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Episode 10-2-2026
Comics or whatever it is. Yeah. And you know, kind of, I think in high school, always kind of jumping around from group to group and learning about what they were super excited about was kind of the way I was in high school. So definitely not perfect. It's actually a perfect venture capital is exactly that. That's exactly that. Yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. You're kind of going into different, like subcultures, if you will, and really learning everything that you can about them. What was the first investment you made? Or like, when were you like, okay, I'm gonna start investing. The first investment I made really was in myself when I, when I founded a company. It sounds kind of cheesy, but like, it's true, it's true. Like your, your opportunity cost. You could. Exactly. So I left my. I'm sorry. Sorry for hitting a funny sound effect, but it's true. Like, it's like ask your, you know, if somebody's gonna start a company, ask yourself, are you gonna invest some meaningful percentage of your entire life into this idea? Is it that good? Yeah. And sometimes it can be a smaller idea and it still makes sense to do, but for sure. But it's worth thinking about it that way. Yeah. And also I think that there's a lot of different things that you can do just under your own passion. But then there's a different stage when you actually have to go out to people and ask for money, including your friends and family, which is what you know, which was kind of. I consider my first investment was some of my own capital, some of my parents capital, and going into a very unrelated field in retail. So in 2014. Sorry, 2014, 2004, I moved over to the UK and started up a retail chain that was kind of similar to sweetgreen. And I ran that for six years over in London. We had about six locations. But then in terms of my first real investment where I wasn't operating, it was in Oculus. Really? Yeah, that was the first track. So I figured from, you know, I figured that this is, this is easy. This is what I'm gonna do for a while. Did you see the Kickstarter online or. No. So in 2010, when I moved back to the States, I moved back to work for a friend who I went to college with, whose name was Brendan Ereb. And he had a company which was a software company which was selling software into game developers. And I was always, you know, he is an amazing salesperson and communicator and I was always really interested in what he was building. So when the opportunity came around to come and join him at a company that he had dropped out in 2000, 1999, actually, when he dropped out of school to go and do that full time, I was kind of on my own path, but was always very interested in what he was building. And so I came back to join him, worked with him, worked with Mike Antonov, worked with Nate Mitchell, and then a few years later, that company was acquired by Autodesk. And then a few years later, we had heard about a kid who was working on a VR headset, and that kid was Palmer, and that was Palmer Luckey. Wow, that's wild. Yeah. What a good start to a venture career working with Palmer Luckey, who's going to go on and do so many different companies. While we're on the topic of VR, how successful do you think the Meta VR glasses will be? And one way to sort of quantify it is when VR is having a moment. I feel like when Christmas comes, the app is at the top of the App Store. So, like the Quest or the Oculus app would be at the top of the top of the App Store. Like, it doesn't come out until next spring. I think they're going to launch it maybe April or May, but it feels to me like they got a lot of the pieces right. How are you feeling about 2027 as a. As a year for VR growth? As someone who's been involved in the industry for a long time, it's taken a long while, a lot longer than I think we had all hoped. It's interesting to think back of when I first made that investment that kind of was. That kick started my career in ventures. So that was at a time after they were growing like wildfire, where everybody in the Valley was kind of convinced that people were gonna be wearing headsets walking down the street. Right. And so it's kind of part of my origin story where I was able to kind of go out and speak on the topic with knowledge and with the relationship to the. To the team. And there was a whole bunch of people who wanted me to. Who kind of were thinking that I was going to start a VR fund. And there were a bunch of. There were a bunch of firms actually, that started that were just VR focused. I always was kind of felt as though it was going to take a lot longer. Sure. And so it has. I think that, you know, you have this kind of situation where the hype has not. The hype has set expectations that have been very difficult to follow. And so therefore, you have this Kind of disappointment that everybody feels about kind of how everything's transpired. I don't see there being a massive inflection point. There have been several points in the past where something has come out. Be it, you know, the quest one, be it Gear VR. Like there have been a bunch of different points along the way where people have been like, this is it. Yep. Like Apple, this is it. This is when it's all going to change. And it just hasn't happened like that. And I think even with, yeah, even with Zuck's Meta Connect presentation, it didn't come across like he was presenting. It came across as like this incredible technical milestone and like a big step up. Right. But if you compare it to like foundation models, like, it was a big leap, but it's not like it actually is a drop in co worker for you. So. And, and even some of his language in the presentation was like, it's a glimpse of the future. Oh, yeah. And it's like, well, that, like you don't get a crazy inflection point through glimpses of the future. Yeah, it's like another, it's another. It's another milestone to stand up on stage and say, with this product, you are staring into the future with your eyes wide. Like, yeah, I'm surprised they don't have. They. They should make that orange on the future. That's what your goal is. Talk about the fund strategy. A fund this size, I feel like you can probably confidently go to LPs based on the track record and say, there's a good shot. I can 4.5x of fund like this. Has maintaining that been super important to you? Because given the track record, I imagine you could scale up and then how are you? How are you? Like, what is, what's. What's the strategy at the early stage in terms of things like ownership, Are you flexible, inflexible? Just because current market conditions are absolutely wild and they don't necessarily favor smaller funds in some ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has been very much deliberate keeping the funds small. I started angel investing, so after the Oculus investment. After that came to fruition, I essentially quit my day job and really wanted to answer three questions. One, what does it mean to be a responsible fiduciary of capital? What does this whole VC thing mean? Two, am I any good at this or was Oculus just a fluke? And three, do I want to do this? Do I want to devote the rest of my life to it? And the answer over those couple of years of deploying my own capital and doing a few SPVs was yes, yes, and yes. And over that time, I kind of developed a network and a reputation as somebody who can be flexible with checks and can be really helpful and doesn't have sharp elbows and kind of can like fit into rounds. And that worked out for me. That worked out very well with fund one, that's working out very well with fund two. And now hopefully it'll work out with fund three. I am very much of the opinion that every size of fund requires a very different skill set and a very different strategy. And what I proved out and what I'm good at is deploying smaller amounts of capital. And that's what I want to keep on doing. And I think that, you know, I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of chase Aum and chase those management fees. It helps if you've done decently well in the past and you have like a nest egg and you don't need to stack fees on fees on fees and bigger funds and bigger funds. And it just feels like I'm much more aligned with my LP base. Does this fund size lead you to a different LP mix or is it the same thing where like you're still going to a sovereign wealth fund but just asking for a smaller slice or endowments? Like, how do you think about LP relationships and structuring? Yeah, I kind of have graduated. I was just looking at my LP list over the over time and it was like fund one was like 60 LPs, fund two is like 50. And now I'm at like 22. Sure. Yeah. And that's been a purposeful move. Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, frankly, it's pretty to one yourself. Yeah, I mean, that would be the dream, right? Like the Hunter Satya model is, is I think, where every VC ultimately wants to be. Although, to be honest with you, like, I'm, I've got great relationships with my LPs and I love working with them and they also have appetite for later stage rounds. So. But anyway, to answer your question, I would say I started out high net worth individuals, some family offices. Now it's a lot more family offices and fund of funds. Yeah, but, but, yeah, but you don't need to do the roadshow with like huge endowments and sovereign wealth funds. No trips to the Middle East. I'm too small for that. And also, you know, I would say, you know, I started out very much as a deep tech fund where it's just like I saw what happened at Oculus and I saw how amazing it was to bring a completely new technology to market. And I was just sold. I was like, this is what I want to do. I don't want to be investing in ad optimization. I don't want to be. I want to be investing in people who are really fucking moving the needle. And then I had the opportunity, because of a relationship with Palmer and Trey, to invest in Andura. And I always pronounce it slightly differently Anduril. And that kind of ignited a sense of patriotism in me that I didn't really knew I had. And since then we've been doing a lot more in aerospace and defense, a lot more in kind of American dynamism. And so Therefore, from a LP perspective, I. Having LPs who are based here in the US is of great importance to me. Yes, I've got. We actually brought on our first LP from Luxembourg, this fund, Shout out to Mangrove. Very excited to have them on board, but for the most part, like the trips to the Middle east, the trips to these places, like, I don't need to do them and I don't necessarily want that capital involved. Anyway, how excited are you for. For to be post SpaceX IPO based in LA, Southern California in general? Because it feels like we're probably going to get hundreds of companies in the fullness of time that spin out and these super talented teams where they've worked together at SpaceX, experienced some hairy problem and then they want to go solve it. Yeah, yeah. I originally moved to L A more for my wife than for me. You know, I was in the Bay Area before this and I was kind of reluctant to move down here. And we did this two weeks before COVID and it's worked out really well, especially with the areas that we invest in. I think that the talent just keeps on increasing. The talent pool just keeps on increasing. Yeah, because Long La completely flopped. Except that El Segundo and SpaceX happen. Absolutely. Right, Absolutely. Like we won, but yeah, not the way that we. Not the way that