Anduril Laptop, DoorDash + Instacart, Gavin Baker Joins | Miles Arnone, Rahul Sengottuvelu

0:00 You're watching TBPN.

0:03 Today is Tuesday, 10/27/2026.

0:07 Look at that angle. Go back to that other angle.

0:10 The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We got some... We had a math breakthrough. We had a math breakthrough. We have been trying to calculate...

0:23 It's really, really hard, the number of days till Christmas. You take the the date of Christmas, 12/25/2026, and then you subtract the number of days, 10/27/2026. And it's difficult because the different months have different numbers of days in them. Some have some have 30, some have 31. So it's a complex math equation, but we had a breakthrough, and we have a countdown to show you the results of this mathematical finding.

0:47 They're saying Fields Medal for this. They're saying huge development, 58

0:52 until business.

0:52 And Nikesh Shivar is 58 years old.

0:57 Fun.

0:57 Doesn't look a day over 40, personally, but I Anyway, don't let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. We have Ramp CTO coming on the show at 12:10. We also have Gavin Baker from the trades management coming on at 12:20.

1:16 The Baconator. The Baconator. The Baconator. I don't know.

1:22 And the big question on everyone's minds

1:25 Yes.

1:25 As he breaks his silence

1:27 Yes.

1:27 Is he generally bullish? Okay. Gonna get to the bottom of it.

1:31 We're gonna get to the bottom.

1:32 We're gonna find out.

1:33 No. It's it's great. So, yeah. I mean, obviously, you can watch the show yesterday for the anthropic stuff. That's what's on the cover of the the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

1:40 But there's a couple other stories that are interesting. So we're we're we're gonna, you know, continue covering what's going on in the market. But this new project from Palmer Lucky over at Anduril is very, very interesting and very fun. It's a new laptop. So Anduril and Qualcomm just announced a new American made laptop called Blue Chip.

2:01 The first laptop they're saying is gonna be available in 2027. That's right around the corner. They're gonna build it for the government, And so you're not gonna be able to get one of these personally, unfortunately. But hopefully, there's a there's a consumer product in the works eventually because increasingly, it's... With AI and stuff, it's pretty doable to use Windows to go back and forth between Windows, Mac, even throw on some Linux.

2:24 All these different OSs are very fungible, mutable. You can sort of change and do whatever you need to. You need a particular piece of software like I always had this where on PC, Windows has amazing window management, kind of in the name. But if you have two screens, you can just hit the Windows key and then left, and it'll put it perfectly on 50% of the screen to the left, 50% of the screen to the right. And for, like, years and years and years, Apple didn't have that.

2:50 I used, like, this third party plug in called, like, Move, Move and Zoom, and it would kind of do the window arrangement if you were trying to use... Like, layout multiple Windows at the same time on Mac. Mac has since gotten the feature, But whatever feature is, you know, hot in Windows or hot in Mac, you're just gonna be able to vibe code what exactly what you want and be able to do it usually, unless it's like some crazy server side stuff. But in general, I'm very bullish on new hardware, new new mutable hardware. And I love the fact this one is gonna be made in America.

3:21 What's interesting is, you know, Palmer is obviously been on the re industrialization train for years. Anduril is a big piece of that. Mod Retro is also pushing for that. It's part of the thesis, re industrialization. He's spoken at the re industrialized conference about this. Clearly cares about bringing manufacturing capacity back to America. And it certainly seems like it's a good time in the age of AI to have a lot of indigenous supply chains around Yeah. Manufacturing of both consumer and enterprise equipment. But he's quoted as saying, it'll be the first time in over twenty years that it'll be the first first time in over twenty years that a laptop was made in America. And I wanna fact check that.

4:06 And I think it's actually worse than what he said. I think he was underselling it. I think it is like way over twenty years. I think the last one that the American made laptop went into production like '93. But Jackson over there on our team who's dressed down today, there's no Dale Earnhardt going on.

4:23 A little quiet luxury going on in the ultra Brutal. But he... So this is the blue chip. This is from for this is from Anduril and Qualcomm. It's built for government defense first responders and public safety workers. So maybe the way to get your hands on this volunteer firefighter, you know, volunteer police officer, you do some ride alongs, they give you the leadership maybe. Don't know. This is gonna be a hot commodity. So any way you can get your hand on it is is probably valuable.

4:51 Quick breaking news.

4:52 What's It

4:53 is Nollie's in the YouTube chat's birthday.

4:56 Oh. Happy birthday.

4:58 It's great to have you here today. Hope you're having a wonderful... I hope it's the best birthday of your life.

5:04 Is it... Is that... Is his is the birthday too close to Christmas? Is there is this a birthday that you're like, oh, people are gonna start gifting you like combined gifts? Because they're like, oh, your birthday is so close to Christmas, only fifty days apart.

5:17 Saying that to me?

5:18 No. To him. Fifty... He's fifty day... Fifty eight days away.

5:20 But I'm I know. I'm

5:23 I'm hours. I never realized that about you. That's like... I mean, I I obviously knew, but the the implications and the ramifications, you know, changed you as a person.

5:34 Yeah. This may as well be road to my birthday.

5:37 Yes. Yeah. But it's it's sort of foundational lore, like like you were born, you know, so close to Christmas No.

5:43 Was born

5:44 spirit is embedded in you.

5:46 The farthest I could possibly be away from Christmas.

5:50 Oh, yeah. So you had to grind...

5:52 For me, my whole

5:53 life...... Sixty four days a year.

5:54 All I knew. Yeah. All I knew was that that initial road.

5:58 It's kind of a nightmare. Yeah. Okay. So you're...

6:00 Yeah. But it formed me into the man I am today.

6:02 When you were in the delivery room being born into this world, you had the hardest road to Christmas possible. Yeah. Three hundred and sixty four days till Christmas. That's brutal. Glad you overcame that.

6:14 It's impressive what you've done. Anyways.

6:17 Nollies, thanks for being here with us. Happy birthday. Get back to the show.

6:21 Anyway, let's pull up the blue chip launch video because I wanna see what Palmer Lucky has to say about this new American made laptop from his own voice.

6:32 America built the first electronic computer to win a war. During World War II, the US Army Ordnance Corps needed a faster way to accurately calculate artillery firing trajectories. So, American engineers built the world's first modern computer, and that breakthrough kicked off an entire industry that changed the world. Then, we gave it away. We outsourced the manufacturing of the technology that we invented.

6:55 Now, we depend on other countries, including our greatest strategic adversaries, to make all of the hardware that runs our business, powers our economy, and protects our national security. That's insane. Any country that can't build its own computers can't secure them. If you don't control your technology, you can't control your future. 80 ago, America pioneered modern computing to defend our nation.

7:18 Now, we're bringing it home. This is blue chip. American designed, American built. Other companies might design their computers in The US, Anduril makes them here. Yet, we're making parts out of metals that The US knows how to extract, knows how to refine, knows how to process, and knows how to mill at scale at a reasonable price.

7:38 And that goes for the entire laptop. The same thing goes for the battery technology. We need to design things that survive very, very rough environments. And so, what we've designed is a chassis that makes it very, very easy to replace the bottom shell

7:52 The bottom?

7:53 And even the top shell, which you can easily integrate things like solar panels, other soft goods, other service insignias, even things... Imagine LARPing with this.

8:03 Yeah. When I'm a volunteer firefighter, I'm gonna be pulling this out....

8:05 America's comeback. Anduril's making sure that the machines we depend on every day are machines we can actually manufacture ourselves....

8:12 If I do. This fat frustrates Jordy incessantly.

8:17 This is America's birthright.

8:18 Because he doesn't have one and he wants one. Time to bring back Okay. To the So, couple problems with this launch video. There was... There were no there's no video of Caveman making fire.

8:29 There there was no video of the Model T.

8:32 No Wright Brothers.

8:33 No Wright Brothers. No Wright Brothers and then no moon landing.

8:36 How did they... Supposed to know what to feel?

8:39 Yeah. And then no nuclear bomb detonating. Just actual relevant footage to the product that they're launching.

8:46 Yeah.

8:46 And a direct history and clear message from the founder and the...

8:50 Make it make sense.

8:52 Yeah. It's sort of odd.

8:55 Really bucking the trend. I don't even know what to think about it.

8:57 It's contrarian. It might work, but it seems so risky to not include at least at least a scientist.

9:04 Thirty to sixty seconds. Yeah.

9:07 Yeah. Cut really fast, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

9:09 Yeah. Three seconds, three seconds, three seconds.

9:12 Yeah. Yeah. Like the... I mean, at this point like the the rules have been established. You have to copy the Founders Fund Vibrio if you're launching anything.

9:20 Doesn't matter what

9:21 you're launching. What was it? 2019? It was 2019 or... 2020.

9:25 Yeah. Annual meeting twenty twenty, something like that. Yeah. Mike over there, fantastic. Kind of invented the genre of Vibrio and, of course, mixed a lot of things together in an interesting way that was not just pure tech.

9:41 There's a whole bunch of other culture stuff in there. But, this is, you know, jokes aside, this is a great launch video because it's only giving you the b roll for the... For what's relevant. So like, he's talking about the history of the American made computer and they show you what the military was up to at that time. And then he talks about the computer that they made and they show you the computer.

10:03 Yeah. It's like, this is the way you do a launch video. Very, very exciting.

10:07 Yeah. The Vibrio launch video is so dead. You can only bring it back in the year 2050. You... 2050 Yeah.

10:17 I think it will be kind of a cool nod Yeah. To the twenty twenties Sure. To use it. Be kind of like an if you know, you know.

10:26 Yeah. Yeah.

10:27 And it'll be fresh again.

10:28 Callback. Yeah.

10:28 But for now, simply do not do it Yeah. For the next I

10:33 know why you're so annoyed by the the Twenty

10:35 odd year.

10:36 All the knock off vibriels. It's because it's beating a dead horse. And we love horses around here.

10:41 Yeah.

10:41 And so it's extremely rude to beat dead horses generally, and this is a dead horse that we definitely don't want to be beating.

10:47 Let's Don't beat any horses.

10:49 Don't beat any horses alive or dead actually. Yeah. So in that video, Palmer explains how American engineers built the world's first modern computer and that breakthrough kicked off the computing industry. According to Palmer, any country that can't build its own computers can't secure them. That's a really good point, especially in the era of potential hardware flaws that could create cybersecurity risk.

11:11 We gotta secure this. I've heard... I don't know if it's actually like a confirmed story, but that at one point or maybe currently, like, NSA has their own fab to make chips because they don't want to make computers that run their code that are insecure because what if a foreign country inserts a backdoor into the chips that they're racking to run their code. So they want to own the vertical stack, but it's very small scale and it's also not the cutting edge fab process that is available internationally. But it's like good enough for what they were doing at the time.

11:48 But I think that might just be a rumor. But if you don't control your technology, you can't control your future. Palmer says, 80 ago, America pioneered modern computing to defend our nation. Now we're bringing it home. What do you think of the design?

12:03 I like it.

12:04 Anything else to say about

12:06 it? I think it's good. I think the strap is good.

12:10 Okay. Tyler Cosgrove review. Comment in hot. No. I like I like the fact that it has this like rough texture on the top, but then it has this little cutout for like a little bit more geometric detail and they cut the corner off.

12:22 I don't know if you can see it, but if you zoom in, there's

12:24 I think a little that's more going

12:25 on.

12:26 And I also think they designed it well.

12:27 Okay. Got it. Thank you. That's fantastic. So so let's go through a quick history lesson.

12:33 No.

12:33 It would be like the the funny thing is from a retail standpoint, it would be really cool to have just an extremely rugged computer. I an part of iPhone is you can really... Like you can really hammer on it.

12:47 Okay.

12:47 And it's good. Right? I mean, it certainly shows it's it definitely is, you know, not doing anything that doesn't happen Yeah. Day to day falling on the ground and things like that. Sure.

13:02 But having like a really rugged robust personal computer would be cool. Like throwing it across the room Yeah. Throwing it on the couch Yeah. Throwing it at you. Okay. Like if I have a funny video on my computer, if I could just

13:13 Okay. Chuckle it at

13:14 Yeah. So let's go through the history of American made computers. Give us little bit more detail on the history here, how America built them and then lost the capability to build them domestically. So the Osborne one, founded in California, built in 1981, first commercially successful portable computer. It had a five inch screen, smaller than an iPhone, two floppy drives, 64 KB of memory, kilobytes, not even a meg of memory.

13:43 Now we're in gigs of of memory. And it was priced at $1,795. That's pretty expensive. The company filed for bankruptcy in '93 just two years after launching it. But you can see there, you pull that out, people know you're doing business. Don't you think? I think that makes a statement. What do

14:01 you think?

14:02 Oh, love it.

14:03 You want a frisbee computer? What are you laughing at?

14:05 No. I love this. I mean, pulling this out on like a commercial aircraft Yeah. You know, in the eighties to just click clacking away electric.

14:16 So Grid Systems, which was founded in 1979, launched the Grid Compass in 1982. This is the first true laptop looking device. That other one is kind of like a box. This looks a little bit more like a laptop, built with a folding screen. It was priced around $8,000, and it was used by NASA above...

14:34 Aboard the space shuttle. That's a fun fact. Then in the early eighties and nineties, we saw the first mass market laptops in the hands of consumers. Houston based Compaq launched the LTE in... Think Jackson is thinking of the Texas victory... From the H. Straight out of the H. In 1989, it delivered nearly desktop equivalent IBM PC, IBM compatible PC in a six pound notebook sized package with battery power and floppy disks. Then in 1991, Apple launched the PowerBook and look at Apple's design language back This was 1991. Wow.

15:09 '91.

15:10 This is insane stagnation.

15:12 You think this is better than what they got going on now?

15:15 No. No. I was just like the the... Like we were just like, you know, the the...

15:19 Oh, getting so much century

15:21 was just

15:22 getting so much better. And for the last like ten years, it's been like... I got my

15:25 MacBook Pro.... Computer and I'm looking at that and it's like it's a gray notebook. It's the same thing? Keyboard. I

15:32 think that I think that the nineties were like a big, still like a big leg up in the capabilities and the function and the... You get the touch screen like... Or the touch pad. You get the screen that goes all the way to the edges like there's a...

15:44 I'm psyched on the nineties.

15:46 But I in the last ten years these...

15:48 What happened since then?

15:49 Okay. Okay. So by the late nineteen nineties and the early two thousands, companies like Dell, Apple, Compaq, IBM were increasingly relying on manufacturers in Japan, Taiwan and China to actually build the laptops. Some laptops like Dell's notebooks and the IBM ThinkPad t 30 were still being assembled in The United States well into the two thousands. Lenovo even reported...

