figure, I did not have enough fine in the story to kind of dive into her. But she's in the middle of obviously Oracle, but also his relationship with Israel. super smart, conservative executive, she does not love the AI bet. She does not love infrastructure. She is a huge fan of the high margin software business.

And I think it's very telling that when Oracle goes all in on AI, basically on OpenAI, that's the client that is making that full bet work. It's the fact they're building data centers for Sam. Software ends up stepping down in the middle of that. And you've entered this new era where they are essentially a NeoCloud. and Larry's on board with that. He's a technologist.

And this is, look, when it, when it was working, the stock, he was the richest man in the world. Yeah. You know, like, it was going crazy. Yeah, that crazy background. RPO day. I remember it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, 317 billion.

You know, the next day, you know, the Wall Street Journal, former, former place of work, you know, reveals that it's all open AI, basically. And then the debt starts being a terrifying reality for people, whether, like, you know, our cash flow is just turned negative. Like, this is terrifying. that's just built in the Larry's DNA in a lot of ways. He's fine with that. Not everyone is but the funny thing is with the paramount stuff like, you know,

that's all built on Oracle stock. His ability to finance these multi-billion dollar media consolidations are at least to some degree margin loans on or loans on his Oracle holdings. It's very at least collateral. We know that because he had to do a $40 billion

backstop to make the Warner Brothers deal happen. And so it's like the guy, it's weird to think about in this context, but like the guy is living on the edge. You know, it's like you're worth $200 billion, but like it's very risky, you know, that the banks are selling off debt, you know, for the different data centers at like 90 cents to the dollar. Like no one knows how it's going to play out. But I think, you know, Larry at 82 years old, he loves this shit. The full cent octopus.

Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. When you've owned, you know, racing teams and sailing teams and you've dog. Yeah, we've got dogfighting. How do you get the same? the rush without a little leverage. Yeah.

Well, we'll dig into it next time. We'd love to have you back on the show, Tom. Yeah, this was fantastic. Always a great time. And excited for the viewers to dig in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go read the full piece as subscribed to Vanity Fair. Obviously, we love them over there.

Yeah, and newcomer. I'm another employer. That's right. Go, go read Eric and Newcomer and all of our stuff. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Great to hang, Tom. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We've been keeping him waiting. No longer. We got Pim DeWitt from general intuition. Co-founder and C-R-E is.

Tim, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. It's back. Well, thanks, guys. Give us the news. You raised some money? How much did you raise? You raised $220 million at a $6 million.

Fantastic. Let's get the replay going. Let's get that replay. Go and let's see that gong. Boom. Congratulations. With authority, powerful hit John for powerful rays. What unlocked this new capital?

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

very cool talk about talk about the data mode I know we I know we've talked about it probably a couple times now but for anyone tuning in for the first time talk about how and why you guys are in a position to do this better than most. Yeah, so we built the largest video game recorder in the world. And so we get a lot of data on how people control embodiments inside video games. So when you're playing a video game, you're essentially just transferring your perception to the screen and then using the controls to control whatever character you have on the screen many times in first person view, just like when you're on a robot.

And so because robots also ship with game controllers, we can map those actions. And then largely it becomes just a. environment transfer problem where the pixels are different, but the inputs are the same. And so we can pre-just like transformers or LLMs are pre-trained on predicting the next text token from the internet, we can pre-trained on the three billion videos that people capture and upload to metal every year, the game recorder, to go from frames to actions. And so LLMs go text to text, we go frames to actions. And then we can scale that into extremely general models that can control every robot that ships,

with the game controller, which is the majority of robots right now. Give us your overview of various robotics categories. Where are you most excited about in the short term? Obviously, in the more, let's say in the next year, it's all about just working with these companies around like testing and proving out different use cases. But what categories are you most bullish on? Because I think for general intuition, I think it's probably going to be quite important to hit like some of these big inflection points when some of these use cases

really start taking off in the way that we've seen other players and infrastructure providers hit like the inflection point with like personal agents for example or browser automation or these other use cases our bet is that that influx that inflection point actually sits largely in simulation first and that most the companies betting on physical robotics only are going to miss an inflection point because every robotics lab goes every robotics manufacturer every company goes through sort of testing their robots and simulation before they transfer them over to the real world. So this year, we've been focusing a lot on scaling with customers and simulation.

