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A
You're watching TVPN today's Friday, March 27, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Realm.
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B
The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
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A
Let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's go. I like that one.
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B
I'm glad you like it, John, because it's the only one you have.
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A
I have two. Okay, let's be clear. I have this and I also have this. So be aware. What is that at the end? I heard some other music. Anyway, let's pull up the linear lineup because we have a great show for you today, folks. It's Friday. We have Billy Bowman, his Kindle, they're calling him the Bowmanator.
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B
The Bowmanator, the Bominator.
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A
If you're in la, if you're in Hollywood and you drive down the freeway, you will see as you enter Hollywood, his name as big as the Hollywood sign. Basically, there's a massive sign, Fiverr paid for. And so we're gonna have him in the studio talking about what it takes to be a director of AI video, what that even means, how he's using these tools, what he's using. That'll be interesting. Then we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise talking about taking private stakes in private companies public. On the public stock exchange, right?
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B
Yeah, it's up 1,300% above nav.
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A
Wow.
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B
So that'll be an interesting.
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A
And then we have a lightning round and we're closing it out with Ryan from SHIELD AI who just raised a massive round. Defense tech is of course booming and we will talk to him a lot lot about what AI means in the defense stack. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces, 75% now of workspaces on linear are using agents. And you should be too. So why is no one talking about Xcellorgy? I love these titles. Very niche company. Was in stealth mode for five years, but sold this week to Novartis for 2 billion smackaroos. That's a good outcome. Novartis, of course is the 300 billion doll billion Swiss pharmaceutical company and they just paid $2 billion for basically a five year old company named Accelergy. Exactly. It's a great outcome. It's a fantastic outcome. This is an interesting story because it's very much like the biotech playbook. Done right, they bring in the right CEO experience.
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B
We can go through this $2 billion exit in five years. From your point of view, is this good?
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A
Is this good?
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C
That's pretty good.
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B
Yeah, pretty.
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A
I agree it's. But this isn't, this isn't in the sweet spot for typical tech news, but there are some interesting, there are some interesting data points. Amir over at the Information said leading indicator of AI adoption. Drug companies like Novo Nordisk. Novo Nordisk Pharma has long been at the forefront of machine learning. Ozempic maker says AI agents are shortening its clinical trials. People think that it's going to a prompt and saying like cure cancer. It's not. It's like you have a 10,000 page document that you need to send to the FDA and if there's a comma in the wrong place, they can just send it back to you and say ah, there's an error. Like we don't wanna deal with it right now. You're back at the back of the queue.
- [03:13]
B
Is that real?
- [03:14]
A
You can get dinged for crazy, crazy stuff. I don't know exactly what I can share, but I've heard of multi billion dollar companies getting dinged for not showing. Like they will list out, okay, we use this centrifuge to run this assay to understand how this chemical separates. But they didn't say, they didn't list out who the suppliers to that supplier are. They didn't explode. Explain the entire supply chain. And there was like very little guidance on it. Like little things like that come up all the time. And reading through all the documentation, of course most of this when you're talking about Novo, it's like they have direct line of communication with the fda. So it's different. But seeing this headline, there are tons of situations where you need to like comb through data and organize it when
- [03:59]
B
it, when it, when, when some type of public company software CEO comes out and says like everything is accelerating because of. Yeah, oftentimes I look at the business and if, you know, if revenue isn't accelerating dramatically, you think like, okay, this guy just wants an AI narrative. He's just reaching for an AI narrative here. But when I see a pharma company do it, no real context on pharma personally. So I'm like, it must be true.
- [04:25]
A
Yeah, no, I mean I was working on FDA filings like four or five years ago and there were so many word documents that needed to be. It was the same application for multiple variations on the product that the FDA was going to review. And so we actually wrote Python scripts to programmatically interact with the word documents to basically do like a very advanced version of Find and Replace. It's like perfect for AI and it just speeds things up a little bit. You submit a week earlier, you can submit more things, more variations, you can give more information, compile more information, investigate other literature, do deep research reports. What else is out there? Let's review all the IP faster, summarize things, find different threads to pull on little things like that. Just squeak out like an extra five minutes here, an extra day there, and it all adds up to acceleration in progress. It's not like an overnight. All of a sudden everything's completely changed. Maybe that happens, but at least right now there's clearly, you know, a benefit from overnight success. But this was an overnight success, at least for Alex Egil, Ted Jardinsky, Luke Pennington and Jeff Harris, who took academic research, which they've been doing at labs at Stanford and Bern, into what is basically a VC backed biotech company, a drug company. So the goal was simple. What do they actually make? They wanted to make a better allergy drug. So when people have allergies, you have a peanut allergy. If peanuts come in, your allergy cells flare up and you need to fight that back. The current blockbuster drug in the category is called Xolair. And when someone has an allergic reaction to a food allergy, drugs act quickly to treat the reaction before it does lasting damage to the body. So the key immune molecule at the center of many allergic reactions is called IGE. And XLRG's lead program, EXL111, targets IGE. So the goal is to work faster, quiet the pathway more deeply, and ideally last longer between doses to fight allergic reactions. And so these will make that less severe. So Redtree Venture Capital seeded the company in 2021, but they stayed in stealth for about five years. The team announced their first big fundraiser, a $70 million Series A LED by Samsara Biocapital. And this is a pretty typical flow for biotech companies. University science first, then they bring on secondary SP specialist capital, someone with experience in biotech. It's less common to go to, like the big names that we know, the Sequoias, the founders funds, the Andreessens, they do some stuff in bio, but very often if it's coming directly out of a lab, going to be IPO'd or acquired in a few years, that's a pretty traditional biotech VC playbook. And so by February of this year, Accelogy dosed its first Phase one patients. So they gave the drug to subjects and it was obviously looking good because the Novartis deal signed a few weeks ago.
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B
Yeah. How well does that phase one trial need to go for somebody to immediately come in and be like, yep, here's 2 billion?
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D
Probably really?
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A
Well, yeah, but it is like standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember, the research was done in 2020, 2021, probably earlier than that. And it's building on an existing pathway. There's some interesting stuff going on.
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B
So Novartis, this guy is such CEO, is such a chad.
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A
Yeah. I was like, I didn't want to diminish his accomplishments by reducing it to a playbook. But this isn't his first rodeo. The CEO Todd Zavodnik, he joined in 2025, sells the company in less than a year. And you've seen the story twice before. When he was at Zeltik Allergan acquired it for 2.4 billion. And when he ran Dermavant or he sold that company for 1.2 billion in 2024. So he's seen a unicorn outcome two years ago and he gets a new job. He's like, I was going to take some time off, gets back in the arena and immediately sells the company. So clearly a great operator. And no one was really surprised by this, at least in the stock market.
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B
Novartis, here's a pit flat join his next company.
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A
That's a good idea.
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B
Just follow this guy around $3 billion acquisitions back to back. I would, I think it's a good.
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A
I would love to be a janitor of this company. I would love to be a janitor here. I'll actually take all stock. I'll take all stock and I will clean the toilets and get coffee if that's what it takes because I know what's going to happen. I've seen this playbook before. Anyway, Novartis, the stock is not really moving on this news because this is very expected. This is part of their playbook. They have made. Just last year, 2025, they made $1.7 billion in sales of Xolair, the allergy drug that's currently the blockbuster drug in the category. And this is a very logical next act in that category. So key Zollayer patents are about to expire. So a next generation IGE asset is strategically valuable right now. Novartis CEO has previously outlined a pretty broad acquisition playbook. It's focused on bolt on deals in core areas. So when they have a business up and running like Immunology, like treating allergies, they have all of the sales and distribution. They have an existing product portfolio, the business is working. Add things on to extend the viability of that business line. And XLRG fits squarely inside of that Plan. Now, the $2 billion acquisition price, it's not all cash upfront. It is split between an upfront payment and there's milestones based on development, commercial targets. So if they, if they, if they all of a sudden they flop in phase two trials, probably some of that gets clawed back, that needs to actually work. And like all of the. That they may have to play out. But they have Novart. Sorry, they have Novartis behind them to propel them through that. And it feels like a pretty standard playbook. So good stuff there. And in general, it's just like it's cool. Anyone who's dealt with allergies, either personally or with loved ones, it's always a hassle. Everyone has a story of someone was on vacation, they got a drink that had a nut in it and someone had an allergic reaction and anything that can treat that is obviously good. So another error in the quiver of modern medicine, which is great to see. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
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B
So, breaking news. Huge leak. Omg. Did you guys know that Anthropic was training a better model this whole time? This is shocking. According to unemployed capital Allocator, of course, referencing a leak a scoop.
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A
I wonder if this will trigger the team at DeepMind or OpenAI to consider training a better model. It feels like if they're doing, they're going to have to respond. So you could see multiple companies training new models based on this leak.
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B
Yep. Yeah, an interesting story.
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A
There's some interesting marketing perspective and how you actually roll out and manage like vibes and hype.
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B
Yeah, to me. To me it doesn't seem improbable that there's been a lot of spud talk on the timeline this week.
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A
You got to get started pumping Mythos.
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B
Mythos talk.
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A
Most powerful AI model ever developed.
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B
It's a good tagline and very, very painful for all the SaaS companies out there that, that just sell off whenever Anthropic does something. And it's a vicious cycle.
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A
Now Prinz wrote a little summary of this. Anthropic has been testing a new model called Mythos. With certain customers, they call it a step change in AI capabilities, including dramatically higher scores encoding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity. I want to know how it will do on Arc AGI V3 because all of the models are under 1% completion on that benchmark. It's the one benchmark that is not saturated. It's very closely guarded. You can't get into the test, the actual test set. You can only see the examples, and it clearly is. I still love the benchmark and the team over at Ark for what they're doing. So this is part of a new Capybara series of models which are larger and more intelligent than Opus. It's more expensive to run and it's not ready yet for general release, but they are excited about it. Mythos pricing bets coming in from 0.005 seconds. $100 in 250 out subs reprice to $50.250 and a $1,000 plan might be coming. Who knows? What do you think, Jordy? Tyler, any thoughts on the new model?
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B
Well, let's pull up this picture of a capybara. Just to put.
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A
Just. I would love to see some context this into context. Yeah. Is it a mythical creature? No, capybara is real. So what's the connection between capabilities?
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B
So they're normally quite docile.
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A
Okay.
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B
But they can get violent. Let's look at this picture.
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E
Okay.
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A
Watch out.
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B
I mean, look. Look at the. Look at the chomp on that.
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A
This is something we should read into. We should say, what are.
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B
What do they mean by.
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A
What did they mean by this? You know, it's clearly some sort of vague post. They're telling you. They're telling you something that, you know, friendly, cute, but also potentially the end of the world. You never know.
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B
There's another picture here we can pull up.
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A
Are you just sending capybara photos while you pull that up? Let me tell everyone about turbopuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles in object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI.
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B
I mean, these are nightmare fuel. Look at this, John.
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A
It looks like a big hamster or a big guinea pig. How big are these guys?
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B
We'll pull up the next picture and we'll see if you still. See if you still still think so.
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A
John, do you think we could contain it? Do you think if we had one in the studio, it would overrun us. Or do you think we could keep it locked up?
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B
I think that's pretty horrifying. I think four or five of these could take you down.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Median weight is between 60 and 174 pounds.
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A
174 pounds.
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D
That's a big.
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A
That's bigger than my dog. Wow. That's a big bar.
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B
That's what I'm. They have these at the Santa Barbara.
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A
So. So this is the metaphor, you know, like, these models are getting incredibly, incredibly powerful. You need to contain them and think about safety. And you need to think about how do you keep the capybara safe. You need to lock it in a box, in a cage. It cannot be allowed to run free.
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C
Yeah. I think just back on the pricing thing, I think, like, this is generally. Right, so basically 0.05 seconds is saying, like, it's just going to get 10x more expensive. Because right now I think it's something like $10 in, $25 out.
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A
People are ready for. People are ready to pay more, though. Like, they're paying a bunch through the API. They're paying more in cursor.
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C
Maybe we'll talk about this right after. But like, the subscription, like, technically it's the same price, but the limits are going down. So it's. The tokens are getting more expensive.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And as you see, like, there's like this insane compute crunch. Like, I assume that models are going to get much more expensive as they're getting bigger.
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A
Yeah, it is interesting. I wasn't expecting to be in the regime of, like, subscriptions as long as we have been, like, just talking to Ben and our. How he sort of bounces around from one subscription to the next. He'll max one out and then move over to the next one and then move over to the different one. And he's maybe more price sensitive than model sensitive. I would always assume. I'd always assume that most businesses would just be on an API consumption basis.
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C
So the reason I'm not hitting the APIs is because it's. It is like basically 10x more expensive. It's more expensive than using the subscription subscription.
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A
So you do most of the work in the subscription, which is just. I mean, that's economically rational. I guess what I'm saying is, like, I'm surprised by how many people who are in a business context still make that decision and how much of a price war we're in. How much capital matters here?
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B
Well, let's pull up this video because I'm not sure. I'm not sure you guys would be making the same decisions with the capybara family of models if you knew that capybaras were capable.
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A
Okay, okay.
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B
This is important, this kind of thing.
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A
What's going on here? They can swim. Wait, this is a human. Is this AI. Oh my God. That's really attacking her.
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D
Wow.
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B
This is why they're calling it their most powerful model ever.
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A
We need to slow down. We need to slow down with.
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B
We can turn it off. It's. It's horrifying. It's horrifying.
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A
Yeah. We need to. We need to slow down.
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B
I hope they. I hope they, you know, keep this with the safety team.
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D
Yeah.
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B
For long.
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A
I think. I think we need all countries to come together and agree to. To control the capybara population because that is truly horrifying.
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B
A lot of chatter on the timeline.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Around, around, around pricing. But all of this is to be expected. Somewhat. Definitely feels like all the labs will have to introduce some type of surge pricing over time.
- [17:54]
A
Take him has a. As a very independent take. He's the biggest Nvidia Stan and he makes a lot of good points, but he is. He's making the argument that anthropic needs more GPUs because he's sharing some posts here. To manage growing demand for Claude, we're adjusting our five hour session limits for free pro max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
- [18:17]
B
And Take him is coming on the show Monday.
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A
I'm very excited to talk to him.
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B
We'll ask him what he thinks about Nvidia.
- [18:22]
A
Yes. And so a lot of people are getting into polyphasic sleep because of this. So Claude has different limits at different times. So when the limits are in effect, that's when you need to be sleeping. Tyler, have you gotten into polyphasic sleep yet?
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C
I'm not there yet. But I mean the problem is getting worse. I think at some point I'm gonna.
- [18:44]
A
I told Tyler that sometimes I indulge in polyphasic sleep after the show. I'll sleep for an hour and then I'll go about my day and then I'll sleep at night. He said that's just a nap. It doesn't count. I guess people really are doing the polyphasic sleep thing to monitor their agents. I wonder if that's an aberration for this particular moment in your life.
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B
You would think you would know one person that has done that and stuck with it. Because I feel like a bunch of people have tried that over time.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Then eventually, I mean if you're trying to get around the limits. Like polyphasic sleep doesn't make sense. You just need to basically be nocturnal.
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B
Right.
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C
Because you need to be like inverse. What? Like San Francisco hours are right?
- [19:26]
A
Yeah.
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C
So the peak San Francisco usage, you got to be like.
- [19:29]
B
Yeah. Or just move overseas.
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A
You could do that.
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C
Yeah. But the polyphasic sleep doesn't really know.
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A
It seems like it's much better to just again, you know, have, have a compute desk or a prompt desk that is geographically distributed evenly across the globe. So when your American employee stops the prompting, goes home for the night, then your European colleague steps up and starts prompting on the same project, and then your colleague in Asia can pick up when Europe goes to bed. Something like that. You know what I mean? So you have 24, 7 coverage.
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C
Yeah, but that's still like at. During one of those periods, it's still like the peak hours, right?
- [20:14]
A
Yeah, because these peak hours are based around US hours. I was more. So there's actually two things going on. There's one where it's like you're waiting for your agents to respond and if it's going to take hours for a prompt to return, you should go take a nap. Because you're better off checking in on a prompt every two hours for the whole day for 24 hours in perpetuity, as opposed to doing a two hour prompt, watching TV, come back, do that eight times, and then sleep for eight hours. That's four more two hour sessions that you could have been letting it cook and interacting with it. That's separate from trying to get around these, these rate limits. Yes, everyone agrees. More GPUs, more CPUs, more chips. We continue to be chip constrained. Even anthropic appears to be chip constrained. Despite incredible fundraising and partnerships with hyperscalers. It really is a vindication of everyone who is saying AI is not a bubble and that the models will get better and that these crazy deals that Altman's doing and Dario's doing and Google's drawing down their cash flow and Meta's drawing down their cash flow, those all look really good in hindsight. Correct. Do you disagree?
- [21:41]
B
I think in general, yes.