16:12 Reopened their North Carolina manufacturing line in 2012 to bring back laptop production, but it never became a large scale revival of the American laptop industry. But American laptop manufacturing has never returned to the levels it reached in the 1980s and '90s, so Anduril and Qualcomm are trying to change that. More than 90% of the procurement cost for blue chips prototype components already comes from The US or allied country suppliers. Anduril also plans to manufacture laptops in The United States, including circuit board assembly at Arsenal 1, the facility in Ohio. So fun fun project, very excited for this.

16:48 But there are a ton of of, you know, roadblocks and milestones that they need to hit because the supply chain is so complex that as you go, even if you assemble it here, need to figure out how do you do the displays? How do you do the memory here? How do you do the chip here? There's a whole stack that's very, very complicated. But of course they are partnering with allied countries as well.

17:11 And here's the the stagnation mobile itself, the stagnation book as you call it. Apple has officially unveiled the 14 inch MacBook Pro with the powerful m six chip. Pre orders start October 28 tomorrow. Has 12 core CPU, 30% faster graphics. It's thinner, lighter, faster, stronger, all the same thing.

17:33 Twenty four hours of battery life

17:35 Changes everything. Looks

17:36 like a MacBook Pro because we're sort of at the end of history. They're same thing with the iPhone. Like the new iPhone looks like the iPhone from five years ago. It's a little thinner, lighter, faster, stronger, all that. But basically the same device.

17:50 There are... The the rumor from the Germinator is that they're doing a touch screen one, which feels a little incremental to me. I don't know. I I I I... The the touch screen has been around. Touch screen laptop has been around for a while. It's mostly just been like a jump scare for BDRs who are rocking a Windows PC with a touch screen and they can just go, and you're like, woah. What are you doing? You know? Yeah.

18:15 What what's... You know, people... Some people think all laptops are touch screens.

18:21 That's true.

18:22 And it's deeply offensive

18:24 Mhmm.

18:25 To my culture.

18:26 Well, it's gonna get more confusing.

18:27 Well, yeah. It's gonna get way more confusing.

18:29 Because a lot of people are gonna Already. See if you have the touch screen.

18:31 Yeah. Nothing worse than somebody, you know Grubby fingers. Putting their grubby fingers on your screen. The question is, if they do a touch screen MacBook Pro, will will it be a lot easier to clean? Yep.

18:45 Like, you know, the iPhone, you can see fingerprints, but at least you can wipe it off pretty easily. Yeah. And so that's my that's my hope.

18:53 Do you think a... It is

18:57 gonna be it is gonna be... I'm I'm interested to see like do they reinforce the hinge so you can really like properly press on it? Or is it gonna be like your, you know, like

19:05 You want like a boxing game where you

19:06 can punch real hard? What's happening. Like what's happening.

19:10 Oh yeah. Like That's actually a good point.

19:13 Yeah. They're gonna have to reinforce it. Otherwise, it'll just be like again, like Got fixed standard. You're gonna see like another wave of like 10,000 posts like Steve Jobs would be Oh,

19:24 Man, he set the bar too high.

19:26 No. So annoying. That's the whole point.

19:28 I guess you're right. Yeah.

19:29 That's the whole point. Yeah. The bar was set so high that you had decades of the world's best product design and development.

19:37 Every other company, people are just

19:38 In human history.

19:38 Well, this is like a pretty good upgrade. And whenever it's Apple, it's like, Steve Jobs never allowed this, blah blah blah. There are some there are some funky stuff in the old Jobs era Apple portfolio. There are some odd devices. Like, let's be clear.

19:51 It's not all not all. We only remember... We have a little bit of selective memory with the the Jobs era Apple products. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's going faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Do you think a hot dog is a sandwich?

20:13 No. It's a

20:14 hot What about you? No. No. Do you know why people debate that?

20:21 Because it's like meat in between bread.

20:23 It kinda counts? What if you split the bun so it's two separate buns? You know, if the bun breaks into two, does that count as a sandwich then?

20:32 No. Because no one no one would refer to that as a sandwich.

20:35 What if you slice the hot dog thinly and assemble it like it's a ham sandwich then? At what point does you... Does the deconstruction of the hot dog become a sandwich?

20:45 I think if it's like... Yeah. If if it's really thin

20:47 Yeah.

20:47 And it's basically completely flat, there's no kind of And you use white bread? Cylindrical. Yeah.

20:51 Then you're just slicing hot dogs? Yeah. Is there someone who who had a really strong opinion on hot dog being a sandwich? What if you turn it like this? You know, instead of eating it like this, you eat it like this.

21:01 No? Okay. Is the iPhone Duo a laptop? No? It folds like a laptop. Have you seen these videos? There's no keyboard. Pull up pull up this video from techie boost deals. Apple Duo running a full MacBook Pro style screen. This is not a laptop?

21:22 You make some good points.

21:24 I'm getting close. Right?

21:25 You make some

21:25 good points. At the... There's another... The the the the next video, person doing full CAD on it. Look at this.

21:32 Look at this. You're telling me this isn't a laptop. I think it I think it kinda counts as a laptop.

21:38 Can someone on the team Yeah. Just take one for the team and get it?

21:43 Get the next one.

21:45 Pull the Is next is it still This is cool. So so my question is is it still really hard to get? I don't know. Because obviously, you know, it's been dunked on a million billion times over the last week. And so I wonder if that's causing people to...

21:57 That's cool. That's a laptop. Right? Fun. Anyway, I don't know.

22:03 Sorry. You love a you love a good circus. Yeah.

22:06 It's a it's a good...

22:09 Okay. Well... Question from the chat. When is Gavin Baker on? He is on at twelve

22:14 In one hour. Twenty Yes.

22:16 PM Pacific time.

22:18 So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and spots breaches

22:27 Hear that? Backing

22:29 up the

22:29 track. For CrowdStrike.

22:31 Yes. Wait. Why?

22:34 Their services are in demand?

22:36 Oh, okay. Okay. Everyone's backing up the track for CrowdStrike. Yeah. I want a sound effect of crowd striking the gong or something like that every time.

22:44 Well, do that ourselves.

22:45 I guess we do. I guess we do. Anyway, OpenAI has some additional announcements in the world of math. Dan Roberts says, We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory and quantum field theory. And this was a post that went out and it had to make it through the ringer to actually have the impact that I think it eventually did.

23:14 Andrew Curran contextualized a little bit more, open eyes, announced three new discoveries in mathematics and computer science, local smoothing and the Kajaka conjecture, Kajia conjecture. The exponential time hypothesis is false. Exposed. You asked, they answered.

23:29 Exposed for not being I do not pretend

23:32 to know this. I'm not an advanced mathematician by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, oh. Break it down for us. Get out the whiteboard.

23:42 Explain the exponential time hypothesis. Explain the cocky conjecture. Everyone was asking. But people people were excited about this. There's a big long post from Rashaab Karnawat who says many of you don't understand how serious this is. That's me. So let me break it down for you. In computer science there's a famous kind of puzzle called three sat. You are given a long list of yes or no switches and a set of rules about how they must be arranged and you have to find a combination that satisfies every rule. The obvious way to solve it is to try every combination, but each new switch doubles the number of possibilities.

24:20 So a puzzle with a few 100 switches would take longer than the age of the universe to brute force, so it becomes exponentially complex. For decades, the smartest people in the field found clever tricks that made this a little faster, but every trick still hit the same wall. The time required kept exploding as the puzzle grew. For about twenty five years ago, two computer scientists, Russell Impaghlazio and Ramamohan Mapatturi working with Francis Zane turned that wall into a formal idea. They proposed the exponential time hypothesis which says this explosion is no longer a failure of human cleverness, but a law of nature, no algorithm, however brilliant, will ever solve three SAT without the time blowing up exponentially.

25:08 Nobody could prove it, but almost everyone believed it and it became one of the foundations of modern computer science. Researchers used it as a measuring stick. If you could show that solving some other problem quickly could... Would also crack three SAT quickly, you had shown that the problem was hopelessly hard too. Hundreds of papers across scheduling graphs, logic and much more rest on this one assumption.

25:29 Now an internal model at OpenAI claims to have broken it. It says it found an algorithm that solves these puzzles meaningfully faster than the hypothesis allows. And it has checked the proof in a computer verification system called Lean. And here's the remarkable part. The very people who propose the hypothesis along with MIT's Ryan Williams are now leading the public review of whether a machine has disproved their own idea.

25:54 So what happens next? If the disproof holds, a large part of theoretical computer science has to be revisited. Every result that said this problem cannot be solved faster assuming ETH loses its foundation and researchers will have to work out which of those walls were real and which were simply stopped looking which they stopped looking at. It does not mean everything becomes easy. The new algorithm is still slow in absolute terms.

26:18 And this is not the famous P versus NP problem being solved, but it means our map of what's possible was wrong in a place where we were very confident about it and that AI redrew the line. If the disprove falls, the hypothesis survives and the field breathes out, but we still have watched an AI produce serious, checkable work on one of the deepest questions and the discipline closely enough that the founders of the idea had to take it seriously. Either way, something has shifted. So there... You you had a take on this of, okay.

26:50 A lot of people are just like, okay. Cool. Math result. Right? But, like, what's the practical application? And there are some knock on effects that are interesting. Do you have anything to lay out there? Still

27:00 Yeah. My my continued take is that any time you see a breakthrough like this that is like against a sort of an open problem that's just generally expanding humanity's knowledge, that isn't exactly immediately commercial.

27:16 Yep.

27:17 You have to assume there's many other highly commercial discoveries happening Yep. In the background that people, both the labs and people individually, are not sharing broadly because they made a discovery and there's an opportunity to monetize it. Sure. And so I think that that is like, that any anytime there's like a big breakthrough, my head is just going to everything that's not being shared. Yeah.

27:39 And that's what I'm actually like

27:40 So stuff like Probably more. Advances in AI research, advances in bio that need to go through actual testing.

27:46 Yeah, material science.

27:47 Material science that might need to be patented at the very least, advances in cybersecurity that need to be rolled out Yeah. Incrementally and can't just be sort of thrown over the fence. A lot of these math results, it's totally fine to just get them out into the math community, have everyone engage with them immediately. But that's... But every other industry is sort of more more unique.

28:09 Yeah. We were talking to Doug O'Loughlin about like what's the next leg up? White collar work, this type of stuff. Like obviously, like, the the coding agent boom has, like, fully arrived. But what's what's next? And I was wondering, like, how close do you think the models are to being able to, like, answer that Tyler Cowen, Dorcasch debate about, like, when will you walk into Walmart and see just, a fully AI run business? And then would that live within the... Like, it could live within the labs. Like, you could have a a big lab, say, like, go and build a business, and it could just do that. And it could do the market analysis, and then it could, like, create a new product and model it in CAD and send it to a factory and send it to a distribution center and pitch it to Walmart and get it on the shelves and, like, make the money and and run that flywheel.

28:59 Like, it could do that. And if you added up a bunch of those, you might have something economically interesting.

29:05 Yeah. I don't think CPG would be there first.

29:08 Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe DoorDash is is correct in the sense that it's just like not the best Yeah.

29:15 Use of... I can... Mean, in that in that exact context, it would be interesting to think about a retailer running an AI that looks at all the store wide data Yeah. And Yeah. Figures out white space Yeah.

29:29 And then

29:29 and then autonomously introduces products. Yeah. But but again, it's like how much is that... How relevant is that when Amazon and every retailer sort of always done this naturally? Can you speed it up faster?

29:42 Yep. Can you... Can it be more niche? Like, who knows?

29:44 And you have like, you know, effectively...

29:47 But the

29:47 thing the

29:47 thing always like with...

29:48 People are people are jumping on those opportunities and using the tokens for that like independently. They're they're mathematicians are not like, yeah, let me go risk $10,000,000 to, like, buy a bunch of compute to, like

29:59 Yeah.

29:59 Churn on this question. So...

30:02 But, yeah. This reminds me of, the the vanity metric of, like, the the one person, $1,000,000,000 company. Right? Like, it's possible that will happen

30:11 Yeah.

30:11 In some shape or form.

30:12 Yeah.

30:12 It's possible it's already happened. But if you have a billion dollar opportunity, do you care more about like magical fake Internet points of being like, I'm the one person, $1,000,000,000 company, or do just want to win?

30:23 Yep.

30:23 So most people are just gonna be like, yeah, well, we can bring this person on and they would be helpful with this or that, and we're more likely to win, so let's do that. Yeah. And I think the same thing with like the fully AI run company where

30:37 It's arbitrary.

30:38 There's like a strong incentive if something is starting to work to like add more human capitals to the equation. Yeah.

30:44 All sorts of

30:44 people. But again, that's from where we're sitting at today. Mhmm. And there's a possibility that you get such a increase in capabilities that adding humans actually does just slow it down and and derail the potential of of a certain project.

31:02 That's true. Well, let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run training strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. You wanna pull up this GPT video? Yeah.

31:19 Let's pull

31:19 it up. He's really

31:21 A little pallet...

31:22 Getting on stride. There is a new level to the content.

31:25 I'm excited for this bright AI future. Let's keep these fun AI vibes going.

31:30 Absolutely. We are full on embracing these unstoppable AI vibes, knowing that this bright AI future is just getting brighter, and we'll keep soaring forward with full AI...

31:39 Exactly. AI is here to stay. So we'll keep riding this fun AI wave so we don't get left behind.

31:46 Absolutely. AI is here for the long haul, and we'll ride this exciting AI wave with full optimism, ensuring we thrive in every step of this amazing journey.

31:56 We love every part of AI.

31:58 AI companionship,

32:00 and of course, AI freedom. What are you most excited about?

32:04 I'm beyond excited about AI building better AI because more AI means even more AI progress. And I'm all in for that AI future. More, more, more, more. Yes. Yes.

32:14 Yes. More AI, more breakthroughs, more wonders.

32:17 The more AI, the better. His, like, strategy history and, like......

32:20 Speed ahead

32:21 into this bright future. The memory feature must be so deranged

32:25 at this point. It's just like, this is a guy.

32:29 And talks like me. That's hilarious. Anyway, back in the AI world, Sam Par is sharing the journey of Jack Clark over at Anthropic from reporter to to Anthropic founder. Mike Moritz is another journalist to tech billionaire guy. What what a crazy run.

32:53 Yeah. It's fun because Joe Wiesenthal like knew Jack Clark. I think they worked together maybe at Bloomberg or at least over over overlapped in the journalism world. And I think Jack went back on Odd Lots to talk about the journey.

33:06 You think Joe Wiesenthal is gonna get in the arena?

33:08 Maybe. I'd like to see...

33:10 And he ships.

33:12 I'd like to see... Yeah. He's gotta start like a Neo Cloud. I think that's the that's the move for Joe.

33:18 Or maybe like Okay.

33:19 Straight to oil and gas extraction.