Next year, a lot of it will be on transferring over to the physical world. Where we are focused specifically at the moment is quadru pets, drones. And I like stable platforms, right? Humanoids are quite unstable still. Their supply chains haven't rammed quite as much. But you can't control them using a game controller. And so if your robot ships with a game controller and has, a front face and camera, then we can likely work well together and the models will transfer

extremely well. Very cool. God mode. In video games, it gives you unlimited health, but recently AI researchers have been talking about a different kind of God mode, imbueing AI models with God-like meaning. What is your take on the models that you're creating? Will they be moral agents? Will they be have consciousness?

How have you grappled with the question of is this God in a box or is it a machine intelligence? It's a machine intelligence. I see no reason to believe otherwise. I think our are processes in the brain are chemical processes. There's absolutely no reason at the moment to believe these machines are conscious. I think the entire debate is honestly somewhat silly. I, right? a lot more things would have to be proven to draw any equivalence there.

And I also think that for us, I think the goal is just studying these systems, understanding what they do well and not well, and then going from there. I think, you know, I tried to stay away from a lot of that cultish behavior and just stay grounded. Yeah. Talk about sentiment, AI sentiment among gamers, because anytime we've had somebody in the gaming world, sort of legacy gaming world on the show and you bring up AI, they go, well, you know, change the topic. You know, no one wants to be caught saying anything positive about it.

But over the last couple weeks, I feel like people are suddenly creating a bunch of crazy experiences, even home hackers porting games from here to there. And it feels like we could be at a moment where people are like, hey, maybe this thing's actually pretty cool and a useful tool. Could be looking at the future Ben Affleck of gaming. Oh, that's right. Potentially. I thought that club of Ben Affleck explaining freezing weights and it was so incredible. That made my day, honestly, seeing him explain that.

Okay, so on gamers, why are gamers frustrated with AI or historically happen? Because it really hadn't done much good for them, right? It made their GPU prices go up, a lot of cap, right? There was a bunch of games that were delayed from studios, and a lot of their investment, and a lot of these large companies was going towards A&A. Meanwhile, all the developers were being laid off at the game studios. So it's obvious why gamers were frustrated. And I think the reason was we just hadn't done much for them.

And I think now we're starting to see the early science of that changing. So modding, obviously, becoming a ton easier. I think in our case, we'll see different types of games being possible on top of these models and different types of interaction patterns. And it just, like, AI just hadn't done anything for them. And I think we're now turning the corner. I do think it's starting to show and we just need to continue creating better experiences for gamers

and bring them along in the journey as opposed to the other way around. Very cool. Awesome. Well said. Congratulations. An amazing progress. Yeah, really amazing progress.

I love our favorite part of doing these interviews of seeing snapshots of companies as they make progress between rounds. I have one more question about, you know, like, it's not necessarily the anthropomorphization, but just this idea that like some people like just hanging out and chatting with the LLMs. And you have metal and people are gaming and uploading clips. And I'm wondering if you think that there's a, that there will be a real market for a, an AI companion that you play video games with. Like you queue in to Fortnite. You want your squad to be full. And so you populate that with something that's roughly at the same level as you, but can also chat and do callouts and has a certain flavor and texture and humor to it.

Do you think that that will be something that will see or is the structure of the video game industry such that that will just get banned? Yeah, I think for sure we'll see this because when you're launching video games, your largest problem is usually player liquidity, which largely drives for attention. And so I think if you're a game developer, you want these type of experiences. And I think you want your environments to be really interactive and rich. And so I think naturally the economics of the industry will push towards this being a thing. I think there's a debate of to the extent that you should label that, right? You should let people know that they're interacting with AI systems. But I do think it will be a thing.

And I think, you know, there will be lots of good things that come from it. And there will be bad things that come from it. And we just have to study those and evaluate them as they come. Yeah. But it would just be like a really fun NPC as opposed to just like the generic bot there and counterfeit. Exactly. Exactly. I think a lot of it will start, you know, the best things start out looking like a toy. And I think the same thing will be true here.

Yeah. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to hang, Pim. We'll talk to you, Sam. We'll talk to you, Sam. Hi. Have a good one. Cheers.

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

Oh, look at that replay. Wow. It's actually a gift for you guys. Oh, really? I felt like I was coming into your house. I almost feel like we don't. It's crazy. Yeah, we have maybe one in the other room, but not in this room.

Thank you so much. Well, I came in and I wasn't sure what the representation was going to be. and then I'm hit with that giant American flag. Oh, yeah. No, but it's not in this room. It's not in this room. It needs to be right here. So, for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself in the company.