- [21:44]
A
I mean, last March, like a year ago, people were like $50 billion, $100 billion, $200 billion. Is this stuff that useful? Is it slop? Is it actually going to be that useful? Are these things toys? Yeah, they're reasonable for this thing. But what real economic value? Certainly it can't be more than like 20 bucks a month or $200 a month. And now there's like lots of people that are, maybe they're only paying a few thousand a month because they're using a bunch of subscriptions. But like they're pretty close to justifying like the Jensen like 250k a year per engineer thing like that doesn't feel that far away from companies just saying like, yes, I give you the permission to spend $250,000 a year on AI inference. Do be as efficient as possible as you can with that budget. But you have my approval. I believe that with that 250 you will generate more than that in value.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah, I think the big thing is there's going to be more use cases that have a similar level of product market fit as CodeGen that, that use tokens on the level that these CodeGen tools do. And we haven't fully identified those yet. There's some early evidence that general agents will drive that. But I would say an example is it seems very obvious that models will be very useful for making financial models. But do you need to make 500 financial models per day? No. Right, yeah. That is interesting. And so there are areas where the models are going to be incredibly, incredibly valuable, incredibly important, used by everybody in any given field and yet they won't necessarily generate.
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A
There are some people that would need to make 500 financial models a day. I think Rocana makes hundreds of trades every single day. And so if you're doing a proper full dcf, pulling every SEC filing for a company and you're doing that hundreds of times a day because you're trading
- [23:53]
B
or he might have hundreds of individual positions.
- [23:57]
A
Exactly.
- [23:57]
B
Real time models.
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A
Sort of like rebuilding a Bloomberg terminal for yourself. I think Bloomberg exists and maybe should, should work there. Anyway, since we're speaking of the government, let's move over to the preliminary injunction. Read the Pentagon Supply chain risk designation. Before we go to Dean Ball, let me tell you about Label Box. RL Environments, Voice Robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So the news is that Anthropic has been granted a preliminary injunction re the Pentagon supply chain risk designation in California, but is allowing stay for one week. I think a lot of people like the tech community broadly came away with this prediction that this wouldn't hold. That this was whatever you thought about how you work with the government and the Ben Thompson thesis. There was, you know, the supply chain thing wasn't really going to stick. It wouldn't necessarily hold up in court, but we'll see where it goes. Dean Ball says this is a devastating ruling for the government, finding Anthropic likely to prevail on essentially all of its theories for why the government's actions were unlawful and unconstitutional. One of the things she mentions is the huge range of amici amici briefs. I don't know how to say amici amici briefs supporting Anthropic, by the way. 0f.
- [25:23]
B
Hey, finally a word that John I lost it. Can't nail instantly. You have an incredible mind that we did find.
- [25:32]
A
We found my limit. We found my limit. On a personal note, says Dean Ball, some friends and allies of mine on the right who have been angry at me for my own words and actions and all of this. Anyone who thinks I spoke out for personal gain or trivial reasons against an administration I served in is crazy. Yet people forget that, that Dean Ball served not in the first Trump administration, but the second Trump administration. And he was like, look, I wrote the AI policy thing. I worked on that. Like, this is not the right path.
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B
So it's always a meek and it's the plural of amicus.
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A
This is brutal for me because I studied Latin and I should be able to nail this because I know it's a Latin word. Anyway, it was a hugely costly decision for Dean Ball, but this judge's ruling shows why I did it. This is a staggeringly illegal act by the government. That is why I'm particularly honored to have been implicitly, explicitly quoted in the ruling for calling this what it was when Secretary Hegseth made his initial announcement, an attempted act of corporate murder. He's standing with the corporations. This case continues, but Anthropic has scored a very large win here. The real victors, however, are all red blooded Americans who are, as the founders would have said, jealous of their liberties. I love it. Well, congratulations and hopefully everyone can just go back to building good models. All this nonsense in D.C. has been a huge side show, side project, side quest, as the race for compute is so much more important. The race for capabilities is so much more important. And so the other scoop is coming from Axios. Sam Altman apparently told staff he tried to save Anthropic in the Pentagon clash,
- [27:15]
B
which he apparently thought was somewhat ironic given that said competitor openly blasts him on any podcast that they go on.
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A
Okay, well, last anthropic story, IPO. They're trying to go public as early as Q4 with a potential 60 billion raise. They're racing and so let's go over to Kalshi and see who is likely to announce an IPO this year. Anthropic's up at 70% on this news. They jumped up from 46% to over 70%. OpenAI's at 49%. Jersey Mike's still beating them both 75%. So you Jersey Mike's heads out there. They do very well in the App Store. I like the sandwiches. SpaceX is in 94.
- [28:07]
B
Discord also sitting at 63%.
- [28:10]
A
Oh, Discord. What a crazy story. I love Jason Citron so much, the founder, but he is out, I think and he has. He's just a wild, wild founder story. I made a whole video about it. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We gotta hit the section. One last note on AI before we move on to the really important thing. Real estate.
- [28:43]
B
OpenAI has surpassed 100 million in annualized run rate. Launched six weeks ago, it's expanded to 600 advertisers and plans to launch self serve advertiser access in April. I am close to setting up a new account and or just churning momentarily so that I get to experience the ads. You know, I love ads. I mean the first ad experience being
- [29:07]
A
from the Wall Street Journal that we know and love is a very good omen. Clearly something's going on. They're happy with each other because they're working together. Yeah, I mean truly like the alpha for the audience is like new ad platforms often deliver really good results before people figure them out. Big companies move slower than you. If you can be the first person to advertise, figure it out. You know, Sean Frank at the Ridge is thinking about it and maybe you should be too. Not to do an ad for ads, but we love ads on this show and we love new ad platforms and we also love Vibe Co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta.
- [29:47]
B
So what's this news before we go on? Apple's talking about opening up Siri to rival AI services. Bloomberg.
- [29:57]
A
I don't know Apple's relationship.
- [30:01]
B
Guess who wrote this story.
- [30:02]
A
I'm going to guess the Germinator.
- [30:03]
B
That's right. Of course, Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistance artist Siri.
- [30:09]
A
Do we need to give him.
- [30:10]
B
Let's give him the Golden Scoop.
- [30:12]
A
Tyler, hold up. The Golden Scoop award for Mark Gurman. The Germanator has has received the Golden Scoop award for you, Mark. March 27, 2020 Congratulations, Mark Gurman.
- [30:26]
B
It's an honor.
- [30:27]
A
Your scoop wins the Golden Scoop of the day. There we go. Yeah, the Scoop. That's good. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. There it is. Scoop. There it is.
- [30:39]
B
This headline is incorrect, by the way.
- [30:42]
A
The Scoop is on fire. We don't need a wild Apple plan
- [30:46]
B
to open Siri to outside AI assistance. So this implies that, that things like ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera could be allowed to take, effectively take the place of Siri. The company is developing new tools to allow chatbots installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri Assistant, enabling users to send queries to services like LLMs. The change is part of an attempt to turn around Apple's fortunes in AI, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers and could allow Apple to generate more money from third party AI subscriptions through the App Store.
- [31:21]
A
Oh yeah, because you have. That would be good. I think that's part of it. I think there's also the antitrust angle, which is that they have had to allow you to change the default search engine in Safari for a while, even though they have that relationship with Google. When you go to the Safari search bar and you just type in some random words, it searches Google. You can actually reroute that to ChatGPT. I did it. ChatGPT is like, I don't use it like I use Google. Google I use for like really, I want like a 5 millisecond query. So the time to actually load ChatGPT and then give you the full answer was not the best experience. But I have wanted for a long time to reroute the Siri button on the side of the phone to just chatgpt instant fast, ultra fast. Just get, just talk to me. But every time I do it I say chatgpt, what's the history of the Roman Empire? And it loads and it says working with ChatGPT. And then it takes a little bit, bit too long and then you get like a short note and then you can open it and it just sort of like you're always fighting in the UI between like are you talking to Apple Intelligence? Or are you talking to Siri or are you talking to ChatGPT? And you sort of go back and forth. So we will see where this goes I would be very surprised if people shift away from the default, like if Apple iPhones ship with the Siri button, just querying their distilled Gemini model or whatever they're going to wind up doing there. That's probably what most people are going to use. But it's exciting that at least there will be some competition in the market anyway. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. So Barry Diller just paid $11 million for JFK's favorite new JFK's favorite New York penthouse. Favorite New York penthouse, not favorite new because of course he has passed away. A long time ago. An entity linked to the billionaire purchased Karen Pritzker's co op at the Carlisle, the same unit where Kennedy famously stayed during his visits to the city in the 50s and 60s. John F. Kennedy stayed in a duplex penthouse at the Carlisle Hotel so often that it became known as the New York White House. After his assassination, his widow and two children, Caroline and John Jr. Lived in the Manhattan Hotel for about 10 months. What's the longest amount of time you've ever spent in a hotel? I don't think I've ever done more than like a week or two. Ten months is a, is a, that's a ride.
- [33:52]
B
Yeah. I never, I never went through and I never had an era of my young adulthood. That's sort of a crazy move that I could, could have afforded to stay in a hotel permanently. But, but now that I'm a, I
- [34:06]
A
was walking in some hotel the other day and I was like, I wonder
- [34:10]
B
if I could like live here like with kids. It would just be that.
- [34:16]
A
Now an entity linked to billionaire Barry Diller has purchased Kennedy's favorite penthouse for $11 million. Diller bought the co op unit from another family of prominent Democrats. Film producer Karen Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, bought the apartment for 12 million in 2007. Pritzker put the apartment on the market for 12.9. It sold for 12.5 in 2007. Interesting that the Chicago high end penthouse market has not moved that much. The Carlisle opened around 1930 on Manhattan's Upper east side. One of New York's most storied luxury hotels. It's known for iconic venues like Bemelon's Bar, Cafe Carlisle, Cabaret space that has hosted legendary performers. A portion of the building was converted to co op units decades ago. Kennedy stayed at the hotel so often, starting when he was still a senator in the 1950s, that a direct phone line was installed for him in his regular duplex suite. That's cool. After his assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to the hotel, but stayed in a different suite. On rainy days, the Kennedy children played in the lobby. The two bedroom apartment includes a large foyer with an art deco staircase. The listing says an expansive corner living and dining room has views over Central Park. There's also a bookshelf lined breakfast room and a corner solarium with a wet bar. Oh, speaking of wet bars, forget apres ski, because homeowners are now building their own bars in custom spaces where they can relax and get toasty after a day on the slopes. This is also from the mansion section.
- [35:53]
B
Huge.
- [35:54]
A
For Brian Healy, what comes after a day on the mountain sometimes takes precedence over the skiing itself. When he built his Lake Tahoe area vacation home in 2019, he spent about $800,000 to build a bar area on the main floor of the house. An absolute dog, which he can ski
- [36:15]
B
to from the slopes.
- [36:16]
A
That's pretty good.
- [36:17]
B
Of Northstar. That sounds great. So maybe not ski in, but ski out.
- [36:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that. He said. I've joked that I designed a bar and built a house around it. This is good. This is my dream. I'm gonna build a movie theater and then build a house around it. That's my goal. What would yours be?
- [36:39]
B
John was sending me a listing.
- [36:41]
A
Surfing ability. One of those endless waves. That's what you need. You need an endless wave pool. You know what I'm talking about? What are those called?
- [36:50]
B
Wave pool.
- [36:51]
A
Wave pool? Yeah. Full wave pool?
- [36:53]
B
Yeah.
- [36:53]
A
Wait, why are you not excited about this prospect of having a house that's built around this endless wave pool?
- [36:57]
B
Is there a drawback? Because I live in.
- [36:59]
A
Oh, I guess you just go to the ocean. Yeah, you could just go. You could just be walking distance from the beach. Anyway, it's hard to beat. Healy, 51, is an Ireland native. Let's go. Let's hear for Ireland. He runs an energy company in the San Francisco Bay area. This is Royal Flash. I gotta meet this guy. After a day on the slopes, Healy and his pals head to the space dubbed Healy's Bar, leaving their gear in the storage area of the Truckee, California property. And sometimes other skiers end up at Healy's home after getting lost while skiing through the trees. It's an open door policy, he says. We invite them for beer. This is our inn. We need to head over to Northstar and get lost and wind up at his bar. Oops. We're lost. We're lost. We don't know.
- [37:46]
B
I know some former guests that are neighbors with this guy. We'll work on connecting.
- [37:53]
A
Could you spare a Guinness for us for two Irish chaps who've gotten lost?
- [37:56]
B
I feel like I've read, like a children's story of wandering in the forest and then some character offers you something.
- [38:04]
A
Sometimes it's like, bad.
- [38:05]
B
Yeah, usually that can send you on kind of a crazy saga.
- [38:09]
A
It seems good. So for alpine sports lovers, warming up with a few apres ski drinks after a day on the slopes is a time honored tradition, says the Journal. But instead of heading to a crowded bar for cocktails, more and more wealthy homeowners are hosting friends at private bar areas with high end, mountain inspired finishes. Real estate agents have said this. In addition to providing entertainment spaces, these cozy areas become additional focal points within the house, like a fireplace or a wine room. Look at that. People are having a lot of fun with the bars. They are creating spaces where the party keeps going and where the kids want to come back and hang out. These bars have features like specialty ice makers, dishwashers. Okay. Decorative lighting, and dramatic finishes. That's not that special. I was hoping for something really crazy.
- [38:57]
C
Yeah.
- [38:57]
B
Does he have any. What kind of games does this bar come with? Do we have darts? Pool?
- [39:03]
A
Axe throwing? Axe throwing. Let's get the millennials. We do things a little bit differently around here.
- [39:11]
B
Honestly, any space can actually be turned into an axe throwing.
- [39:14]
A
But this sounds good. They're coming off the mountain, doing a jacuzzi, and going downstairs for an espresso martini. It's pretty good.
- [39:21]
B
Pretty good.
- [39:22]
A
It's very nicely designed. I love, I love the finishes. I think this is a fantastic, fantastic choice. Bruce Johnson, a retired lumber executive, and his wife, wellness coach Peggy Duffy Johnson.
- [39:32]
B
Let's give it up for lumber executives.
- [39:35]
A
They keep mahogany flowing through the global economy.
- [39:38]
B
The official wood of business, the fact that we don't have a mahogany sponsor.
- [39:44]
A
I think we're looking at Bruce Johnson. We gotta get connected to this guy. He might be able to send some mahogany our way.
- [39:51]
B
The official lumber partner of tbn.tbpn.
- [39:56]
A
so they wanted a mountain inspired aesthetic for the bar in their Edwards, Colorado home, which is about 10 minutes from Beaver Creek Resort. Their daughter in law, interior designer Jackie Johnson, worked on the $200,000 space, which has open wine storage columns, sconces wrapped in brown suede. The downstairs base also includes A sauna.
- [40:16]
B
I gotta show you. After the show, I'll show you a video of me at Beaver Creek around 2016.
- [40:21]
A
What are you doing?
- [40:23]
B
I was riding in the double court. I was riding in the train park and my buddy was filming. Another buddy was sitting kind of like on the. Basically next to the jump. And so one buddy films me. I land, catch an edge, and end up like entirely on my head, sliding on my head, like, body suspended above. And my other friend doesn't actually see me having this horrific crash. And so my other friend is just like sitting there like this, like, thumbs up to the camera and I'm just like chaotically getting thrown across the landing. Good fun.
- [41:00]
A
Okay, we gotta learn about winter forward fabrics, because that's important if you're trying to create this apres ski vibe. Jackie suggests using winter forward fabrics such as alpaca fur, heron hides and mohair. I like alpaca fur. That sounds lovely. In designing his bar, Healy looked to his Irish heritage for inspiration. Using green leather bar stools. That's our signature color over here. A green marble countertop and vintage green glassware. It's Irish influenced in a little LA at the same time. Calling it a modern but not necessarily nightclubby vibe. He likes to drive around Martis Camp the 2000.
- [41:41]
B
This isn't giving you a little bit of a nightclub vibe.
- [41:43]
A
There's a little bit of a nightclub vibe. It's not necessarily nightclubby, though. I think it's more Irish influenced in little la. Anyway. To create an atmosphere of informal fun, apres ski entertaining spaces are often placed near amenities such as pool tables, golf simulators, hot tubs and saunas. Developer I like that we're getting claps for that. Developer Robert Covington put 80s video games like Pac man next to the lower level apres ski bar of a home he recently built in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The roughly 7,400 square foot home asking 13 million is located near the base of Mount Wenner. Is that how you pronounce that? Wenner.
- [42:23]
B
Werner.
- [42:23]
A
Werner and guests can access the basement bar directly from the outside. There's another bar in the living area upstairs. The goal is to provide additional gathering spaces throughout the home. You need a lot more seating for families on a ski vacation. For some homeowners, apres ski entertaining is more of a state of mind. Jewelry designer Jane Berg, 64, and her husband, marketing executive Kevin Berg, 70, built a house next to the slopes of Colorado's Aspen Highlands.
- [42:47]
B
Is it a state of mind or is it just having a drink after skiing?
- [42:51]
A
It's A state of mind. Okay, Jordy, stop asking questions. Sliding doors in their kitchen face the mountains and open to a terrace with fire pits. So the couple end up using the entire primary level of their home for apres ski party C. Anything's an apres ski entertaining space if you're in the apres ski mindset.