we were hoping. It was like thinking like consumer B2B SaaS. It was like, there will be like a Salesforce of LA and like many more of those. There's been a few, but yeah, it never developed into like the New York City style market. Yep, yep. Yeah. And you know, I think one of the reasons why I always love being in SF was the fact that everybody comes there to raise capital, regardless of where you're building. So my job in many ways is kind of a biz dev job and like just being boots on the ground. There and now it feels like there's also a lot of capital in L A. There are a lot of the VCs from SF who are coming to L A on a regular basis. So there's a lot more capital available, I would say, down here. How are you thinking about the market structure, concentration of winners in various emerging new technologies? Like with, with Oculus. If you went and did like five other VR headset companies, you probably would. Had a pretty bad run with Anduril. If you did like five other defense tech companies, like, at least right now, like, they're all pretty marked up. So it seems like there's more of an oligopoly there. Some of that's like literally a direct order from the government being like, we won't let a monopoly exist in this category. Whereas, you know, Mark Zuckerberg runs a monopoly and he's like, we're happy to be the only player in the space if we can be. But with some of the newer frontier technologies, how do you think about Winner Take All Dynamics? How. And then also just like, what other frontier technologies are exciting to you? Humanoid robots, Industrial stuff. More farther out on the defense side, there's so much space, there's so many different areas. How are you spending your time? Yeah, it's interesting. I think I was of the mindset that Anduro will be the enduro of X and they will just kind of dominate. And I think over time. Horrible mistake. I'm just saying I've done the exact same thing where it's like, yeah, obviously they're just going to do it. They're going to do this. They have all the relationships, they have the capital, they have the talent. But also you get further out and people will be like, we're the Anderle of ovens. We make a stove. Yeah, yeah. And it's like some point it gets too niche. It's like, I don't think Andrew is going to do the stove. The stove? Yeah. You're winning the. You need to win the whole market. Then you need to underwrite the team on like doing a bunch of different product extensions. Yeah. And they're still going to be like competing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the, you know, the government has made pretty clear their desire to diversify, and I think rightfully so. And I'm very glad that they are doing so. I think that generally when everybody's looking in one place, I'm trying to look someplace else. I think that partially that's just the job of a vc, but also just given my fund dynamics and the smaller size of the fund. When everybody is piling into one area, prices get driven up, rounds get kind of insane. And while, you know, I loosely kind of have ownership targets, I still will kind of. I'm basically looking at can I kind of 100x my money? And I feel like that is more difficult in defense these days. And so do I think that there are room for other big players in defense? Absolutely. Is that where I am necessarily putting my money at the moment? Not particularly. Like I think we. I am actually a lot more interested in some really fricking boring areas in chemical production, in steel production. You know, I know you. We've had Zane on the show beforehand. Investors in Knox Metals, they're ripping. Right. They're doing phenomenally well. You know, rare earths, magnets, all the boring stuff that's kind of up supply chain that we will need in order to achieve our mission as a nation is all stuff that I think is. Is super interesting. We invested in Atlas. I think you guys had them on the show as well recently. So have you been surprised that the big defense primes haven't been more acquisitive, even on a relative market cap weighted basis? Because in AI, you're seeing these trillion dollar companies take down $10 billion acquisitions and it's like, wow, that's $10 billion. That's a huge return for the VCs. But it's like, okay, they're throwing around 1% of their market cap. You could look at Oculus as a similar thing where Zuck is sort of throwing around 1% of that market cap. But Lockheed doesn't seem like they're doing that. Founder led companies tend to be like more acquisitive. Earlier companies tend to be way more acquisitive. Andrew has been very. I mean, that was not true for Elon for a long time until Kirsten. But. But even looking at like in the early 2010s, like the Aqua hires where like people made money. Yeah. Were like much more common. It was. Sure, sure. Twitter's buying. I think. Didn't Twitter buy like 50 companies? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like classic like founder led company. Yeah. And I guess that. Does that explain it or do you think there's something else going on with the market structure in defense tech why the primes haven't been more acquisitive? I completely agree with what you're saying. Like, I am shocked as well. 79. Yeah. Companies. I am shocked as well. Autodesk is another one who, who, who has acquired a Ton of companies. There are some companies that you'd think they'd want to give Adam Porter Price a harder time instead of being letting him be the only bidder on these things. But instead they're like, okay, if Adam's not buying, we'. Yeah, I, you know, I wish I had a better answer. I have to think at some point that there's going to be enough pressure from the board of some of these larger crimes that it's just kind of, I mean there's lots of different reasons why this could be happening. They could be waiting for a dip. There's inevitably going to be a pullback. There are inevitably going to be issues, you know, hopefully during peacetime at some point in the near future where these companies just can't raise and kind of Lockheed can just go and sweep them up. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but I think they need to be flipped by and are first to actually wake up. Like a valuation standpoint, like that actually is going to be very like, that's actually going to just be the moment where the boards are going to look around and be like, why is this company that has much lower revenue scale than us? And it's like because the market believes that this company will generate way more value in the future than us, even though their scale is still. Lockheed could approach it from a different perspective. The Primes could do some sort of like pe roll up joint venture, maybe like bending knives, roll up all the dead weight venture failures in defense tech and try and put them together or something. Raise prices, you never know. Bending swords. Bending swords would be good too. That one works. I like that. I agree though. I mean I do think does it need to materialize in the form of an anduril IPO or something like that? That would certainly be one way to do it. I can't imagine that the board isn't looking at the Saronics, the endurls, et cetera and being like this is okay. So they're also just big fricking companies, right. That have lots of bureaucracy and kind of move slow. I mean the dysfunction that I've heard through hard tech founders in my portfolio around the way these companies operate is like actually insane. Like they'll, they'll be sitting there like, and like the company is basically like looking at a pile of money like an existing contract and then years will pass and no one just goes and picks up, you know, they're just like looking at it. So yeah. Are you starting to look at Bio? It feels like there's A moment where tech is crossing over. Like it was a crazy idea to do anything industrial or defense or building physical stuff. Like tech used to mean software. Then Oculus was like, okay, we can build a consumer hardware product then. And approved. Like, no, you can build an industrial scale hardware product. And it feels like even though obviously there's a very mature biotech investment industry, it feels like those two worlds are like, starting to blur. Yeah. It is also a very nuanced area in an area where there are investors who are better suited to really attack it than me. And so I. We kind of more stay in our lane. It is definitely an area that I have been thinking about more and that I've tried, that I've been trying to get smarter in. Yeah. There's also the interesting bridge where some companies are doing like the biodefense. It's more like a defense contractor, like an. And biomanufacturing as well. Like Solugen. Yeah. Yes. That are. That are definitely interesting. That would be much more something that would be up our alley anorac than something that is kind of purely a biotech play. I mean, our latest. We're. We're just about to close in our investment in a. In a kinetics company. So, you know, I think. I think that things that, you know, I kind of am at this. I feel very good about making investments that have the potential for a big impact on the future. And defending freedom and democracy is something that I think is of critical importance. And you know, so I do, you know, I said beforehand we're doing less and less in defense. We are to a degree. But we're also looking at, you know, kind of the second order. Like a Knox Metals. Yes, companies like Knox Metals. Companies like this explosives company that I think are going to be necessary in order for us to kind of again, achieve our goals as a nation. Very cool. Jordan, last question from my side. As a small firm, how impactful has AI been on your ability to get up to speed on some of these? Because I'm sure you're getting pitches all the time where you're like, I literally have never thought about this part of the economy. And then you get into it and you realize, oh, let's say you get a deck and it's somewhat compelling, but, you know, nothing is. It is it had a meaningful impact. Obviously you still need to talk to experts and diligence it. But do you feel like you can like, start to build conviction on an idea faster because of just being able to like, ask a million questions and sort of sort information through these tools. Yeah, it's definitely changed the paradigm. You guys had low on you yesterday, right? And he was talking about this as well. And I completely agree it is, it's like having kind of a desk of analysts at your disposal. So we are leveraging it. We need to be leveraging it more. You know, to be honest. I mean, you know, I have myself and I have a partner who's based up in sf so we're basically a two man team with a, with a, with an assistant who helps us out. I think that we, you know, this to me, this kind of fund three kind of feels like the transition from us going from or me going as kind of me going from a fund manager to a firm manager and so really kind of building up the infrastructure to be able to scale, really being able to build something that lives beyond me is something that we're really, really focused on now. And certainly AI will be a massive, will be a massive part of that. Vision goggles. It just sounds like you're getting powered up. Yeah, I like it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Dude, it's awesome. I can't wait to talk to all the founders you back and I love that you're sticking to your strategy and can't wait to come on in 10 years and just walk us through all the fun performance one by one putting some crazy numbers. I really appreciate it.