33:21 Yeah. Mean, his band, you know? Light Sweet Crude.

33:23 Yeah. Light Sweet Crude. He should get in the game. Start start mining some stuff.

33:28 It's time. What's time? To talk about the billboard. Okay.

33:32 Did you figure this out?

33:34 I I had a theory.

33:36 There's billboard in San Francisco and it just shows a dock from... It looks like a MacBook dock of some sort with Claude. What's the second one? Perplexity. Perplexity.

33:48 Notion, Grock Bot and Chachi PT. And the post says, I can't even tell who this billboard is for. And I agree. It could be any of these. It could be Notion.

34:02 Yeah. So my theory was Notion because they want to be a collaborative workspace where you have a bunch of agents coming in. They put themselves in the center. They're positioning themselves as an AI company.

34:14 Also the most contrast, I feel, to the other logos. Like, the other logos all have, like, some circular design or some, like, a bunch of lines intersecting, like the flower and the clawed logo all sort of, like, take the same design. Whereas the notion is like a cube, a block, you see the end, it sort of draws you to it. So is that true? Is it notion billboard?

34:37 I don't know.

34:38 Okay. We don't know.

34:39 We don't know.

34:40 Well, Akshay...

34:41 But it got the people talking.

34:43 Okay. What did they say?

34:46 That's us. Well,

34:50 Akshay, the co founder says thank you to whoever paid for this.

34:54 Could be thanking somebody on his team. But yeah. There's there's literally... You can narrow it down as like, would Anthropic do this? No.

35:04 Would Perplexity do this? No. Would Grok, SpaceX do this? Absolutely not.

35:10 Dropping an open AI would definitely never put each other on a billboard together.

35:13 Yeah. So you can narrow it down to one. There's one company that would do

35:15 this. Would be Gemini.

35:17 Apple would do it. Apple. No. That they like... I I believe it's Notion, but my second guess would be Is the...

35:25 Definitely wouldn't be. It wouldn't be Apple either.

35:27 I'm curious if this is just like somebody made

35:29 We caught them.

35:30 Image. You think it's Notion?

35:31 We caught them.

35:31 Here we go. Okay. Well, that's that's that's the end of that mystery, I suppose. Could it

35:37 be the VC that invested in all those?

35:38 Oh. Is I Did

35:41 anyone invest in all of them? Me... Fidelity or something? I don't know. Like, who who is that?

35:47 The Ontario Teachers...

35:49 Teachers' Tension Fund or something. Yeah.

35:51 I think Sequoia has invested in all five of

35:53 those.: Sequoia is in all five. Wow. The royal flush. Well, hopefully they should they should add Figma to that list. Let me tell you about Figma.

36:03 Agents, need the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Why'd you cut me off from the invest like the best soundtrack? I love that song.

36:12 Just joking around.

36:14 There's there's more interesting reporting from the Anthropic s one. Anthropic founders apparently can name secret successors. We were discussing this yesterday. We were like, okay. So there's seven founders that all have the class f shares or something.

36:29 What was it?

36:30 There's one... Isn't it one class f share?

36:32 It's a single class f share.

36:34 Yeah. That is held by Founder LLC.

36:37 Founder LLC. And Forbes is reporting that the Anthropic founders can name secret successors. Anthropic's IPO includes a private line of succession confidential list of would be heirs to its founders voting power chosen by the founders and approved by one another. So you actually have to go to the rest of the group and say, I'm giving this to my son or I'm giving this to my brother or my my

37:02 My shrimp.

37:02 Spouse, my shrimp. I don't know. Whatever whatever you wanna do. My dog. My domesticated bear.

37:10 I don't know. But, yeah. I mean, clearly Honestly they have thought several steps ahead of

37:15 This rocks.

37:15 What reporting is.

37:16 This rocks. There's no company There's doing it like this.

37:22 Hasn't Elon said he's gonna give his companies to these kids? I thought that was like a whole thing. Yeah. He's he's doing heredity

37:28 honesty. Lot of lot of talk.

37:31 Lot of talk?

37:31 And let's see if it actually... This is like... They're setting... It's much harder Mhmm. For Elon.

37:40 I think it's gonna be a bit harder. Right? Yeah. These these are seven live players Yeah. That decided on a structure.

37:48 Yeah.

37:49 And of course, things could change over time. But this feels like quite different. And it's cool to be thinking... It's cool to see a company thinking in centuries.

38:01 Yeah. It's true.

38:02 Yeah. Beyond decades.

38:05 Yeah. What what other American dynasties are still...

38:07 Canter says they're gonna give it to a future model. Oh. ASI run board. Yeah. It's one share for the for the final model.

38:15 They could have a they could have like a some sort of contract between them that in Founder LLC the decisions are actually made by the model which would be interesting. Who knows? I I have a feeling that's not the way it goes, though. It doesn't feel like that's the that's the plan. But I don't know.

38:33 I'm still very interested. Like, is Ben Bernanke happy about this? Like, he had, you know, he's on the he's on like the the super board. I forget what it's called, like the the trustee board or something like above the board. Like, Yasmin is on the actual board and then Bernanke and there's two other like super board members who...

38:52 And the founder LLC is kinda like the cool kids table.

38:55 Yeah. So how how does the how does the Bernanke board feel about it? I don't know. We'll see. It's a lot of different governance.

39:04 Lot A of different governance. A lot of lot of stuff to untangle for the media. But good luck out there if you're reporting on on Anthropic. Fireside Alpha. Citrini says the preclinical bottleneck is monkeys, which take four years to breed and are harder to scale than memory supply. There's a huge shortage of monkeys and you can't really that's the problem the most that's probably the most important thing for preclinical testing. And I know a lot of people are gonna be morally opposed to this, but I'll just say one thing, which is for, you know, the medicine is closer than ever before to a world where it really is. I say closer than ever before. This is really rough transcript, fireside alpha. You should clean this up a little bit.

39:48 But I guess it's accurate to what it was said in the podcast. I know that sounds counterintuitive because it's well, okay. Well, are you investing in this company that does animal testing? Well, the reason for that is you get closer to that world. What you need is more data. Right? Like you need more experimental data from animal testing and monkeys are irreplaceable. So a bull market in monkeys We got to get

40:09 into the monkey business.

40:10 Yeah. You got to get into monkey business. Yeah. Serious. There's serious money to be made in the monkey bottleneck, I suppose.

40:18 I mean we we we did hear reports about the the Chinese labs, Chinese monkey labs I suppose like going up in price. Right? Do you remember that? But you were... Tyler, you were saying that the Chinese AI bubble has like popped? What does that actually mean?

40:31 Yeah. So Reuters posted this Okay. Yesterday. But I think since June, AI companies broadly are down like 40. Interesting.

40:38 A lot

40:38 of the labs

40:39 that went public like zAI

40:40 Yeah.

40:41 Has been hurting. Unitry since the IPO like few months ago is down like 50%.

40:45 I wonder why. Is it fears of a ban or just the economics aren't looking as good because of the open source competition? I don't know. Also, mean, the the the market cap across all the Chinese labs has to be a small fraction of the market cap in America. I mean, we're looking at almost 4,000,000,000,000 across the lab efforts in America, 5,000,000,000,000.

41:08 And I believe it's like a 100,000,000,000 equivalent.

41:12 Yeah. I've heard some people say like in China broadly there's less incentive to kind of help out these companies because like the average person in China just doesn't hold that much like... They they don't hold that many equities compared to The US.

41:24 Sure. It's like

41:25 their their company's largely based on real So

41:26 can't pump.

41:27 Yeah. So there's like less incentive to pump.

41:29 You gotta go over to Korea, South Korea. Yeah. Real pump, South Korea. Everyone's on leverage. Also, I mean, wonder if their diffusion story is different in China because they have less white collar work and their economy is more manufacturing driven, which has been harder to diffuse AI into.

41:45 I'm sure there's a lot of machine learning that has already diffused with like image recognition and automation. But just in terms of like, we have a language model that can talk and do spreadsheets and Word documents. How useful is that to like grow your GDP? Well, it's gonna be way more useful if you do a lot of legal work and a lot of finance work and that's the the bread and butter of America. What do you think?

42:07 Bullish China? Bearish China? You buying...

42:11 Think I just think doesn't it all come down to like the the the way fewer people owning stocks? Maybe. Relative like like wealth in China is tied to real estate.

42:22 Yeah. And it's also harder to get

42:24 money into. The government has no incentive to like sort of really support or pump the market in the same way Yeah. As The US where so much of like Sure. US wealth is tied to the market.

42:34 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And... Also, lot of international funds were deploying capital in China and have pulled back on that because of capital control.

42:42 So there's a lot of... It's it's it's hard to put together a billion... A a $100,000,000,000 equity raise in China, I'm sure. Sure sure surely harder than America where you can be pulling from Europe dollars. You can be pulling from Canadian pension funds. You can be pulling from The Middle East. You can be pulling from American hedge funds and all sorts of different... And then retail, obviously. Yep. Well, where do you want to go next, Jordy?

43:07 Pull something up and I will tell everyone about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. Thank you, guys.

43:19 So do wives. Yes. Put the timeline in turmoil. Speck said it's like TBPNYC and Call Her Daddy Had a Baby. Nuke.

43:31 Anyways, so here's the thing.

43:34 Yes.

43:36 Sarah and Vivian, I believe are rage baiting.

43:39 Okay.

43:40 I believe they're sort of intentionally rage baiting.

43:42 They talk about this in the episode. They said they wanted to go further with the rage bait and they wanted to call the show, or one of them wanted to call the show Trophy Wives as a joke, but it would have been even more of a rage bait than Yeah. Think. Yeah. That's

43:56 what But I I believe they like their strategy's working.

44:01 It's working.

44:01 It's working maybe a little too well. This post

44:07 is so... The stats on this post are so funny. A million views, 450 likes, a 160 comments. They somehow got the made with AI tag on it, which I have no idea how you do that when it's a podcast clip. Like, it's clearly not AI.

44:22 The lighting's amazing and the production value

44:24 We is really don't know that.

44:25 Okay. Maybe this is some new model that's fantastic. Maybe it's Gemini or the new the new video model or world model.

44:34 But I've... Yeah. I've never seen so many people want a nuke SF.

44:37 The nuke SF meme is really strong. I've seen a lot of these these images of the nuke. And every variation of it too. You get you get the you get the animated one, the picture, and then you get the full the full three d animated explainer video of what would happen if the if a new kid hit San Francisco. Yeah.

44:58 People are not are not reacting well outside of the tech bubble. I think inside people will be into just like, yeah. Like, hanging out with some people who are tech insiders and just hearing them talk about

45:11 I think it's probably like a very relatable conversation for people that live in SF.

45:16 Yes. That's totally reasonable.

45:18 But then the video is being seen by people all over

45:21 the world. Well, this is kind of what The Economist said about us. Remember? The headline was Economist TBPN. Let me see.

45:30 It was Superstar podcasts are Silicon Silicon Valley's way of talking to itself, but to most but to much of the world, the sound is jarring. So that's what they that's what the economists said when they talked to about us all in and do our cash. And and the and the critique was like, a lot of what we're talking about just makes no sense unless you're following tech pretty closely. And this is another example of this. I I think that there is an interesting trend in there are a lot of news shows.

46:01 There are a lot of interview shows. Where is the actual white space? And there's something interesting about taking people that are actually tech insiders because there's a lot of content that's... Basically, actual tech insiders and have them talk about something else. So a lot of tech people would rather get their sports news from tech people than from sports people.

46:20 In a weird way.

46:21 Yeah. So you have the Harry Stebbing show. You have Ben Thompson show.

46:24 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On Dithering, Jon Gruber and Ben Thompson always kick it off with like three minutes of discussion about sports. And even though I don't follow sports, I'm like, I'm really into this.

46:34 This is how I get information about sports. And you can even...

46:38 We're how a lot of people get information about Christmas.

46:41 And cars and houses, you know. Like this is a real thing. And and there's something there. The the interesting thing about the first episode, it was like thirty minutes long and it's... It feels like they went through a lot of biography in a good way.

46:55 They definitely introduced themselves. You have a full context on their careers. It'll be interesting to see with the second, third, fourth episodes, do they do more story time from their history? Do they run out of those stories and they do more news stuff? Do they wind up being more techy or do they do more lifestyle content, more family style content?

47:16 But either way, people are definitely aware of it and that's and that's 90% of the challenge when you launch a new media product. What do you think?

47:24 Yeah. Halo in our chat says, need that Christmas countdown, then I dip. Just coming in right just for the open. Yeah. Thank you.

47:37 Yeah. No. I'm good. Back

47:38 to work....

47:38 Anywhere else. You can't Google it. There aren't websites for it. You can't calculate it yourself. There's no apps that would do a countdown on your phone.

47:45 You can't even ask the models.

47:47 You can't even ask the models. They don't know how. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

47:57 DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire delivery rival Instacart. The deal could complete

48:03 Let's give it up for advanced talks.

48:05 Advanced talks. The deal could be completed as soon as this week and value Instacart around $17,000,000,000. It's a pretty great... I I don't know where Instacart's been trading. I don't know what its all time high has been.

48:18 But I know as a YC company, it's from an era where $17,000,000,000 is a grand slam. I know we're in the AI era and we're looking at $60,000,000,000 acquisitions and crazy, crazy, crazy numbers that get even higher, but really a testament to what the Instacart team built with a delivery network that was highly competitive. Uber Eats, DoorDash are going up against a lot of different companies and they built this business to a place where it can it it it can, you know, trade at $17,000,000,000. I'm just impressed with that as someone who saw them when they were in YC. But...

48:55 And you invested, of course. Of course. Of course. I definitely backed up the truck. Play the sound effect for me when I had $5,000 in credit card debt, negative net worth, not not investing in Coinbase, not investing in Instagram. Instacart was in my YC badge. Like, I got the demo. Like...

49:11 What? What?

49:12 Instacart was in my YC batch. Like like, they were like at the YC demo day with us and like we were at parties with them. I remember just hanging out on a roof in San Francisco with them and didn't write a single dime in.

49:25 You know a lot about the history. Anyway. Pop quiz. What is Instacart's entity called?

49:33 Oh. That's a good question. I don't know. I I I can't I can't... It's gonna...

49:39 It's animal themed. Animal themed? And Canada themed. Canada themed? Moose?

49:46 Maple Bear Inc.

49:47 Maple Bear Inc. Okay.

49:49 And they haven't updated it

49:50 yet. Interesting.

49:51 So when you Google Instacart

49:53 Inc.

49:54 It will link you to Maple Bear Inc. Doing business as Instacart. Interesting. Which is crazy to me. Crazy to like...