- [43:10]
B
There we go.
- [43:11]
A
Often Jane hires a local chef and a bartender to set up the open format kitchen, which has two sinks, one of which gets used as an ice bucket for drinks. People ski in and ski out of here, says Jane. The home has an outdoor ski track near the hot tub where guests leave their ski. This seems. This is gonna get me more into skiing.
- [43:31]
B
When you see a picture like this of champagne in the snow, does it give you. Does it. Do you have, like a primal reaction to that?
- [43:37]
A
Yes. Yes. And you know what song plays immediately? Cherry. Cherry Lady. Have you ever heard this song?
- [43:44]
B
Of course.
- [43:45]
A
It's such a good song. Let's play it. Let's play just a little bit so we don't get demonetized. But as soon as I see this image, this is exactly what plays.
- [43:56]
B
Sherry Sherry lad.
- [43:59]
A
This is like that vibe perfectly. It's amazing. Anyway, go listen to it. Modern talking is the artist behind Cherry Sherry Lady. Up next, what do we got?
- [44:14]
B
A retirement.
- [44:16]
A
We got graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And you know what else we got? Gemini 3.1 pro. You thought that they were done. They did another model, they trained another model and they released it.
- [44:30]
B
The rumor.
- [44:31]
A
And with a more cable baseline.
- [44:32]
B
They're working on another model.
- [44:33]
A
I don't know. I don't want to comment, but it's entirely possible. And with a more capable baseline, Gemini 3.1 Pro is great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.
- [44:47]
B
A retired pictures home with a gym inspired by Fenway asks 23 million. Okay, where is this game? James and his wife, photographer Ryan Shields, spent years designing and building the house just now north of San Diego. James Shields was a star pitcher in the major leagues for 13 seasons. So when he and his wife decided to build a California home in 2018, they were amused to discover that the lot they selected was shaped like a baseball diamond. We looked at each other and said, I guess it's meant to be.
- [45:16]
A
It's meant to be.
- [45:17]
B
They bought the Rancho Santa Fe property the next day for 1.8 million. The pair spent the next few years designing and building roughly 13,500 square square foot house with a gym, pool, putting green and bowling alley.
- [45:30]
A
Bowling alley is underrated. I know some of you folks have seen There Will Be Blood that bad things can happen in bowling alleys, but great things can happen in bowling alleys. I know Jordy hasn't seen There Will Be Blood. Tyler, have you seen There Will Be Blood? No, you haven't.
- [45:43]
F
Wow.
- [45:44]
A
Ben, you got a task team homework this weekend. Team homework. There Will Be Blood.
- [45:50]
B
I mean, my first milkshake.
- [45:52]
A
You don't know about. I drink.
- [45:53]
B
Okay, but first question is what kind of rig are they using in the bowling alley? Because we learned earlier this week that, that maintaining these bowling alley machines, you can't win.
- [46:03]
A
You can't win because if you go with the good machines, they're from the 50s, it's going to be a nightmare to maintain. You're not going to be able to get parts and you're not going to be able to find mechanics because they've all retired. But if you go up insetter, everyone's going to be making fun of you.
- [46:15]
B
If you have a $23 million home, how much is a reasonable amount to spend on your bowling alley maintenance? Because if you're willing to spend 5%
- [46:24]
A
annually, I think you have to industrialize America. You have to, you have to get a couple of CNC machines and be ready.
- [46:32]
B
Here's a tip.
- [46:33]
A
Here's a. Fabricate your own parts.
- [46:34]
B
Here's a tip.
- [46:35]
A
Yes.
- [46:36]
B
Startup focused on bowling alley maintenance. Build that, then buy this home. Then you won't have a problem.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah, I think that's a good solution.
- [46:47]
B
Now looking to spend more time in Idaho. Let's give it up for Idaho.
- [46:51]
A
Love it.
- [46:52]
B
Where they own property and have several horses. The Shields are listing the 2.4 acre California property. Got a horse nickname, Big Game James by teammates and announcers. Shields played for teams including the Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres and the Chicago White Sox. As a lifelong athlete, he put a lot of thought into the gym at the Rancho.
- [47:12]
A
I love this massive door that slides open. They have 16 foot tall glass windows and doors with steel latches. Instead of doorknobs, wood paneling covers.
- [47:22]
B
Let's pull up this picture of Big Game James getting in a fight on the field.
- [47:31]
A
I wouldn't want to be his contractor on this project.
- [47:35]
B
Wait, so I can't tell. So he's on the right. He's swinging for the fence.
- [47:41]
A
Oh yeah, he's swinging. Okay. Yeah, because he's a San Diego guy. He's on the right. Stingrays.
- [47:45]
B
Oh, okay. Okay, I think. Wait, you're acting like I'm a.
- [47:48]
A
Wait, no, wait. Or is he Red Sox?
- [47:51]
B
No, it's the White Sox. He played for the White Sox, the San Diego Padres, and the Kansas City Royals.
- [47:57]
A
Okay, so which one is he?
- [47:59]
B
So I think the Padres must be the.
- [48:01]
A
No, no, because there's a raise. Wait, who is in this image?
- [48:04]
B
They just pulled it randomly.
- [48:05]
A
Okay, so the gym has a brick wall to evoke Fenway park ware. Shields took a swing at Coco Crisp in 2008. So that's like one of his finest moments. So he rebuilt the house to.
- [48:18]
B
He's like, that swing was a memory I want to cherish forever.
- [48:21]
A
Honestly, respect. I think I would remember that forever. Well, we should move over to some more heartwarming stories in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal today. The feel good tearjerker moments. Three real estate agents won't forget. We'll just read one. But prepare to not have dry eyes, Jordi, because it's very heartwarming. So in December, Lauren Toronto, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker, was at a $12.75 million listing in Naples, Florida. It was a five bedroom neoclassical home located just one house from the beach. This house has a castle like feel with rotunda.
- [49:00]
B
We have Alpha in the chat. What do we have from Woods? Athletics for the Rays, too. There we go.
- [49:05]
A
Wow. We really know nothing on sports. Well, thank you. Thank you for. Thank you for correcting us. Padres are the San Diego team. Thank you. It's really bad. Anyway, so this house is a castle like feel. It has a rotunda, ceilings, turrets in the rear.
- [49:20]
B
It also would, like, help becoming ball knowers.
- [49:22]
A
Yes.
- [49:23]
B
Everyone's like, you guys are like ESPN for tech. I'm like, what's espn?
- [49:32]
A
Anyway, this house also has a curved mahogany staircase that serves as a focal point when you enter the home. This real estate agent calls it the wedding staircase, and it lived up to its name that day. So she'd been at the property for an open house, but it started to rain, so she decided to close up early. As she was outside taking the signs down for the open house because it rained, she sees a couple in wedding attire on the beach across the street trying to take photos. They'd just gotten married. The woman was wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet, and the man was in a sports jacket with a white boutonniere. She invited them to finish up inside and get out of the rain. They were soaked and the bride's hair was pretty Wet. So she dried them off as best she could. And the couple and their friend who was shooting the photos came inside. They climbed the staircase and took a few more photos. The couple were adorable in their twenties and extremely appreciative. I didn't have any champagne in the refrigerator, so we just toasted with water in plastic cups. It was informal, but a darling and magic moment. It made their day and my day. Cheering up. Yeah, it's cute. Very, very cute. I love it.
- [50:39]
B
Well, we gotta change the story together.
- [50:42]
A
Okay, we're going. We're going over to Drew Barrymore. She put a Westchester home on the market two years after buying it. No, skip it. Okay.
- [50:50]
B
No, I'm just. I'm in disbelief.
- [50:51]
A
Wait, about what?
- [50:53]
B
Putting it on.
- [50:54]
A
Which one?
- [50:54]
B
How could she put on? How could she relist this home?
- [50:57]
A
Well, let's find out. Maybe the Wall Street Journal did some gumshoe reporting and got to the bottom of why Drew Barrymore is selling her house just two years after buying it. So she was fed up with her long drive to the Hamptons. So the actress and daytime talk show host Drew Barrymore started looking for a weekend home in Westchester county when she saw a circa 1700s mansion for sale. Wow, that is very old. Barrymore said she felt a karmic connection to the Harrison county property I or Harrison, New York property. I walked in and I was like, I know my family's been here. I know that I have work. I have work. I have to work on this house. I know that I'm supposed to be doing this, said Barrymore, 51 years old,
- [51:41]
B
who and just immediately flipped it.
- [51:45]
A
Flipping this in two years will be my life's work. It was like a strange spiritual calling. She lives in Manhattan with her two daughters. Primarily, it turned out she actually did have a connection to the area. Her great aunt, the late actress Ethel Barrymore, had a home in nearby Mamaroneck, where an enclave known as Barrymore Lane is widely believed to be named for the family. Barrymore bought the roughly 12 acre estate for 4.4 million, according to property record. She did an extensive renovation. She has a deep interest in interior design and has considered pursuing it professionally. Between Pinterest, thrifting and a can of paint, there's nothing you can't do, Barrymore said with a laugh. But roughly two years later, the actress is listing the property for 4.99 million. Remember, she bought it for 4.44, but
- [52:34]
B
she put a lot of money into it, the renovation. So she's flipping it at a loss?
- [52:38]
A
I think so. The renovation took longer than expected, she said, and the family lives have changed in the interest. The estate includes a roughly 5,600 square foot, five bedroom main house, a pool, a pool house with an additional bedroom. Barrymore said she previously owned a home in Sagaponic, New York, but the distance from the city and the weekend traffic to the Hamptons became untenable as her children's schedule filled up with social and sporting activities. Harrison, by contrast, offered accessibility and charm. The property, located roughly an hour from Manhattan, is a short drive from the picturesque Rye in Bronxville. While nearby Bedford has drawn celebrities, the median sales price for a home in Harrison is around 1.1 million. The property's expansive acreage gave Barrymore a sense of being close to nature. It's really like being in your own personal park. There are tons of deer. There are pheasants and ducks. There are rabbits. When she purchased the home, Barrymore said she thought it would only need a cosmetic renovation. Instead, it turned into a complete internal gut with much of the plumbing, heating and air conditioning replaced. Barrymore also revamped the ground floor to open up the kitchen, which felt dark and boxed in. It took a year of engineering to figure out how to accomplish it.
- [53:52]
B
Well, wonderful opportunity for somebody that wants to live in Westchester.
- [53:57]
A
Yes.
- [53:58]
B
You got a go check it out. You got a celebrity to to handle your remodel for you. Yeah. You effectively at for. For less than the dollars that were actually put in.
- [54:09]
A
Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about MongoDB.
- [54:20]
B
Great to have you on.
- [54:20]
A
What's the only thing faster than the AI market your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And our next step is here with us in the TVP ultradome.
- [54:31]
B
Here he is.
- [54:32]
A
Billy Bowman. Good to meet you. How you doing?
- [54:35]
D
I'm really good.
- [54:37]
B
How's your week been?
- [54:38]
A
What is your life like right now? Are you just getting blown up by everyone?
- [54:42]
D
Probably.
- [54:43]
A
Okay, Yes.
- [54:43]
D
I haven't even had time to check all the DMs yet. I'm really doing my best just to
- [54:46]
A
take care of everything.
- [54:47]
B
Yeah, I was shocked. We were live on the show reading about this whole thing because we had seen the ad on the 101.
- [54:55]
A
I saw it in person. I drove right by it.
- [54:57]
B
Very hard to be miss. And then we texted Nick, one of our producers, and you seemingly responded within an hour or Something like that. It was very fast.
- [55:07]
D
Yeah. I've been perpetually online very fast, glued to the screen to not miss anything.
- [55:11]
B
Okay. Okay. So, yeah. So for anybody that missed it, there is a massive Hollywood sign scale.
- [55:17]
D
30ft tall, 30ft long, 230ft long, wide, 230ft wide.
- [55:21]
B
And on a hillside that I haven't seen any out of home advertising on before. So I want to get the whole story, like, let's start, I guess at the beginning. How did this happen? Were you on Fiverr, very active or you were friends with the Fiverr team?
- [55:38]
D
So actually, no, but the creative director, Nir Refuha. So shout out to Nir for making this happen. Reached out to me and basically, do you want to do this? And I thought, like, first of all, you're joking. He was not joking. Then secondly. Right, it's just a print. Like it's a billboard, right? No, no, no. We're building the sign. No, no.
- [55:55]
A
Right.
- [55:55]
D
And then like as they're sending mock ups and stuff, I could see like, it's actually someone. Is this like the sheer scale of it? So it's been the work since October last year. I don't have full insight into the full production. I've just heard kind of the stories from the team. So full shout out to the Fiverr team and especially Ellie Peer, who is the guy doing this. He pulled off the impossible together with the entire Fiverr team and the family kind of just made his. What do you think?
- [56:19]
A
I'm never gonna.
- [56:20]
B
Personally, I love ads. I'm never gonna look at any hillside the same way ever again. Because I'm surprised they were able to pull us off even with the city.
- [56:29]
A
It's remarkable. Take us back to the beginning. Did you study? What do you study in school? How do you get into your business? And then I want to sort of go through how AI is affecting your work. But just start as far back as you think is relevant.
- [56:46]
B
Right, sure.
- [56:47]
D
How the hell did I end up here? I typically start with like, it's nature and nurture, right? So like, creativity is the only thing I'm good at. Like, I'm terrible with everything else, like bookkeeping or whatever. And I grew up in a creative family, so my mom and dad ran a small advertising agency my entire life. My mom was the kind of exact shout out to mom and dad.
- [57:06]
B
She was my dream upbringing.
- [57:07]
D
Yeah. Graphic designer. And that was the art director. And I grew up, you know, like putting little micro machines in Xerox and it's kind of making collages and all this stuff. So super creative. My whole family. My sister works as a game designer. My brother has done all kinds of web design, runs a Dungeons and Dragons startup. So, like, we're all very creative. That's all I do. I'm classically trained. I studied at Beckman's College of Design in Stockholm. Probably haven't heard of it, but Stockholm, I mean, it was a pretty good deal in Stockholm. So classically trained. Ended up going into fashion for whatever reason. Worst decision of my life. But I did. I love clothes and just like aesthetics and how to bring ideas into garments. I worked at All Saints, H and M, a bunch of different brands. Menswear designer. Dude, doing clothes.
- [57:50]
B
No way.
- [57:51]
A
So you would actually decide, like, where the buttons go on shirt.
- [57:54]
D
Yeah, exactly. Drawstring, length of the hoodie and really, you know, all the. All that stuff.
- [57:58]
B
Why was it the worst decision?
- [57:59]
D
Yeah, well, so it's like, you know, you've seen Devil Wears Prada, right? Yeah, that's how it actually is.
- [58:04]
A
Okay. So people have really big.
- [58:06]
D
I mean, it's constantly this, like, you should be happy to be here.
- [58:10]
A
Okay.
- [58:10]
D
In the worst, like toxic, you can get into the sustainability part of it, blah, blah, blah. But, like, there's no career process prospects. You're basically what is a licking ass for 10 years and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you'll be the creative director. Yeah, with a big maybe. So not something for me. So eventually I pivoted to tech where it was like, this is back in 2018, 2019. So back then that was like, you know, job security. Like, all the fun design stuff was kind of going on there, building like branded experiences on web and mobile. So I worked at PayPal in Sweden, in Vodafone, a bunch of different brands, until I ended up in an AI startup in 2023. Yes, exactly. This was early. This was I tinkering with midjourney since mid 22. That very first one came out and I'm like, I can actually get like a hovering sneaker in the air and it looks like something. Before then it was disco diffusion and Dall E and all these kind of weird retro AI now, I guess.
- [59:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, vintage.
- [59:05]
D
Vintage AI, exactly. So from there we did a bunch of stuff over 2023, which Chapter has to be called. It's a German AI startup.
- [59:13]
B
And eventually you were in Germany?
- [59:15]
D
No, I was working remote from Sweden. So Remot. That's cool. Happened as well. So I did that and eventually they pivoted, we parted ways and at that time, like, tail end of 2023. I'd been posting some spec ads just like a little bit more art directed. Maybe I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but maybe for the time it was just a couple of levels up what most people were seeing. And all of a sudden my DM is like people from the first AI agencies, monks, the big agencies. Like we have to reputation. You have to do AI with us. And all organic on LinkedIn.
- [59:47]
A
Yeah. Explain what the workflow was for those first ads. Is that static images that are AI generated, then you're doing text layout and something like Figma or is it video from start to finish that you're cobbling together? Are you doing mixed media where you're using some stock footage, some AI video editing together after effects? What's the workflow?
- [60:05]
D
Well, so that's where we are kind of now. Back then, back then, back then it was like just getting anything that felt realistic, had a bit of grit and texture to it that was like sheen, plastic, mid journey look. Yeah, ye faulty in the industry.
- [60:17]
A
So you were able to get away from that with the correct prompting.
- [60:20]
D
Correct prompting. Just having an eye for art direction, angles, lighting again.
- [60:24]
B
And then editing.