Sure. Greg Castle, managing partner of Anorike Ventures. We are a early stage deep tech firm. Been around since 2017. Just closed our third fund, which is a $35 million fund. A capital allocator. Did you always know you wanted to be a capital? Is that what you dreamed of being as a child?

Certainly not. I think... What do you want to be when you grew up? I think I was always deeply interested in kind of niche subjects and different kind of subcultures, whether or not it be skating or video games or comics or whatever it is. And, you know, kind of, I think in high school, always kind of jumping around from group to group and learning about what they were super excited about was kind of the way I was in high school.

So definitely not a capital. Venture capital is exactly like high school. You're exactly right. You're kind of going into different subcultures, if you will, and really learning everything that you can about them. What was the first investment you made? Or when were you like, okay, I'm going to start investing? The first investment I made really was in myself when I found that a company

It sounds kind of cheesy, but like, it's true. It's true. Like your opportunity cost, you could be earning a salary. So I left my. I'm sorry, sorry for hitting a funny sound effect, but it's true. It's like, ask, you know, somebody's going to start a company, ask yourself, are you going to invest some meaningful percentage of your entire life into this idea? Is it that good?

Yeah. And sometimes it can be a smaller idea, and it still makes sense. sense, do. But it's worth thinking about it that way. Yeah. And also, you know, I think that there's a lot of different things that you can do just under your own passion, but then there's a different stage when you actually have to go out to people and ask for money, including your friends and family, which is what, you know, which was kind of, I consider my first investment was some of my own capital, some of my parents' capital, and going into a very unrelated field in retail. So in 2014, sorry, 2014, 2004,

I moved over to the UK and started up a retail chain that was kind of similar to Sweet Green. Sure. And I ran that for six years over in London. We had about six locations. That's cool. But then in terms of my first real investment where I wasn't operating, it was in Oculus. Yeah, that was the first track. So I figured from, you know, I figured that this is easy.

This is what I'm going to do forever. Did you see the Kickstarter online? No. So in 2010, when I moved back to the States, I moved back to work for a friend who I went to college with, whose name was Brendan E. Reeb. And he had a company, which was a software company, which was selling software into game developers. And I was always, you know, he is an amazing salesperson and communicator. And I was always really interested in what he was building. So when the opportunity came around to come and join him at a company that he had dropped out in 2009,

actually, when he dropped out of school to go and do that full time, I was kind of on my own path, but was always very interested in what he was building. And so I came back to join him, worked with him, worked with Mike Antonov, worked with Nate Mitchell. And then a few years later, well, that company was acquired by Auderdesk. And then a few years later, we had heard about a kid who was working on a VR headset and that kid was Palmer. And that was Paul Mulcky. Wow. That's wild. Yeah, what a good start to a venture career. Working with Palmer Lucky is going to go on and do so many different companies. While we're on the topic of VR, how successful do you think the meta VR glasses will be?

and one way to sort of quantify it is when VR is having a moment, I feel like when Christmas comes, the app is at the top of the app store. So like the Quest or the Oculus app would be at the top of the app store. Like it doesn't come out until next spring. I think they're going to launch it maybe April or May. But it feels to me like they got a lot of the pieces right.

How are you feeling about 2020? 27 as a year for VR growth as someone who's been involved in the industry for a long time? It's taken a long while a lot longer than I think we had all hoped. It's interesting to think back of when I first made that investment that kind of was that kick started my career in venture. So that was at a time after they were growing like wildfire where everybody in the valley was kind of convinced that people were going to be wearing headsets walking down the street. Oh, yeah. Right. And so it's kind of part of my origin story where I was able to kind of go out and speak on the topic with knowledge and with the relationship to the team. And there was a whole bunch of people who wanted me to, who kind of were thinking that I was going to start a

VR fund. And there were a bunch of companies, there were a bunch of firms actually that started that were just VR focused. I always was kind of felt as though it was, going to take a lot longer. Sure. And so it has. I think that, you know, you have this kind of situation where the hype has not, the hype has set expectations that have been very difficult to follow. And so therefore you have this kind of disappointment that everybody feels about kind of how everything's transpired. Yeah. I don't see there being a massive inflection point. there have been several points in the past where something has come out be it you know the Quest 1 be it year VR like there have been a bunch of different points along the way where

people have been like this is it yep like Apple this is it this is it this is when it's all going to change and it just hasn't happened like that and I think even with yeah even with Zuck's MetaConnect presentation it didn't come across like he was presenting it came across as like this incredible technical milestone and like a big step up right but if you compare it to like foundation models like it was a big leap but it's not like it actually is a drop-in coworker for you so and and even some of his language in the presentation was like it's a glimpse of the future oh yeah and it's like well that like you don't get a crazy inflection point through glimpses of the future.