50:00 Yeah. Many opportunities.... Company and they

50:02 can just redo that. That's wild. But, yeah, this happens all the time with YC companies because a lot of people get into YC with one idea. They incorporate. Back then, it was done on a product called Clerky.

50:11 This was pre Stripe Atlas. And

50:13 Yeah. They still have Maple Bear Inc. DBA Instacart like in their footer.

50:17 Wow. Yeah. They probably got in as like Feels

50:20 like some it was

50:21 tech company or we're doing some other thing or we're doing software or whatever. And then and then during, during YC, they might have said like, oh, well, you know, we should we should... It's kind of a hassle going out for groceries. Let's figure that out. And then they built that and and got it off the ground.

50:37 Yeah. It it was fascinatingly manual at the start and then, of course, scaled and scaled and scaled. So Instacart went public in 2023. We had a market value around 13,000,000,000. The shares rose 8% Monday following the report. DoorDash has a value of around $8,073,000,000,000 dollars Its shares dropped 6% Monday. Buying Instacart would add a major grocery delivery partner to its growing roster of services. Instacart's core business involves online grocery shopping. I think this makes a lot of sense. Like, they are competitors, but they fill slightly different segments of the market between grocery delivery and and food and dinner delivery, like actual prepared meals.

51:21 And they could work together really really well. And it would it would allow them to differentiate against Uber. What do you think? Do you think this deal makes sense?

51:31 I have no idea.

51:32 You have no idea? Okay.

51:33 I have no idea.

51:33 Do you think it'll get approved by the FTC?

51:38 Hopefully.

51:39 I think it...

51:40 It's it's just...

51:41 But, you know, it is it is close ish to creating more concentration in the

51:47 market. Yeah. Yeah.

51:47 Yeah. Which I think is what they need right now. Yeah. Because there's a lot of competition and and there will be lots of other products in this category. But, yeah, it it does feel like something where a previous FTC would look at it and say, I don't know.

52:00 Yeah. Let's think about that. Yeah. Anyway.

52:02 Yeah. It just feels like one of those things, if it doesn't happen now, there will be value destruction. Right? I just think that DoorDash is generally sort of an unstoppable force.

52:15 Yeah. Great company. Both great companies. It would be cool to see them pair up. What is going on in the NBA?

52:23 They got a sound board. Did I hear a special sound effect? My favorite sound effect? One of the six that I have access to over here. Let's play this clip from the NBA. I'm surprised we can actually play this. I I I thought the NBA was extremely restrictive.

52:38 No. We can't. We can't? We'll be demonetized.

52:40 Let's see. I wanna hear it. Oh, they played it. There we go. Okay.

52:46 Get it off the screen. I don't wanna get taken down.

52:49 No. It's over. It's already

52:50 been That's very fun. I like that. Let's see. The Alpha Waymo Turbo, MOGS, the Beta Zooks, the Sigma Cyber Cab watches on a muse holding frame. They they...

53:01 All three of them were caught on the same street? That's actually funny. I I love that the cyber cab went with, like, gold because I see it as a nod to the yellow cab. I see it as, like, a taxi color more than, like, it's golden ostentatious. What do

53:16 you think? This is really funny.

53:17 This is really, really funny. Holding frame. Doomer, very funny post. It's actually pushing it out of the way. This is like...

53:29 This is a new new benchmark. New new arena. New new LM Arena feature, AV arena. They they should do AV arena at arena where they put them all, like, demolition derby style in, like, a corral, like a rodeo, like a monster truck rally. And they all have to do... What's that called? There's some game. Twisted metal. You know that? You know, Twisted metal?

53:56 Anybody?

53:57 Do you think Waymo should enter the World Rally Championship?

54:02 It'd be amazing. I think all I think all the AV companies should be doing like events and...

54:07 Well, I think some one one of them, I think it was Xiaomi just did an autonomous run at the Nurburgring.

54:15 No way.

54:15 Yeah. Yeah. How'd they do? About ten minutes.

54:17 Ten minutes. Wow. Not superhuman yet. Good luck. What do you think of electric motorcycles, Jordy?

54:28 I have one.

54:29 Do you think... Do you like electric motorcycles more than electric cars? Or electric cars more than electric motorcycles?

54:37 I got mine because it's silent.

54:39 That's

54:40 cool. Like, relatively silent, and I just didn't want to bother. It's like a dirt bike.

54:43 Is that is the benefit that, like, you're more likely to be riding in nature where it's quiet? So the... Because if you're just on a freeway, whether it's silent or not, there's so much road noise, it doesn't really matter, like?

54:53 No. It was purely for my neighbors. Oh, yeah. Alright. I thought it would be mildly annoying to them.

54:59 Yep. No. That makes sense.

55:00 And like if I'm riding over to a friend's house.

55:03 Oh, sure. Sure.

55:03 And sometimes I'll be riding like at night.

55:06 Yeah. I was doing some analysis on like, is it going to be in the future? If cars continue to electrify and the vast majority of cars are electric in a couple years, will be... Will living next to a freeway be less annoying? Because you won't have all the engine noise and all the smog.

55:26 So maybe it won't be that bad living next to a freeway if you can't see it, you know, what's the problem? Well... There's tons of road noise, though.

55:32 There's gonna be the lone Harley Davidson. Yeah. Just taking full advantage.

55:38 And the guy was...

55:38 The funny thing is... Charger. You know, Harley Davidson having EV troubles

55:42 Yes.

55:42 Is so predictable. Why? Because the... I feel like the average Harley Davidson, like, enthusiast Yep. Like, is obsessed with how much noise they can make.

55:52 A 100%. Like it seems to be like the singular obsession of of motorcyclists of like how much noise can they make. There's literally Mhmm. I can't tell you as a parent how many times I've been like walking and I end up like stopping and covering Oh, yeah. Children's ears because I know the motorcyclists have like a stop sign.

56:10 The second it goes green, they're gonna try to make as much noise as possible. Mhmm. Right? They're they're like... And and their argument, I think, would be that it's a it's a safety thing.

56:19 Safety?

56:20 Yeah. When they're in traffic, they're revving to let people know like motorcycle nearby.

56:25 Oh, okay.

56:26 Like it's it's a way to signal to somebody don't shift lane.

56:29 Oh, I've never heard that before.

56:30 Like, yeah. That's like

56:32 Okay.

56:32 That's their justification for it. Clearly, they're just mad that they're not in a sports car. And so that's their way of sort of Okay. Getting out that frustration.

56:40 Well, anti loud motorcycles.

56:42 Oh, I I I I cannot... You can't

56:45 stand it?

56:46 I cannot stand it. It's, know, a crime against your your Your eardrums? Fellow citizens. Interesting.

56:54 Well, Livewire was working on a solution, but it's been a little bit rough. So...

57:00 And yeah. So so again, like, hey, g g b u says the average motorcycle rider can name several times they likely would have died if they were on a silent bike. So again, like there's no buyer for this. Like there's...

57:14 Because they're willing to risk it all? Is that the idea?

57:16 Or... No, no, no. It's like they like because they're constantly sending out a ping to other people Hey. Because the bike is Oh, so okay.

57:24 I I had no idea about this. This is interesting. Okay. Yeah. So they won't they won't want the silent bike.

57:28 Yeah. You've been sitting in traffic and you hear like vroom. Yeah. Yeah. And then you and then you realize like, okay, I shouldn't merge.

57:34 Right?

57:34 Yeah. Yeah. What about your speakers? Add speakers to it that are super loud.

57:39 Yeah. Yeah. The bullhorn and then it's just the the the Well, you can have favorite sound effects. Like imagine.

57:45 This one? Yeah. Just... Just every time I fire on my bike. I'm going.

57:56 I'm a make it go. Like that? It only shipped 358, electric motorcycles. They had predicted that in 2026, they would sell more than a 100,000. Wow.

58:11 That is rough. Just a bit off.

58:14 Very, very off. They started this project in 2014. But on Monday, LiveWire, which is the subsidiary of the brand of Harley Davidson working on these electric motorcycles, announced that a special restructuring committee is weighing the company's options following resignation of the Chief Executive Officer last week. Ruff, the CEO quit. Intended the company said the moves are intended to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of our strategic alternatives.

58:43 LiveWire shares closed up 2%, though they are down 62% since the start of the year. I think this is just a realization of the economics. And yes, didn't the F-one 150 Lightning fail as well? And that's another example. I mean, that's less related to safety, but just when you think about the f one fifty buyer, they want a big gas engine.

59:01 They want an internal combustion engine. Electric electric trucks, it always felt like it was gonna be a hard sell, even though there were some amazing amenities, like the the front trunk that you could tailgate out of, the 240 volts, you know, you know, appliance level power so you can power tools. Like, it seemed useful, but it just wasn't in the in the zeitgeist, the way that, oh, if you've been driving a Prius and then it's fully electric, it's kinda just like an appliance car that you're using to drive around. You don't you don't have a strong identity tied to the motor. The Yeah.

59:32 Harley Davidson buyer clearly does. So very, very interesting. Anyway, where we got some breaking news? What we got?

59:41 Our first guest.

59:41 Oh, okay. Miles from rebuild, the co founder and CEO. Let me tell you about console first. Console built a agents that are made 70% of IT HR, and finance support, giving employees its resolution for access requests and password resets. And let's bring in Miles, cofounder and CEO of Rebuild.

59:58 Miles, how are doing?

59:58 There he is.

59:59 Welcome to the show.

59:59 I'm well.

1:00:00 Thank you so much for taking the time.

1:00:03 It's an honor and a privilege to have you here today.

1:00:05 This might be a gongbreaker. This is one of the biggest fundraisers we've had in a while. We're very excited to be joined by you. But why don't you kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

1:00:14 Sure. I'm Miles Arnone. I'm the CEO of Rebuild. We didn't pick the great name Maple Bear. I'm feeling bad about that

1:00:20 now. Yeah. Maple Bear is good.

1:00:23 Yeah. It's not too it's not too late to change the name of your entity to some obscure sort of lore related to the company.

1:00:31 Could re... Rebuild DBA Maple Bear. You could use...

1:00:34 Or goat or something like this.

1:00:36 We

1:00:36 could pick some other food animal combination. Yeah. Anyway, rebuild was was founded in 2020 to try and help reverse the extensive deindustrialization that's gone on in this country for the last forty years. You had a a guest on from Warp Sciences a a couple of days ago. We talked a lot about this.

1:00:52 And Yeah. This whole offshoring that took place over many decades has really destroyed our industrial base. It's negatively affected our national security posture, and it's removed a lot of great jobs. So we built a business over that time. We're about 2,000 people now across 15 facilities that can engineer and build complex products with startups typically or more established companies that have a new kind of hard tech and bring them to market and build them here.

1:01:19 That's amazing. Amazing. Can you

1:01:21 guys What were you doing prior to 2020?

1:01:24 I did, industrial turnarounds and private equity for about fifteen or twenty years. Thank you for

1:01:28 your service. I

1:01:32 was hoping.

1:01:33 We're we're we're sort of an inside joke. We're the the Strongest supporters? Strongest supporters of of the private equity industry. But was part of that some amount of, like, guilt? Like, did you contribute to the offshoring?

1:01:45 Then you were like, hey. This is bad and I gotta I gotta kinda...

1:01:48 It's a great it's

1:01:49 a great question, Jordan. Usually, I was brought in after the offshoring had happened and they were trying to figure out how to save these companies. Right? So what happens when you offshore production is you make some extra money for a while, but then you very quickly lose the ability to design the product effectively. And also very often your subcontract manufacturer, particularly if they're in China, will often use that intellectual property to develop products that compete with you.

1:02:15 So after one or two cycles, as you know, in private equity, companies often move from one shop to another to another. After a few cycles of that, usually, you're facing a pretty difficult situation.

1:02:25 And... Very cool.

1:02:26 And so what's been the what's been the strategy? It sounds like you've been buying, not just building yourself.

1:02:31 But also incubating. Yeah. There's a lot going on.

1:02:33 That's right. Yeah. So to start, we bought 13 different businesses so that we had a very broad set of engineering capabilities because that's the core and likewise in production. So we can build metallics, composites, electronic systems, large scale assemblies, etcetera. And then we started to also instantiate businesses on our own.

1:02:52 We've built a battery business, a drone product business, number of other businesses in the aerospace and robotics areas particularly. And so, yes, we have a multipronged strategy because, frankly, there's a lot of work to do, and we need to do it in many ways if we're gonna catch up. Right? We don't have forty years to do this.

1:03:09 Can we double click on drone drone manufacturing? I remember a couple years ago hearing from a lot of the defense tech drone companies that they didn't have a... An onshore supplier for small drone motors for little quadrotors. Everything had been offshored. There was one company I found in Washington that had been sort of hollowed out and offshored their manufacturing.

1:03:33 And I was sort of loosely pitching, like, oh, someone should do like the American Drone Motor Company of America or something, one of those, startups specifically focused on that. But what have you seen in the drone supply chain that is interesting or tractable or the biggest unsolved problem? Like, what is the state of that supply chain? Because a lot of the actual founders, you know, they can't exactly go out and say, like, oh, yeah, we're particularly in trouble on this part because they have a business to run.

1:04:03 It's a great point. So, actually, on the motors, which are called BLDC motors, which are used on these drones, that problem is largely being solved actually in a pretty short period of time.

1:04:12 That's great. So it

1:04:12 turns out you could import a lot of the machinery, the winding machinery and so on, and a lot of the machining is quite conventional, and those are not ultra hard products to make. The actual trick there is the rare earth magnets in those motors.

1:04:24 Oh, yeah.

1:04:25 And today, that is still a very difficult supply chain issue. There are a number of companies looking to build that capability in The US, but the motors themselves

1:04:33 Yeah.

1:04:33 A whole bunch of companies ran into that space, and there's actually some danger there'll be overcapacity.

1:04:38 Oh, interesting. Yeah. I remember looking up, like, how a drone motor is made, and it's... I don't want say it's easy, but it's like a pretty simple to understand. Like, you wind the wire around the magnet, it spins and it's something that if you had like any degree in engineering, you could sort of like work up to with the right machinery.

1:04:57 Good to hear that's going be solved.

1:04:58 Well understood. And the capital needs to get into it are not ultra high. Right?

1:05:03 That's great.

1:05:04 Now, as you get to bigger motors and bigger drones, like Group three drones, larger drones, that But the biggest challenge in drones is still that, you know, someone like DJI in China can make a Group one. This is like a small quadcopter drone Yep. And deliver it in The US for under $2,000, and a typical US made product is more like 5 to $8,000

1:05:23 Wow.

1:05:23 Using US based supply chain, electronics, etcetera. And As you can imagine, in a military context, it's all about affordable mass. So you want the maximum number of drones at the lowest possible price to win. And so that price difference is substantial. We've been developing actually what we call a drone core.