- [60:25]
D
Yeah, and editing. Yeah, sure. Where to put the logo and you get like good pacing and everything into. So it feels like an ad that's I think was back then really kind of a bit lame, so to say. So back 2024 did a bunch of work. Did a music video for Hardy and Fred Durst, Ballantine's Whiskey. They were leaning into AI so much. They've done a ton of AI videos.
- [60:51]
A
I mean I remember like the original, the original cover art for their, for their big album was. I think it was airbrushed, but it looks like AI art now.
- [61:01]
B
Yeah, we were just so we were just asking the founder of SUNO yesterday on the show what artist has leaned into AI the most? And he didn't want to name names in part because he actually knows who's using the products and a lot of them want to be quiet about it. But he didn't have like a really clear answer on like who's leaning in the most. But that seems like leaning in quite a bit. If in 2024 you're like we're gonna
- [61:25]
D
use this to make a lot of crazy kind of glam rock video. All kinds of math.
- [61:30]
A
And there's so many times when an album comes out and they have the budget for one classic music video or two or maybe three, and it starts to get low budget, it's like, oh, let's use like a DV camera for this shoot. Or let's not bring the. Let's not rent a soundstage. We'll do something a little more organic, maybe do some tour footage for this one and stretch the budget further. But you know, you can. With AI, you can probably just do a video for every single.
- [61:55]
D
Oh yeah.
- [61:55]
A
I mean that's a real opportunity really.
- [61:57]
D
People are still like staying in the live action box. Just a fine box when you're doing live action. But like the truly. And we can get into that later how you scale and test to just like do different specific stuff for different channels.
- [62:08]
A
Totally.
- [62:08]
D
All this stuff, we haven't really gotten there yet. On the client side, they don't know what to ask for. They just know they should be experimenting with it.
- [62:14]
A
Sure.
- [62:15]
D
But yeah. So then 2025 we.
- [62:18]
A
So you're wrapped at this point by agencies or they call you a lot
- [62:21]
D
of agency rep at that point. Slowly built again. I was nobody on social media. I mean I'm like 30k on LinkedIn. I'm not some huge guy, but like I have a huge sign but not a huge guy. So it's building a following, building attention and then eventually that kind of formulated into a huge, huge project over 25. So we did activation campaign for Taylor Swift. We worked with Luz Capaldi, with Google and YouTube. Universal Music Group. I mean yes, a lot of really big brands together with Wonder Studios and a bunch of people I just got to know, got to know over the AI. Mean I worked with Dave Clark back in the day. 2024. Sure. If you hang out on LinkedIn, you've
- [62:57]
B
seen him shout out, what does your team look like to execute on all this?
- [63:01]
D
Great question. It's growing but the biggest bottleneck for us is actually finding people. Like on the artist side. It's super difficult to find people who ask like the right circumstances. So I also teach at Sweden's like biggest creative school called Berg School of Communication. They have at least what we think. The world's only AI program at this point. One year in classroom, government funded and I'm there for three weeks. So the ones with a little bit of a freelance appetite, they tend to come to me. Yeah. And getting some really good. Yeah.
- [63:29]
B
So like it's a great recruiting strategy.
- [63:30]
D
Part of the talent funnel is really good. I mean like promise, the AI studio they bought the Curious Refuge, if you saw that online education.
- [63:38]
A
So cool.
- [63:40]
B
Yeah. So many questions. So like on the projects that you mentioned in 2025, what does a team look like for an individual project. How quickly are you completing them? How would you compare those projects to the same type of production from a decade ago?
- [63:59]
D
Sure, sure. Well, it's really different, I would say. I mean everyone has a different take on this. I think having a lean and means squad is better than us. Like we used 30 artists. Like you can do that. But that creates a kind of a too many chefs problem. I think we have to have like a really strong lead and then delegate that. So structure is also everything in an ar.
- [64:17]
B
Yeah. And as a cost thing, you're running a small business creative agency. Right. Like every incremental person that you bring on is just eating into that overall project fee.
- [64:26]
D
Absolutely. And some are more efficient with prompting and others are not. I mean the big cost is not necessarily on the credit side. It's hours, the human hours. That's still. And that's the key on you know, as you know, it's not. What did they say the LA news channel? I mean he just pushed a button. I mean that's the classic trope. Right. So it's definitely that. But smaller teams that can do more I guess is the short story of it. And it's super different. Like I wish there was a formula. Always this, always that, you know, of course. But having a lean and mean squad of four. I think for the Lewis Capaldi we were seven artists in total working under the Wonder Studios umbrella who facilitated that.
- [65:05]
A
And for those folks who are joining you and working with you, do they have similar paths where maybe they were classically trained in art or design and then they narrowed down at some point to fashion or typesetting or typography or visual design or video editing. And then this sort of allows them to zoom back out and sort of almost retreat to the more classic train, the more aesthetic driven work.
- [65:36]
D
Something like it. I mean I think the AI kind of family, the global one, we come from kind of all walks of life creatively. I mean you have, you know, Gossip Goblin or Zach London. He's blowing up right now. He had a I think Hollywood Reporter article about him as well. He's an ex anthropologist. So like the beauty of this stuff is that it's not only X industry peeps. Of course you have also live action directors. I have a weird non linear design career. People come from documentary all kinds. But again or just because what truly matters is what's. What's in here.
- [66:07]
A
Yeah.
- [66:07]
D
And how you can articulate and just
- [66:08]
B
an obsession with using the tool.
- [66:10]
D
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. We can this never ending.
- [66:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. You've seen what. How is your stack of evolved, like what models, what models were you using in 2024, 2025? I'm assuming you're constantly trying all the new tools.
- [66:26]
D
Yeah, I mean, up until 24, I guess mid Journey was king and queen and it was everything. That was definitely the big model. Then you kind of had Flux and a bunch of other more indie ones coming in and the scene becoming more competitive, which is great. I think that's. I think that's also what's happening with Sora. You know, not everyone's going to make it. It's just. Just a testament to a free, healthy market. That's how it should be. So then as Google kind of entered the chat, like really bigly to you, sir. VO3 and Nabana VO3 nano banana. The Google suite has become kind of industry standard for us. So definitely using that a ton. And then of course, now cling three sea dance two, they're kind of king of the hill now in AI video.
- [67:07]
A
How is your access over VO3?
- [67:10]
D
Oh, yeah, yeah. As it stands right now. Yes.
- [67:12]
A
How is your access to Sea Dance three or Sea Dance in general? We've heard that there's like long queues, there's rate limits. It's. It's not something that Billy Bowman does not get.
- [67:22]
B
Rate limited.
- [67:23]
D
Well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the Dremina cpp so Creative partnership program and I've had pre access for.
- [67:30]
B
Told you a month or so. Don't ever rate limit.
- [67:34]
D
So. Yeah.
- [67:35]
B
The man with his own Hollywood side.
- [67:37]
A
Yeah.
- [67:37]
E
Yeah.
- [67:38]
A
You don't want to.
- [67:38]
D
You gotta have seat. Answer. They're rolling it out now in a fascinating kind of play there, at least from the rumors I've heard, is that us might be kind of the last on the list because as Europeans, we're kind of.
- [67:48]
B
So why is their model better? Because they just downloaded every Hollywood film ever in history.
- [67:55]
D
We can only speculate. Right. Yeah, I mean that's the data set and the training that went into. Sure.
- [68:01]
B
Is, you know, just basically higher value Data than even YouTube. Right. Because YouTube is like potentially.
- [68:07]
D
Yeah.
- [68:08]
A
Yeah. Although. Although it feels like at least trailers for every movie are on YouTube and I would assume like there's like every Marvel fight scene gets clipped and is on like the movie Clips channel.
- [68:19]
B
Yeah, but that almost. That'd be like if LLMs were only trained on content above paywalls.
- [68:24]
A
I guess you're right. Yeah. Yeah.
- [68:26]
D
I mean, it's all kind of what you say, the inner workings of this stuff.
- [68:29]
B
How is the concept or the like. How is prompt engineering evolved? Because there was a period with just regular LLMs where everyone was obsessed with prompt engineering and then the models got it much better. And of course everyone still has their own prompts and skills and things like that. But for the average. The average user is not even really caring about prompt engineering, at least with text now. Because the output is just good enough for so many different use cases.
- [68:58]
D
Yeah. I mean, I love that topic because I think prompt engineering was one and synthography and all these kind of titles around this stuff. I don't care, man. Making images, whatever. People tend to want to make things more fancy than what they are because they want to hold on to the old idea that getting good output is technically difficult. And that's just gone.
- [69:17]
A
And that was the case with you're a master of After Effects or Photoshop and you're a master of the tool. And so even if your ideas are mediocre and it's like, well, you're the only person that can actually instantiate anything. So if I just give you.
- [69:31]
D
We have this technical moat.
- [69:33]
A
Exactly.
- [69:33]
D
Used to be that way. So, Stephen Bartlett guitari of a CEO, this brilliant PDF article on LinkedIn last year that's called your moat is dead.
- [69:41]
A
Yeah.
- [69:41]
D
And that's just summarize all of that. But back to your question. Prompt engineering has changed a lot in the sense that the models have gotten so much better. Understanding natural language. Like, you don't need to go super fancy. I mean, I do sometimes because the boring answer. It depends on what you're using.
- [69:55]
A
I remember old Mid Journey used to you'd say, like, not, don't do six fingers, please, please, please do five fingers.
- [70:02]
D
Right. All the negative stuff.
- [70:03]
E
Yeah.
- [70:03]
A
And you put in like the lens and the. And the color grade that you.
- [70:07]
D
Which you can still do.
- [70:08]
A
You can still do that. Some of that. Yeah. Some of that got.
- [70:12]
D
Yeah.
- [70:12]
A
Just abstracted.
- [70:13]
D
Yeah. And you can still bring it in. And I think that kind of goes back to like, everyone that comes into this industry from different walks of life will have a new perspective because they sit on a table. Type of terminology and vocabulary and also taste and craft.
- [70:26]
A
And that goes to the anthropologist who's going to come with a completely different set of language and get very different results.
- [70:31]
D
Or even me. Like, I'm not a live action director at all. Like, again, I'm a weird designer guy, but I have a lifelong passion for movies. I've done my 50,000 hours or whatever. Like, I could go. I mean, I'm in the God I'm.
- [70:43]
B
You should go movie for movie with John.
- [70:44]
A
Have you seen Borat?
- [70:46]
D
Oh, God, I'm classic.
- [70:48]
A
It's a classic. Exactly.
- [70:49]
B
Sorry, sorry. It's a running. Running joke.
- [70:51]
G
Okay.
- [70:52]
A
It's the only movie that he's seen. I've seen a lot of movies. I love movies.
- [70:56]
B
But we joke about it.
- [70:57]
A
But he's also.
- [70:58]
B
Do you think people are. How good do you think people are at spotting deep fakes today? Because people, I think, would like to think they're good at spotting it. But there's so many videos out there in 2026 that people are like, oh, that's AI or that's not AI.
- [71:16]
A
I've gotten caught a few times. I've noticed these funny vehicles. If it's a funny vehicle and it looks like it's filmed on a.
- [71:22]
B
It's gotten to the point where people will be debating, like, physics.
- [71:25]
A
Yeah.
- [71:26]
B
Like that. That is not impossible. And they're like, well, look at this study.
- [71:30]
A
Yeah.
- [71:31]
D
But I think Runway put out a pretty funny post a couple of weeks ago about, like, basically an a B test of, like, it mixed AI And I think they used real start frames. So, like an actual photograph. And then one was just the real, and then the other one was animated with AI. And anyone can go and take that test right now, but, like, we're there.
- [71:50]
A
Like, the New York Times ran a similar thing with poetry, literature, science fiction all around. AI generated content versus non. And a lot of the New York Times readers preferred the AI generated content.
- [72:05]
B
So you're getting hit up by artists, you're getting hit up by companies that want to make ads. What industries are or what. Is there anyone that's like, not hitting you up and saying, like, we're never gonna do this. Because even I think people were pretty surprised when Gucci came out like, this
- [72:22]
D
was a McQueen, all the big fashion.
- [72:24]
B
Yeah. They came out and said, like, yeah, we're making, we're doing. And. And there was. It was. They. They had an interesting approach where some of the images just looked exactly like normal Gucci photographs. And then they had, like, some GTA esque images that clearly were generated. And I thought that was an interesting decision because if they just came out and we're like, we're using AI, but it looks real, I think people would have had less of a negative reaction. And then some of the stuff was just obviously cgi, so it kind of muddied it a little bit. But who is it? Seems like everyone is now starting to experiment.
- [72:58]
D
Yeah.
- [72:58]
B
But is there anybody?
- [73:00]
D
I would say, overall for us being a Stockholm Sweden, maybe we don't have as much access to the big narrative stuff as you guys have here. Will that change? Maybe. But mostly for us it's been brand and content and commercials. Just because the ins we have with agencies and just how we position ourselves. Our bread and butter. I'd love to do more narrative. If I ever had time, I would do more short films. I don't have any time.
- [73:22]
A
Also, it just does feel like in terms of the actual workflow, doing a 3 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour movie from start to finish.
- [73:30]
D
Don't do it.
- [73:31]
A
It's gonna be iffy to say, okay, does the character look exactly the same two hours later?
- [73:38]
B
What advantages are companies getting? Is it speed, cost, flexibility? Like even not quality, but yeah, flexibility. Can they do scenes that they never would have been able to?
- [73:50]
D
It's a good question. And I think my kind of favorite sound bite that anyone can steal this. I'm not gonna copyright it. But don't spend less on budget. Spend more on imagination. Don't spend less on budget because that's just like you're just going to paint yourself into a corner if everything is
- [74:03]
A
about like cost reduction.
- [74:04]
D
Cost reduction. Like in this media landscape with everything that's going on on every platform and ever competitive. And now ads are going to look better than ever. The rising tide lifts all boats, right?
- [74:13]
A
Yeah.
- [74:13]
D
So like I just think that's a completely backwards strategy. So rather.
- [74:17]
B
But couldn't there be an argument for keeping the budget fixed but having more variation in the underlying creative.
- [74:23]
A
I think that's exactly what he's saying. Yeah, he's saying that if you're a brand, you're spending a million dollars on creative assets and you say, great, AI is here. I'm only going to spend 100k. Well, your competitor is going to spend the same million, but they're going to get 10 times, maybe 100 times as much content, as many variations, as much creativity. And they're going to smoke you.
- [74:41]
D
Or even just the nature of the content because we can fucking put the camera on an arrow flying through a battlefield and over the monkey and then a little squirrel takes it. Like anything.
- [74:50]
A
This guy's a director.
- [74:51]
B
Anything.
- [74:52]
G
Totally.
- [74:53]
D
So I mean, we're waiting for those br. Just to our earlier point, clients haven't gotten there yet. They don't know. It's just like, oh, here's we want to do a live action ad. Can we do it with AI instead? Can we fit in this old box? While the old box is gone, you can kind of do anything. So that's what's really exciting. I mean, we did a protein bar ad with a Swedish nyx. They did have Kim Kardashian as a big face a couple of years ago. Anyway, the brief was to, like, fly down through the clouds. A girl is glamping in, like, Argentina and she eats a bar and then feeds it to a capybara that starts twerking.
- [75:24]
A
No way.
- [75:25]
B
Good luck. You know capybaras can get violent, right?
- [75:27]
D
Yeah. But these were very friendly, the AI capybaras.
- [75:30]
B
This is a good use case for AI because capybaras are some of the most docile creatures. Until they're not.
- [75:36]
A
Until they're not.
- [75:36]
B
We played a video of a capybara attack earlier on.
- [75:40]
A
You might have saved a life by using AI to generate the capybara instead of using a real animal hand.
- [75:45]
D
And there you have the sustainability issue as well. Like, okay, the carbon footprint of flying towards engine, like doing all this the traditional way. Yeah, good luck. And we could measure, like, you'll never win the sustainability argument against AI as well.
- [75:59]
A
How interesting. Take. Yeah, any.
- [76:00]
B
Yeah, any. Any.
- [76:01]
A
I feel like the AI industry has very much been on its back foot playing defense on that, saying. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not that. It's not that. Better.
- [76:08]
C
Yeah.
- [76:08]
B
The example, the example. The example that I've always used in the, in the, in the film entertainment context is the idea that, you know, somebody making a film would fly out 50 people to another continent to get scenes that would ultimately take maybe 60 seconds. Seconds. Yeah. Just to tear it down. Just to tear it down. Yeah, yeah, it's, It's. Yeah, it's certainly going to be more sustainable to, like, do the right few, hit the keyboard in the right way for enough times to get an output. What advice are you giving to creatives? Because what you've done is exactly what we've talked about on the show and what I think the general point of view, at least from the tech industry is. Yeah, if you want to resist AI, you're going to. You might, like, feel better about yourself for some amount of time, but eventually you're going to get steamrolled by somebody who is. Loves doing the same type of thing that you're doing is just going to use a different tool set. So, yeah. What advice are you giving to creatives across their kind of career on how. How to actually lean in? And I think there's a way to lean in and get just as much satisfaction, have just as much intensity of the creative process and just as Much joy, more control.