Yeah. It's like another, it's another milestone. You want a CEO to stand up on stage and say with this product, you are staring into the future with your eyes wide. Yeah, I'm surprised they don't have, they should make that, the eye expanders. If you want a good clock or coinage on the future, that's what your goal is. Talk about the fun strategy. I, a fun this size, I feel like you can probably confidently go to LPs based on the

track record and say like there's a good shot I can for. or five X a fund like this, has maintaining that been super important to you? Because given the track record, I imagine you could scale up. And then how are you, how are you like what is, what's the strategy at the early stage in terms of things like ownership? Are you flexible, inflexible? just because current market conditions are absolutely wild, and they don't necessarily favor smaller funds in some ways. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it has been very much deliberate keeping the funds small. You know, I started as I started angel investing, so after the Oculus investment, after that came to fruition, I essentially quit my day job and really wanted to answer three questions. like one, what does it mean to be responsible fiduciary of capital? What does this whole VC thing mean? Two, am I any good at this? Or was Oculeous just a fluke?

And three, do I want to do this? Do I want to devote the rest of my life to it? And the answer over those couple of years of deploying my own capital and doing a few SBVs was yes, yes and yes. And over that time, I kind of developed a network and a reputation as somebody who can be flexible with checks and can be really helpful and doesn't have sharp elbows and kind of can like fit into rounds. And that worked out for me. That worked out very well with Fund 1. That worked that's working out very well with Fund 2 and now hopefully it'll work out with Fund 3. I am very

much of the opinion that every size of fund requires a very different skill set and a very different strategy. And what I proved out and what I'm good at is deploying smaller amounts of capital. Sure. And that's what I want to keep on doing. And I think that, you know, I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of chase AUM and chase those management fees. It helps if you've done decently well in the past and you have like a nest egg and you don't need to stack fees on fees on fees and bigger funds and bigger funds. And it just feels like I'm much more aligned with my LP base. Does this fund size lead you to a different LP mix or is it the same thing where like you're still going to a sovereign, wealth fund, but just asking for a smaller slice or endowments?

Like, how do you think about LP relationships and structuring? Yeah, I kind of have graduated. I was just looking at my LP list over the time. And it was like, Fund 1 was like 60 LPs. Fund 2 is like 50. And now I'm at like 22. Sure. Yeah.

And that's been a purposeful move. Yeah. And, you know, frankly, it's pretty. Pacing to one yourself. Yeah. I mean, that would be. I mean, that would be the. the dream, right? Like the Hunter Satya model is, I think, where every VC ultimately wants to be.

Although, to be honest with you, like, I've got great relationships with my LPs, and I love working with them, and they also have appetite for later stage round. So, but anyway, to answer your question, I would say I started out high net worth individuals, some family offices. Now it's a lot more family offices and fund of funds. Fund to funds. Yeah. But, but yeah, but you don't need to do the road show with like huge endowments and sovereign wealth funds. No, I'm, I'm, I'm too small for that. And also, you know, I would say, you know, I started out very much as a deep tech fund where it's just like, I saw what happened at Oculus and I saw how amazing it was to bring a completely new technology to market. And I was just sold.

I was like, this is what I want to do. I don't want to be investing in ad optimization. I don't want to be, I want to be investing in people who are really. fucking moving the needle. And then I had the opportunity because of a relationship with Palmer and Trey to invest in Anderral. And I always pronounce it slightly differently.

Anderl. And that kind of ignited essentially patriotism in me that I didn't really knew I had. And since then, we've been doing a lot more in aerospace and defense, a lot more in kind of American dynamism. And so therefore, from a L.P. perspective, having LPs who are based here in the U.S. is of great importance to me.

Yes. I've got, we actually brought on our first LP from Luxembourg this fun. Shout out to Mangrove, very excited to have them on board. But for the most part, like the trips to the Middle East, the trips to these places, like I don't need to do them and I don't necessarily want that capital involved anyway. How excited are you for, to be post-SpaceX IPO based in L.A., Southern California in general, because it feels like we're probably going to get hundreds of companies in the fullness of time that spin out in these super talented teams where they've worked together at SpaceX, experience some, you know, hairy problem, and then they want to go solve it.