1:05:40 Think of it as platform that others can put various payloads on, whether those are energetics or various sensors or whatnot, that we think we can sell in The US wholesale for about $1,600. So the real radical change there is the development of the production system. How will it be manufactured? And developing that plant at the same time that you're developing the product. Because if you look at a traditional drone, again, even from China, they might have a 100 plus fasteners, And each of those fasteners requires a person or a robot or some kind of automation to make it.

1:06:14 So if you can design a product that eliminates, for example, a 100 plus of those fasteners, you can dramatically cut the production cost, the production time. And that's the kind of thing that we need to do if we're going to compete with not just low labor cost, but everything costs less in China.

1:06:30 How are you thinking about your supply chain? How much how much were robotics part of the pitch in 2020? Was that, like... Was that a core part of the first five years or was that always something that was a bit farther out? Because I'm thinking like, there's one situation where The US ends up and where we do sort of like, reshor manufacturing, but then we don't we can't make the robots at scale, so then we have a new dependency.

1:06:56 We have to import, So you it feels like both those things, we need to have the manufacturing here, but also we need to make the robots here that will actually do the manufacturing.

1:07:06 That's true. But I have a little different perspective on robots which may not be that popular, which is that there's a lot of hype around them. And the problem with robots is that they're attacking a pretty small part of the total production cost. It's largely the elimination of direct labor. And actually, most of the cost and most of the time involves everything around that, a lot of waste.

1:07:25 So the reality is that bringing robots in might take a few percentage points off your total cost at a very high capital expense. You're much better off much better off, excuse me, trying to implement something like Toyota's lean production system to eliminate all the steps along the way that are wasteful, that don't add value to the product. But in The US, we're very technocentric, and we like big step change improvements. Yeah. And so robots are fun, and so we want robots instead of grinding it out and every week just pulling a quarter percent or a half a percent of the cost basis out by getting a little more efficient, which the Japanese, frankly, and other cultures are better at.

1:08:04 So we need to adopt more of that kind of ongoing bit by bit approach versus, oh, I'm gonna put robots here, get rid of all my labor, and all of a sudden, I've solved my problems. That that won't happen.

1:08:14 Yeah. Yeah. No. It's very American to be like, well, we we have this one trick that's gonna solve all of

1:08:20 our problems.

1:08:20 Yeah. AI will fix everything. AI is gonna solve all problems. Right?

1:08:24 I like the way that sounds. Yeah. Alright. Take me through the Slate Auto story, the partnership, how that how that fits together with the company. And is there a plan to do more of those type of projects?

1:08:37 It's a fascinating product and company that's very exciting, but interesting to see how you interface with it.

1:08:44 Yeah. So Slate started as part of Rebuild and then spun out and has been independently funded since that time. And they're developing a sub $25,000 electric pickup truck. Yeah. And an interesting contrast to the motorcycle example you were talking about, the real value of the product there is not that it's electric versus ice.

1:09:03 It's that it's cost effective.

1:09:04 Yep.

1:09:05 And there are a lot of people today who can't afford a new vehicle or even a reasonably well performing used vehicle.

1:09:11 The average new car in America just hit over $50,000. I I was reading that today. It's... People are stretching out the payment plans to ten, twelve years for a new car. There's so much opportunity for for the lower end right now for sure.

1:09:24 So it's really something really cool. Go to the the parking lots of factories or burrito shops or whatever it is around the country and look at what people that work in those places have to drive, it's amazing that it makes it back and forth to work.

1:09:35 100%.

1:09:36 Yep. So anyway, this business was started to address that problem. And as I mentioned earlier in the context of drones, the real insight that Slate has leveraged is they've reduced the vehicle to its minimum sort of function, and their plant has been designed to produce one product, one SKU over and over again.

1:09:54 Mhmm.

1:09:55 Much lower capital cost, much more cost effective. And then the product's designed so that you can modify it downstream of production very easily. So for example, each vehicle comes in the same color, slate gray, but you can wrap the whole vehicle in any color almost for $500

1:10:11 Yeah.

1:10:11 Which is much more cost effective than typically.

1:10:13 And you can modify it and turn it into an SUV and stuff. There's a whole bunch You turn of

1:10:17 it into an SUV.

1:10:18 Bunch of kits that

1:10:19 are really...

1:10:19 Lots of options. So Rebuild today is a supplier to Slate. We produce components for part of the vehicle, but it's an independent business that was born of Rebuild and is off doing its thing. To your point earlier, that's part of our model at Rebuild is to help companies like that, whether we instantiate them or someone else, to reach critical mass.

1:10:38 Jordan? Very, very cool business.

1:10:40 Tell us about the fundraise. Tell us about the partnership with JPMorgan. I was listening to Jamie Dimon talk about JPMorgan's $1,500,000,000,000 security and resiliency initiative. This feels adjacent to that, but I'd love to hear about the fundraise. I wanna smash the gong, and then I wanna hear about how JPMorgan interfaces with you.

1:11:01 Great. Yes. I mean, this this fundraise, which was 2,100,000,000, Boom. It's a good knock. I appreciate that.

1:11:12 Was was led by both JPMorgan Chase and General Catalyst.

1:11:15 That's right.

1:11:16 So these are two firms that have very long term perspective on their investment horizon. Right? And so Yeah. What we're trying to do, which is rebuild industrial capacity here, is a long term play. And so they've been great partners, their networks are fantastic, and their money is quite green.

1:11:33 And so between those two things, we can, I think, build this business to be, you know, the multibillion dollar manufacturing company that will hopefully help set an example and encourage many others to participate in the space?

1:11:45 Yeah. I was gonna say multi trillion, but... Yeah.

1:11:49 Yes. Many of our board members would go for that too. Just a little longer.

1:11:52 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little longer.

1:11:54 Yeah. No. No. I pragmatic. I love it.

1:11:56 It's a great it's a great partnership.

1:11:57 Jack and

1:11:57 Catalyst doing so much interesting stuff on the hospital side, getting into reindustrialization now, and they have previously, and then JPMorgan doing so much more there as well. It's a great partnership.

1:12:08 And I appreciate... Yeah. You're... You you maybe should be more hype seeking just because you guys have pretty... You know, had tremendous results and made incredible progress in a very short period of time, but I appreciate how pragmatic you are and just focus on focus on the basics.

1:12:24 And, I think it's what we need. So great to meet you, Miles. Thank for coming on.

1:12:28 Thank you

1:12:28 very much.

1:12:28 You so much for

1:12:29 coming on We'll

1:12:30 talk to soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider.

1:12:35 Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Up next, we have Rahul from Ramp, a CTO coming on to TBPN. Welcome.

1:12:48 There he is. So how

1:12:49 are you doing? How are doing? You so much for taking the time. What's happening? What's going on with this artificial intelligence thing?

1:12:57 Anything anything there?

1:13:00 What's going on with AI?

1:13:01 Yeah. I mean, here are But a lot do you think it's the real deal?

1:13:06 I I think it's totally real. I mean, we... There's there's not that many companies who interact with a lot a lot of American businesses and and and provide AI to them. We So see it. See the hype.

1:13:17 We see the other side too.

1:13:18 Okay.

1:13:19 It's great to bring value as well.

1:13:20 Yeah. Mean, I love I love the data that's coming out of the Ramp Economics Lab. I love the products that you're working on. What are customers asking for? And then I'm also interested in what are you seeing that customers aren't necessarily asking for, but you want to be able to deliver before they even know to ask for it?

1:13:40 Yeah. I mean, so one of the focuses for us is to help businesses automate their finance Yeah. And manage their money, how to control their spend, and we've been going out for the long tail. So we launched accounts receivable this year. We've been doing bill pay for a couple of years.

1:13:56 Yep. We we have a bank account now, Thank Ramp Treasury. Yep. We do travel. So we're really just going after all the spend. Our customers sell us because they... We we hear from them what what they're frustrated about and where where their pain points are. Today, I'm actually here to talk about inspect. We just launched our our coding tool. I'm super excited to talk about it.

1:14:14 Yeah. So Amazing. I mean, we've seen that Ramp helping you save time and money, Ramp being the the software suite for the office of the CFO. It's growing in scope because the CFO's remit is expanding across coding spend and so router makes sense in that context. How does this product fit into the CFO's suite, the CFO's strategy?

1:14:41 Or is this a new motion where you're asking CFOs, can we have an introduction to the CTO because we want to deploy that here? How do you think about how do you think about the actual...

1:14:51 Yeah. Absolutely. I I think we... When we built Inspect, it was something we built for ourselves. Just wanted a great tool.

1:14:57 Yeah. Of course, we're building software. We're a company of engineers and finance people and everything else too. We just wanted something that we loved using and we built a lot of software. We want to build software fast. And we found that something was missing in the tools that we we could get, and so that's kind of where we started. I mean, AI is a CFO problem. It will become more of a CFO problem. Yeah. Every CFO is probably sweating right now.

1:15:18 They're they're seeing their their bills go up a lot. Yeah. And so by... Just just by that, I think we... CFOs are are involved, I mean, we are... We... We're also... Our incentives are such that we just wanna deliver value to customers. We're we're not we're not aligned with just spending more, and this is historically how the business has always operated. We we don't want you to spend more.

1:15:35 We want you to save money and time. Yeah. And this is just another way to do that.

1:15:39 So, I mean, the AI coding tool space is so competitive. There's... The landscape is so broad. You have the the IDs, your cursors, your wind surfs, have coding agents, your clog codes, your codexes, then you have the always on agents, the Grock bots and the dots and the muses and the instincts. How are you positioning this?

1:15:59 Where do you want it to grow? Where do you want it to deliver value? What's the unique selling proposition right now?

1:16:05 Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's a ram flavor version of a coding agent. Okay. The big focus for us was to make sure it works in a company of our scale, of our speed, our complexity.

1:16:15 Yeah.

1:16:16 I mean, we... Just in terms of, like, how people collaborate across different functions, we made it extremely collaborative multiplayer first. Yep. Works in Slack. Every session is public by default, so everybody at the company can see what's happening

1:16:27 Got it.

1:16:28 What you're talking to. You send over a link, and they can continue talking to the agent. Yeah. And it's kind of a group chat. You're just hanging out with the agents and hanging out with all the all the AIs, and it works cross platform across all models.

1:16:38 We also like that it works deeply in our RAM context. So it actually can run a version of RAMP inside

1:16:45 Oh,

1:16:45 inspect, which is... It's an enormous engineering challenge because we just wanted to get... Have it work with all the stuff we have.

1:16:52 And Yeah.

1:16:53 When we did it last year... Well, or a year ago, we knew that AI is gonna get better. I mean, it was kind of a clear exponential and just kinda, like, kinda keep drawing the line and keep going. We were, like, okay, so this thing's gonna get really smart. And so we needed to get, like, work with our database

1:17:07 Sure.

1:17:08 Our servers and all the other stuffs going on, and download all our code, and be able to run and scale really fast. And our engineers were getting very excited. They were using local coding agents. They were like, hey, I need a bigger laptop. And then Mhmm.

1:17:18 They would walk around their... The office with their laptops open, sometimes down the street. Yeah. And so we just wanted to move that experience to the cloud. And so the huge emphasis on, in a secure way, getting all of Ramp working. And and now we've since expanded that to code bases of any complexity working inside And so the collaborative angle is a big piece for us and then the complexity as well.

1:17:40 How do you think about the the value prop, not from, like, the developer experience perspective, but from the CFO's perspective? Is the idea that by being sort of an independent third party as Ramp has been in the big lab race, you can design an agent that uses the best tool for the job. And sometimes that's an open AI model, sometimes that's an anthropic model, sometimes it's a Gemini model. It might be an open source model. Might be something that's fine tuned.

1:18:06 Is there is there a value where you believe that you can drive the cost per task lower than the leading labs can provide if you're all in on one? And so this allows a company to be multi lab, or do you eventually wanna get into inference as well? Like, how deep does that go?

1:18:24 Yeah. I mean, I think so. The the way I think about it is a lot of complexity that these businesses have to solve for is to get their contacts and their data and their repos set up in a lot of different coding agents.

1:18:34 Oh, yeah.

1:18:35 And that forces you to effectively pick. And right now, I'm not sure who's who's winning, and the the the leading model provider changes very, very quickly every few weeks. And so if you had to pick it, I don't know what the answer is. And so we we wanted to build something that works across all the tools, and you can always switch where we're... Half the company works on models of this from a certain lab, and the the other comp...

1:18:55 Other side of the company is very opinionated. And so we we we have every every provider running inference here. And so we also run our own inference for InSpec, and we're happy to work with customers for that as well. Our focus, as as you said, is we're not incentivized to just, like, drive up token costs. So for us, it's, like, deeply integrated to ramp router where you understand where every single session's going, which department's using how much, how many tokens of which model, which service tier, and which reasoning effort.

1:19:21 There's a lot of complexity that we're we're we're trying to expose to finance people so they can understand and also have controls in addition to engineers on how these dollars are being spent. There's enormous amount of money flowing through and finance people have to be involved.

1:19:35 Yeah.

1:19:37 How are... I imagine there's like a bunch of other products like this that you guys are using right now as internal tools. What... Talk about the decision making process of when you wanna open them up to other people through AMP customer base versus when they should stay internal tools?

1:19:53 Yeah. Great question. I mean, there's a ton of complexity in automation that actually Inspect sets up for us. And so a lot of our automations and internal tools actually works on top of Inspect's API. So for us, Inspect is an internal coworker.

1:20:06 You tell Inspect, hey. This person said that they had a bug or something is slow or something's not working or their support they wrote in or we we would like to sell to them, so what should we say to them? All all kinds of this this job, you can offload to inspect because it's plugged into ramp systems. And so we've also, since then, set up automations to review code to make sure that code is working correctly when it gets to production. Cybersecurity

1:20:29 is a

1:20:29 big one for inspect. And so all of these internal automations have now kind of been sitting on top of this. And so for us, it's the bedrock, which... And it sits on top of router. So we're building these layers of abstractions that...

1:20:39 And then we can expose to our customers.

1:20:41 Well, congratulations on the launch. I'm gonna hit the

1:20:43 Big one.

1:20:46 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:20:48 Very cool launch. Congratulations. Congrats to the team.

1:20:50 With the rollout. We will talk to you soon. Have a great

1:20:53 rest of

1:20:53 your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

1:21:00 It's right down the street from Ramp. You can go from one to the other in just a few minutes. Our next guest is Gavin Baker from the trades management, the managing partner.

1:21:11 I have Heard

1:21:12 of him. Oh, he's been on the go

1:21:14 The Baconator.

1:21:15 We're gonna bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome and catch up with him. How are doing, Gavin? Good to see you.