- [77:32]
D
Now we're getting there. And truly, you don't even have to choose anymore. I typically say it's not about AI or it's AI. And because we also did a recent super bowl commercial for a big airline, all the talent were shot green screen. We background and relit them, put them in a beautiful cloud environment and all this stuff. So you don't even have to choose anymore. You can keep the human talent, the human performance performance and all that stuff. But the advice for creatives, well, just test it. Don't say blah until you tested it. And if you have tested it and it's not for you, well then wait or stuff. But this is not going to go away. I just fully accepted that this is not going to go away. I was also scared. I've not always been this happy. Go. Lucky optimist.
- [78:12]
B
So you started absolutely printing.
- [78:15]
D
Well, we'll see. We're doing fine. The jury's still out. But to that note, there's more opportunities than ever. The ad world is in kind of flux of like we need stuff. In two weeks you get good luck with CG and live action and you can kind of. Okay, I don't always want these two week briefs, but you can help, you know, do this math.
- [78:37]
B
I still take the six month brief.
- [78:39]
D
Yes, yes. Too long for AI. I would say keep it about a month, a month and a half, I think for a couple of ads or like 30 seconds.
- [78:45]
B
But still that is dramatically more than just like typing into the box what you want.
- [78:50]
D
Oh yeah, yeah. Because it's like just going into an AI project. You have to think about casting. Are we doing an AI phase or where you can choose all the looks, demographics, everything, or are we doing like
- [79:02]
B
what feedback do you give the various labs on what they're doing badly today?
- [79:09]
D
Right. So I mean we are in a bunch of these creative partnership programs and it's great because you do get to feedback and it can be anything from like the. If that's what you mean, like the AI provider.
- [79:17]
F
So.
- [79:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, like the five, the six finger thing.
- [79:21]
A
Cheaper, faster, better with a certain style.
- [79:24]
D
Sure, sure. I mean what we're doing is what I call like live art directed realism. Yeah. If it doesn't look like a movie frame, it's not good enough for us. Like that's, that's where my base level is. So I found a really neat. I mean, you've seen some of the work. Maybe I'll send it up if you want to pull it up. But if it's not There it's not good enough. So like realism. That's others focus in animation, other focus in stylized claymation. Again, you can kind of do anything. What I. I want is better, more human focused interfaces. I think that's like making us the tools more human and less.
- [79:57]
A
Sorry, more software. Like more of a software.
- [80:00]
D
I mean the user experience of using the product. Like actually like I want to queue up 5.
- [80:06]
B
I just want a chat bot that you can just.
- [80:07]
D
No, God, no, no, no. We don't. I mean, I don't generate in the OpenAI. Exactly.
- [80:13]
A
Have you thought about getting into like the vibe coding world? Building the tools that you want or having your team work on that, Building a harness around all of the different models?
- [80:22]
D
New site is actually vibe coded to some extent. There's a really neat webflow plugin that you can use as a bridge to get into, to bring Claude into there.
- [80:30]
A
Sure.
- [80:31]
D
So there's just no time. I hear a lot of people feel the same, like just the exhaustion of keeping up. It's insane. I mean, I do my best and I try to focus, you know, branded content, ad stuff that we're doing. But I do wanna.
- [80:43]
B
How many super bowl ads do you think you'll do for next Super Bowl?
- [80:47]
D
We'll see, man. Like.
- [80:48]
B
Like over five.
- [80:50]
D
There were AI Super Bowls ads besides ours as well.
- [80:53]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I figure you're gonna get at least.
- [80:56]
A
Do you think next year there'll be more than half? More than 25%?
- [81:01]
B
I would. I would guess that. I think it was more than half this year.
- [81:04]
D
Exactly, exactly.
- [81:05]
A
It's somewhere.
- [81:06]
D
Background replacement, relighting. Oh. You know, combining even.
- [81:10]
A
Just like there is a new AI driven rotoscoping tool that just replaces the background. And that's AI but it's just a replacement for sitting there and cutting out something.
- [81:19]
D
Yeah, yeah. All these kind of menial tasks that no one loves to do. It's just like a machine is better at that. Can we let the machines do it?
- [81:25]
A
Little blemish replacement.
- [81:26]
D
Yeah. What I don't want AI to do is like writing the scripts, coming up with the ideas, because that's the fun stuff for us. Will we get there? Maybe. But right here, right now, it's trash. Like, that's not at all where it's at.
- [81:36]
A
Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What does the integration with Fiverr actually look like? It doesn't sound like I can get you to make me a Super bowl ad for $5.
- [81:46]
D
No.
- [81:48]
A
So is Fiverr just a. Is Fiverr just a way to Meet you. Is this just more of like a marketing partnership for Fiverr to open up people's minds about the type of people that they could hire?
- [81:59]
D
Sure, great question. So besides the name Fiverr, that's kind of stuck. Yeah, it's all. But there's a lot more high budget stuff, stuff on fiverrdcs and what we're doing with the hub is that they've curated like a really solid selection of some of the best and with different styles also that you can go and hire now because like our experience as well of talking to agencies like, yeah, we found this guy on Instagram and DM'd him and it was terrible. Like trying to find people who are vetted and really good industry pros is hard because there's like a handful of people in the world that dust is at a level that is good enough for commercial production. So I think that's like the opportunity they're presenting on the hub. Like come and work with these.
- [82:37]
B
Here's an interesting question. So I've always felt that at any given point, at least when it comes to kind of startup style design and branding, that there's only maybe like 100 people in the world that actually do great sort of like leading edge work. And I've always thought that was funny because for so long millions of people can make a website, can make product design, et cetera, and yet there's still like this small group of people that actually are pushing the frontier and kind of like leading from a style standpoint and kind of like setting the tone, setting the actual tastemakers. Do you think that that will stay the same with AI? My expectation is that it will to some degree. It feels like an iron law almost that at any given point, regardless of the tool set, there will only be a small number of people that are true, true tastemakers.
- [83:31]
D
Absolutely. I mean, this is true already today. Like if you are on socials, a lot of people are asking for work, like kind of mid. I mean people are new, people are kind of happy amateurs playing this stuff. Most people might not have a.
- [83:42]
B
And there's still demand for kind of the middle of the pack.
- [83:46]
D
Sure, yes, it will all.
- [83:47]
B
It's just that you're not going to get the, you know, quickly people identify the hundred or so and realistically it can get down to like 10 or something. Something like that.
- [83:59]
D
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think what's happened is that the floor is raised, but so is the ceiling. So like really standing out is also more difficult because people make awesome stuff. Like there's so many talented people in the. In the industry. So Cream will rise to the top, but it's also more competitive because that's the baseline. Anyone can make a cool fight scene now. Okay, what's next? Like what actually makes us tick? So to say.
- [84:21]
B
Yeah, where. How are you building the company? You're here in LA because you have your own Hollywood sign, but you're based on. Based in Stockholm. Stockholm. You're building out the team there or do you remote?
- [84:33]
D
Yes. So really, really kind of what I say, step by step, brick by brick. Really really carefully selecting who we bring into the team. So we have two assistants at home now holding the fort. Shout out to you guys so we could be here. But like to our earlier point, it's really difficult to find people. So what's been a good funnel for me is working with teaching the stuff as well and identifying some of the leading talent that are kind of AI native, that grow up kind of going to school with this stuff. They might need more traditional schooling in terms of tools, art direction and stuff
- [85:00]
B
that they don't have because how to work with clients.
- [85:02]
D
That too. That too. Being able to take a brief. All this stuff. So really, really slowly and like human at the, at the front and center of everything. But we have like a temporary office. I mean it's literally just been me and my co founder for the last years doing this. So we're some type of. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.
- [85:19]
B
Amazing. Amazing. I mean it's so, so fun to talk with you and because like we haven't had. We've had plenty of kind of creatives come on the show that are using. Using the different tools quite effectively, but nobody that's just like made it like I am going to recreate the modern ad agency.
- [85:37]
A
I think people sort of wrote off how like the models are so amazing. It's so magical when you fire off one prompt and you get something that looks real that people just completely wrote off the middle, which is like actually making a product of a story or something. We had this idea for an AI video that would be me and Jordi on the microphone. Throughout history, different big innovations. So the invention of the steam engine, the invention of the telephone, the invention of Wilbur Wright, launching the first airplane and we're there sort of talking about it and we generated a still frame, tried to animate them between and it was just like it was quickly turning into like a multi week process that should have been like a month that we budgeted. But we were like, let's spend 30 minutes on this and, like, hopefully we'll make it work. And we never quite got it there, so we just never published it. You know what you should do?
- [86:28]
D
You should film it. You have a green screen here. Yeah. The background places your voices are real. You don't have to clone your again. You don't have to choose.
- [86:35]
A
It's.
- [86:35]
D
And that's really good.
- [86:37]
A
So we have everything here.
- [86:38]
D
So we could do it.
- [86:39]
A
Okay, last question. Aura recently partnered with Chrome Heart for a ring. Yes or no? Was this something you'd pick up? Is this something you'd reckon. Is this fake news? Yeah. Okay.
- [86:50]
D
Already. For the record, I don't. I can't afford Chrome art.
- [86:54]
A
Okay. You know.
- [86:55]
B
Yes. Hey, let's. Next super bowl season, you might be crowned up.
- [87:00]
D
Might be. Might be.
- [87:01]
A
Okay. Okay. Well, it's been fantastic.
- [87:03]
D
Likewise.
- [87:04]
A
Thank you so much. We should definitely work together on something.
- [87:07]
B
Let's figure out something to work on.
- [87:08]
A
Yeah, that'd be a amazing.
- [87:09]
B
Yeah.
- [87:10]
A
Yeah, I'd love it.
- [87:11]
B
Awesome.
- [87:11]
A
Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud. Building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And that brings us into the Lambda Lightning round. And we are kicking it off with Benjamin Miller from Fundrise. But first, we will pivot that camera around, show you the entire TV in Ultradome, and we will show you the Lambda Cloud because we are in the Lambda Lightning round right now. And I believe we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise in the Restream waiting room. So we will bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. We'll try that again to bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. How you doing?
- [87:59]
B
What's going on?
- [88:00]
A
Hey, guys, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. D. Since this is the first time on the show, why don't you introduce yourself and the company?
- [88:08]
E
All right. All right. So my name is Ben Miller. I'm co founder and CEO of Fundrise. We are an alternative investment platform. I think the largest direct to investor platform in the country. Been around for 15 years. We've democratized investing into real estate.
- [88:21]
A
Overnight success?
- [88:23]
E
Yeah, real estate, tech and private credit. We have 2 million customers. We just took our fund, VCX but public last week on the New York Stock Exchange.
- [88:33]
A
It's amazing.
- [88:34]
B
Very, very cool.
- [88:35]
D
We love.
- [88:35]
A
Nice how fundrise has been around as
- [88:38]
B
long as, as, as long as I've been following, like, tech closely.
- [88:43]
A
Yeah.
- [88:44]
B
So. So it's very, very cool to have you on the show. Yeah. Let's get into the recent launch because we've obviously seen it all over our timeline. I had a friend of ours messaged, John and I yesterday, Yesterday seeing something that was. He was like pissed off. He was like, how do we all miss this? So anyways, yeah.
- [89:07]
A
How long has it been in the works?
- [89:08]
B
Come together? Because it's not. You can just spin up and, you know, there's a lot of moving pieces.
- [89:14]
E
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so funny because when we started out, everyone tells us a bad idea, which was we were. We democratized investing into real estate. This is about 2021, 2020. Everything was hot, hot, hot, hot. Real estate was hot, tech was hot. And we were foolish enough to think about, well, what else could we do that would be really painful and hard and new? And so we came up with the concept of why don't we try to expand into democratizing investing into private tech, into venture capital? We're different than the normal approach. We usually start by going in the front door of the sec. So we go into the sec, say, this is what we want to do. Can we create a pull venture capital fund? No one had ever done that before. It took us about two years going back and forth with the staff and we created the first. It's a venture fund just like any other venture fund, except anyone can invest in it. And we launched, I think at the end of 2022. And then stock market collapsed. Everything in tech became negative. So we were super low lucky because we started investing at the bottom of the cycle. And so that's how we got access. When we got access to Anduril and Anthropic and Canva, people were very bearish on tech. And that's like. So people are like, how did you get these great names? I was like, well, we picked good names, but it was also. There was a lot of luck there. So anyways, I'll give you the story, but I don't want to keep, you know, if you want to.
- [90:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, continue, continue. Because. Yeah, so, so, so two years working with the sec, you, you, you actually create the fund, but it's not publicly listed at that time. It's just available in, in your, in
- [91:02]
E
your product to the public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is something that people in tech weren't familiar with, but you can Be public and not be publicly traded.
- [91:09]
D
Traded. Yeah.
- [91:10]
B
Yeah.
- [91:11]
E
And so we were. It's a public venture fund. It was, you know, we're filing, you know, public reporting on the SEC's web, Edgar. And so we ended up, you know, raising about half a billion dollars across 100,000 investors. We have 100,000 investors. The fund had a lot of good returns. Like, within three years, it had been up like 85% or something. Especially in the last. Last year it was up 65% the last 12 months.
- [91:40]
B
And that's nav being up 65%.
- [91:44]
E
Yeah, well, I mean, it's just the mark of typically, it's just the last round, you know, what was Anthropic's last round? What was Vanta's last round? Or Canva or whomever. So we typically marked the last round valuation and we invested in OpenAI and Databricks and all these companies three years ago. So it ended up doing pretty well. And then, so then we, when we
- [92:08]
B
said, okay, like, I'm in the wrong business, fund manager, I wasn't wrong.
- [92:13]
E
Because real estate's so much more brutal than tech, let me tell you. It's a lot nicer to be an investor than a builder.
- [92:19]
B
Yeah. What, what do you guys look for on the actual asset side? I'm assuming some of the positions are direct summer. You know, you've bought into SPVs. Like, what. How do you, how do you qualify on the, on the asset side?
- [92:38]
E
Yeah, I mean, our check size grew over time, so now it's like, it wants to be like 20 to 50 to 100 million. And the way that we did it is that we, we have. Fundrise is 200 people. We have 100 software engineers. We built, you know, fintech platform with millions of customers and payment processing. And then we built a real estate AI product called Real Estate AI. And so we have like a whole AI, like, initiative. And so that's how we really, like, got comfortable with the different products that we got to Anthropic, I think early is that we were building with it and we're like, oh, my God, this is such a better enterprise product than anything else. Go down the list. Like, it was, it was almost 80% other than Anduril, which I don't have any killer drones. We were, you know, we really. It's. Every time I see a company come to me like, I sort of saw some flow for deal and repl it and I said, like, I just don't know. We don't use the software, so I can't. I Can underwrite it by paper, like an MBA underwriting, but without being grounded as a true user. Like, I just. It's. So that was. That's our process. A combination of being using it, building with it, and then if we build with it and we love it, we usually hunt it down. We're not reactive. Typically. We were like, okay, this is a great company. How do we get into this company? How do I harass the CEO and the executives?
- [94:02]
A
Adam Grimm's worst nightmare coming in.
- [94:06]
E
Yeah, Well, I mean, we're direct with Anduril.
- [94:08]
A
Yeah, that's good. I mean, that's the right way to do it. And I think that that's something that is underrated. And I think a lot of investors don't necessarily know how far you can be away from the cap table.
- [94:21]
B
Yeah. What. Yeah. What is your pitch to companies? Is it that, hey, we have, you know, 100,000 people in this fund. They. They're excited about your company. They want exposure. This is a better way for them to get it than investing in the third or fourth layer of some random spv. And. Or how do those conversations typically go?
- [94:43]
E
Yeah, I mean, it, you know, if you sound, you know, you're around like, half the time it's just relationship. It's just like, you know, somebody, they get to know you, they get comfortable. I mean, at least half the time it's just pure relationship driven. Sometimes it's like more of a hard pitch. And so like ramp, for example, which we invested in, and it's done really well. That took a couple of, like, turns of the wheel. And. But ramp is sort of very marketing mind, if you probably have any sense of ramp, they are very aggressive and
- [95:18]
B
thoughtful, and we know a little bit about.
- [95:22]
E
Yeah, right, right. So this is like one of their. Part of their DNA is product marketing. So we said to them, we know we have 2 million customers, like 2 million people. Like, why don't we work together at invest in ramp and see if you guys can. Let's see if we can be helpful. And we went out to half our customer base, people, and we were the most successful partnership they've ever done. Hundreds. Hundreds of customers. And we know.
- [95:49]
B
Yeah, because your customer base is like, I don't know. I imagine your minimums are quite low. But in general, if people are investing in alternative assets, like business leaders.
- [95:59]
A
Yeah, like, they're business people.
- [96:01]
E
Yeah. I mean, it's. We did it with Canva, too. And it's just like Canva was so big, it didn't move the needle for them. And I've done it with smaller companies where we were like we drove 25% of their revenue growth in a single year.
- [96:13]
A
That's great. It's a great value add.