Yeah. Yeah. I originally moved to L.A. more for my wife than for me. You know, I was in the Bay Area before this, and I was kind of reluctant to move down here. And we did this two weeks before COVID, and it's worked out really well, especially with the areas that we invest in. I think that the talent just keeps on increasing. The talent pool just keeps on increasing. Yeah, because Long L.A. completely flopped, except that El-Sigundo and SpaceX happened.

Absolutely right. Absolutely. Like we won, but like, not the way that we, not the way that we were hoping. It was like thinking like consumer. B2B SaaS. It was like there will be like a sales force of L.A. and like many more of those. And there's been a few.

But yeah, it never developed into like the New York City style market. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the reasons why I always love being an SF was the fact that everybody comes there to raise capital, regardless. of where you're building. So my job in many ways is kind of a biz-dev job and like just being boots on the ground there. And now it feels like there's also a lot of capital in L.A.

There are a lot of the VCs from SF who are coming to L.A. on a regular basis. So there's a lot more capital available, I would say, down here. How are you thinking about the market structure, concentration of winners in various emerging new technologies. Like with with Oculus if you went and did like five other VR headset companies, you probably would have had a pretty bad run with Anderil if you did like five other defense tech companies like at least right now like they're all pretty marked up. So it seems like there's more of an oligopoly there. Some of that's like literally a direct order from the government being like we won't let a monopoly exist in this category. Whereas you know

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

It's interesting. I think I was of the mindset that ender all will be the end of all of X and they will just kind of dominate. and I think over time horrible mistake I'm just I'm just saying I've done the exact same thing where it's like yeah

obviously they're just going to do it they're going to do this they have all the relationships they have the capital they have the talent but but also you get you get further out and people will be like we're the ender all of ovens we make a stove yeah yeah

at some point it gets too niche it's like I don't think Andrew is going to do the stuff the stuff yeah you're winning the you need to win the whole market and then you need to underwrite the team on like doing a bunch of different product extensions. Yeah. And they're still going to be like competing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, you know, the government has made pretty clear their desire to diversify. And I think rightfully so. And I'm very glad that they are doing so. Yeah.

I think that generally when everybody's looking in one place, I'm trying to look someplace else. I think that partially, I think that partially, I'm trying to look someplace else. Um, I think that partially, Partially that's just the job of a VC, but also just like given my fund dynamics and the smaller size of the fund, when everybody is piling into one area, prices get driven up. You know, rounds get kind of insane. And while, you know, I loosely kind of have ownership targets, I still will kind of, I'm basically looking at can I kind of 100x my money. And I feel like that is more difficult in different. defense these days. And so do I think that there are room for other big players in defense?

Absolutely. Is that where I am necessarily putting my money at the moment? Not particularly. Like I think I am actually a lot more interested in some really freaking boring areas. In chemical production, in steel production. You know, I know you've had Zane on the show beforehand. We're investors in Knox medals. They're ripping, right? They're doing phenomenally well. you know, rare earths, magnets, all the boring stuff that's kind of up supply chain that we will need in order to achieve our mission as a nation is all stuff that I think is super interesting. We invested in Atlas. I think you guys had them on the show as well recently. Have you been surprised that the big defense primes haven't been more acquisitive, even on a relative market cap weighted basis? Because in AI, you're seeing these trillion-dollar companies take down.

10 billion dollar acquisitions. Yeah. And it's like, wow, that's $10 billion. That's a huge return for the VCs. But it's like, okay, they're throwing around 1% of their market cap. You could look at Oculus as a similar thing where Zuck is sort of throwing around like 1% of that market cap. But Lockhe doesn't seem like they're doing that. Founder-led companies tend to be like more inquisitive.

Earlier companies tend to be way more acquisitive. Sure. Anderl's been very. I mean, that was not true for Elon for a long time until cursive. But even looking at like. in the early 2010s, like the aqua hires where, like, people made money. Yeah. Were, like, much more common.

It was, you know, Twitter's buying. I think didn't Twitter buy like 50 companies? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, like, classic, like, founder-led company. Yeah, and I guess that, does that explain it? Or do you think there's something else going on with the market structure and defense tech? Why the primes haven't been more acquisitive? I completely agree with what you're saying.