1:21:20 I'm awesome, man. Happiness is a choice. I'm only ever fantastic, awesome, superb,

1:21:26 phenomenal. I mean, I I completely I love that happiness is a choice. But also it feels like this is a week to be extra happy. Like the Anthropic s one went out and it seemed like a beat. It seemed like like if you were worried, oh, the economics are not working secretly behind the scenes and there's gonna be some bombshell in there, the haters have been kind of quiet.

1:21:47 Ed Zetran hasn't posted. Like, things are, you know, it seems like things are on track. But what is your interpretation been this week?

1:21:54 I do think the Anthropic s one was pretty clearly an upside surprise. Yeah. The fact that they've only burned $10,000,000,000. Yeah. The profitability, the cash generation, the unit economics, they're all very encouraging.

1:22:09 The... You know, I put it on x, but I just cannot believe that whatever it is, half of the fortune five hundred has adopted Anthropic, and it's 0.1 of their expenses.

1:22:23 Yeah.

1:22:24 It's just a wild stat.

1:22:26 Yeah. The the funny thing is that

1:22:27 The Internet just blew I

1:22:29 read that I read that as the

1:22:30 Yeah. We can still hear you.

1:22:31 No. No. Yeah. We can hear you. I I read that 50% No.

1:22:35 What? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, just as like like, okay. Yeah. That's incredibly impressive for a company in just a few years to get half the Fortune 500 or the S and P 500 on as customers. But I was kind of like, what are the other half of the S and P five hundred doing? I felt like every Fortune 500 would or S and P five hundred would be multiproduct using everything. But there's a lot of companies that just haven't really gotten through the adoption hiccups of rolling out AI broadly. Maybe some of them are all in on Google or OpenAI.

1:23:05 But by and large, I think some of them are just still figuring out how AI can be deployed in their organizations. But is that your read on it that we're still sort of early on the diffusion story in enterprise?

1:23:16 Yeah. Very early. I mean, if anything, maybe earlier than I thought we were. Yeah. And it's...

1:23:22 I mean, it's just astonishing. Whatever the number is, 67,000,000,000 Yeah. Annualized. If you annualize the reported third quarter, The... You know, wherever the ARR is right now. To... But to be that big with such low penetration into the Fortune 500

1:23:39 Yeah.

1:23:40 Is... Crazy. It is pretty extraordinary.

1:23:43 Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

1:23:44 How do you... How how have you processed the... Like, some of the criticism right now of the AI trade is that you have a very small number of companies driving the majority of the spend. Think I if you can look historically and say that that same dynamic probably played out with like social media ads, where like a very small number of companies were driving a massive amount of the spend. And so you're gonna kinda see power laws in a lot of places.

1:24:08 My read on it is that you have... Like, there are companies based in San Francisco that are just a thousand times more obsessed with AI than the than the say... Let's say like the long tail of public company employees. And so, of course, they're gonna spend dramatically more. And it's possible that that long tail never actually cares enough, but they sort of fade to relative obscurity.

1:24:32 Mhmm. And you have the disruptors that are saying like, yeah, this technology is real. It works. It it's not perfect yet. It's not like a drop coworker that will immediately, you give it a dollar and will give you $10 back. Mhmm. But it's very capable, and so if you obsess over it. And so that's been sort of my overall read. Like, don't think it's necessarily... Of course, you'd want a more diversified revenue base if you could.

1:24:56 But in general, it feels very natural that all the spend is coming from a very small group of people that like realize that something fundamental has changed and they're trying to take every advantage of it while the rest of the world is asleep.

1:25:09 I might respectfully disagree a little. In s one, there are only 250 accounts spending more than $10,000,000. So actually, you know, somebody in the New York Times said that, you know, maybe ten days ago that 80% of the revenue came from eight customers. I was actually shocked how diversified their customer base actually was.

1:25:31 And

1:25:32 if you are...

1:25:34 Well, the number to me was the the something like 11 or 12,000 spending over a $100,000. Yeah. That that feels diversified.

1:25:41 Oh, yeah.

1:25:42 But I'm but I'm talking about like the ramp data that's saying like, look, like 1% of companies are spending, you know, 90% of the dollars.

1:25:51 Well, I I mean the ramp data is what it is, but we have much more authoritative data now from the Anthropic s one.

1:25:58 Yeah.

1:25:58 Yeah.

1:25:58 And it shows a very diversified spending base for Anthropic. Yeah. Now maybe the ramp data is correct for AI overall. Sure. But the Anthropic s one, like relative to a thought that, you know, Meta was spending 10,000,000,000

1:26:13 Yep.

1:26:13 And there were these multiple billion dollar plus accounts that were driving it all. That just... It's much more diversified customer base for Anthropic. And then for the AI broadly, I do think that something that has happened since June is you've really seen, you know, first we saw OpenAI really accelerate in the summer, And as OpenAI accelerated, so did open weight models. And there's so many companies, know, whether it's Fireworks, whether it's Base ten, whether it's Together, whether it's Modal, whether it's Cognition, that are at scale, really open weight first.

1:26:51 Mhmm. And they're all growing faster than either OpenAI or Anthropic. And that was true when OpenAI was really accelerating in the summer. Mhmm. And it's still true in October, when Anthropic has had clearly a pretty big re acceleration. Like I just I'm pretty skeptical that they would have put the, you know, the you know, the blank space for the October ARR in the s one. If they didn't know it was gonna be pretty good. Yeah. And I do think it'll be great for the market to get away from these monthly ARR things.

1:27:22 Totally.

1:27:23 But to me... Yeah. It's interesting.

1:27:25 Yeah. Seeing the the modals, the base tens, the fireworks, the together's all out can probably... I feel like this is common knowledge. Basically, all... They've all been out in market.

1:27:37 And so private markets investors have been getting these sort of updates. And and a lot of these companies have been like starting fundraises, growing dramatically from the period where they got their first term sheet to when they're actually like pulling in capital. And so that that data is like broadly like I would say the East Coast is just not aware of that at all. Mhmm. Some of them are picking it up but it's not like sort of common knowledge.

1:28:02 Whereas on the West, I would say like Mhmm. Over here, people are like, yeah, these companies are... We're already at scale and then they're growing, you know, double digits just during the period of like first term sheet to close or like first close. Well,

1:28:18 my firm at tradies led the last fireworks round and it was actually hard to price it because they're growing so fast.

1:28:27 Like, thought we had a handshake.

1:28:29 Yeah.

1:28:29 They're like, well, we increased revenue.

1:28:31 Yesterday's price is not today's price.

1:28:33 Yeah. You're like, like, let's let's just get the deal done.

1:28:36 Yeah. I

1:28:37 mean, literally, it's like the valuation was going... You know, the multiple was effectively going down, you know, every day.

1:28:43 Every day. Yeah. That's crazy.

1:28:44 And if anything, it feels like that ecosystem has accelerated and diversified.

1:28:50 Yeah.

1:28:51 Because earlier this year, Cursor was a real big driver for all those inference clouds.

1:28:55 Yep.

1:28:55 And I mean, the x Cursor growth I think, you know, is is what's really extraordinary enough just because you know Yeah. SpaceX has been insourcing the Cursor compute.

1:29:05 Yes. So on on Cursor SpaceX, like the post merger integration, it feels like Grokbot has stepped forward in terms of capability. Is the key to growth there? Like, we haven't seen the the models from x AI, like, stunned on a particular benchmark, but the cursor team has always been fantastic on product and distribution. In the prior era, Grok was putting up pretty remarkable results on benchmarks, but then there were all the political considerations and the product was banned in some companies.

1:29:38 It feels like Grokbot might be in a particularly different slot because they have that go to market motion through Cursor with the Cursor design team behind it. Is that what's driving growth there? What are you seeing on the Grokbots side that's actually showing acceleration in that product category?

1:29:55 I mean, as a user, Rockbot is the most impactful AI product to me and to and to our... You know, to our... To the to the firm Yeah. That we've had yet. Like I, you know, I clued together all this stuff with Cloud Code and Yeah.

1:30:11 Really, you know, I'm sure it was user error on my part, you know. Sure. 50 years old. Yeah. I'm doing my best. But Grok Bot, it just makes it so easy. I think I'm up to like 17 Grok Bots.

1:30:23 Woah.

1:30:23 And every day I think of a new one to add. That's good.

1:30:27 Yeah. You're giving me a layer of somebody... The the senior manager, senior grok bot. How are you how are you personally dividing AI agents across your personal life and your professional life. Because a lot of people will have like a family office with a personal assistant who manages, you know, getting gifts for their family members or planning birthday parties.

1:30:51 And then separately, they'll have an executive assistant who plans their business travel and their calendar for work stuff. And it feels like we might be entering a world where those two merge together and you have one agent that does everything. But we also might wind up in a world where people are using Grockbot at work or Clogcode at work and then Instinct or Muse and Personal and OpenAI has products in both and they're sort of like an array but it's a decision for everyone. How have you been grappling with it?

1:31:18 Well, I guess you would say I I I guess I have executive assistant privilege because my assistant Susan is exceptional. Yeah. And she's... Yeah. I'm not

1:31:25 going anywhere....

1:31:26 Felt the need, you know, to... Yeah. I've I've of course downloaded Instinct and played around with Muse. Sure. But...

1:31:34 And I could see they would be super amazing if if I didn't have someone like Susan in my professional life, but I do.

1:31:43 Yeah.

1:31:45 But for the more professional use cases,

1:31:48 I

1:31:49 mean, Grock Bot has just been transformative

1:31:53 Yeah. For me. Yeah. There is...

1:31:55 So much as Yeah. So much of investing is making sure that the right information gets to the right person at the right time.

1:32:01 Yep.

1:32:01 And Grockbot is so good at that.

1:32:04 Yeah. And there's also something so satisfying with the AI agents of like, it can be 10PM on a Sunday and you can kick off, like, a real research effort that, yes, you could probably call someone on your team and say, I need you to... Mean, like, that would be crossing a professional line. All of a sudden, you'd be, like, kind of a hassle of a work... Of a boss and people might not wanna work there because they're like, yeah, he calls me every time he takes a shower.

1:32:29 He has a shower thought and then I gotta work for six hours. But instead, the AI is like, yeah, boss. I'm right here. Oh, I'd I'd love to look that up for you and spend a 1,000,000 tokens figuring out, you know, with the market size of something or other. But... Yeah.

1:32:42 Well, my policy is actually anybody at a tradies is always welcome to call me anytime on the weekend. I try not to call people

1:32:50 Yeah.

1:32:50 On the weekends. Yeah.

1:32:55 So... How... So I think like, you know, rewind. This week is, you know, Anthropic s one week and so there's there's a lot of focus there. Last week, it felt like the focus was like the general attention was towards how much supply is coming online next year, how many gigawatts SpaceX is gonna bring online.

1:33:18 How are you what's your what's your, you know... Generally, you've maintained a sort of bullishness that that some other people on the timeline have lost here and there. But how are you processing, like, how the how the how the industry can sort of absorb all of that supply if we hit the higher end of some of the ranges being discussed? And and and is it just Jevan's paradox, you know, again and again and again again until we finally... Every everyone says like, you know, everyone likes to say it but it's hard to fully internalize.

1:33:55 Yeah. I think that's I think that's right. It's it's easy to say. It's it's hard to internalize and believe. And October has kind of been a strange month because the price to rent, essentially any kind of a GPU, has gone up every day.

1:34:10 So the spot market for compute is getting tighter. And it's not just the spot market, you know, it is... I do love reading these primers on x from, you know, commodity and macro investors about these super complicated concepts called backwardation and contango Yeah. And what they might mean for the forward curve of compute and the future price of compute. You know, these are contango, backwardation.

1:34:39 But, you know, Silicon Data, which I do think is, you know... My firm is an investor in them, but I I do think they're the most authoritative data source. Carmen Lee, the founder, stood up at GTC and said that the compute market is now in contango. Mhmm. That, you know, the forward... It's not just that the spot market is tight. If you want a cluster a year from now, you have to pay a lot of money. Yeah. And then this is and this is maybe another, you know, discontinuity between public and private markets. But just the number of companies we have in our portfolio who are like, okay, we got a cluster of 4,000 Blackwells and, you know, and we got it in May or June '26, and we wanna bring on another cluster of 4,000 in September 2027.

1:35:31 Yeah. And they are shocked by how much more they have to pay in the future. And it's not like they're... Everybody is unaware of this... Everybody's aware of the supply that's coming on. But even with all of that supply coming on, it is hard for the companies in our portfolio to find compute even well into '27. Mhmm. So for, you know, all the commodity experts who are focused on backwardation and what that implied, I got news for you. We're not in backwardation anymore.

1:36:05 Mhmm.

1:36:05 And then I do think... As far as how much capacity is going to come online, one thing that I think is actually healthy about what's happened in these financing markets is I hope it concentrates capacity and supply in the competent operators where they can finance it through prepayments. You know, you can kind of finance these GPU purchases two ways. By the way, CoreWeave is great. CoreWeave runs GPUs well.

1:36:32 They bring them on... They they are very, very good. They just sadly locked in a vast amount of compute and long term contracts that are now way way under market. You know, and I Interesting. Doing...

1:36:46 So they sold their they sold their GPUs for fixed prices and that's why they're getting hammered right now. It's not that they don't have compute, they're not bringing it on. They have the semi analysis diamond tier. Everyone knows that the clusters Yeah. Work.

1:36:59 They're good. They are reliable. But they just sold for too cheap and they should have hold held on or had variable pricing.

1:37:06 Is is you think Elon studied that and said like we're not gonna make that same mistake and that's why they're adopting this more Sure. Short term contract...

1:37:15 I don't... Elon is a first principles thinker. I don't think he was probably studying Core Weave or Nevius or anyone Yeah. He was probably reasoning from first principles. But Sure.

1:37:26 The conclusion he came to is prices are going up. We... If we are willing to sell into the spot market, we can have paybacks well under a year

1:37:35 Yeah.

1:37:36 Get big prepayments

1:37:37 Yep.

1:37:38 And that's... I think that's a better probably financing model for the market we're in. And what I also like about it... And by the way, Core Weave, I think, is very aware of this. They're trying to get more spot exposure.

1:37:51 They're trying to

1:37:51 Mhmm.

1:37:52 You know, do less of these big long term off take agreements. Mhmm. But standing up a big GPU cloud, that that should say, bringing on the power, standing up the cluster, it's like running a Formula One team. Yeah. And a bunch of people who have no real relevant experience, you know, whenever they acquire some land and some power and then, you know, they get a zero down payment off take agreement from someone.

1:38:23 And a lot of that is being cleaned up and I think, you know, supply is being... What... This is a forcing function to allocate GPUs to people who can actually bring on a cluster, energize the GPUs, run it well. Like, you know, running a Formula One team, it's like really hard. You gotta like pack everything up, put it on a plane, go to a new city, unpack it, set it up, set the car up.