- [96:15]
E
Yeah, yeah, it's a huge value add. I mean I think it's like we're one of our products we love is Intercom, which is Fin.
- [96:22]
A
We love it. We're sponsored by Fin.
- [96:24]
E
Okay, well we're adopter. We adopt a fin like 18 months ago and we basically we invested in Intercom and I think we're investing more and I think that like our customer base is so big. I mean it's millions of people. We know where they work, we know what their job is, we know where they live and we have so much data about them. So you said like I only want to. We did this with Service Titan also because we invested in Service Titan before they went public. So I only want small business owners in the Midwest. Okay, great. You know what we can target and then we can like because they are investors. We're not a marketing platform. So I think that like the, the idea that I think it's true but it's novel is that the people are. You can have an army of people driving sales marketing brand. When we listed VCX and when it went public last week, huge part of the reason it was successful like very successful was the massive broad based investor group who is very excited, supportive. We call it network investment. There's social network and then there's network actually investor networks, we think that people are a value separate from their money.
- [97:45]
B
You become publicly traded quite recently, it immediately trades way, way, way, way, way above nav. And that creates a problem which is that I as an investor could be very interested interested in the underlying assets, think you have a fantastic portfolio. But maybe I don't want to pay way above nav even if I'm bullish on the companies. How do you think this kind of like broad based exposure to privates can evolve over time? Are you thinking about future products that would kind of solve some of these? Clearly there's a massive amount of demand. Investors are excited to be invested in vcx but there's clearly there maybe is more evolved solutions to come.
- [98:34]
E
Yeah, it's so funny how these things like anybody who's ever had any success knows that before that everybody told you it was not going to work. When we conceived of this idea of taking it public listening every single expert told us it would trade at a discount in half. They said it was don't and we put it to a shareholder Vote. I had thousands of people telling me not to do it. It's going to trade down. And our view was every phase of this process people have a reason to basically be negative. Originally it was so novel. Should you democratize invest? And then it was can you get access to the companies? And then it was well now you have access and you've democratized it. But these investors need liquidity. They can't handle liquidity, which by the way even big institutions can't either. I went through 2008 financial crisis and I watched Harvard Endowment have to dump stuff. So anyways, so I've thought of it as like, okay, they've had great performance. Performance. Average client performance was 40% a year. So I was like great, we delivered. So let's just give them clean liquidity and may trade at a premium. I thought it would but there was
- [99:54]
B
some precedent that it would trade at some premium. Like Destiny, I remember at least at times has traded way above nav.
- [100:03]
E
Yeah. But Robinhood's didn't. So it was on unclear my view. I did a whole investor day presentation where I said to people, here's why it might trade up, here's why it might trade down. And why my trade up is that you can't get shares of Anthropic at par in a liquid wrapper with no carried interest. You can't get Anduril go down your list. OpenAI and ramp and Databricks. The idea that you can get these companies in a perfectly liquid wrapper in a low cost regulated vehicle, that makes sense to me. They would trade a premium. I said that's what could happen. It could also be that sentiment gets negative. There's a war in the Middle east. Anything can happen. It traded a massive premium. Massive. It's been blockbuster success, validated all of our of our aims and hopes and now I'm getting the other side. Oh yeah. With trades too much of a premium. I said well, it's been eight days, right. It's been eight days. Like we have more wood to chop. Right. We have more things we're doing. We have just announced a partnership with Kraken to tokenize it. Tokenization I think is going to be really like part of financial innovations we've been doing this for. Financial innovation is key to democratization and key to lowering, lowering the cost of intermediation. So I mean this is, we're super early days here.
- [101:36]
B
Yeah.
- [101:37]
A
Have you been processing the private credit stories over the last couple months?
- [101:44]
E
Yeah, I mean I've been doing this for 15 years. Right. So like this is like how it always goes. Already happened in real estate where institutional money, they raised a lot of money, it's successful, they raise more money, it's successful, successful. And you just go until it dies. That's just how institutional money works. And so they just did. There's a cycle, every single sector has a cycle. And if you don't, basically, if you don't have a lot of restraint before you need to, you just always end up in this problem. Every single time. Every single time. And so that's what's happening with private credit. I don't think it's as bad as everybody says, but it's, you know, the problem is that you end up with this vicious cycle where once you get negative sentiment it actually becomes self fulfilling.
- [102:35]
A
Totally. Yeah. Because there's more people pulling out, less people investing.
- [102:40]
B
How big can VCX get? Like if I'm a major platform VC fund, do I see this and think, okay, I'm going to have more competition at Series B C eventually. Is this something that you think can scale to tens of billions of aum?
- [103:02]
E
Are you a dream walker? Are you in my dreams?
- [103:06]
B
Maybe I can see where you're going.
- [103:10]
E
Yeah. I mean the hope and the goal here is there's sort of two sides to the marketplace. So the next turn of the wheel is I need to convince the best private companies this is good for them. We're one company on their cap table. We're a venture fund to the private companies we're a venture fund just like any other venture fund. There's no differences except for our capital, Evergreen Forever capital. Low cost, passive, passive long term capital, which to me as a founder and a builder, that's the best money around. I'd rather have that than value add, quote value add. So, so I think that we get to a place where structurally an allocation to passive long term money becomes like the best companies get it, the best companies want it. Kind of a Jack Bogle Vanguard model would be. If we can become sort of the structural bridge, then we get scale. The bigger we get, the lower our fees. The lower our fees, the bigger we get. And at $100 billion of our fees are tens of basis points, it's super disruptive to the venture industry. It's good and bad because they're going to want us and hate us at the same time.
- [104:30]
A
Well,
- [104:32]
B
it's very cool. I think we never give investment advice here, but I think in general, for 99% of people, if you're excited about great private companies, you should take an Index approach. And an index approach that allows you to have liquidity along the way makes a lot of sense. And I think there's a lot more to come here in the category. I would expect it to be oligopolistic in the way that even the platform VC funds are, they can all get bigger together. So excited to see more innovation.
- [105:09]
A
It is funny, we were tracking, like, will VC funds go public? Dan Primack was telling us that that might happen. I never really expected it to go the other way, but it makes so much sense with your strategy where that goes. And the value prop that you've given to founders at a particular stage just makes so much sense. The pitch is fantastic.
- [105:29]
B
Are you hiring, like, new kind of quasi VC partners? Are you gonna try to poach from any of the. Any of the other.
- [105:38]
E
That's a good question.
- [105:39]
B
I mean, because, I mean, it feels like you're. You're building. You're building fundrise, which has, like, millions of investors, and then you're seemingly like, now, like, basically, like, I need to invest in all the products that we love and use.
- [105:50]
A
Yeah.
- [105:50]
B
And I imagine you'd like some support.
- [105:54]
E
Yeah, I mean, this is. This is my takeaway. And I guess I don't know if other people have experienced experience this, but my takeaway is very hard to delegate successfully. There are, like, fundrise together. Founding team's been together 15 years every year. Maybe if we hire 100 people.
- [106:12]
A
Another overnight success, too.
- [106:17]
E
It takes a long time to find people who are just like you can delegate to, and they just deliver. I think I've almost never had the experience where you hire somebody, somebody I've hired. I've tried go hire the fanciest person with crazy good resume. They just don't deliver. I don't know. I mean, sometimes you gotta roll sleeves across different industries and finance and real estate. And so I'd be like, maybe there's a venture person who can just get access and you just pay them. But I certainly.
- [106:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think. I think oftentimes the hardest thing is finding undiscovered talent. But the undiscovered talent is what typically ends up actually being like a game changer in an organization. Somebody that doesn't necessarily have the pedigree. And that could be, for you, somebody who's just historically been a software engineer. And they're like, I was always interested in investing. And then they come in and bring a new approach to investing that kind of works in the structure that you guys have.
- [107:24]
E
But I guess. I guess there's two ways you make money in venture. One is that you discover something before it's the hottest thing ever, you come in early. The other one is that you just get access when they're already hot and you just ride the product market fit train.
- [107:39]
B
And so I'm hoping this, yeah, that's been the issue. There's been so many attempts at like democratizing the private market within tech and a lot of them end up looking like crowdfunding platforms and then they have this massive negative selection bias where they're getting the worst companies that come on in crowdfund and then the investors don't end up making money and it creates this vicious cycle and then the companies just go away over time and, and this is like, you know, potentially it seems like you're guiding to the opposite of that, which is like you have a differentiated value add, you have a product that no other platform VC can offer. And then you talked about all the potential like positive flywheel of like more capital, lower fees, more capital, lower fees, more investors, you know, more value add. So.
- [108:28]
A
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the success, the overnight success, 15 years in the making. The chat loves to see and we appreciate you taking the time.
- [108:37]
B
Yeah, great, great to, great to finally meet.
- [108:39]
A
Have a great weekend. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon Ben. Cheers, bye. Let me tell you about Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream go to restream.com and let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses we are running over. So we'll bring in our next guest, Ferris from Normal Computing. Ferris, how you doing?
- [108:59]
B
Hey guys, thanks for having me on.
- [109:00]
A
Thanks so much for jumping. Good to see you. Please introduce yourself in the company.
- [109:07]
G
Hey, I'm Ferris, founder and CEO of Normal Computing. So Normal is a company that builds AI software with the world's largest semiconductor companies. So right now more than half of the top 10 by Revenue Semiconductor companies use Normal to design custom silicon. And we're also using that same capability right now to bring new kinds of chips and Asics to market ourselves. Mostly focused on energy. So hyper efficient, ultra efficient Asics.
- [109:36]
A
Okay.
- [109:37]
B
Seems somewhat abnormal given your stage to have this level of traction, but continue.
- [109:43]
A
Yeah, where did the name come from?
- [109:46]
G
It's a couple of things. So one is right now the Asics are targeting different kinds of probabilistic machine learning models like diffusion models. So Normal is kind of an ode to the normal distribution. But also there's this kind of broader view that this is really the way that computing should be like, this is the more natural way to process and run AI inference and AI workloads in general.
- [110:12]
A
Yeah. Tell us about the chip landscape where you see the most activity. There's a lot of news from ARM this week around cpu. Obviously, everyone's familiar with the gpu, and then between the TPU and Cerebras and Grok, there's a few other ASICs that are sort of popular, but it feels like there's a much longer tail that you're going after for sure.
- [110:38]
G
I mean, so obviously we had GTC last week, and Jensen put forward what I think is a really nice equation where he's saying that revenue equals tokens per watt times total available gigawatt. So what that means is it's. There's two main problems that we should be focused on right now from our perspective in chips. One is increasing the amount of energy that's useful and usable by us and for us, but the other is improving the energy efficiency that we have in the silicon that we're using. And so there's a few trends. One of those, I would say, relates to the news that ARM put forward. They have their own chip, you know, real hardware for the first time in 40 years.
- [111:21]
A
Yeah.
- [111:22]
G
Historically an IP licensing business. That's part of this broader trend to, you know, custom silicon and the data center moving to heterogeneous computing. Which means that in the future, not that many years from now, rather than having a very small number of different kinds of chips that are running all of our workloads, we're going to have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of different kinds of data chips that are tailored to each workload and application in the data center.
- [111:50]
A
Are thermodynamic computing chips underrated?
- [111:54]
G
I think so, yeah. What do you think?
- [111:57]
A
I haven't heard that much about them, I don't know. And it feels like it's very early stage. And so I've seen some demos, but it's very unclear at the demo phase how much is being done on the actual chip, what the value is. And we went through this with GROK and Cerebras, where there was a. There was very early pushback around, oh, well, like, you'll never be able to run this type of model on that chip, or it will. You'll need to network a thousand chips together to do anything valuable. And I've been surprised, and I think we've seen some narrative violations around Cerebras and Groq. I've used, I've used Codex 4.5 Spark on cerebras. And I know it's good, I know it works. We had a founder come on that baked llama onto a chip and made it available at chat. Jimmy.AI and like you can just feel the value. Yeah, you can just feel the value. And I'm wondering like, should I think about thermodynamic computing just as like another speed versus size or cost trade off or if it unlocks a different, a different like vector of optimization?
- [113:06]
G
It is a different vector. So right now, I mean the two typical vectors that you have, I mean really, there's three if you include area, but you have speed and energy. Yeah, those are typically the trade offs that you're making. But we're introducing a new one which is noise.
- [113:23]
A
Okay.
- [113:24]
G
So for these kinds of devices you can't necessarily run like, you can't run a calculator or something where you need full precision, like deterministic calculations. But let's say that you're trying to run something like a diffusion model model, which I think is super topical. Right. Because OpenAI just winded down SORA this week. It was costing them like $15 million a day to run 2.1 million cumulative revenue. But that's, that's the kind of workload that's a really nice fit for this computing paradigm because you're taking something that's noisy and approximate by definition and mapping it to hardware where the physics maps like really nicely between those equations.
- [114:07]
A
You think that's five years away? 10 years away?
- [114:11]
G
We think right now, yes. Yeah. And I think it has to be. So like, from our perspective, 2030 is a key date that we talk about a lot internally because there's a view that, you know, even by 2028 we're going to have like a 49 gigawatt shortfall in terms of power. And so something, something has to change, something has to get, give. It's, it could be energy, it could be that we find like new sources or, you know, data centers in space or one of these other directions or it's, we have a real breakthrough when it comes to silicon and that's kind of what we're going after.
- [114:47]
A
That'd be amazing. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong.
- [114:50]
G
Oh, awesome. I have my own gong behind me too. I don't know if you saw that.
- [114:53]
B
No way.
- [114:55]
G
Just for this, it's a $50 million round. We're calling it accelerator round.
- [114:59]
E
Led by Samsung.
- [115:02]
B
Led by. Led by who? Sorry I missed it.
- [115:04]
F
Samsung Samsun.
- [115:06]
B
There you go. And what were you doing before this?
- [115:09]
G
I was at Google. I was at Google Brand and then Google X afterwards where I met my founders, my co founders.
- [115:14]
B
There you go. Somewhat of a non traditional. Yeah. Great actor.
- [115:19]
A
Seems like the perfect, perfect team for this. Well, congratulations. Very excited. Yeah. Come back. We'll talk to you soon.
- [115:26]
B
Actually multiple times this year.
- [115:27]
A
Yeah. Have a good one.
- [115:29]
F
Take care.
- [115:30]
A
Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI with without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we'll bring in Evan Loomis from Overmatch Ventures. Evan, how are you doing? Good to be.
- [115:51]
H
I'm doing great. It's good to be with you guys.
- [115:53]
A
Kick us off with the news.
- [115:56]
B
Just hit us with the number.
- [115:57]
A
Just hit us with the big number.
- [115:58]
H
Oh, man, you're grabbing the gong.
- [116:00]
F
I can't wait.
- [116:01]
B
Straight for.
- [116:02]
H
We just closed 250 million. Yes.
- [116:07]
A
Congratulations.
- [116:09]
H
Thanks so much.
- [116:10]
B
We can put it in bill. We can just say a quarter bill.
- [116:12]
A
Quarter bell. It's a quarter bill.
- [116:14]
H
There it is. We raised the money in a couple months. I'm so grateful.
- [116:18]
A
Very nice.
- [116:20]
F
Overnight success.
- [116:22]
H
That's another funny little noise too. I kind of need those for my office here.
- [116:27]
B
It's Friday.
- [116:27]
D
Yeah, it's Friday.
- [116:28]
H
Friday it is Friday.
- [116:31]
A
Tell us about the investing thesis. I want to know about sector and stage. How much are you saving for? Follow on. How concentrated do you want the portfolio to be? Where are you seeing opportunity in the venture landscape?
- [116:45]
H
Our sweet spot is deep tech, defense and space. There's a set of technologies that are existentially urgent and important for the United States to look lead in. And so that is our sweet spot. We do precede through series A. I've got an incredible team. Morgan Hitzig, Jordan Blaschig, a bunch of other folks. Typically at the pre seed, we're doing 2 to 3 seed, 3 to 5.
- [117:11]
B
Back in my day a pre seed
- [117:12]
H
was like 5 to 10.
- [117:14]
B
My day was 500k.
- [117:16]
A
500k. Now you can kill the mill. Still, I mean that feels like potentially like 50 companies. Companies in this portfolio. That feels broader. Is that intentional? Is that how you think it will pencil out or do you think that concentration will build or you'll wind up taking more bets?
- [117:33]
B
I'm betting 25 max.
- [117:35]
A
Okay, let's hear it. What do you think?
- [117:37]
H
Oh, man, I love it. Yeah, you nailed it.
- [117:39]
B
Your bet.
- [117:41]
H
If I had a gong, I would hit it right now. Yeah, we're shooting for 25 portfolio companies. We keep about half the fund for reserve. So when you guys know this probably better than anybody, but the winners kind of move fast, day one, they tend to break out and you want to make sure you hold enough for reserve for those.
- [118:01]
B
Is the United States overmatched right now? What a great question in a way that's not. Clearly we still have our exquisite systems and aircraft carriers, but it's hard to read into how the war is going. But it certainly hasn't felt like we're in a great spot given, given this kind of mismatch and capabilities. And it feels like our adversaries have just been preparing for the last 20 years for a style of conflict with the United States. You know, basically betting that we are going to continue to be one way and that how do we just counteract this threat in a sustainable way? And so far from what I'm seeing, it seems to be like it's been a good strategy.