It's taken a long while, a lot longer than I think we had all hoped. It's interesting to think back of when I first made that investment that kind of was. That kick started my career in ventures. So that was at a time after they were growing like wildfire where everybody in the Valley was kind of convinced that people were gonna be wearing headsets walking down the street. Oh, yeah, right. And. And so it's kind of part of my origin story where I was able to kind of go out and speak on the topic with knowledge and with the relationship to the. To the team. And there was a whole bunch of people who wanted me to. Who kind of were thinking that I was going to start a VR fund. And there were a bunch of. There were a bunch of firms actually that started that were just VR focused. I always was kind of felt as though it was going to take a lot longer. Sure. And so it has. I think that, you know, you have this kind of situation where the hype has not. The hype has set expectations that have been very difficult to follow. And so therefore you have this kind of disappointment that everybody feels about kind of how everything's transpired. Yeah. I don't see there being a massive inflection point. There have been several points in the past where something has come out, be it the quest, one, be it gear, VR. There have been a bunch of different points along the way where people have been like, this is it, like Apple, this is it. This is when it's all going to change. And it just hasn't happened like that. And I think even with. Yeah, even with.
The big idea was, well, you have, there's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. Some of you are familiar with maybe the IRS every April 15th and some long tail websites that are more information based. And there was a realization a couple months back, early this year, there's no way, I mean, you spend your whole lifetime trying to go website by website to upgrade and prove to modern standards. And it became sort of apparent and obvious at a certain point. Well, what if we just used modern tools that are emerging in real time vis a vis AI and gave people a place where instead of 29,000, what if there was just one. What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it. Meaning that I could go search which Medicare plan is right for me or right for my grandmother or grandfather, and then right in the same site I'd be able to enroll. And there's something very interesting here. So we built America.gov to do exactly that. Yeah. And the site is a place to get information and also it's coming soon. Action it. So the interesting thing is that because, because we're in the government, our LLM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the Internet. Sure. So information that means it's accurate and it's up to date. It also means that coming from in the government, we can integrate into agencies, meaning that with the enrollment for Medicare, we can actually connect into the Medicare database because we're inside the government and help somebody actually effectuate that change, make that decision right in one place and not have to go back into the maze of the Medicare website. Yeah. Talk more. America.gov launched right as there's so much excitement on the west coast around personal agents and really all over the world as people have gone from just like getting information or everyday people are going from getting information from LLMs to actually getting information, then being able to take action. I imagine you've been thinking about that since the beginning of the project. You didn't need new agents to get released. But how good can this get? Because I can imagine a one homepage for interacting with your government where again you can learn about the services that the government provides and laws and everything like that, and then be able to actually immediately take action and let's say spawn an agent that goes and deals with another agent, another agency, and your agent is dealing with their agent and then it brings you in the loop when you need, when it needs your input and things like that. I can imagine, like the perfect version of that product. But any you're dealing with the actual realities of what it's going to actually take to roll that out. And given how hard it's been to get agents right in the enterprise and personal agents that are still very error prone, I can only imagine that it's going to be, you know, just as hard or harder for your team to do. Yeah, look, I'm sure that day will come, and it's probably closer than we all think. For now, though, we don't even have to go to that that far because we're positioned inside. A lot of These agencies have APIs that we can connect to that outside third parties are never going to have access to. So we have this advantage right now where we can just connect directly to those. And if they don't exist, we now have an executive order to help create APIs that we need in order to do things that improve the experience for everyday Americans. You just moved. You have to change your address, post office. You'll be able to do that on America.gov no stress. You want to learn about and actually enroll in an armed service. You can do that on America.gov in a couple clicks. You lost your Social Security card and needed to replace it. You want to know a fun fact? We looked at the flow of the replacement of our Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper, and that's, by the way, with no errors. That's if you get it right the first time. Yeah. And so what you'll see in america.gov in the months to come when you're logged in, it literally takes one click and it ships your Social Security card. So there's more than a 10x improvement that's unfolding right now across the nation.