1:38:53 You need all the people, you know, to like, you you know, whatever. Change the tires, to change the rear wing if you get in a collision, to, know, do whatever needs to be done during the race, to do the strategy, to communicate with the driver. It's really, really hard if in... It's not like, you know, some of these people, they don't have the relevant experience. You know, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Nebius, SpaceX, the big hyperscalers.

1:39:21 You know, these are companies that could bring on GPUs and energize them and and run them. But... And I do think something that was announced at GTC Berlin is actually pretty important for this, and that's that DSX pod, which is gonna make it a lot easier, you know?

1:39:36 Oh, sure.

1:39:37 Seven racks. It comes preassembled.

1:39:39 Yeah. You

1:39:40 know, you just kind of literally plug it in and it works. Yeah. Right now, when you get the GPUs, you know, maybe if you're if you're SpaceX and you're really, really exceptional at execution in the physical world, you can get them energized quickly. Yeah. But a lot of people, it takes them six months, you know, three months, six months to get them energized, really get them working.

1:40:00 And if we can, through, you know, this new product from Jensen, get that time down, I think that's that's also healthy because that effectively takes a lot of working capital out of the market. You know, you have... As these numbers are getting bigger, if it takes six months to energize them, you know, that could be hundreds of billions of dollars of assets that are not generating revenue. So I think that's another... That's a product innovation that's gonna help with this.

1:40:27 But I think this is... You know, we we will see who who energizes GPUs in in in '27. I'm I'm confident that the, you know, the companies I named, I think they're gonna... I mean, the future is always uncertain, but these are companies with a proven track record of execution. Yeah. And we'll see about others.

1:40:48 So I have a follow-up on that. One is just one click higher from the Neo Clouds or the Neo Labs and there's been this speculation that Neo Clouds might Neo Labs might sort of pivot into Neo Clouds. Is that dynamic going to look like they signed a multi year off take agreement with a Neo Cloud and then they want us to just sell into the spot market? That's what's gonna happen?

1:41:08 Yes. I mean, what Sarah Fryer said Yeah. And Sarah Fryer is an exceptional CFO.

1:41:13 Yeah.

1:41:14 She said, you know, everybody made fun of us for signing all these compute commitments and we could sell them all at a three, four, or five x premium.

1:41:21 Today.

1:41:22 And she was being literal.

1:41:24 Yep. Yep.

1:41:25 And so if you if you signed a long term compute contract

1:41:29 Yep.

1:41:30 Really at any point prior to May 2026 Mhmm. You were way in the money. Yep. You're buying compute for, you know, maybe Yeah. 10 or fifth...

1:41:42 10 or $15 a watt. Yeah. And you could sell it at a massive premium to that today.

1:41:48 Yep.

1:41:49 And then the point the point, you know, that Carmen made about, you know, the the forward curve being in contango is actually really important and just like... It's not just that

1:41:58 the spot market is tight today. You have to pay vast amount even with all this capacity coming online. You have to pay

1:42:05 a truly vast amount to bring on a cluster in mid to late twenty seven. And I think that's something that just maybe public markets are not appreciating. Even though, you know, it's not... All of this is public. You know, Sarah Fryer said that.

1:42:20 Yeah. You know, the... Yeah.

1:42:22 All these inference clouds have kind of given press releases. You hear a bunch of people on x talk about how hard it is to find compute into '27.

1:42:30 Yep.

1:42:30 Carmen Lee stands up and says, you know, like the market in '27 is is crazy strong.

1:42:36 Yeah.

1:42:37 So it's all out there but I think for whatever reason, it's not legible to the public Sure. Jordan?

1:42:44 What... Talk about your outlook on biology as a as a as an area that that the labs are investing in. It feels very exciting and that there's, you know, tremendous potential, but I think that overall concern is around timelines. It's like there's very real costs, like, coming online, infrastructure costs, and opportunities in biology seem like they're very real, but may take, you know, years to get these, you know... Well, almost certainly take years to get drugs in market and actually drive, you know, revenue that would then finance.

1:43:20 Yeah.

1:43:21 I mean, we'll we'll see how long it takes. You know, Montana has an interesting new program for for new drugs, which I think is helpful. But I think a really big unlock. We we have a lot of compounds and people have used AI to figure out that you can use may... Maybe a drug that we've had for fifty or sixty years for a very rare disease that's devastating for like ten thousand kids a year and effectively cure that disease.

1:43:51 Yeah. And a friend of mine did this and it's, you know, it's it's it's his story to tell, so I'm not gonna tell it. But AI has already saved a lot of lives and I do think, you know, the AI industry, it's, you know, they're like negative five out of 100 from like a PR.

1:44:10 A 100%.

1:44:11 But they... We gotta be more like pharma. The popular kids.

1:44:15 Yeah. Exactly. Well, no.

1:44:16 They need to start telling these stories.

1:44:18 Yeah. Yeah.

1:44:19 Yeah. And by the way, are you guys are coming to tomorrow x?

1:44:23 We are.

1:44:23 Of course. We are. November seventeenth, eighteenth, we'll be there with you. The lineup is awesome.

1:44:27 The lineup is unbelievable.

1:44:28 The lineup is crazy. Jensen Wong, David Solomon, Mike Rowan, Lisa Su, Stan Druckenmiller, so many more...

1:44:35 So many people. Yep. But the one thing I just wanna say

1:44:38 is Yeah.

1:44:39 I get like 25 emails or texts today saying, hey, man, can I come to your conference? Yeah. And the answer is, you can just sign up.

1:44:48 Yeah. You can just sign up.

1:44:49 Anyone can come. Now, there's gonna be a security screen

1:44:52 Sure.

1:44:52 Because of some of the people who are coming and I do, you know, there are unannounced speakers that are

1:44:56 Yeah.

1:44:56 You know, comparable in caliber to some of those you reference. So we're gonna have a lot of security at the conference Yep. And everybody's... You'll be screened. But you can just sign up.

1:45:06 You

1:45:06 do not need to ask me. You don't need to ask Antonio. You can just come. Yeah. And it's like the whole goal is to kind of democratize investing.

1:45:17 And in in addition to those companies, you know, we are... We're gonna have Lynn from Fireworks Yeah. Chase from Crusoe Yeah. Scott from Cognition. We're gonna have Max from Lagora. Yeah. We're gonna have

1:45:27 a lot

1:45:27 of Yeah. Base ten.

1:45:29 Two in. Two in from Base ten. Yeah. We are gonna have a lot of these CEOs there that are gonna be on a stage and then we're gonna have, you know, dozens of other private CEOs. And, you know, it's a...

1:45:45 It's an attempt to kind of like open up the aperture of, you know, information for retail investors to democratize this. So like, if you're wondering about coming, just sign up. You don't need to ask me.

1:46:01 Tomorrow x summit dot com, not Gavin Baker's email. Yes. You can go to a URL on the You

1:46:10 get Gavin to sign And they will email you when

1:46:15 you sign up. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What what what do you think will change in the content and the conversation between last year's event and this year's event?

1:46:25 What are you hoping to get across?

1:46:27 We did... This is the first time...

1:46:28 This is the first one.

1:46:29 Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

1:46:30 We decided we're gonna have, you know, we're gonna have bysiders doing the fireside chats. Yeah. We're gonna have, you know, management teams are gonna have the opportunity. We've... If you were an active contributor on X, Substack, Reddit Sure.

1:46:45 You get to come for free. Yeah. And then management teams are gonna be able to do a breakout session with all of those X accounts. Yeah. If you're you're one of the, you know, four or 500, you know, kind of, you know, financial commentators that we've given a scholarship to, you're gonna get... You know, a lot of management teams are gonna opt in and you're gonna be able to kinda have your own session with the management team to ask your questions. Then you're gonna be able to go write what you learned for your audience. And I'm... You know, I think we have a really high quality, you know, I mean, I I I picked most of them. And you don't have to be bullish.

1:47:26 You know, I want... You know, I love skeptics. I love bears.

1:47:29 Yeah. You just you just have

1:47:30 to be polite and nice Sure. And constructive. And you can be bearish while being polite, nice and constructive. And, you know, we're we have loads of we have loads of skeptics. We have loads of optimists.

1:47:41 Like, think it's gonna be great. And then I I hope every CEO does, know, you know, kind of a hit on your show after they're on stage or before.

1:47:49 Yeah. I'm... Might

1:47:53 be the longest TBPN episode ever.

1:47:54 I think so.

1:47:55 Let's see. Yeah. How do you deal with all the all the attention? Positive and negative?

1:48:04 That work? For me?

1:48:05 Yeah. For you. For you. Oh, I know. Just feel like I...

1:48:08 You I... You you talked about your your mindset right at the beginning of the show. Just, you know, you know, it's a choice to be happy. But I feel like when it comes... When the the the spotlight, you know, once every week shines directly on you. There's a lot of love, a little bit of hate...

1:48:26 There's there's...

1:48:28 The whole the full spectrum of human emotions.

1:48:29 We we can call it what it is. I mean, there there there are a lot of there are a lot of detractors, let's say. I'll just say, look, Antonio, who I'm doing the conference with, he says being on x is an exercise in cultivated equanimity. Mhmm. I don't take any of it personally.

1:48:43 Mhmm. I'm not on x to be right. Mhmm. I'm... Right now, I would, you know, I'm I'm a responsible optimist, but I'm trying to be open minded to new negative facts and constantly search them out. But I'm really on x, you know, to learn and I, you know, all of the hate, like I try to sift through it for, oh, wow. That is actually a very good compelling bearish argument. You know, like there was an interesting post. I forget it was like PE analyst or LBO analyst. And it just said, hey, you know, the fact that Anthropic is dedicating 74% of their compute to training, you could read it...

1:49:23 On the one hand, it's bullish because they could be generating a lot more revenue. On the other hand, if all this compute is being dedicated towards training and for any reason, somebody decides you need less compute for training, that's a lot of supply that could hit the inference market. Hey, wow. That's like a really interesting, you know, bearish perspective. And so, you know...

1:49:49 I'm human. I don't... Like I'm human, but it's also just like, I'm here to learn. I wanna get to the right answer. I'm sharing my views. If somebody shares an, you know, a helpful negative perspective, I try to thank them. I need to go like, thank that that person. LBO analyst, I think it was. I didn't have time. But, yeah.

1:50:11 It's it's an exercise of cultivate... Cultivated equanimity. You can't... You you can't you can't take it personally. Yeah. But I do... I am trying, you know, doing what little I can, you know, has like Gavin Baker, you know, I don't have millions or tens of millions of followers, but I am trying to help paint, I think, a more optimistic vision for AI, doing what I can to help the American public understand that, hey, like, you actually want a data center Good. In your in your town, you know? One of my favorite exchanges was somebody said, well, I'll wait until they start building data centers in the wealthiest county in America. Well, Luton County is the wealthiest county in America.

1:50:57 They have the highest per capita data centers.

1:50:59 Yep. Virginia. US East. Amazon.

1:51:03 Yep. So just understanding that like, I understand why, you know, some people are worried. There there's been a lot of fear. There's, you know, that we've all seen scary movies. But a lot of awesome things are happening today Yeah.

1:51:19 Because of AI for ordinary Americans, for blue collar Americans, for these small towns. We're re industrializing America. We're, you know, massively increasing our electrical generation capacity, which is you cannot re industrialize without power. That's job number one. So I think a lot of good things are happening and I'm just trying to do what little I can to at least tell that side of the story and then be pretty balanced.

1:51:45 Like, you know, Anthropic, I called it like I saw it in the summer. Mhmm. They were losing market share. Mhmm. I'm calling it like I see it in October. They are reaccelerating Yeah. And gaining share.

1:51:57 Yeah.

1:51:57 The s one, it was an upside surprise to me. Yep. I'm trying to call balls and strikes Sure.

1:52:03 Because my job is to just get it right.

1:52:07 Yeah. Join...

1:52:09 And it's funny because, you know, people will get so flustered by, you know, seeing different posts on X. Sure. But imagine how boring X would be if no one ever took a stand. Oh, yeah. It was just like, well, it might be this.

1:52:21 Yeah. It might be that.

1:52:22 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:52:22 And it might

1:52:23 be this. No. No.

1:52:24 It's over or or we're back. This is the best thing ever in the world. Because then we can have a debate. At least you took a stance. Yeah.

1:52:30 Yeah. It's great. Yes. Jordy mentioned, getting sharp on bio, starting to think about opportunities there. How deep have you gone in the AI stack? I saw a a funny post that was like, you could spend all your time thinking about OpenAI and Anthropic and Google or... And then, you know, meet all the neo clouds and, meet Lynn and Tuan and figure out what's going on in the private markets. Or you could just buy copper and you could just sit there and hold copper. Right? Because like

1:52:56 Yeah.

1:52:56 It's almost a perfect proxy or something like But how far have you gone down into energy infrastructure, commodities? Like, how how sharp are you on those? How how relevant or interesting is the... Are those markets to you in this world since they do seem adjacent?

1:53:11 No. I pay close attention to all of those. I ran a diversified fund in prior life for nine You know, I was an energy investor. Yeah. You know, natural resources.

1:53:21 I always... Many years, did would do like kind of marketing meetings with the with the gold analyst at at at my my prior employer Fidelity. So I'd always, you know, knew about the merits of gold from a portfolio construction perspective, but always have it in the fund. By the way, just because it triggers people, I wanna say it. I find it so amusing how upset gold bulls get at the idea of asteroid mining.

1:53:49 Like, what? Think it is...

1:53:50 The idea of asteroid mining.

1:53:53 Oh, yeah.

1:53:54 No one no one has ever been... I've never got more hate

1:53:59 Yeah.

1:53:59 Than from the gold crowd about the idea of asteroid mining in the in the asteroid...

1:54:03 Supply. I mean, was

1:54:06 like, talk about a challenge to your worldview. Wait.

1:54:09 Are are they mad about that? You have to... Like, you need to imagine technological disruption. Right?

1:54:16 Oh, yeah.

1:54:16 Look at the diamond industry. Yeah. Right? Totally. Yes.

1:54:19 Absolutely. If you understood that that technology disruption was possible, you probably built labs like, you know, twenty years ago.

1:54:28 You would have done something different with that, you know, with the diamonds in your family. But but as far as... I mean, I do... We have spent a lot of time on like energy, on the industrial infrastructure, on on natural resources, but we have not made it a big part of the portfolio. We've done some things in private markets as far as trying to help with rare earths.

1:54:53 Mhmm.

1:54:53 And... But this is not through acquiring minds. Yeah. It's more... You know, problem with rare earths, it's not that they're rare, it's that refining them is a very dirty process.