- [118:52]
A
So
- [118:55]
B
not fun to say out loud, but seems like the reality.
- [119:00]
H
Yeah, it's a great question. It's funny, our name is the intent, the goal is that America has overmatched capability abilities strategically and technologically, which is the point. We are definitely not overmatched by anybody at all. And I don't think we ever will be. But we're a little bit behind in some areas. I'll say that. I think one of the things that makes our country so wonderful is that we're a free people that can do the impossible. Every technological revolution, historically, we've won. Think about it like semiconductors, we invented it. Software, we got it. We're on the end of this software revolution. And the next revolution is going to be denominated by artificial intelligence, advanced chips, certain defense and space based capabilities, hypersonics, space offense, defense, robotics, autonomous systems. And so we're going to win. And the reason I'm so confident about that is like I get to be on zoom calls all day and meetings with founders that are like actually architecting the future. So I feel really bullish, but I also feel behind, you know what I mean?
- [120:19]
B
So yeah, I'm not overly negative either. I mean, we talk with like, you know, up to six founders a day. So I feel like we get to see the future where I'm like, okay, if we, if we just let these teams cook for five to 10 years. We're going to have a lot more energy, we're going to have a lot more industrial power locally. We're going to have a lot more batteries made in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. You could just go down the line, but certainly we got to get into gear and it just feels like we need. One concern I have right now is that there's great talent out there that looks at a massive category that's not even monopolistic and thinks like, I shouldn't start a business in that category because this other company started like a year ago and they've already raised $100 million. And I just think for some of these categories, we're going to want a bunch of really talented.
- [121:09]
A
Yeah, I have a question about that. Our venture capital capital wars, like startup capital wars, where there's two companies in a single category and then the VCs are just pouring money in. That's a textbook, like, you're not getting the power law winner necessarily. It's not great for the economic outcome. But is that good for America?
- [121:30]
H
Of course it's good. Yeah. This is great. This is part of. Wow, there's the eagle.
- [121:37]
A
That's the eagle.
- [121:39]
H
Didn't know you guys had that one up your sleeve. Yeah, of course it's good. And this is how competition works. And this is why we're going to win. And I'm so bullish about that.
- [121:49]
A
Yeah, we don't typically pick winners. There's always a battle between a bunch of private enterprises and smart entrepreneurs that can go and innovate. And the best product usually wins.
- [122:00]
H
That's right.
- [122:01]
A
Yeah. I love it. I love it.
- [122:04]
B
Very cool.
- [122:04]
A
Yeah.
- [122:05]
B
Where are you based, by the way?
- [122:07]
H
I'm based in Austin, Texas. I moved moved back here about a decade ago to co found a company called icon, where we 3D printed the first house in the United States in 2018, which was kind of my entree into venture, if you will. Venture was not on the cards at all ever in my life. And we had really good success with that business. And it kind of pulled us really close to the national interest. We picked up major contracts with every branch of the military, the intelligence community, and even won the contract contract for the moon base. So as you guys know, we're going back to the moon as a country and as a species. And you can't bring two by four and drywall, unfortunately. So we're going to partner with them to make sure that we've got like a permanent civilization up there that's awesome.
- [122:59]
A
Yeah. What a fun.
- [123:00]
B
So you're saying you're going to help make it a state?
- [123:02]
A
I like it.
- [123:04]
H
Yeah. I mean, Texas is the greatest state and it's America for sure.
- [123:09]
B
And we're talking about the moon.
- [123:10]
A
Well, the moon. I don't know, maybe, maybe the Texans don't want the moon to be a state.
- [123:14]
B
Well, maybe, maybe, maybe the moon could just be an extension of Texas. That'd be very. The New Frontier County.
- [123:20]
A
We're going to make the moon a county.
- [123:22]
H
If the Texans get there first, then they might try to claim it their own.
- [123:25]
A
So we'll see. They might.
- [123:28]
B
But last question. What's that drone behind you?
- [123:31]
A
That's a boring company. Flamethrower. Right.
- [123:33]
B
Oh man, it looks like a dream drone.
- [123:35]
A
That's a flamethrower.
- [123:36]
B
Is it working? I don't know if you
- [123:41]
A
don't have
- [123:42]
H
the gas canister on it. Mostly because I've got four little kids.
- [123:45]
A
Yeah, I can imagine if, if they
- [123:48]
H
broke in here, it would be really, really bad for everybody, so. But I keep it back here.
- [123:52]
A
What a design. That is such a good design. I love that thing.
- [123:55]
B
Yeah, we gotta get one of your office.
- [123:57]
H
Yeah, you guys definitely need one for your office too.
- [123:59]
A
So definitely.
- [124:01]
B
We'll work on it. Great to meet you, Evan. I'm really glad you're doing this and I'm sure we'll talk to many of your upcoming portfolio companies.
- [124:09]
A
Yeah, we're excited. Awesome.
- [124:10]
H
Good to be with you guys. Thank you.
- [124:12]
A
We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.
- [124:25]
B
Up next we have Moda.
- [124:26]
A
Moda. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [124:30]
B
What's going on?
- [124:31]
A
Good to meet you.
- [124:31]
I
Hi. I'm good. Thanks for having me on.
- [124:34]
A
Thanks for joining.
- [124:35]
B
Huge week for you.
- [124:37]
A
Yeah.
- [124:37]
B
Walk us through the company and the launch.
- [124:41]
I
Yes, yes. I'm very sleep deprived right now, so apologize for that. Yeah. So I'm Anvisha. I'm the founder and CEO of Moda. Moda is an AI design tool for non designers. People use our AI design agent to create create slides, social graphics, like all kinds of landing page mockups, everything. The difference between us and other stuff is we've created it on a fully editable canvas so it's not giving you back like a static image that you can't edit. It's like truly drawing shapes. You can click and edit a text box, you can move things around, et cetera. We just announced our seven and a half million dollar funding round led by General Catalyst with.
- [125:22]
A
Yep,
- [125:25]
B
General Catalyst and General Catalyst.
- [125:27]
I
And Pear, the founder of Dropbox. I used to work at Dropbox, so that one's really special to me to have Arash on board.
- [125:35]
F
Yes.
- [125:35]
B
Veterans, let's go.
- [125:37]
A
Yeah.
- [125:37]
B
Let's go. Okay. Okay. So you came out with somewhat of a controversial launch. You're the anti slop company giving people control over their outputs to take. Slop might come out, but then you can change it and it adapt it, improve it. Yet talk about how the launch has gone.
- [125:55]
A
Why? Shots at the pigs of the trough. Some of us like slop.
- [125:58]
B
Yeah, some of us do.
- [126:00]
I
Slop is what you want. You can. You can get it in Moda. You can get it wherever you want.
- [126:06]
B
Thank you.
- [126:07]
H
Thank you.
- [126:08]
A
The pro slop company now, no, obviously makes a lot of sense, but take us through the thesis.
- [126:13]
I
Yeah, for sure. So the launch, this was unexpected. Like, obviously, you know, we put a lot of effort into like putting together this video, this narrative, shout out to shown media who helped us with the video and things like that. The, the unexpected part was like the controversy around it, I guess. I mean, I did put a lot of effort into those, like, first two sentences. I think I spent like, you know, I don't know, many, many hours writing and rewriting them.
- [126:38]
B
You baited them.
- [126:40]
A
Okay, wait. Remind everyone what the first two sentences. Sentences were.
- [126:44]
I
The first two sentences were, we raised seven and a half million to kill AI Slop. Introducing Moda, the world's first AI design agent with taste. Now, I know the world's first is like triggering to people because it's like
- [127:02]
B
you're staking out your territory.
- [127:03]
A
Yeah, yeah, but it's.
- [127:04]
B
Yeah. And yeah, I think part of that is like, I think generally right now there's been so many companies in every category worry that people have launch fatigue. And for better or worse, even if something's like cool and a new approach, they will try to find some way to pick it apart. But yeah, I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. How are you seeing the competitive landscape? Making slides and websites are things that basically every. It seems like almost every company in the world is like converging on having a product to do something like this. You guys are specializing in it. That'll give you some edge. But like, how do you. How do you see the space evolving?
- [127:45]
I
Yeah. So I'll say a few things. First of all, our Launch had I think like 8 million impressions on like Twitter across like my video, other content, LinkedIn. We had a absolute insane amount of signups like there the market is saying that this problem is not solid solve yet which was my thesis when we started this company. And to give a little bit of background about myself, I'm a second time founder. My previous company Dover was backed by Founders Fund and NYC and I've been through product market fit. I've scaled the company. When I went out to fundraise for Moda, I was met with a lot of skepticism. People were like why are you starting another AI design thingy? And I think it really comes down to the details here. I don't want to get too much into talking about competitors right now and the landscape and details, detail. But I will say that everyone is kind of taking this approach of like let's go with the coding agents. Let's like Claude is really good at writing code, right? Let's get Claude to like slop up a PowerPoint, right? Like just like spit out some HTML, looks like a PowerPoint. Let's go. Those PowerPoints all look the same. They all have like boxes and like, you know, and then you go and try to edit it, right? And it's like you're stuck in like this like weird drag and drop like kind of world and you don't kind of have that of kind control. So I think that the best AI tools are not the ones that help you save time. They have a place, right? So it's like a lot of AI tools have this pitch like oh, like you're a marketer, you can create like a million ad creatives in like 30 seconds. Great, right? They all probably are slop. I think the best AI tools are the ones that like let you do things that you never could have done before, right? And this is like the magic of cloud code and things like that. And we want to do that for design. And I think in order to truly do do that, you truly need to actually have like a, like this is a little bit technical but like an actual vector canvas, like where you can put something in one place. Exactly. And move it to another place. You can draw things, you can literally create anything in there, right? And so we took this very different approach where we built an agent that is not outputting HTML. It's not outputting like you know, an image like nano banana or anything like that. It took us like months to build this. Like just didn't work for like we tried like five different approaches. Just like didn't work. Didn't work, didn't work. Finally it started working and it's just very different from what anyone else is doing. And I think this is going to really unlock this kind of, like, next level of creativity for people, in my opinion, that's going to let them create stuff that they could never do before. So I'm very bullish. The people who have been signing up, it's kind of been. It's been insane. Like, the range is just like. There's like investment bankers like McKinsey analysts signing up and then there's like, sheepskin farmers in New Zealand, like, at the. People, like, messaging me, like, the craziest shit that they've, like, done with this product already. And so I'm like, okay, I think we're onto something. And, yeah, the competition's going to be fun.
- [130:33]
A
Yeah. We talked to an AI director, Billy Bowman, earlier today, and the. I mean, he was voicing over, like, the need for tools and like, he doesn't.
- [130:41]
B
That was his number one request.
- [130:42]
A
Does not want to work in a part in a text box.
- [130:44]
B
Yeah.
- [130:45]
A
And he's done like literal super ads, using AI, leaning into AI, being very aggressive about it.
- [130:52]
D
Yeah.
- [130:52]
B
And the time saving thing too. He was like, yeah, our average project is like six weeks, something like that. So he's not trying to sell entirely on speeding up timelines. He's trying to sell on how do we do things that we were not possible otherwise with traditional shooting. So very, very cool.
- [131:12]
I
Yeah. One interesting thing, just as like a side note, that might be, like, an interesting insight. I've been getting so many support requests that I've just started sending people like a Google Meet link. And I'm like, can you talk right now? I'm in this Google Meet, just hanging out here today. Say it again.
- [131:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like an open window into whoever wants to talk. Yeah, it's great.
- [131:30]
I
It's just an open window. I talked to this guy today who works at this, like, firm in the uk and he set up this, like, insane Claude plus Moda thing where he has these. His entire job is in all these claw MD skill files and he has connected it to all these tools via mcp. And I was like, how did you even do this? Yeah, we have an MCP service. Not even really documented. I don't know how you figured all this out. Basically, he did some crazy shit. I don't know how he did it, but I've been astounded by the amount of businesses I've spoken to that are like, we need Your API, we need your mcp. Like luckily we have all that. But it's just like the way that products are getting used right now is completely different than anything I've ever seen. It's like everyone wants to chain together these things. They want this level of things talking to each other in automation. I've been building products for many years for a consumer product like ours. I would never build an API on day one, but now I'm like, oh my God, our API needs to be one of the first party things that we do basically. So that's been interesting as well.
- [132:36]
A
Yeah.
- [132:36]
B
Someone in the chat mentioned I forgot about this, but Google just launched Stitch like last week which is so funny because the whole idea of like stitches transform ideas into UI designs for mobile web application. So it's so funny because 15 years ago you would have been getting the question maybe like, what if Google does this and then of course they come out with this. But as we've seen with, you know, I expect this market to, to evolve, like similar to Codegen where massive market, tons of opportunity to just focus and you have an advantage being a nimble startup. How big is the team right now?
- [133:12]
I
We are five people, like a couple friends that I've dragged into this helping me out right now. So we are hiring if anyone watching this wants a job. Yeah, no, it's been absolutely insane. I think that in some ways like the, the, the hate is kind of interesting as well because it's like I've been, you know, getting people like retweeting, being like, look at these like people like raising all this venture capital, like doing this. I'm like, yo, we're like a five person team. Like not expect this. Like we're just like keeping, trying to keep up right now and yeah, but it's been really fun and yeah, very excited to sort of see where we go from here.
- [133:51]
B
Yeah. Ignore, ignore the haters. Keep shipping.
- [133:54]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.
- [133:59]
B
Yeah, it was great to meet you and congrats, congrats on the big week. I'm sure you won't have much of a weekend with all the inbound, but good luck building. Good luck.
- [134:09]
A
We'll talk to you soon.
- [134:10]
I
Thank you.
- [134:10]
A
Have a good week.
- [134:11]
I
All right, see ya.
- [134:11]
A
Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about your Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with agents. I love that sound cue. We don't have our next guest. He will be joining in just a few minutes. I'm just laughing about, you know, obviously I don't want to diminish a seven and a half million dollar raise. That's a great amount of funding. But it's just so funny to imagine, like trying to redirect the people. Like the type of people that are going to hate on a seven and a half million dollar raise are not going to understand, like, well, no, no, no. Look at Google's cash flow. Like, they're drawing down tens of billions. Like, you should be more focused on them. But they won't. I think that will fall on deaf ears. Well, in the building is Josh Kushner's new fundraising for Thrive Holdings. They're in talks to raise two plus billion dollars. Is this the Thrive Capital offshoot? Tyler's happy about it.
- [135:11]
B
They're saying he's one of the greatest capital raising athletes.
- [135:14]
A
Yes.
- [135:14]
B
Of all time.
- [135:15]
A
Bringing AI to industries like accounting. And it's.
- [135:17]
B
I want to pull up this video from Northwestern University. Researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrains.
- [135:27]
A
Is it a scary robot or is it like a nice friendly robot?
- [135:30]
B
You're not gonna like this robot.
- [135:31]
A
I'm hoping for. Oh, that is terrifying looking.
- [135:35]
B
Let's get some sound.
- [135:36]
A
You gotta go back to the beginning. This thing is so wild. Oh, well, I can't hear. Crazy. Oh, there's. They're hitting with a stick. Oh, no, you can't be doing that. It can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain. Let's play some of this video. Let's play more because it's only 56 seconds.
- [135:56]
B
Playing videos is kind of a lost art form here at tvp.
- [136:00]
A
It goes back and forth, but apparently the leg breaks off and it keeps crawling. It keeps going. It's the Terminator. Not the one that you've seen. Let's see.
- [136:14]
B
It's crazy how terrible it looks.
- [136:17]
A
Yeah.
- [136:18]
B
It's sending very strong negative signals to my brain.
- [136:23]
A
Even just like painting it blue would probably be an upgrade.
- [136:27]
C
This means, I think now it's better than when we saw the. I think it was unitary. Get down on all fours and crawl around. That was.
- [136:34]
B
That was terrible. Yeah, but there's just something about those movements that tells my simple human mind to run.
- [136:41]
A
Yeah. It spikes your cortisol. We evolve robots themselves through the world. What else is your fear response?
- [136:48]
B
I would Never let anything spike my.
- [136:50]
A
You said you'd make. It stimulates your. Your brain. The fear response.
- [136:55]
B
Well, I've trained my cortisol response. I've trained my. My mind to be able to.
- [136:59]
A
Well, so has the looks Max Streamer clavicular who has been arrested in Florida. He was caught in a TMZ mugshot. So that's important news for those who have been following his story. The video is crazy and we'll see. It's always weird with these stories from the kick streamers. Whether it's all a planted story, whether they got something to go viral and it's engineered or they did it by accident, I don't know. But I'm sure that there will be more reporting. I believe Taylor Lorenz is on the case. Nvidia backed startup seeking to counter Chinese AI is a $25 billion valuation. This is from reflection Berber Gin writes in the in the Wall Street Journal.
- [137:45]
B
I wonder, I am so curious what their money progress is.