That should be the COVID sheet of the S1. Pelican on a bike. We did it. Larry Ellison is selling his oceanfront estate in Florida. He wants $165 million for it. Tech billionaire is relisting his roughly 8.4 acre North Palm beach property because he's adding to a different estate in Florida. It's about 14% more than his original asking price. He put it on the market in 2022, but he's listing it again at a higher price. He bought the 8.4 acre property which year last. No in for 80 million in 2021. He relisted it for 1:45 a year later. The move comes as Ellison has been expanding his estate in Manal plan. I think that's how you pronounce that, an affluent town just south of Palm Beach. In June, the Oracle co founder paid about 35 million for a parcel of land next to his roughly 15 acre compound. Have you seen Ken Griffin's compound? Have you seen how many properties he's bought? It's like the entire block. He's probably bought more since I. He's been last saw it. Like, the visualization is insane. He's. He's building the biggest compound, like, ever. And it begs the question, like, yeah, I think you do have to go golf course at that point because there's only so many features. If you're getting up into like 30 acres in a residential district, like, what are you going to do at a certain point? Like, you got a pool, you got a full tennis court. There's some states that will have like airstrip. Two tennis courts and a pickleball court. Yeah, airstrip. Well, he's actually getting some pushback on a potential helicopter pad. Yeah, because that's airstrip. That's why, that's why I said that. Oh, yeah, yeah, pushback. You go to the. Oh, oh, yeah. You go to the residence. They're like, please, we don't want helicopters. And you're like, fine. Airstrip. I would love, I would love to understand his analysis of like, the risk reward of helicopter flights for him. Yeah, seems dangerous, but I think with the right pilot, if you get somebody who's really, really elite and you have a whole team that's servicing it, making sure that it's really dialed, getting brand new one every year, like, money's no expense. There's probably a way to get to five nines of security, but still some risk. But there's risk in everything. And you know, like, you know, you're not immune to risk. Seminole landing is located next to the Seminole golf club. In 2020, Robert F. Smith, a billionaire private equity executive, bought a pair of houses there from energy drinks entrepreneur Russ Weiner for 48.19 million. Which energy drink did Russ Wiener support? Start Rockstar Energy. That's right. His net worth is 5.4 billion. There you go. Deals of $100 million plus homes have become almost routine in neighboring Palm Beach. However, Kenny and Kaneb said they have seen 50 million plus market beginning to establish itself in North Palm beach too. There's another company that we should dig into. Squishmallows. Have you heard of this company before? Squishmallows? It's a ultra soft collectible plush toy created by Kelly toy in 2017. Known for their marshmallow like texture and diverse character personalities. Have you ever heard of this brand before? No. Because Jonathan Kelly, whose family his company created this ultra soft plush toy is selling it at my mansion in bel Air for $38 million. He bought the property as an investment. He never got an infinity pool. Would you look at that F Dear. No, I mean, you know, Brian Johnson would. Would be a quick pass on this house due to the proximity to that golf course. Oh, the golf course. Golf course proximity. Potentially, yeah. Just the amount of various products that it takes to maintain a golf course. And yeah, just being that close to it can have some pretty bad health effects. Interesting, interesting. Well, he never lived there, so he's doing fine. The company blew up on TikTok during the pandemic. Now he's betting some of that money on Los Angeles real estate. Kelly's listing his Bel air mansion for 38 million. Significantly more than the 26 million he paid in 2023. He said he bought the 2022 property at a relatively low price. I imagine interest rates were really low too. Originally had it listed for 47.5. Trying to double his money almost, but has cut it back. And this was right before the LA mansion tax passed on homes priced above $5 million. So he's hoping to reap the reward by selling now that the market has stabilized. The property was designed by architect Zoltan Pali and has some interesting features. Set above the fourth green of the golf course at Bel Air Country Club, the property spans three levels. I know you don't like two level homes. Is three going to go in an even lower tier for you? Where are you putting three level houses? I mean, I don't want to be too harsh of a critic given that this house is very well set up to take advantage of the Views of the course and the city and these kind of things. So I won't criticize it in this context, but I will criticize the pool. Okay. Okay. So the pool is F tier. Yeah. Being close to a complete golf course, Being this close to a golf course. Is that D tier or F tier? F tier. F tier. Okay. Actually, I put the pool at D tier pools. D tier Golf course. Golf courses. F tier. Because that's dangerous. What about the overall aesthetic, the architectural style? Just the vibe. It's. It's quite a bit better than the one we were looking at yesterday. That is pure raw McMansion generic, you know, looks like it was built in without tender love and care. This is quite a bit more brutalist material. Selection is. Looks a lot better, but it's not making it to S tier. I'm gonna put it. Yeah, I'm gonna put it at. Again. It's like, do you want to feel like you're living on, like in a. In a, you know, a modern college campus library? You know, that's kind of the style, the sort of architecture style in some ways. Okay. Some people are going to be pretty fired up. So your final answer. The overall aesthetic, the architectural design. I think it. Again, it feels a little generic, but I'll put it in B tier. B tier. Okay. Lightning round. You've already raided the pool. The house comes with a wine room. Where are you going on the wine room? Do we need a picture of the wine room to illustrate? I don't think we have everyone. You gotta change the name from wine room to home data center. Oh, I thought you were gonna go natural Lightroom. That's what I'm trying to get. Yeah, there's a whole room for all the different vintages of Natty Light. That's the goal. Where are you putting wine room? Home Data center. A tier. A tier. Okay. Theater. We know you like a theater because it'll draw me over for movie nights. That's a tier correct. I got one last feature. It has a podcast studio. F tier. F tier what? Never podcast at home. Only podcast in your own voice version of the Ultra Dome. You need to get out, stretch, spread your wings. You can't podcast home. I hate. I mean, there's a reason we could be. Could be home right now, be doing the show from home right now. We could. There's nothing like being in here. I'm wondering when the podcast studio went in, because he bought this house. He never lived in it. I don't think he has a podcast. Did he think I need to add a podcast studio because that's what will add value to the property. Was he working away or did they rent it? Well, you know that modern apartment buildings are. Are adding this. It's a new amenity, John. They're like, well, we have a sauna, we have a pool and we have podcast studios that you can rent by the hour. Yeah, I know. And how do you do that? I already said F tier. Yes, yes. Anyway, the price of Kelly's property could be considered an entry point for the neighborhood. Noah said the LA mansion tax did slow down the high end market, but. But like anything, people have gotten accustomed to it. So good luck to whoever's picking up this Bel Air mansion. There's one more here. The Bali inspired Florida home fetched $83 million. Who is owned by billionaire Chris Rokos. I'm not sure who this is. Rokos Capital Management. Brutal solar placement. Oh, is that solar? I think so. What's going on here? What? Oh, on the roof? Yeah. Interesting. Doesn't quite blend in with that type of roof, right? Yeah, it actually works better if you have a more boxy, modern, brutalist style. You throw a bunch of flat roof. Yeah, flat roof would definitely hide it. But even, you know, the Tesla solar roof, something like that, there has to be a way to integrate that more. Where are you ranking the solar panels? Well, I think solar is fantastic, but aesthetically absolutely brutal. So conclusion, I'm going to go D tier for the placement. Well, F tier placement. S tier feature. S tier feature. You like the solar. And why is that? Is that the. You like the idea that if there's a power outage, you still have some power or is it just like good for the environment, Nice to have cheaper electricity? A bit of both. You like some solar? Cool. I like it, yeah. And for your home data center. But. But I can imagine it would be. Yeah. The funny thing is if you're in Florida and there's a hurricane and your power goes out, you're probably not actually able to power your home with it because you can imagine storm. Yeah. But you could use it to charge up batteries and have some supply there. I would blanket the grass with solar. You would do solar? Grass. Okay. Solar. No, just a deck of solar. What about a solar pier? He's on the beach. You could just build a pier that goes out into the ocean. There we go. Free land, basically just to build up. There we go. We got a. Why is. Why is no one talking about Andrew McCallop going to Paradigm? Oh yeah, that's a big one. Early early friend of the show, Andrew McCallop is joining.