Like, I am shocked as well. 79 companies. I am shocked as well. Autodesk is another one who has acquired a ton of companies. There are some companies that... You'd think they'd want to give Adam Porter Price a harder time instead of letting him be the only better on these things. But instead, they're like, okay, if Adam's not buying, we're not either. Yeah. I wish I had a better answer. I have to think at some point that there's going to be enough pressure from the board of some of these larger primes. that it's just kind of, I mean, there's lots of different reasons why this could be happening. They could be waiting for a dip. There's inevitably going to be a pullback.

Yeah, and there are inevitably going to be issues, you know, hopefully during peacetime at some point in the near future where these companies just can't raise and kind of Lockheed can just go and sweep them up. Yeah. I don't know what it is. But I think they need to be flipped by Anderol first to actually wake up, like from evaluation standpoint. Like that actually is going to be very like that's actually going to just be the moment where the boards are going to look around and be like, why is this company that has much lower revenue scale than us? And it's like because the market believes that this company will generate way more value in the future than us, even though their scale is still. Lockheed could approach it from a different perspective. The Primes could do some sort of like PE roll up joint venture, maybe like bending knives, roll up all the deadweight venture failures and defense.

tech and, you know, try and put them together or something. Raise prices. You never know. Bending swords. Bending swords would be good, too. That one works. I like that. I agree, though.

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

I mean... The dysfunction that I've heard through hard tech founders in my portfolio around the way these companies operate is like actually insane. Like they'll be sitting there like and like the company is basically like looking at a pile of money, like an existing contract and then years will pass and no one just goes and picks up, you know, they're just like looking at it. So, yeah. Are you starting to look at bio?

It feels like there's a moment where tech is crossing over. Like, it was a crazy idea to do anything industrial or defense or building physical stuff. Like tech used to mean software. Then Oculus was like, okay, we can build a consumer hardware product. Then Andrew approved like, no, you can build an industrial scale hardware product. And it feels like, even though obviously there's a very mature biotech investment industry, it feels like those two worlds are like starting to blur. Yeah.

It is also a very nuanced area and an area where there are investors who are better suited to really attack it than me. And so we kind of more stay in our lane. It is definitely an area that I have been thinking about more and that I've trying to, that I've been trying to get smarter in. Yeah. There's also the interesting bridge where some companies are doing like the biodefense. It's more like a defense contractor, like an annual... And bio for manufacturing as well. Totally.

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

And defending freedom and democracy is something that I think is of critical importance. And, you know, so I do, you know, I said beforehand we're doing less and less in defense. We are to a degree, but we're also looking at. you know, kind of the second order. Like a Knox Metals? Yes, companies like Knox Metals, companies like this explosives company, that I think are going to be necessary in order for us to kind of, again, achieve our goals as a nation.

Very cool. Jorny. Last question from my side. As a small firm, how impactful has AI been on your ability to get up to speed on some of these? Because I'm sure you're getting pitches all the time where you're like, I literally have never thought about this part of the economy. And then you get into it and you realize, oh, let's say you get a deck and it's somewhat compelling, but you know nothing. Is it had a meaningful impact? Obviously, you still need to talk to experts and diligence it.

But do you feel like you can start to build conviction on an idea faster because of just being able to like ask a million questions and sort information through these tools? Yeah, it's definitely changed the paradigm. You guys had low on yesterday, right? And he was talking about this as well. And I completely agree. It is like having kind of a desk of analysts at your disposal. So we are leveraging it. We need to be leveraging it more.

You know, to be honest, I mean, you know, I have myself and I have a partner who's based up in SF. So we're basically a two-man team with an assistant who helps us out. I think that we, you know, this to me, this kind of fun three kind of feels like the transition. from us going from or me going as kind of me going from a fund manager to a firm manager. And so really kind of building up the infrastructure to be able to scale, really being able to build something that lives beyond me is something that we're really, really focused on now. And certainly AI will be a massive part of that. Navy vision goggles.

It just sounds like you're getting powered up. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Dude, it's awesome. I can't wait to talk to all the founders, you back. Yeah. I love that you're sticking to your strategy.

And can't wait to come on in 10 years and just walk us through all the fun performance one by one. But on these numbers. I really appreciate it. I love what you guys do. It's so cool to be on here and to be in this amazing place. It's a great time. Close it out. Yeah.

We'll see you at 11 a.m. Pacific on Monday. Have a great weekend. Have the best weekend ever. Of your life. of your life. It's possible. A lot of people go into the weekend.

Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at TBPN.com. And we will see you on Monday. Goodbye. We love you.