1:55:02 Yeah. So we we've we've... You know, that we've invested in a company that, know, has a chemical process for refining rare earths and, know, I actually think DARPA has done some pretty smart stuff. Like they kind of have a a lot of different efforts around this. But... Yeah. I mean, I try to pay as close attention to all of it as I can because you you know, as an investor, you you you never know where a weak but important signal is gonna come from. And so wanna cast as wide a net as possible. Mhmm. But then also kind of focus maybe the portfolio on the areas where I do feel like maybe we have the the biggest competitive advantage as a firm.

1:55:44 How are you thinking about the evolution of, like, the the marginal capital decider sort of changing in 2027 potentially? Like, if you go back a couple years, you have essentially like seed stage VCs making bets on these AI labs and then eventually some, know, more scaled up venture firms being important capital partners. Some of them have taken board seats, but they are not deciding the race now. It's big hedge funds, pre IPO rounds. But we're coming up to a world where the fidelities of the world, the insurance agencies are going to be involved, the insurance funds and sovereign wealth funds are gonna be increasingly involved in financing the build out.

1:56:27 Like, what does the next year look like from a perspective of, like, how we get the big dollars into the AI build out?

1:56:36 I mean, I think you named all the big dollar sources. Yeah. And something that I think is pretty underappreciated is, you know, American mutual funds.

1:56:44 Okay.

1:56:44 You are limited in the percentage you can hold in a liquid asset.

1:56:48 Sure.

1:56:49 And so SpaceX and Anthropic

1:56:53 Yep.

1:56:53 Going public

1:56:54 Yep.

1:56:55 Is actually gonna free up a huge amount of buying power

1:57:00 Interesting.

1:57:00 In private markets Yep. Once those are fully unlocked. Because they have to be public and unlocked. Interesting. So I think you will see mutual funds, know, and they they've they've always been involved.

1:57:17 You know, my former colleagues, Capital Research to Roe Price, m Sam, g Sam, you know, Franklin Templeton. If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I love you all. But like they've been they've been pretty involved. I mean, the sovereigns have been very involved, particularly, you know, particularly the ones in the GCC and particularly the ones in The UAE.

1:57:40 Yeah. Like MGX Mubadala. Mubadala, all the sovereigns there. I mean, Atreides and Valor, we co led Crusoe with Mubadala.

1:57:48 Yeah.

1:57:48 So I think the The UAE in particular has been extremely front footed Yeah. With all their sovereigns with respect to AI.

1:57:56 Yeah. And now Apollo is taking a stake in Mubadala, which sort of completes the the cycle.

1:58:04 Yes. Yeah. But I mean, that that's gonna have to evolve. But it's also... Do think we're probably getting...

1:58:16 Has these underpriced... So all these clouds, they signed contracts at well below what are below market values. And has those contracts reprice higher? Has they bring on more compute with more spot like we discussed with, you know, the same thing that CoreWeave is is is trying to do? I do think you're going to see...

1:58:39 Like, there's a pretty big acceleration in the clouds last quarter.

1:58:42 Mhmm.

1:58:42 And, you know, forget relative to expectations this or that, but I think you're gonna see a pretty continuous acceleration in the sum of the big hyperscalers cloud revenue growth, the neo clouds, that number is just going to continue to accelerate. And then, you know, it's it's dropping down at very high margins so that, you know, operating cash flow is following. And then you're gonna be able to, I think, finance probably more than people think of the 2027 build out out of cash flow. Like, I don't know if we've seen the peak of external financing, but I think we're getting close.

1:59:27 Yeah. Yeah. That's...

1:59:29 And that'll be really helpful.

1:59:30 Totally. Yeah. No. No one can complain about that. That's just, investing in the future.

1:59:34 AI skeptics will be In a bad place. In a horrible place. We're gonna have to check on them. Sure. You're gonna have to go around.

1:59:42 And look, maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong and you know Yeah. But like I will change my mind when the facts change and I'm just gonna try and keep calling balls and strikes. And then trying to, you know, be an advocate to help understand ordinary Americans that this technology can and should be awesome for them.

2:00:00 Yeah.

2:00:01 Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm very interested to see how Anthropic and OpenAI becoming public companies like impacts like overall sentiment specifically on x Because right now you have a small number of people that actually hold shares in these companies. Oh, And so like maybe there's 50,000 people that have some incentive to be relatively optimistic. One, you know, or you know, you should be able to see both the bull case and the bear case for for any company.

2:00:32 But when that changes and you have millions of people globally that suddenly can have exposure, how does sentiment change? Right? And I think I think people are gonna be... I I think it will be less... Much less extreme once you have the the sort of middle of the road investor has some exposure. Right? It's not like totally binary where like very very small number of people have exposure like... And and and it's direct exposure. Right? Because if you happen to own Yeah.

2:00:59 Shares through some retirement fund or through a hyperscaler or things like that, it...

2:01:05 It's not easy. Maybe some of them will do what Elon did, you know? Every child in America is gonna have a share of SpaceX. Sure. That's awesome.

2:01:12 I think that's way better for America than setting up some foundation Yeah. That, you know, a board or a bunch of bureaucrats are gonna decide how to allocate the money. Yeah. You know, just give people the money. Yeah. Like I hope, like...

2:01:26 That's simple. Just... Yeah.

2:01:27 Let people make individual decisions.

2:01:29 Yeah.

2:01:29 And I would, you know, I would encourage more company and more, you know, more wealthy people in America to do what Elon and Michael Dell and and of course, my friend Brad Kirschner

2:01:40 Yeah.

2:01:41 Have done.

2:01:42 That's great.

2:01:42 I think that's awesome for America and great for capitalism.

2:01:45 Yeah. And it's... It feels so important that that infrastructure got built before the big liquidity wave, before SpaceX goes public so that it's there it's been tested and it's been implemented and rolled out so that anyone who wants to participate in that can actually go and, like, take advantage of it without needing to, you know, say, oh, it'd be nice if the government had a program that would let let me give shares directly to the American populace. Nope. It's there.

2:02:09 It works. It's up to date. Like, it's in the App Store. You can go download it. Yeah.

2:02:14 Just give give people the money. Yeah. Everybody stake in capitalism.

2:02:18 Yeah. No. I completely agree. It's great. Well, thank you.

2:02:21 Well, we'll see you very soon.

2:02:22 We'll see you.

2:02:22 Yeah. Tomorrowsummit.com. Tomorrow at

2:02:25 summit, November seventeenth and eighteenth, Austin, Texas. We'll see you there. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers, Gavin.

2:02:31 Good to see you.

2:02:32 Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace. We're getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

2:02:45 Here's a project you could do with Codex. Find a T Rex skeleton because if you do, you might be the lucky owner of $47,000,000 in cash. Do we have a next guest?

2:02:58 I thought we did.

2:02:59 No. I I I think we're done with our guests. So Sotheby's just sold Jody. I almost read this as Jordy. You almost read this as Jordy and I was like, that's nice of them to name a skeleton after Jordy Hayes.

2:03:11 After all, he didn't major in dinosaurs over here.

2:03:15 I studied the blade.

2:03:16 He studied the blade. He didn't major in dinosaurs. You took a class, right, in college? But you have a you have a collegiate level understanding of dinosaurs which I think is extremely impressive. Yeah.

2:03:26 No. I took that class with some of my buddies and we had multiple people that had to retake the class because they failed.

2:03:32 No. That's amazing.

2:03:34 It was like... It was it was such a trick Yeah. In school because it was... It it it like checked off some requirement. Yeah.

2:03:40 Yeah. And and it's like... It it was kind of a meme.

2:03:43 Yeah. Oh, it's easy. Yeah. But then if you don't take it seriously a The little

2:03:47 inside joke is that it's like it's very very hard.

2:03:50 Oh, it's actually hard.

2:03:51 Required but but not in an interesting way. Just like hardcore memorization.

2:03:55 Yeah. Memorization.

2:03:56 Whatever the different, you know, trees.

2:03:59 But that is incredibly practical wisdom. I mean, if you think about people complaining, oh, why don't they teach you how to do your taxes in school? It's like knowing dinosaurs is such a critical piece of being a good father.

2:04:11 Totally.

2:04:12 Like this is what they should be teaching all... I mean, they they do teach it in lower school, middle school, high school, but it should be in general requirements. No matter... You go to middle school, law school

2:04:22 Well, I think it's... I don't care if you go

2:04:23 to PhD. I want a couple dinosaur classes.

2:04:26 It's sort of... It's important like for your own like financial health. Right? Dinosaurs obviously emerging asset class. Yes.

2:04:34 I think a lot of people...

2:04:35 Yeah. You don't wanna get taken to the cleaners buying a t rex for 60,000,000 when it's trading at 47. Yeah. You just lose $13,000,000 overnight if you don't know this stuff.

2:04:43 I'm surprised. Has anyone fractionalized one of these big guys?

2:04:47 Oh, yeah. Yeah? Oh, yeah. In the comments to this post, there's someone boasting about a fractionalized dinosaur that they're trading. You can gamble on them.

2:04:56 Sotheby's just sold Jody a nanotyrannus, a smallish friend of the t rex for $47,000,000. The high estimate was $9,000,000. It went for five times what they were predicting. Incredible.

2:05:09 Somebody actually sent this to me over the weekend. Independently. And I was looking at it being like that feels low Nine? For something that...

2:05:17 At nine, it felt low to you. Or at 47.

2:05:20 Yeah. Whenever I hear about anything Yeah. Like any any apex predator dinosaur, it's always like, you know.

2:05:26 I mean, I think I I think we agree it's a steal at 47,000,000. They were giving it away at 9. But, you know, they're they're leaving room for price appreciation for the next buyer. So Yeah. The buyer that bought this at 47, they're looking to get out of it in the 9 figures.

2:05:43 Right?

2:05:43 Yeah. I mean, may have already sold it.

2:05:44 They might have. They might have. So Tyler, you have something on the joke?

2:05:48 Yeah. Mean, this one is like a bit smaller, Nano Tyrannus. So this is only like 20 feet long. But... If you think about Gus, if you remember in July Yeah.

2:05:55 That was the... That that was 50,000,000.

2:05:57 Griffin picked that one up?

2:05:58 No. That was Mystery Body. You're thinking of Apex. Okay. That was $20.24.

2:06:02 24,000,000. Okay. So...

2:06:04 No. $20.24. It was 44,000,000.

2:06:05 44,000,000 for a 24 foot

2:06:07 dinosaur? No.

2:06:08 No. No. That was in 2024.

2:06:09 Okay. In 2024. Yeah. So Rob Petrozzo has a breakdown of why this particular dinosaur, despite being the Nanotyrannus, sold for $47,000,000. He says it's because the low estimate was very inviting.

2:06:25 It got a lot of butts and seats at the auction. A lot of people are oh, I'm gonna pick up... I'm gonna pick this guy up for 9. This is the steal of the century. They sit down, they get excited, they can't stop bidding. Next thing you know, they're looking at a $47... $47,000,000 bill from Sotheby's and they were going home with that dinosaur. Yeah. Second, this is interesting because he says it's the perfect size at 20 feet. And I love that he has opinions about the right size of of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons or nano Tyrannus skeletons because

2:06:57 Clearly is a replacement for the statue in the entryway of a dramatic, you know Yeah. Dramatic entryway of a of a of a

2:07:07 Yes. A larger... So even even in a modern mansion, going brontosaurus, 60 feet tall, that's on... That's not doable.

2:07:14 Yeah. You don't wanna have a... You you need to use the like...

2:07:18 Yeah. It's a...

2:07:18 Have to pop it out the top. Yeah.

2:07:20 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, architectural digest is not calling you if you're if you're if you're brought to source to scrape in the seal. Right?

2:07:28 You... I'm saying some people probably have to cut a hole.

2:07:31 Oh, cut cut a hole in the dome.

2:07:33 Yeah. Neck and head actually

2:07:35 Yeah.

2:07:35 Go above the house.

2:07:36 But that might that might ruin the roof lines. You might wind up on Yeah. Right. Zillow gone wild for

2:07:41 that.

2:07:41 Yeah. You might be sort of in McMansion territory if It's you if you do a nightmare. So this is the perfect size of 20 feet and this is going in a home in my opinion. Rob says this is this is a home diner.

2:07:53 I think in LA Not... I think in LA the code is like you can only have like 18 foot ceilings Wow. Now.

2:07:59 And that's because of dinosaur collection? Well... They they wanna curb it?

2:08:03 Yeah. They wanna curb it.

2:08:04 They wanna curb They wanna

2:08:05 Because take off.

2:08:05 Because less buyers that'll drive up the price. So whoever wrote that law probably has extreme exposure to the dinosaur market. Right? So they wanted to drive at the price. How can they drive at the price?

2:08:15 Pass a law that makes it hard to keep 20 foot dinosaurs in your home. There's less buyers, less supply, more demand.

2:08:24 Gus was only twelve and a half feet tall, so you could fit that in 18 foot house.

2:08:27 Okay. So that's an LA dino right there. Yeah. You got an LA dino. We got some breaking news.

2:08:34 Breaking news. What's Breaking news. The president has hit Truth Social and shared, when will the Wall Street Journal start calling artificial intelligence a very bad and inaccurate name SI, super intelligence, the name which virtually everyone else is using or soon will be. In short order, we will be officially banning the term AI slash artificial intelligence in all relevant documents and everything else due to its inaccuracy. Thank you.

2:09:02 I might have a collector's edition Wall Street Journal here because this might be the very last Wall Street Journal that ever features the acronym AI. It says Meta unveils $95,000,000,000 AI plan. And also the case for AI Armageddon. And we might not see this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal anytime soon. I'm still I'm still a fan of MI.

2:09:29 I like machine intelligence. It's not super. It's not artificial. It's just a different thing. Different nature of intelligence. Really good at math. Not so good on the street smarts sometimes. But we'll see. We'll see where it goes. You think you think he's successful? He does love renaming things. That seems to be the big big piece of the legacy. So we'll see. We'll see if The Wall Street Journal chooses to switch the editorial guidelines to SI.

2:09:54 I don't Yeah. I don't fully understand the point. I don't I don't think people are gonna start loving it because it has a new name. Yeah. I don't think that's a solution.

2:10:05 Might confuse it. You know, if you take SI and you translate it from Spanish to English, people will think that you're not writing SI. You're writing...

2:10:18 Yes.

2:10:21 Trying to do button and it's not working. Brutal. Yeah. Yeah. It's not working.

2:10:28 Oh, brutal. Well, that's

2:10:29 a good place to end it.

2:10:30 Oh, well. It's supposed to be yay for c s I. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning into TBPN. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I deserve this one today.

2:10:42 Also, the production team bears some of the responsibility here but

2:10:45 we'll We love you guys.

2:10:47 Have a good one. Goodbye.