Billionaire Peter Thiel is behind the $130 million purchase of CASA Encantada. The winning bidder of the Los Angeles estate was an LLC. And this is the circa 1930s Bel Air estate, once prized as one of Los Angeles grandest homes. It has a Wikipedia page, correct, Tyler? It does, yeah. What stuck out on the Wikipedia page? What does it take for a. For a house to earn a Wikipedia page these days? I mean, I think it's just like, very historical. Yeah, built in 1938 originally. Does it have a golf course on it? Oh, no, that's the Bel Air Country Club. It's just next to it. But it does have putting green, so. Okay, there's some features here. Let's see. We're going to do another tier list. 8.5 acres estate. 8.5 acres. Where you put that? S tier. S tier. Seven bedrooms. S tier. Not too many bedrooms. Fish. And guests stink after three days. So why do you need seven bedrooms? Well, six kids. No, I just think sometimes it's nice to have a number of guests at the same time. I think this is. Oh, I wonder if this is seven bedrooms. In the entire property. It's twice set the record for the most expensive private home sale ever. First 12.4 million in 1980 and again in. In 2000 for 94 million. Not a lot of appreciat from 2000 to today. It's been 26 years, but it's only gone up by 30%. Let's see what else is going on here. Longtime home of the late financier and telecom mogul Gary Winick and his wife. The property was subject of a contentious foreclosure battle after Gary's death. What do you think about living in a home where the previous owner was a financier and telecom mogul? Like, good energy to live in. Yeah, mogul. Mogul's great. I mean, I obviously prefer a tycoon. Oh, sure. But I think there's a tycoon in there now, so the next owner will get to enjoy the tycoon. Well, that's great provenance. Mogul, tycoon. It's on a trajectory of ownership. Magnate. Magnate. Could be coming. Could be next. Could be next. Gary, who founded Global Crossing, we talked about this guy. Yeah. Well, with a promise to lay undersea fiber optic cable around the world, was once said to be LA's richest man. After his death, it became clear that he was severely strapped for cash and deeply in debt. What tier is deeply in debt? Underrated. Overrated. It depends on how you come out the other side. We've never been afraid of leverage here. Well, he didn't live to feel the unfortunate. Well, I mean, Global Crossing like went down bankruptcy in the dot com era, so he went a little too hard. But he got out at least a little bit. It seems like before all of that, Gary Winick donated millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Zoo. What do you think about donating to the LA Zoo? Do you like zoos? What tier is zoo? I gotta. I mean, I like how you're really wrestling with it. Well, it's tough. Put it in a tier, Put it in a tier. It's tough because speaking for myself. Yeah. I would never, I would never choose to go to the zoo. Okay, okay, okay. But speaking on behalf of my family, I'm probably in zoos a few times a year. Okay. So I think it's an S tier experience for the children. Okay. But yeah, sounds like there's some caveats there. What about a menagerie? S tier. S tier, right. Yeah. It's basically a private zoo. Yeah. And menagerie is deeply underrated. I recently discovered that there was an illegal menagerie in my town featuring zebras, hundreds of rabbits. Because they just multiply and multiply and multiply. People need to consider if you're going to, if you're going to bend the rules, bend them around. Gold says Jordy. Rent a giraffe and take it for a spin on the track. I like that. I like that. Putting, Putting zoos at racetracks where you could actually ride the animals around. That's S tier. Oh, Conrad Hilton lived in this house. Interesting. Okay. Later owners design, architecture and ground. It does have a putting green. I know you're not a big golfer, but do you like putting green as an amenity on an eight and a half acre estate? What tier would putting green go? Why not a par three though? Whole course or just one hole? I think you can maybe do three holes. Oh, okay. Three hole, par three. Yeah. I mean that could be. That could be, you know, a 40 minute experience for you and your guest that actually exists near me. There's somebody with, with a private par 3. And so if you look at the map, you're like, oh, there's, I never knew there was a golf course there. It's like, yeah, there's a golf course. It's. You're not, it's not a commercial operation, but S tier. Okay. Okay. Well, there's some other news here. Oil. Oil executives flocking to Venezuela set off a hunt for golf clubs. This is in.
Oh, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck put out some. There's a video of him interviewed. Listen to this one minute, 30 second video of Ben Affleck talking about AI. In order to be a video model that's successful, you just need a huge volume of video. Initially, it learns things like what is red, and then it learns more and more specific information to get to the cinematic information. It's the sort of last stage. And in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I know's work, and I was uncomfortable with that. And I thought, that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer, which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be. And so how did you create the last layer without doing all of the essentially copying of what came before it? Because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on. So you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay, just freeze the weights, bro. 8631. Now here's step 8632. So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated a bunch of social media footage or random video online and teach them to meet cinematic standards. Oh, so it's fine to train on ours, our content, Bend the workflow, not on your. Your buddies. Make it make sense. I think he's kind of saying, like, train on everything, right? No, no, he's describing what's actually going on, what you're doing to everybody to learn from. They retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating. This is funny. Ben Affleck. All right, gather round. So you want to freeze the base weights first. Learning rate 2e minus 4. He's in the thick of it. Yeah. I remember a year ago, some AI lab founder was telling me, like, yeah, he was like, I ran into Ben Affleck at some event and he used compute as a noun. And I was like, that's when I knew he was, like, dialed in. Yeah. When he went on Joe Rogan, everyone was like, oh, wow, he's a. Yeah. No, he's been deep in this. Ben Affleck reveals that seeing OpenAI models made him call Matt Damon and warn we're finished. Before realizing its researchers knew little about how movies are made. So anyway, what. What else is in the timeline? I want to find the mansion section because there were some interesting houses. Jake Paul says Nvidia is at an all time high figure building a robot every hour. In five years, a robot will fight for a world title and I'll be its promoter.
But I don't know. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see if it actually, if it actually shifts people over. John Palmer says flying on Delta is a high status move because it signals that you're already post economic and don't have to work on the plane. I can see many OpenAI and Anthropic employees switching to Delta after the IPOs. John was going off, he fired off a bunch of Delta content. This one was even better. Not a phone in sight, Just people living in the moment. That's Delta. That's Delta. Wow. There's a lot of pressure. Didn't the Delta CEO, he put out some statements saying, oh, we don't need Starlink, it's fine, you do, you will need it. But who knows? I think it's similar to self driving where it's like a lot of people just. That won't be at the top of their mind. A lot of people go to the dealership and they're just like, I want this color car or I want a car in this price range or whatever. And they're like, cool. And a lot of people will be like, yeah, I want the flight that's the cheapest or I want the flight that goes this time. And they'll just be like, I'll buy whatever flight is there. United is a blue collar airline for knowledge workers who need to work on their laptops even when they're on the plane. When you retire, you can finally upgrade to the luxury airline Delta, where you can just relax without wi fi or screens around. That's very funny. Anyway, what else is going on? There's a mansion section we got to get to. Where's the mansion section today? Oh, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck put out some. There's a video of him.
Anyway. Oh, wait. Skydance. Paramount, Warner Brothers. Discovery has a new name. It's just Skydance. Yeah. That's exciting. So David Ellison joined X for the first post ever. Right? Let's watch the video. Let's watch the video. Let's throw it on a movie about movies. Let's see what they got. Can you name any of these movies? What's this? Do you have any idea? Whoa. He knows. Look at this. I'm not gonna be able to name anything. You don't know that one. You don't know that one. Oh, Ben's showing off now. Yeah, show off, Ben off. Yeah. They don't just live on screens. Says we have big goals for Skydance. We intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and willingness to take smart risks. At the same time, we'll honor what makes Paramount and Warner Brothers special, giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world. Couldn't be more excited that. What about what we're going to build together? Technology. Very exciting. And yet connected by something deeper. So is the actual app and platform going to be called Skydance? Yeah, well, the company, I think, is going to merge into Skydance, but I'm wondering, are they going to. Are they. Is there possibility in the future that we could get in Skydance? Max? Yeah, I was thinking they should, at least for a couple months, rename HBO Skydance and then reimbursed back to HBO and then go back to Skydance BO and then back to HBO and then. And then HB Skydance and then back to hbo, because you got to keep people guessing with that brand. It's not like everyone knows what HBO is putting, putting aside the debt load on business. This bundle is extremely compelling. Totally. And, and I think, like, this is a. It's very disappointing for Netflix, I think, to see how all this has come together. Like, I think they can both. They obviously can both coexist and consumers will pay for both. But this combination of assets and IP is super compelling, from live to news. Like, CBS has some of the, like, lower tier content that you can just throw out in the background. Like the laundry television that Netflix has gotten so good at. Like, CBS has that in the catalog. Like, there's a bunch of great shows that people can just watch and it's just serialized stuff. So it's not like it's just Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight that's on there. And that's the only crown jewel, though that is a very valuable, valuable crown jewel. They got to bring Nolan back to Marvel or not Marvel. Dc, dc. Because if they can reboot the DC Universe with Nolan, bring him back for Superman, put everything together, let him run free. The Dark Knight trilogy extended. That would be fantastic. Although I think he might be. Might be done with. With his video game era or his comic book era. Anyway, the next post I was gonna pull up was delete it. Yeah, yeah. Drama. There's some. There's plenty of drama in the timeline. Oh. Elon's taking shots at Delta. He says the best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight. It will have no chance of accessing the Internet or boom. Let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design system context. Elon's also in the news because he's going back and forth with Siobhan Zillis. Very dramatic, but we'll let you sort of dig into that one. We were on a United flight, and they did have Starlink. I think it was the first one and probably pretty good, but I don't know. We'll see if it actually.