- [137:52]
A
A $25 billion company. He's running a. A 4 billion dollar, $4 trillion company. Like can he squeeze the pennies out of the couch cushion? I think he can.
- [137:59]
B
No, no, it's not that. I'm just wondering.
- [138:01]
A
I'm just partnered with Nvidia to do open source there.
- [138:05]
B
This is a tremendous valuation for a company that I don't believe has released a product yet. So whatever they're cooking must be pretty darn good.
- [138:14]
A
I'm rooting for American open source AI. Same play that eagle sound I'm happy about. Good luck to the folks. Over.
- [138:21]
B
Let's bring in Ryan.
- [138:23]
A
Let's bring in SHIELD AI Ryan, how are you doing? Doing well.
- [138:26]
F
How are you?
- [138:27]
A
We're great. It sounds like you're really, really great though because you have some big news for us. Tell us what happened.
- [138:33]
F
We do have some big news. We just closed our Latest financing. Raised $2 billion at a $12.7 billion money.
- [138:40]
B
Hit it again, hit it again, hit it again.
- [138:42]
G
There we go.
- [138:43]
B
Two hits, one for each billion.
- [138:46]
F
There.
- [138:47]
A
Wait, did you upset size? The round I have on my sheet, 1.5 billion. It seems like the preferred equity components.
- [138:53]
F
Okay, you can call 1.5 billion. And then as part of the round also completed an acquisition.
- [138:58]
A
Really?
- [138:59]
F
You know the. A company called Echelon Technologies, the leader in physics based simulation for high end aviation training and something that's integral, I think to the future of AI pilots and autonomy.
- [139:12]
A
Yeah. So I mean with that acquisition sort of reintroduced the shape of the company software. Where are the integration points in the Hardware. What do you build? What do you partner on? Who are you selling to? Is it all government? Is there some commercial? I imagine the business has grown. What's the shape right now?
- [139:29]
F
Yeah, so we sell to the United States and friends of the United States, all government, almost entirely military. If you're not familiar with the company, if your viewers aren't familiar with the company, we have to. The company's focus on protecting service members and civilians with intelligence systems. You had my brother on here very early when he started.
- [139:49]
A
It was great.
- [139:50]
F
Navy seal. We started the company together. The mission is very near and dear to us. The way that we get after the mission is twofold. Number one, building advanced aircraft, and number two, building AI pilots or advanced autonomy.
- [140:02]
A
Yeah.
- [140:04]
B
What were you doing while he was SEALs? Were you on the startup path?
- [140:10]
F
Always, Yeah, I was doing nerdy things, working at Qualcomm. I had started a company that did wireless charging. I sold that company to Qualcomm and then led the wireless charging efforts at Qualcomm. And then my brother was getting out of the SEAL teams and thinking, what about what he wanted to do next? And long story short, he came to me and said, I want to bring the breast of what's the best of what's going on in the autonomous driving sector to the mission of protecting service members and civilians. His mission was clearing billions of threats. It was a mission type that had killed more service members and civilians than any other mission type in the preceding 20 or so years. And he felt like if we could take the best of AI and autonomy and bring it to the mission of protecting service members and civilians, it would be a really impactful thing for the world. Yeah, I thought it was an inspirational mission. I did think it was a stupid business, but my brother is a persistent person, and. And he showed me the line, and I'm glad that he did.
- [141:06]
A
Yeah. Take me through the state of autonomy in the flying vehicles that the military operates. Because there's so many different vehicles, from helicopters to fighter jets to cargo planes, then if I'm correct, the different branches have different versions of the same airframe? Sometimes. And so are you selling one, one piece of software to multiples, multiple branches of the military? Are there differences between what you're selling? Are you focused on a particular area within the different airframes that are in service right now? Where's the biggest opportunity?
- [141:47]
F
Good question. So the state of the autonomy. I'll say like two components. Number one, from the market side, I think that everybody has reached a point where it's undeniable to the customer base. That autonomy is one of the most important things of the future of security and stability. That wasn't the case 10 years ago, but I'd say kind of at this point, everybody's fully bought in on the need for the capability. With communications and GPS degraded, you need systems that are going to be able to see, think and act at the edge even if they can't reach back and communicate effectively with. With the pilot on the ground. The state of the technology is moving incredibly fast. You can build very advanced capabilities. We see, I would say, very advanced autonomy deployed on the battlefield. Certainly we have very advanced autonomy. What we haven't yet seen is very large scale deployment of of autonomous systems. And the focus of SHIELD I when it comes to the software side is fast forwarding the proliferation of advanced autonomous systems within the United States and friends of the United States to protect service members and civilians at scale. The hard thing about AI and autonomy when it comes to aviation and frankly any weapon system is sitting at the intersection of enabling very high performance, achieving very high levels of assurance and supporting very fast development cycles. Traditionally in this business it's been pick maybe one or if you're lucky, two of those three things. You achieve high performance, but it took you a really long time. Or it might not be something that you can certify as airworthy or certified in a weapon system because you know, there's just too many things that could go wrong or you get a very high level of assurance. But it's just really stupid autonomy. And it took you a long time to build. And so everything that SHIELD AI has focused on building is basically the industrialization of autonomy to fast forward the proliferation of autonomy by creating basically pipelines that enable developers and countries and companies to deliver high performance, high assurance autonomy at the speed of relevance.
- [144:00]
A
I have a few sort of random scattershot questions to help me understand the state of autonomy in military equipment. Do tanks have lane keep assisting? Does cruise control exist on a C130? Is America taking a walk crawl run system? Or are we going to jump straight into AI dog fighting? Because that feels like the Mount Everest of the autonomy challenge versus just you're tired and your tank is rolling down the highway and you don't want to bump into the person in front of of you.
- [144:36]
F
Yeah, well, one of the amazing things about the U.S. military and militaries in general, the spectrum of capability that's in the inventory. There are literally planes that are 80 years old and still fly.
- [144:48]
D
Yeah.
- [144:48]
F
And then you have stuff that's that's fresh off the line. So you have the full spectrum of stuff that has the equivalent of lane keep assist to the stuff that is fully manual.
- [144:57]
D
Sure.
- [144:57]
F
A lot of the focus is on bringing advanced autonomy to the newest systems because that's sort of the easiest to cut in. And with the amount of technological change and the huge step up in volumes of systems being deployed in places, you know, around the world, there's just like ample opportunity to cut that software in. As new things are coming off the line, we are starting to see some interest in sort of backwards application of advanced autonomy to legacy systems because certainly, you know, things are around for a long time and the more advanced autonomy you can apply kind of throughout your force structure, the more advantage you going to have. And so certainly we see developments in that area as well.
- [145:35]
A
Talk to me about how your progress tracks with the AI progress from the big labs that we see news from every day. Like the models of the big labs, the LLM companies are getting bigger. They're GPU constrained, they're data constrained. Are the advances in the, in the more like consumer focused coding, focused AI labs, is that transferring and accelerating your progress? Either because you're reading research papers like Google put out one about optimizing KV caches and I could imagine that applies to some companies. The transformer paper might apply to your business or at least are you getting benefits from like. Yeah, like we're able to use coding models to advance what the software that we're writing at Shield AI the benefits
- [146:26]
F
are across the full stack from development to deployed edge systems. The thing that we do is focus on enabling the intersection of high performance and high assurance at the same time. So you know, with like these models that are used throughout the consumer space and the amount of progress, you see very high levels of performance, you see very fast iteration speed. And then you have things like hallucinations that can, you know, can be counterproductive, which is okay, like you're writing, you know, an essay, make some stuff up, but if you're trying to disambiguate between blue force and red force and you're going to make, you know, consequential decisions, those things are tougher to deal with. Or if it's going to result in your airplane flying into the dirt, tougher to deal with. And so we absolutely use those things and we bring it together with frameworks that impose very high levels of assurance on the decision making of the algorithms.
- [147:18]
B
What, how are, how are the various like shahed systems? Are they, are they primarily what do we know about them? Are they primarily remote piloted? Are they using, is there any element that's actually autonomous or are they just kind of picking a spot on the map and sending it off and kind of just saying like, hopefully we hit our target, at least we'll create some kind of chaos. Like what?
- [147:43]
F
Yeah, good, good, good question. So typically those are GPS guided munitions. So they pick a spot on the map and they send it and then it's got, you know, they can have some terminal guidance that helps it like hit something of value. But.
- [148:00]
B
Terminal. What is, what is terminal?
- [148:02]
F
Terminal, sorry, terminal guidance is just to make sure that you know, a weapon is tracking toward something event interest.
- [148:08]
B
And so some, and so if, if one of those drones goes into, into an area where there's GPS jamming or denial, is it falling back to camera going to like still do its best to hit the original target? Like how, what do we, it depends
- [148:23]
F
on how sophisticated it is. I would say that like Shaheds by and large and, and, and are, are GPS guided munitions, but some munitions will have cameras that like, so it doesn't fly into blank pavement. It might be able to, to see like a truck or something else that would look like a valid military target. To just make small course corrections that enables like a weapon to hit that instead of an empty parking lot would be the type of corrections that can be made during terminal guidance as opposed to like the long transit portion of the mission. But you know those types of systems and the same, the same challenge exists in the United States when if you are just picking targets off of maps, without like good intelligence and good updates and the ability to provide course corrections based on what you're seeing on the edge, you can end up wasting a lot of munitions with little effect.
- [149:20]
B
What's been your reaction to the news out of Barksdale, Louisiana? Have you seen a bunch of reporting this week around some unknown drones flying around the air base? I don't know how much you can share there, but like this seems like something where an opportunity to assess some enemy's capability, but it feels like there's. Drones are like the thing I've been processing is like, it seems like historically if you built like an exquisite system like an F35 and you have a pilot in it, you can't exactly go and test test it in an enemy environment very easily because you'll risk starting a conflict or losing the plane, all these different things. Whereas with inexpensive drones, why would an adversary not just send them out around the world to start testing their capabilities in a Live setting because worst case scenario you lose the asset. But it's not super consequential when you look at these overall budgets. So.
- [150:27]
F
Yeah, well, good, good, good question one, I'm actually not tracking the latest news in Louisiana. I'll go look it up right after the fact. But I can tell you counter UAS is a major problem for governments globally. These things can be hard to deal with. And if you engage them kinetically, the question of collateral damage becomes one that, that is an important consideration. The small draw drones that can harass military bases. Yes. Or like you know that other countries can do the same with their, their largest pieces of hardware. And that's why you see the Chinese like running major military exercises around Taiwan. You know, they could stick to quadcopters, but they choose to use the full spectrum of their capabilities to intimidate and shape the, the environment. But you did call out something that I think is also very important, which it can be hard to fly your capabilities around and understand their true potential. When you think about some of the security challenges in the Pacific, the distances are so vast. And then if you look at the range space in America, it's relatively confined. And so how do you rehearse and think through some of the problem sets when your range space is way smaller than the theater? And that's where capabilities like Echelon, the simulation environment, come into play.
- [151:43]
B
That's your new acquisition.
- [151:45]
F
That's the new acquisition. And so there's a, there's a program called the Joint Simulation Environment that started to get after the problem of we can't rehearse the way that we used to because the domains are so large. And what once people have this realization they're like great, well maybe we'll try a simulation. And what they found in simulation is that there was stove piping across vendors. Every vendors had their own stove simulation. Every vehicle platform had its own simulator. And then if you were in space or on the sea or in the air, you had a different simulator. And then by the way across countries you had different simulation systems. And so Echelon became the leader in the joint simulation environment, which is one of the reasons we're so excited about it because it is the only multinational multi domain, multi vendor and there's one more multi in there in the world. And it creates this unbelievable foundation to enable not just what it does today, which is training and rehearsal against like high end threats and complex scenarios, but it creates the opportunity to introduce, well, what do autonomous systems do in that same sort of environment? So the Things like collaborative combat aircraft or advanced weapons, those things get pulled into the environment. And now you can see, well, this is how humans and AI are able to work together in these scenarios to inform the designs of those things. And if you continue to play that forward and you see, you know, it's my belief that in every vertical, whether it's. And medicine, like pick your thing, vertical leaders will show up when they figure out how to close the feedback loops between, you know, the data aggregation and generation through training, through deployment, and close that loop in their domain. And one of the things we're very excited to do with ECHELON and SHIELD together, we're the leader in AI pilots. You might have seen the United States Air Force announcement that SHIELD is one of the two companies selected to build AI pilots of the collaborative combat aircraft. And so we have some great work on that front. And now by taking the simulation leader across services and domains, we can start substantially scaling that simulation environment, augmenting all of the real world data and start closing that loop to build extremely high performance AI pilots that were able to test against the authoritative threat models with the authoritative Blue force models and also train us and allied forces to fight effective effectively with those AI pilots as part of their formation. So we're very excited about it in the short term and on a decadal basis.
- [154:28]
A
Decadal basis, I like that term. Yeah. Decade thinking in decades, literally. I've never heard that before.
- [154:33]
B
What is the actual interface? What are the, like the interface of Echelon look like? Is this like, am I thinking like flight simulator type of thing or is it more, you know, you're just kind of running a simulation and seeing.
- [154:47]
F
Seeing, yeah. So you can think of it a very simple view like a flight simulator, but you know, with a proper, as you seem like a flight simulation dome.
- [154:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [155:00]
F
Very, very realistic physics, very realistic sensor models to include radar, night vision, eoir or regular light cameras. Appropriate physics approach, appropriate red forces with like, not just like video game style, but these are the actual capabilities across like the electromagnetic, electromagnetic, invisible spectrum that really enables very advanced training and understanding of performance.
- [155:29]
B
Yeah, fascinating.
- [155:30]
A
Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congrats on the progress and have a great rest of your day.
- [155:36]
B
I'm really glad you guys are building this company.
- [155:38]
A
This feels extremely.
- [155:39]
F
Yeah, appreciate it.
- [155:40]
B
Thank you.
- [155:40]
F
Love the gong, by the way. And thanks to the two gong strikes, of course.
- [155:44]
G
Of course.
- [155:45]
A
It's massive progress. Yeah.
- [155:47]
B
Great to have you on, Ryan.
- [155:49]
A
We're glad and thankful for everything that you're doing with the rest of the team. So thank you James. Have a great rest of your day. 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 easy in beta starting today. Go check it out.
- [156:07]
B
Bill Ackman. They're saying he's likely down 20% year to date. Now he was, I believe, took a big position in Meta not too long ago.
- [156:17]
A
Yeah, he had some contrarian takes. I don't know, it might pencil out. I don't know.
- [156:22]
B
Yeah, I think it's still. I'm still like it'd be silly to be bearish on Meta over the long
- [156:29]
A
run, but certainly Buco Capital bloke gave some more context on what's happening in the market. Market. He said the market is just a guy staring at two screens. One has Truth Social, the other is Anthropic Blog. In front of him are five buttons that say Software Semis, European Defense, Energy and Gold. Trump or Anthropic Post. And he hits a button to make Those stocks move 5% up or 5% down. It is. It does feel like that's the nature of the market these days. Signal had a funny screenshot here. Someone built a, or assumingly Vibe Coded an app that turns any TV into a retro flip flap split flap display. These are very cool. You've seen these, they flip around. You see them in old airport terminals for when the flights are leaving. Wayne chimes in and says, I'm very likely going to build this with Claude code this afternoon and post a link to a free download to this third thread because this is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that someone should pay $199 for something that probably took about 18 minutes to make. And Yash, the creator says, I will look for your post. And exactly one minute later, Open source my tool to render your efforts a total waste. Try me. And so there's a little bit of a standoff in the Vibe coding world. I thought that was very, very, very funny. Is there anything else you want to
- [157:53]
B
lastly, some texts from Q1 of last year. Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon, looks like Doge is making progress. I've got our teams on alert to take down content, doxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Elon reacted heart and he says, are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others? Zach says, want to discuss Guest live.
- [158:18]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [158:19]
B
And Matthew Zeitlin, former guest says you can tell who is used to antitrust investigations.
- [158:31]
A
Well, stay safe out there. If you're planning on bidding for some IP and you're two of them, you're chatting with the richest man in the world. Yeah, maybe stick to a phone call. Who knows. Well, good luck out there.
- [158:43]
B
Will be an interesting weekend news. The markets are now closed which means
- [158:49]
A
we can go to. Where do we go on the weekends? To the beach?
- [158:54]
B
Well, I was going to say it means that you want to be refreshing truth social.
- [158:58]
A
Yes. You want to stay up to date and it's red. We closed way down the S and p closed down 1.67.
- [159:06]
B
Good opportunity to touch grass. But next Monday we've got take him Logan Bartlett. We got Cody Ko joining we got going Cody Ko going back to back with Brett Adcock.
- [159:17]
A
Let's go.
- [159:20]
B
Never before on a podcast have we had Cody Ko and Brett Adcock back to back territory.
- [159:26]
A
I'm very excited. I've been a huge fan of Cody Ko for a long time. I watched a ton of his YouTube videos. So yeah it will be very fun.
- [159:31]
B
Anyways, leave us five stars.
- [159:33]
A
Spotify Newsletter tbpn.com Best weekend of your life. Flashbang.