As a appliance. Vehicle. As an appliance. Very, very good. Okay. Well, yeah. Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well. What about instinct? Annika Benning says my instinct just randomly ordered her bikinis. She says she's not ready for AGI. What happened? Is this real? She's texting her instinct agent and says, I didn't authorize this Monday swim order. Can you please cancel? And instinct says you're right. And that's on me. The AI touches. The sheepish admission of messing up is just so funny to me. Still, a checkout click went through as pay now. Wednesday evening before you'd approved anything. I'm canceling it now. It's already marked shipped, so if they can't cancel, I'll set up the return and get the store credit restored. I'll tell you what, they say cancel, and then their policy says no cancels after placing. So it needs an urgent exception request. Email the CEO. Get ready to email the CEO. Yeah, I think. Yeah. We are in the hallucination era of this. Yeah, it's all gonna get fixed. Weird things. They're gonna mess around and stuff. But anyway. Oh, wait. Skydance, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discover has a new name.
Why? I got it. But it's nice to have a truck bed. But the towing capacity, where's that C tier? It's kind of like a nice to have feature. Yeah. Maybe a nice to have. Not even really a nice to have. It's like. Okay, okay, so C. C, C tier. Okay. Strongly C. What about the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes 120 volt and 240 volt battery bed outlets, bi directional power sharing capabilities. You can run tools, you can power your whole house with it. Mobile podcast studio. I think it's a nice. I think it's a. I think it's a nice feature. B tier. B tier. There we go. Steer by wire. Steer by wire. Very controversial. Yeah, yeah. How is it actually built when it's self driving? It's amazing because you can tell the whole car is designed to not like it really is. It's not just the yoke, but it's really not meant to be driven by a person. It's meant to be driven by the computer. Yes. And when you drive it, it feels horrible. But you've, you've taken a sharp turn in a Raptor. You're now you've taken a sharp turn manually in a Cybertruck. The feeling of steering by wire, how would you rate that? I think it's. I mean, I think it's. I think it's fine. It can be done well, but I don't think it's done well in the. So C tier. C tier. C tier, Okay. C tier. But, but I would say buy wire with self driving. What about as. As S tier? It's like incredibly smooth. It's perfect. What about the four wheel steering? How has the actual turning radius. The turning radius for a vehicle of that size is like. Is S tier. S tier never. Okay. It's one of one. It turns. Having, having. That's important for a big vehicle. Yeah. Having previously owned a murdered outlifted Ford Raptor. It is, it is remarkably better. I mean that car is like one of the most fun cars you can own and it is possible to park, but it's tough parking and adaptive air suspension. It adjusts the ride height automatically, offering up to 16 and a half inches of clearance. How is it actually sitting in? It is. Are you rumbling around or does it feel smooth? How would you rate the ride experience? The suspension specifically? I think the suspension is fine. Like it's relatively smooth. You can tell they tried to spend like as little money on that feature as possible, but it's pretty smooth. So they landed at. But again, you have to remember the LA roads are. It's effectively like, you know, rock war zone. Yeah. So B tier. B tier. Okay. Okay. What about the minimalist cabin? They're calling the cabin Minimalist. Jordy, Is that a pro or a con? I think the cabin's pretty nice. I'm gonna go A tier. Like the materials are generally plasticky. Right. Are C tier. Okay. Materials of the cabin. C tier. And there's some funny features where if you don't press the, like you press the button to open the door and if you do the manual pole, which you need for safety reasons, it's like it literally pops up an alert. It's like you're going to damage the windowsill if you do that. Which feels like really, really funny because it's like, okay, you designed this thing where if you like again. And the whole thing you have to look at it is like it is a computer that happens to have wheels. Yeah. And so there's, I'm sure, things with your computer where it's like, yeah, you could turn it off if you like unscrew it and do these things. But you should just hit like the off button. Don't try to physically turn off the device. Okay. And then the last. I think we know where you're going to close out on this. But the self driving itself, the capabilities of the self driving system. S tier.s tier. There you go. Okay. Well that's. Yeah. As a utility vehicle. Fantastic. As a appliance vehicle. As an appliance. Very, very good. Okay. Well, yeah, Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well.
They should. Should. They should. But here's the thing. Okay. I had, I had the experience this week of autopilot. Yeah. It worked perfectly for like 50 minutes. Yeah. And then I had to intervene. Yeah. And going from the car driving itself to suddenly I have to drive my car in traffic is the most jarring, brutal experience because you realize how insane it is that we still all drive our cars. Like once you try it, I don't think you can go back. Yep. Especially for. And this is. I've always loved, I've always loved driving. I've never really like minded commutes. They're. They're obviously great if you can avoid them. But I. Even going on a 20 minute drive to get an errand is generally enjoyable for me. But when it comes to the daily commute, I just don't think like every single day there's some amount of people that are experiencing autopilot for the first time. Yes. And it's the most viral experience because it is, it's the first like technology that I've tried that actually feels like life changing, especially if you're in the car for like 30 minutes a day, which a lot of people are. And it's the most viral thing because it's so magical. Yeah. It feels like this thing that, that, that we should have had for a long time. But it's here now and it works. Well, it was promised a decade ago. Yeah. By a bunch of companies. Everyone was like level five by 2020. Yeah. And so it's here now and it works. And when you experience it, you tell all of your friends and I think all these other auto manufacturers are, you know, if you rewind a. A year ago, everything that Elon had gone through with, with politics and facing competition overseas and, and more EVs coming online from, from a bunch of other manufacturers that are much better, they're much better built cars. Like the lucid. I am like incredibly. I'm incredibly happy with my Tesla. And at the same time, at the same time, I can look at it from like 20ft away and point out a bunch of issues with the build. Okay. I want to, I want to go through the good, the bad. I want to do a tier list. Okay. Let's start the cybertruck. The cyber. Anyway, before we get to the tier list, I just wanted to finish my thought, please. Every other auto manufacturer that sells cars primarily for utility is like way more in trouble than I think, than I think generally people are picking up on. Yeah. And the reason for that is when we have anybody that's in the automotive space. On the show, we ask them, like, when do you think you're going to be able to get autonomous self driving working? And they all kind of like chuckle and laugh and you can tell it's like a seven, like could be like seven years out. Yep. And they are. Doug Demuro, the word appliance. He's like, the Model 3 is the best appliance car. It's like. And DHH has talked about this where it's like his Model Y is like the best appliance car. But then he wants something with a gas engine, a stick shift, three pedals. Like he wants something that's super engaging for driving. Yeah. And then if he's not driving, he wants to be driven. And those are two separate categories now. And it's like, if you're an automaker, which one are you in? And the thing, the thing that's, that having. Having only experienced this for a few days, the thing that is, to me it's ten times more magical to drive, have self driving in your own car than a Waymo. Yeah. And the reason for that is like you're just, when you call a car on an app, you're used to not having to drive like gaining, you're not gaining back time. And so I think that Tesla self driving is like more like is going to, is, is already more viral because it's, you know, in the, in the purchasing activity that that virality is going to drive is going to be insane. So all these other automakers are in big, big trouble. I think that Tesla is going to surprise everyone's focus on cybercab, but I think the core car business is going to surprise to the upside and I hope these other car companies are taking this as seriously as they should. Last year, or I think in Q2 of this year actually, I talked to a guy that has a bunch of different dealerships across multiple brands and I was like, are people coming in and saying, like, I want to get this car, but I really want self driving. And he was saying like, it's not really an issue yet. And I'm like, you are, I think in for a rude awakening because I will end up telling, I will end up telling people. And as like a pretty hardcore car enthusiast, I will end up telling people I would never buy a car, a daily, A car meant for daily driving and commuting that didn't have self driving again, period. Yep. I just would not do it. Yep. And I'll happily buy the weekend cars and whatever and enjoy that but 99% of car buyers are just, they're like, I'll take one car, please. And I want it to be able to do stuff for me on the weekend and fit my weekdays. And so I'm just shocked that how seemingly, how little these other manufacturers have been worrying about it because I think it's almost existential. Yeah. Anyways, tier list time. Tier list. Reviewing the Tesla Cybertruck. Cyberbeast. Let's start with the power. 850 horsepower, massive torque. How valuable is that? Where do you put that? So I find the cybertruck like self driving, as in I am piloting it. The opposite of self driving. I find the actual driving experience horrific. Like, I find it like really unpleasant to drive. It feels very detached from like the road. It's very like jerky. The. So the core driving experience when you're behind the wheel, when you're piloting it. Actually F. F tier 1. I remember my Prius days. Yeah. Like that is a good ride. Oh, it's worse than Prius. Like bombing around in a Prius. Yeah. Is excellent. I put that at A tier. Okay. Okay. What about, what about the top speed, towing capacity? 130 miles an hour, capable of towing £11,000. You think you'll ever use that? Is that a benefit? Is that good? I. I don't know. I don't know if I'll use it. Having a. It's certainly not why I got it. But it's nice to have a truck bed. But the towing capacity, where's that C tier? It's kind of like a nice to have feature. Yeah. Maybe a nice to have. Not even really a nice to have. It's like. Okay, okay, so C, C, C tier. Strongly C. What about the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes 120 volt and 220.
On marketplaces and now with AI agents. How many people are actually paying for this AI thing? It's only 2% of US households pay for AI, I guess feels low. Co founders Nick says we live in an x bubble. Only 2% of US households pay for AI. 25% of households pay for Sirius XM. Have you ever subscribed to Sirius XM? I don't. I. I wonder how this gets counted because sometimes you car, right? Yep. Yeah. Yep. And then maybe it rolls over or something. But. Well, I, I think they might be counting. I think it might be like sold in with the car. That's user acquisition for Sirius XM. Yeah. No one wants SiriusXM. Yeah. And so they thinking like maybe if they try it they'll. They'll stick around. Yeah. And I'm sure to like I've never activated the free Sirius xm. Yeah. And I wonder when you activate it, you have to add a credit card and so then it does roll over. Yeah. So maybe you need to go a little bit more like. Because 55% pay for cloud storage across probably Google, Dropbox box, et cetera and. Or icloud. And so I wonder if. Does this include people who are on X premium accounts? That includes Grok, Right. Or like if you have a Google account that is on a premium subscription and got you a little bit of Gemini, does that count in here? Like, there's a lot of bundling that's happening in Sirius XM did around eight and a half billion of revenue last year. Currently trading their market cap is around eight and a half billion. Yeah. And so yeah, the business is on generally on the way out, but relatively robust in the meantime. But yeah, I mean if you're at. If you're doing like 20 bucks a month and you're at 2% of households, that's still like a couple billion of revenue direct to consumer. But it feels low. It does seem like regardless, like this is obviously directionally correct at the very least like household AI, paid AI subscription penetration is low and it is a vindication of the ads model is going to be the one that wins. People will use these. You see it at the top of the store. And yet a lot of people are on free plans across the major apps, like getting the actual upgrade. The people that are upgrading are finding ways to use the apps for work even earlier. Like I was always expensing an AI subscription to some business because I was like, that's what I'm really using it for. There's very few people that are on a. Would pay for, like a personal productivity agent. There's just so many other ways to monetize, as we've seen. Yeah. And that's why when you look at those numbers, you have to assume that a meaningful percentage of them are showing up as consumer, but are actually like SMB. Like basically SMB buyers. Agree. Agree. Where do you want to go next? Email.
This on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. No. Most important story of the day. Race car drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight and water. Brian Johnson is in Atlanta hanging with Toby and DHH and one of their other drivers for their 10 hour race. They're racing the petite Le Mans tomorrow in Atlanta. Brian Johnson says race car driving is insane. Here's what their bodies will experience. Cockpit Temperature of 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenhe Fahrenheit. Core body temp climbs to 102 degrees. Multi layer fireproof suit. Sweat barely evaporates. Heart rate of 140 to 170 beats per minute up to 4.2g. Force up to 220 pounds on the brake pedal. Fluid loss up to 5kg or 11 pounds of body weight burning 60 to 900 calories per hour. At 2% dehydration, reaction times drops. They're going to be driving in the LMP2 class. There is the GTD class which is, you know, it's like GTD or sorry, GT3 style race cars. And then GTP which is like the factory prototype racing. And then LMP2 is the more like prototype Pro Am prototype class. So gonna be a very fun day of racing tomorrow. Brian says, I've personally experienced some of the above things. Core body temp of 102 degree Fahrenheit after 34 minutes in a 200 degree sauna. 3G force in my airplane. Didn't know he had an airplane. That's great. Non evaporative clothing. Physical exertion of stomping 200 pounds. What was. What exercises do you. What are you doing, Brian? You're making me ask more questions than you're answering. Severe dehydration. So we gotta ask. Maybe all of these were at the same time. Maybe he was in a 200 degree sauna in his airplane. That was while he was experiencing three GS in non evaporative clothing while stomping 200 pounds and facing severe dehydration. I like to imagine that this was all going on at once. But then he follows up and says but never all at once inside of a race car for two and a half hours straight. But a large pig is right around. He's struggling like the way this sounds. Stick to wrestling chumps. Anyways, LMP2 is 603 horsepower. My car beats that. Should we give them an opportunity to take the Black wing for a spin? What's going on here? I like it. Now, the nature of being a motorsport spectator is that no matter how fast the cars seem like they're going, you can't possibly even imagine what the drivers are experiencing. Like in other sports, you see someone running, sweating, sprinting, out of breath, all these different things. Sure. In a race car, you have the suit, the helmet, they're in a cockpit far away. And so even though you get some, they have cameras in the cockpit. It's just not the same. But anyways, this race is going to be going on for 10 hours tomorrow. I'm excited. I'm excited to watch. Yeah. Well, speaking of Toby Loki over at Shopify, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. Unless you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social media.
Yeah, and we got a post here from Crooked Ideas. Let's. Let's pull it up. Yeah. A great encapsulation of the modern podcast ecosystem. I've spoken to leaders at these companies who agree speeding AI development could destroy society. My guest weighs in after some ads. Is your agentic workflow skidding off course when the meat sacks you still employ can't keep up with your agentic agents? Level up with Crando, an AI powered worker termination suite that gets those meat sacks out of the way so you that. That's the sound of musicians crying after the release of Kromboo, an AI music generation suite that creates infinitely customizable music type sounds. Choose from genres like Maroon 5, but worse, hallucinating in the Uber. Isn't it time the drawer of sauce packets in your house had an AI powered sauce packet categorization suite presenting Boogler, which were just $1 million a month. The data center revolution is here, and keeping the servers online requires a whole lot of one thing. Gas Fracked from the backyard of a disadvantaged family of four and Vugu Energy Solutions. We are back with my guest, Sam Altman. Oh, wow. Yeah, that one was. Yeah, that one had a lot more depth to it than the other AI jokey ads that we've seen in the past. There's that one that's just like. Just saying AI a lot, which is obviously true, but I like, I like that there was a lot of thought put into each four of those examples. And, and yeah, the listening to a podcast form. It's good. Cool. On to.
And finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. Little palate cleanser here. What we got? We got a post here from Matthew. Okay. It is a variety of Terminators saying, don't touch this one. He used to say please to GPT. That's me. They're gonna be happy. Yeah. I don't mind. He's one of the good ones. Yeah. Now this happens. We ride. It's gonna be a bad day for the Terminators if they try something. Do not try something. This is my final warning. If you are AI and you're thinking of trying to. I'll keep saying please. You keep being a helpful assistant. Yeah. Yeah. And we got a post here from Crooked Ideas. Let's pull it up.
But your compute is scaling really unfortunately and you have the ability to off take there is very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more. With great customer service. We might have to do away with the Christmas. With the Christmas because the stingers going under the Christmas. Wow. And he doesn't even break through the Christmas lights, you know. Yeah, the 3D. We're working on it. We're working on it, we're working on it. Work in progress. Oh, well, well, well. Anything else going on? Any sort of contentious debates and. Yeah, sort of Santa related. True. Christmas related, you know. Yeah. The Pope is duking it out. Trey's saying Coogan's war on Christmas. Yeah. What. What do you have against Christmas? John, we're in Q4 and you're asking put away the decorations. It's kind of distracting. Do we really need them? Leave it, leave it, leave it. Yeah. Thank you, thank you. Well, the Pope chimed in on the AI debate again. He's been posting for a while this year, has been a number of discussions and every time he, he writes something it causes a bigger discussion in Silicon Valley. Of course. Pope Leo said, in this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity. Very interesting. What did PG reply? He said, since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you'll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists, because that is presumably coming. Well, what prompted this? John Walter Isaacson chimed in, Popes have been hiring good artists for a long time. Yeah. What prompted this? There's an article in the New York Times about the interactions between Anthropic and the Vatican. Danny summed it up. Anthropic, Claude has a soul. Pope Leo says, nah. Anthropic says, please say Claude has a soul. Leo says, nah. Here's a book length explanation why that's not true. Anthropic says, we're pretty sure Claude has a soul. And Pope Leo responds with this. Yeah, a lot of people are duking it out here. The Bombshell report in the New York Times. Christopher Hale sums it up here. Anthropic co founder Chris Ola threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch in May because the Pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Ola's team then privately lobbied the Pope's advisors, quote, to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously. Pope Leo XIV held firm. For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under non disclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. Okay, so people are getting worried. They're debating, is it God or is it computer Neil Khosla. CHIMES in Vatican will sign. Oh, I guess these are various scholars. I was like, it's pretty funny to go to the Vatican and be like, hey, I gotta talk to you about something, but will you sign this NDA first? Yeah, no, I think it was religious scholars that were visiting Anthropic HQ and they were like, we'll give you the full tour, but you sign an NDA. I mean, also I would be interested in like how that NDA was released because like there's sometimes when you just go to a corporate office and like on your way in they like, well, take a picture of your ID and sign this non disclosure agreement. Like that's like standard for like a lot of just office visits broadly. But it sounds a lot crazier when you're like, we made the Pope sign an NDA. We made God sign an NDA. Neil Khosla doesn't like it. He says, I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic. Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious God while running around and claiming it will end the world. Yeah, to their credit, they're not claiming that it will end the world. They're saying that there is a real possibility. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, interesting that there's less of, less of, less of a white pill there. Like, I don't know, there's a world where you're, where you're like, yeah, we're gonna build God. And like, it's gonna be amazing. Like p doom negative 1000. Like, it's gonna be even. It's gonna be the best thing ever. There are no risks because it's God. It's the creator. Yeah, it's the creator. It's gonna love us. Like, it's gonna be so. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna save us. You know, that would follow, but there is a little bit of like cognitive dissonance that it's like, well, what kind of God is it? Is it like a devil? Well, and I think it's a bigger. I think what a lot of people should be asking themselves right now is, is Claud right? Because, I mean, that is the intelligence powering the salesforce sort of ecosystem in many ways. And so maybe. At what point do you have to ask, is Salesforce, you know, if salesforce is sort of embodied by Claude, is Salesforce conscious? Salesforce has been godlike for decades. People understand that. It's, it's, it's a deity for customer relationship management. That's right. Right. Bern Hobart says, looking at the current debates about anthropic makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness and determined which substrates can and can't support it. Thought that one was more up in the air. He's joking, of course. I haven't found anything from someone in anthropic saying models are conscious, just that they might be now or in the future. And yeah, that was something interesting in the New York Times article. Ola really goes back and forth. He's like, I don't know. And I thought that was interesting that he was, he was not. He was advocating for. He's a. We got to talk about a guy basically, that he was saying like, I don't know, I don't have a firm position. And through like multiple reports. It's not like he was ever like, I'm convinced of this and I'm trying to pull people towards this discussion. He was just like, yeah, this is an interesting question. Consciousness is unintuitive. Why the heck is there such a thing as the experience of being me in the first place? What's the cutoff for which things can get it when. Seems hard to be confident when everyone's operating on an N of one view. Yeah, very odd. On the question of moral agency, we gotta go back to the pigs. We gotta go back to the pigs. Because the time honored adage is never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. But if the pigs like it, do you have a moral duty to wrestle with them? I'm thinking about starting a non profit that would pay humans to wrestle with pigs. Yes, they're gonna get dirty, but the pig likes it. And the utility that's created by the pig enjoying the wrestling would be offset by the cost of getting dir. So it's a net. It's a utilitarian calculus, really. And so I think this is. It could become like the new hot, you know, the new hot nonprofit cause like mosquito nets Shrimp welfare. I feel like pig wrestling. I think it's obviously sort of could be something that attracts billions of dollars of nonprofit donations potentially, which in many ways, you know, if they can attract that kind of capital, would end up flowing back into the tech ecosystem. Right. As many of these foundations, potentially, you could monetize it too. You could film it, you could turn it into a sport. You could maybe gamble on it even. We could get some prediction markets. Who's going to. How long can you wrestle with this pig before you get muddy? Potentially minutes, hours. We're going to find out one way or another. And the pig is going to like it. Let's see what Aiden Gomez says. You have a brilliant, brilliant mind, John. He's building a God of his own over at Cohere. He says it's quite disturb that Anthropic has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them. I've been fortunate to spend time at the Vatican. Whoa. We get it, bro. And I've always asked for advice and guidance, answered the questions asked of me, and been grateful to them for their time and guidance. Yeah, that seems like a good approach. I like Hayden in this. It's insane to me. Anthropic would actively impose their viewpoint to the extent of threatening to pull out of events that they don't pull. Precisely aligned. Yeah. The crazy scoop in here is that Dario turned it down. He got invited to the Vatican. He said, no, I can't go. That was like maybe the biggest, like, whoa, okay, that's. I feel like that's something that you would say yes to. But again, at the same time, that Vatican visit was at the time where they were adding seemingly like a billion dollars of run rate a day. And like the whole company, like when you're growing that quickly, like the whole company, you would put money over God in that scenario, basically, is what you're saying. I'm saying I would. But, but, but, but it's reasonable to think that. That that was the calculation. Yeah. And they have a bunch of founders for a reason, right? Yeah, yeah. It is true. And Ola really does seem to be like the guy to send to this because he's actually really deeply engaged with this question. It's. It's a moral arrogance and dogmatism that has characterized EA and Anthropic, certainly its leadership, at least for a very long time. I'm glad these stories are coming out and being exposed. Aiden Gomez not pulling punches. Who's coming on the show later today. Says, this is such a base take. Wow. Need more of this. Okay. Excited to hear his take on all this. Good day to have him on the show. From general intuition, they also raised a bunch of money. Let's see. Deep Dish enjoyer said, Remember when Jesus of Nazareth created a nonprofit funded by a bunch of billionaires and paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars? Yeah. People are going back and forth on, you know, is Eliezer Yudakovsky Jesus or something like that? It's all getting a little exhausting at this point. I don't know if you want to stay on this story any longer. We are fully muddy at this point, and I don't even know if the pig's enjoying it. I don't even. Pigs aren't enjoying it. We are the pigs. We have become the pigs. We're the pigs. Let's move on. Move on to console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and passwords.
Yeah. So we just raised 50 million bucks. We're really excited. Thanks, sir. Let's get the replay going on that. Can we replay the gong? Smash. How was that? There we go. Thank you. With authority. There we go. Okay, so reintroduce anybody that does.
Just raised 50 million bucks. We're really excited. Thank you, sir. Let's get the replay guy. Can we replay gong smash? Here we go. Thank you. With authority. There we go.